WE LOVED SUZIE

Director Georgi Banks-davies on how she created an authentic masturbation episode of I Hate Suzie

I HATE SUZIE, created by Billie Piper and writer Lucy Prebble, follows Piper’s Suzie Pickle, a flighty, co-dependent actress whose life gets upended when compromising photos of her and a man who is not her husband are published online by phone hackers. As the threads of anxiety and stress begin to pull apart the fabric of her professional and personal existence, Suzie goes through a journey of self-discovery over eight episodes entitled ‘Shock’, ‘Denial’, ‘Fear’, ‘Shame’, ‘Bargaining’, ‘Guilt’, ‘Anger’ and ‘Acceptance’.

It was a golden rule of the series that each episode would be delivered from Suzie’s singular emotional perspective, but director Georgi Banks-davies says that each one was “designed differently for each emotion”. Episode 1, ‘Shock’, for example, has a claustrophobic feel to convey Suzie’s world caving in after the release of these explicit photos, but the fourth episode ‘Shame’ might just be the series stand-out. It’s a ‘Masturbation Inception’, as it were, which explores the manifestation of Suzie’s complicated sexual desires.

“If I showed you the reference book for that episode, it’s massive, because our imaginations are massive,” says Banks-davies. “There was a lot of research into what masturbation looks like. We’re so used to seeing the cis, straight male perspective and a lot of the episode is challenging that.”

Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind inspired this interior instalment set mainly within the confines of Suzie’s bedroom and her imagination. “I wanted this sense where what’s real and what’s not is quite seamless even though, dramatically, it is clearly a fantasy, but the way in which we manoeuvre, it feels like a tunnel in your mind.”

Reality, fantasy and memory were the states Banks-davies wanted Suzie to traverse between, and each environment had its own technical rulebook. “We shot on more vintage lenses for the fantasy and the colour grade shifted around in memory,” she explains. But it was vital for the director that no matter how abstract the direction Suzie’s mind took her, the narrative was always coherent. “The challenge was how do we concrete it, so it doesn’t just become a giant mess,” Banks-davies says. “A certain amount of that is done in the edit, but equally it went back to this core idea that we’re on the bed and there is always a linear through-line [to it].”

Storyboards were used, but the director left room for movement on set to “work things out” in the moment. And it was deliberately designed to be unsexy to reflect both the shame-themed storylines. “I didn’t want to create a masturbation episode for people to wank over,” the director says. “You’ve got one woman grappling with what she finds sexy juxtaposed with another woman being sexually assaulted on a train. It was a difficult episode to edit and it took some time to find itself because it is so unique, but Lucy’s writing was genius.”