‘It feels surreal and wonderful’
Filmmaker Francis Lee talks about what it means to him to be closing the BFI London Film Festival with only his second feature, AMMONITE
“WE HAVE SO much in common!” laughs Francis Lee when Empire tells him that he’s the ‘new Scorsese’. For while he may not make films about gangsters and garlic, we’re of course referring to Lee closing the 2020 BFI London Film Festival, as Martin Scorsese did last year.
“It does feel like an incredible honour,” he says over a video call from his kitchen. “When they were going to show Ammonite to the programmers, I was super-nervous. Tricia [Tuttle, Director Of Festivals] saw the film, said she loved it and they were going to programme it. That was a real honour. Then when they came back and said, ‘You’re going to be the closing-night film,’ I was like, ‘Fuck!’”
Not only that, but Ammonite — the story of a relationship between fossil hunter Mary Anning (Kate Winslet) and a younger woman of a different class (Saoirse Ronan) — was “bookending” with Steve Mcqueen, who is opening with Mangrove. “It feels really good to be in his company,” says Lee. “And for my work to be being looked at at that kind of level.”
The BFI, though, has always been at the heart of the most seismic moments in Lee’s career. He recounts the other major — arguably the most major — moment since he became a filmmaker. It was 2014 and earlier in the year, Lee had been shortlisted for the ifeatures funding scheme — a programme that the BFI ran with Creative England and BBC Film. It provided support to regional, first-time filmmakers and he’d made it to the
final five after submitting his script for God’s Own Country. Unfortunately he didn’t make it to the final three and Lee — who had self-funded his previous shorts by working in a scrapyard — speaks of being “really devastated, because I just didn’t know how
I was going to get this film made.”
Several producers had already read the script and loved his writing, but passed as they told him, “We think it’s a niche film, it will have a very small audience. Two farmers in a gay romance on the side of a hill isn’t going to fly.”
So all appeared completely lost, until he was called into a meeting with the BFI’S Film Fund team — including Ben Roberts (now the CEO) — at their office in the West End of London. At the end of what seemed to be a random conversation, they told him, quite casually, that they were going to give him the money to make the film.
“It was monumental and a fairly shocking moment,” he says. “I came out and thought, ‘Did they really say they were going to make my film?!’” Still quite incredulous at the turn of events, Lee insists without them, “I don’t think it would have been made.”
And now, just a handful of years on, he’s equally as incredulous that he’s one of the LFF’S headliners. He shakes his head. “It’s so surreal.” Then smiles, beard rising. “And really, really wonderful.”
AMMONITE CLOSES THE BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL ON 18 OCTOBER. MORE DETAILS AT WWW.BFI.ORG.UK/LFF