The fight for a new kind of eating-disorder film
With her feature debut Body Of Water, director Lucy Brydon had to work quickly and carefully to create a responsible — and cinematic — depiction of anorexia
MAKING YOUR FIRST feature is never easy, let alone one challenging the conventions of eating-disorder stories on screen. With her directorial debut Body Of Water, Lucy Brydon wanted to present the realities of anorexia without glamourising it. “Like any mental illness, it’s very internal,” Brydon says. “It’s difficult to dramatise.”
The film follows long-term anorexic Stephanie (Sian Brooke) after she’s discharged from treatment, examining how the illness impacts her relationships with her mother Susan (Amanda Burton) and teenage daughter Pearl (Fabienne Piolini-castle).
Shooting the film proved a battle — it was completed in just 17 days after several rewrites to refine the character dynamics. “The initial script was much darker,” Brydon explains. Even the original title, Sick(er), changed, with Brydon renaming it after the film turned out more poetic than expected. “Early iterations were more like horror, which Sick(er) suited. But now it’s much softer,” she says.
The biggest screenplay challenge was making anorexia itself the antagonist. “It always comes between Stephanie and her family,” Brydon says. “I’m interested in how it manifests across generations. How we see our sisters and mothers, [how we] see ourselves reflected in them, or not. That’s a specific female thing.”
Sian Brooke lost weight for the role, with Brydon ensuring she remained physically well. “She was very small,” she recounts, “It became an ethical thing. I don’t want to make someone ill because of my project.” The actor worked carefully with a nutritionist and a trainer. “Sian’s never struggled with this stuff,” says Brydon. “She felt she could put this on like a hat for the role, taking it off when she was done.”
Brooke’s physical transformation, however, isn’t the visual focus of Body Of Water. Films like To The Bone have faced criticism, with research showing younger anorexia sufferers can find extreme thinness on screen ‘inspirational’. Here, Stephanie’s body is seen from a distance and rarely exposed. “If we’d shot it handheld, up in her face and body, it wouldn’t work. These shouldn’t be films for girls to look up to. It’s about the insidious nature of these issues, how destructive they are. It’s not about being beautiful. It’s about control, and security.”
Despite the challenges, Brydon used “sheer force of will” to make a film reflective of her own eating-disorder experience. “This stuff goes so deep, and we don’t talk about it. I hope this makes it easier and gives people something to identify with.” The fight, you sense, was all worth it.