Running On Ice: The Story Of Shooting A Summer Movie In Winter From Fast Girls' Regan Hall and Lily James

Late last year I was invited to visit the set of Fast Girls, a sports drama coming out this summer, which stars Lenora Crichlow and Lily James as two female athletes who are forced to simultaneously compete for a 200m sprint medal and work together as part of a relay team. Since most of the film was shot on location, this wasn't so much a set visit, per se, as a trip to a Travelodge with a camera. Actually, that's not fair. But the main thing stopping it from being fair was that I'm now 80% sure it was a Premier Inn.

The cast and crew seemed very grateful to finally be shooting some films inside. While interviewing the cast, I heard quite a few horror stories about the main female actresses having to run around in sub zero temperatures while dressed for the summer, i.e. in crop tops and running knickers. To make matters worse, the girls were placed on a strict diet as part of their athletic training regime. I caught a glimpse of the lunch they were given while the rest of the crew munched happily on M&Ms, and there was a big emphasis on fresh vegetables and protein, with no cake in sight.

Actress Lily James, who plays track star Lisa Temple, admits that between the running, the food and the cold, times have been hard.

"We've all been going a little bit insane. Before we started shooting we had six weeks of really intense training. We were doing two and half hours, five times a week: running, weights, circuits … Our diets have completely changed, we eat five times a day, loads of protein shakes, creatine … mad stuff.

"I sort of … I laugh about it now, but it's not funny. It was really hard, I mean it's freezing outside and we're in the athletics gear, which is just pants and a crop top. We've worked so hard on getting our bodies into shape and working on technique as a runner … For then to be so freezing cold that all you're thinking about is wanting to get warm again… It was a bit disheartening, with all the work we'd put in, that the weather really distracted us. But we fought through it, and I don't know how we survived it, but I've seen some of the playback and it looks like a glorious sunny day!"

Director Regan Hall recalls one time when the conditions pushed one of the leads to breaking point:

"I had Lily James come up to me two days ago. Drizzle was coming down at 10 o' clock at night, in 3 degree temperature, and she said, 'I'm going to refuse to go out there unless you buy me a bar of chocolate!' So I gave in to one of Lily's first and only diva requests.

"There was one moment where I'd taken my longjohns off under my jeans and all that kind of stuff, and I was prepared in sympathy to go out and be there in my T-shirt and underwear. But just as that moment happened, all the girls realised it was far too cold and couldn't go out anyway. I was about to do my big sympathy moment, and I didn't get to do it!"

One thing that you will surely notice if you go to see the film is that, despite being released during the London 2012 Olympics, the filmmakers were unable to even mention anything associated with the event for legal reasons. The script wasn't even allowed to include the words 'London 2012', since it was trademarked, so in Fast Girls the event the girls take part in is referred to as 'London 2011'. The word Olympics is trademarked as well, so the characters compete instead in the 'World Athletic Championships'.

I had assumed that releasing a feature connected with the Olympics, even if the fact is not stated explicitly in the script, would at least lead to funding opportunities. According to Hall, however, this wasn't necessarily the case.

"I think it's tapping into that kind of vibe of … everybody's interested in it now. But that had no impact on whether or not we had enough money for the film or not. In fact it actually, in some ways, made our life more difficult because there's so many Olympic things going on that the main sponsors are all doing the actual Olympic stuff. What we're tapping into is the interest in the Olympics, because certainly two years ago I think the majority of the population couldn't give a stuff about them! But now they're starting to know who the stars are, and who the young talent is and all that kind of stuff, so hopefully this film taps into not only that interest but people's inquisitiveness about what goes on behind the scenes."

With a few notable exceptions, team sports movies tend to be oriented towards the male end of the spectrum. Even some of the better girls' sports movies, and I'll tentatively include Bend It Like Beckham here, seem to spend a lot of screen time fighting stereotypes about women who take part in sports professionally. I asked Regan Hall whether it was significant that Fast Girls is about, well, girls.

"What really grabbed me about the film is that it has a great positive energy to it. It's not often you get films with female lead characters that have that same positive energy without being, "Lalala, this is a girl's movie." In this film, gender has nothing to do with it. Male athlete or female athlete, you go through the exact same traumas.

"Sure, I think that perhaps a little bit of the girl-fight element might seem like it's specific to a girls movie, but in actual fact there's a scene we wrote in the film where there's a bit of a punch-up on the track, and when we first started showing the script to proper athletes they said, "Oh that'd never happen, you'd never get a fight on the track." Then about a month later one of the European champions running against one of the male Jamaicans started going at each other! [Laughs] So yeah, it's universal, gender has nothing to do with it, but as you say it's nice to have a good positive team sports film that's not about boys."

During the shoot I noticed that the crew were filming on digital RED cameras, a popular choice more recently used to shoot The Muppets, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and The Social Network. I asked Hall about the decision to shoot on digital instead of film.

"We're filming on the new Red Epic cameras, so we've got two Reds shooting simultaneously. That allows us to do some really nice slow motion work, so we've got the girls running around the track in slow motion. The reason for choosing digital over film on this one was the amount of slow motion work, we'd have just been burning film, so it was a much more practical and cost-effective decision to do it that way. I'm not biased either way, it's just a case of getting the best product for the best price."

During the set visit we also interviewed stars Lenora Crichlow and Bradley James, who also agreed that it was very, very cold. Fast Girls is out in cinemas from June 15th, and we'll publish our own review shortly before release.

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