Northern Irish actress Karen Hassan has opened up about the intense experience filming writer/director Viko Nikci's new mystery thriller Cellar Door, saying "I genuinely was sobbing" while shooting certain scenes.
The Belfast-born star, well known for her small screen roles in Hollyoaks, Vikings and The Fall, leads the Irish psychological drama as Aidie, a young girl who finds herself in a mother and baby home.
Speaking to RTÉ Entertainment, Karen said of the plot: "She wakes up with a priest and a nun telling her that she never gave birth in the first place, but she trusts her body, she trusts her instincts and it's about her trying to find this lost child, but not really quite trusting herself."
The actress said it was rare to get a script as unusual as this coming across her radar. "Probably never! When this landed on my desk I knew it was really special", she explained.
"It really did have a weird effect on me. As soon as I read it I went downstairs and said to my mum 'I need a cup of tea!' I said to her 'I've had this script land on my door and I just can't even get my head around it'. I was blown away."
They filmed over four weeks, which she said was "a very intense experience, but an amazing challenge".
"Viko often describes writing the script as a fever dream and filming it was quite like that as well", Karen said, adding that the filming experience was different to anything she had experienced before, on many levels.
"We filmed it all out of sequence", she said. "It was hard joining those dots, but as some point you just have to give yourself over to the gods and give yourself over to the emotion that's in that scene.
"Every time I watch it, I think about those days filming. The way we filmed it was very unique, it's like no film I've ever filmed before.
"There was no clapperboard, there was no action, there was no cut sometimes. Every take that we did, we could do anything. Normally as actors you're trained to remember your continuity but there just wasn't any so that gave you a real freedom to experiment. But what it also left was Viko a year in the edit having to piece together all of these puzzles!"
She said the intensity of the subject matter, which she researched thoroughly before starting work on the film, meant emotions often ran high while shooting.
"When I act I like to feel the scenes, there was one in particular where I was acting with the lovely Catherine Walker, and it was quite an intense scene and I genuinely was sobbing during the middle of it", Karen said.
"I went home and I was really upset that night, and many other nights, because I really was feeling what I thought Aidie would be going through. That was really important to me, to show the audience this is a real story, and to feel the rawness of that."
She added: "The whole time as well I wanted to show there is this lightheartedness about her as well and this devilish spirit, which makes you want to champion her."
Cellar Door is out in selected cinemas in Ireland on Friday, January 25.
