Alistair Harkness
It’s about time she started getting things together, but she’s like: ‘I’ve made this carapace for myself to protect myself and now that’s who I am’.” Scottish filmmaker Peter Mackie Burns is talking about Daphne, the eponymous character in his impressive debut feature. Played by rising star Emily Beecham, Daphne is smart, sarcastic, foul mouthed and falling apart – a 31-year-old woman trying to navigate her somewhat transient life as a restaurant worker in London by actively withdrawing from any relationships that can’t be walked out of at a moment’s notice.
She’s the sort of funny, flawed, fractious character that’s all too rare in British movies, but has become a bedrock of some of the best American indie films of recent years. Whether it’s Greta Gerwig in her self-penned comedies Frances Ha and Mistress America, Jenny Slate in Obvious Child, Lena Dunham in her proto-girls debut Tiny Furniture, Olivia Wilde in Drinking Buddies, Anna Kendrick in Happy Christmas, Charlize Theron in Young Adult, or Desiree Akhavan in Appropriate Behaviour –US actors and filmmakers have long recognised the creative benefits of building movies around compelling women who drive the narrative. It’s something that prompted Mackie Burns to wonder, “Where’s our version those films?”
“We all know women like that,” he says when we meet the morning after Daphne’s British premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. “But we don’t see them, especially people who are Emily’s age. People in their late 20s/early 30s, they don’t get to see themselves on screen and we thought that was a good enough reason to make a low-budget film – and to make it as truthful and three-dimensional as possible.”
The film actually grew out of a short called Happy Birthday to Me, written by Daphne screenwriter Nico Mensigna, and starring Beecham. Shot guerilla-style for £500 on the streets of East London in 2013, it wasn’t until Mackie Burns started cutting together the footage that he realised the character had a lot more juice than he’d imagined. “We had no monitor while we were shooting, so it was only when I got back to the cutting room that I could see how detailed the work was that Emily was doing. I spoke to Nico and said, ‘let’s talk more about this character.’”
With input from Beecham, they fleshed out an extensive biography for Daphne that ran to a couple of hundred pages. With the short film as a proof of concept, Beecham as the star and a first draft of the script, Burns took the project to The Bureau, the production company behind the award-winning 45 Years. Within 12 months he was on set, “which is an amazingly quick process”.
He’s not kidding. Having trained as a theatre director at what was then the RSAMD in Glasgow (“Kate Dickie was a classmate,” he says), Mackie Burns started out working for the likes of The Tron and The Traverse before making the switch to film in his mid-