'Longest Ride' star Britt Robertson: 'I've always had a connection with an older generation'

NEW YORK, April 1 (UPI) -- Britt Robertson says she could easily relate to the character she plays in the big-screen adaptation of Nicholas Sparks' bestselling romance The Longest Ride.

Directed by George Tillman Jr., the film follows two parallel love stories – the contemporary courtship of Robertson's college student Sophia and Scott Eastwood's professional bull-rider Luke, and the decades-long marriage of Ira and Ruth. The stories intersect when Luke and Sophia rescue Alan Alda's elderly Ira after a car crash. As Ira recuperates from his injuries, Sophia reads him the love letters he wrote to Ruth over the years, allowing the older couple's courtship, trials and triumphs to unfold through flashbacks where Jack Huston plays a younger Ira and Oona Chaplin portrays his Ruth.

Told by UPI at a roundtable interview in New York Sunday how refreshing it is to see young characters like Sophia and Luke showing such appreciation for their elders, as well as for the rapidly disappearing tradition of letter-writing, Robertson revealed, "I have a really great relationship with my grandparents.

"My grandmother raised me for a good portion of my life," the 24-year-old actress continued. "She moved to Los Angeles with me to be an actor, so I've always had a connection with an older generation and, yeah, it definitely stuck out to me. I love that relationship, the Ira-Sophia relationship. I think it's really well-written and there is something so special about it that you don't see very often and to explore that and have him really touch her in this way that it inspires her to love harder and work harder in life. I think that's a really powerful thing: to be open to people who have had more life experience."

The Longest Ride is to open in U.S. theaters April 10.