Rye Lane Is a Refreshing and Delightful Rom-Com that Rejects the Label

Vogue: How would you describe Rye Lane to someone who’s never been there?
Raine Allen-Miller: It’s a wonderful place where you don’t really know what’s going to happen. [Laughs.] It’s quite a simple shopping street, but you get some really interesting characters. It’s pretty diverse, and it’s changing a lot. It just started being gentrified like 10 years ago. It’s one of those places where you can get a flat white, but you can also get Jamaican jerk spice and a fake Gucci bag. It’s this incredible hot pot of all sorts of things.   

You’ve said you always insisted that you would write your first feature—how did this script change your mind?
I found it really funny, and it was a simple script, which is a great canvas for a director. There was so much room for me to build a world and add my spin on it. It was originally set in Camden, which is North London, and I felt quite strongly that it needed to be set in South London because it’s such a misrepresented place. It’s often depicted as quite gritty and rough,  South London generally and especially Peckham and Brixton. 

Besides the setting, what were some of the major ways the final film differed from the script?
It was written by two guys, so they were interested in my take on Yas’s character. Also making all the flashbacks feel slightly more surreal—whenever I think back at something that happened, I imagine it in a slightly theatrical way. Like, Oh, I said it so well and I looked great when I said it. It’s a human thing—when you tell a story, you make it into this big incredible thing, and so it was important that those flashbacks felt a lot more elevated.

How did you find your leads? You can tell they’re having so much fun.
We met some incredible actors, but when Vivian and David walked in, they were just right. I can’t put my finger on why. I like actors who aren’t necessarily comedy actors. They’re technically good, and they have the right instincts as actors, but they have funny bones. They’re not playing to be funny, but they understand funny, and that was key. Both of them had buckets of that.