Gemma Arterton talks "REALLY weird" bedroom scene with Dominic Cooper in The Escape movie

Starring Gemma Arterton and Dominic Cooper, The Escape is an intimate portrait of a married woman who seemingly has it all.

Married young, she has all the trappings of a successful life: a house, a husband, children and a nice lifestyle.

But she is unhappy and yearns for more, something that she is unable to put her finger on.

The movie’s dialogue moves so seamlessly and so realistically you would never guess most of it is improvisation.

“It’s bringing personal things to the table which colour it in, and then you refine it in the moment,” Arterton explained.

“It’s weird, you bring your own stuff and Dominic [Cooper] would bring his own stuff, and you react off that and then it becomes fictional in a weird way.”

Though building a movie around improvisation in a large part may be risky, improvisation is not just down to the actors.

“I loved working this way [improvisationally],” Arterton said, “because there were no particular setups with the camera.

“It wasn’t like, here’s the wide, now we’re swinging the lens and there’s your mark, which sort of puts a formality on it.”

The close quarters of the small house make The Escape an intimate, almost claustrophobic, film.

Particularly in the bedroom scenes between Tara (Gemma) and Mark (Dominic) where a small room is compounded by Mark’s constant, suffocating affection. And, of course, the cameraman.

Gemma said: “It was really weird. I usually hate with a passion doing any sort of sex scene but this felt different. It actually felt quite easy but really distressing, but not in the usual way where it’s like I don’t know this person, ugh they’re suddenly touching my breast. What was distressing was the acting.”

“In the bedroom scenes, as an audience, you’re not sure what you’re watching yet, and there was stuff I knew I was doing that I knew [the cameraman] had caught, that Dominic Cooper wasn’t aware of,” she said. 

Those stolen moments that even Cooper isn’t aware of only added to the stress of the marriage slowly falling apart and the audience found itself yearning for Tara to be able to express her dissatisfaction more articulately.

“He knew that I was going through something but I don’t think he knew the small things, like putting the food away in the cupboard and it being excruciating, these are the things that people miss in their marriages when they break down,” Arterton said.

The breakdown of the marriage, though it falls equally on Tara and Mark’s shoulders, plays more into Tara’s point of view — showing her isolation and depression as it suffocates her.

With movies like The Escape, and the recent release Tully starring Charlize Theron, cinema seems to be catching up to the fact that these stories of women simply living, living messily and complicatedly, are worth telling.

“There have always been people making films about women in a very detailed personal way but now there are more people making films about them and not necessarily women that are heroic or likeable. I think that’s a good thing.”

For all of its closeness, The Escape steers clear of judging its characters, particularly Tara as she seeks an escape from the life that both bores and strangles her.

This lack of judgement is in part down to Arterton’s raw performance and also in part due to the sheer lack of other characters casting judgement of their own (save for a particularly painful scene with Tara’s mother).

“You watch people like Robert DeNiro and mostly he plays really unlikeable, bastardy people and we love him for it and yet the number of times I’ve been told ‘well we didn’t really like that character, Gemma,’ — I think that’s such rubbish.

I think it’s because women have always had to be likeable, so the more female voice and perspective we have the more just and lifelike things will be.”

Tara’s life is messy and painful but it is also honest, all of which plays across Arterton’s face as she moves like a ghost through her life until one day she makes a change and though her escape comes alive again.

The Escape is in UK & Irish cinemas on August 3, 2018.