‘These early friendships are huge romances’: Extra Geography’s lessons in teenage love

Rose Tremain, along with the cast and crew of a new film updating her 1950s story to the early 00s, remember the intensity of these relationships and explain why its story has not dated

A few years ago, Rose Tremain was asked to name her biggest disappointment. Her reply? The film of her novel Restoration. Despite a Hollywood budget, Robert Downey Jr and Ian McKellen in the cast and a couple of Oscars, it was “a dog’s dinner”. Speaking on the phone from her home in Norfolk, Tremain is far more complimentary about a new British adaptation of her semi-autobiographical short story Extra Geography, set in a boarding school in the 1950s and first published in 2007.

“I’ve been delighted by this whole project,” she says, still sounding surprised. Tremain adores the script, adapted from her elegant five-page story by playwright and Succession scriptwriter Miriam Battye. At their first meeting, Battye told her it would easily transfer to the modern day: “I felt really pleased about that,” says Tremain. “It’s not just a little relic from my past. It has relevance now.”