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“The film industry's a small business in Britain, so invariably you'll know who you're working with”, JJ Feild remarks, and with Third Star, Edinburgh International Film Festival's closing gala film, the statement couldn't be truer. Almost everyone involved in the film somehow knew each other before: Feild and his co-star Tom Burke previously worked together and both already knew another of their co-stars, Benedict Cumberbatch, whilst Third Star's writer Vaughan Sivell and the fourth of its primary actors, Adam Robertson, have known each other for many years, and set up the Western Edge Pictures who produced the film. For a feature that relies heavily upon the interaction between its characters, it is comforting to know that the friendship continued off camera as well as on. “We were all in a little cottage together for four weeks – with one bathtub. If you're shooting for only a month, you don't have time to slowly get to know each other,” Feild explains.

Third Star follows James (Cumberbatch) and his closest friends on a journey to his favourite place in the world, Barafundle Bay in Pembrokeshire. It is something of a pilgrimage for him, as he is suffering from terminal cancer, but Sivell has ensured the script has minimal references to his illness, preferring to focus on the energy and the enjoyment felt by the characters on their adventure. “As a writer I was being asked to develop ideas that tended to be about Afghanistan and Iraq, and I was really aware that while they were the most brilliant stories, it is easy to end up being pushed towards something a bit sensational, and I didn't want to do that,” Sivell reasons. “As we all live longer that age of mucking around lasts longer, so now there's this weird time at the end of our twenties when we're not sure whether we've wasted the last decade, whether we should settle down or if we're still young. In the last generation we'd have been in the trenches – my god, we've got it easy. So I wanted to find a story, and this was it, that asked the characters to be naturally brave, to be heroic out of a gesture.”

With so much personally invested in the film (Sivell wrote and produced it), it was crucial that the right director came on board. That person was Hattie Dalton, whose previous work directing short films had seen her receive a BAFTA. And it was a perfect match for Dalton too. “I'd been sent quite a lot of scripts, but none of them really resonated as much as this. This was telling a much bigger story that was potentially dark but you get to have a giggle along the way,” she says. For her, the cast's pre-existing friendships were also a vital part of the film. “We're not short on talent in Britain, but it was important to make sure everyone was capable of representing the beautifully drawn characters Vaughan wrote, and it really had to be a believable chemistry between them, and a believable friendship.”

With the exception of a few very brief scenes, Third Star features an entirely male cast. So how did Dalton feel, being one of the few women on set? “Probably only in hindsight do I shake my head and wonder how I dealt with that, but I really enjoyed it. I'm fortunate enough to have brothers so I loved the whole nonsense and banter between the boys. I wanted to encourage it as much as possible because it then came out in the improvised scenes,” she laughs.

It is doubtful the boys needed much encouragement in this area. Throughout the interview Feild and Burke share anecdotes and make fun of each other and it is precisely this natural rapport that makes the characters so enjoyable to watch, something that shines through in the final film. “We improvised some moments, and JJ would always rip the piss out of my character,” says Burke. “In real life I'd probably rip the piss out of him just as much but in character I'd absolutely clam up. I think that was to do with the actual character dynamic, rather than not being able to think of what to say.” Feild confirms this, “We were trying to shoot so many scenes each day, you just don't have time to sit on a chair doing a crossword between scenes, so you're just in character the whole time – and not in some intense method way, you just have no other option. So we really sparked off each other really quickly. We found our role and the dynamic worked, so you get four very different human beings on one journey together.”