BILLIE PIPER
The award-winning actor-turned-filmmaker discusses her directorial debut, Rare Beasts.
BILLIE PIPER HAS, FOR MUCH OF the last quarter-decade, dealt only in stealth and surprise. After starting out as a teenage pop star, she made the first of many moves that you couldn’t have scripted: joining one of telly’s most loved-and-raged-about shows (Doctor Who), before doing theatre (‘serious’ theatre, pronounced “theatttreee”). Then came the most-talked-about of all talked-about TV (I Hate Suzie) and now, at not-yet-40, her arrival as a writer-director. And a writer-director who creates brutal, bizarre, brilliant, weird work that has everyone, well, surprised by its cinematic pluck.
Did Piper know that she’d created something quite so out-there with her first film — a tale of a millennial woman (Piper as Mandy) navigating the mundane horrors of modern life? “During the writing process, I did what I felt was right for me and the vision of the piece,” she says. “I didn’t think about it as a deliberate choice; I just wanted this particular moment in life to be truly represented in the film. And at the risk of it being too much, it had to perfectly mirror the levels of stress we’re all experiencing. It didn’t feel like I was going to go out of my fucking way to make this really hard work. It felt real to me as an experience.”
With Piper now a 38-year-old woman dealing — as Mandy does — with relationships, work, kids, it would be easy to assume it’s autobiographical. An assumption so often borne out of the belief that a woman’s work must be memoir. “It sort of suggests you can’t have a new and creative idea in your head,” Piper says. “Like you’ve always got to be picking apart from what’s happened to you. That said, I would be lying if I didn’t say I understood those feelings of being totally wrung out by modernity. I know those emotions acutely and that is very much lifted from my own crisis with the modern world.”
It is very firmly a dramatisation, though. And Piper’s influences for it might not be what you expect — she points to choreographer Pina Bausch, director Busby Berkeley, mid-period Woody Allen, musical theatre and Disney (“It’s all in there, bedded into the subconscious”). But her favourite “straight-up director” is Paul Thomas Anderson. “He sort of informs lots of things, not just filmmaking — like personal choices,” she laughs. “I’m so devoted to his style.”
While there are PTA shadows stylistically in Rare Beasts, it also has a tonal roughness and coarseness that is entirely Piper’s own. Qualities that plugged struggle into the process. “It was really, really hard,” she attests. “That’s been the biggest eye-opener of this experience. How much you need to hold your nerve.”
People in production offices peering at mood boards didn’t get Rare Beasts on the page because, says Piper, “It’s a very loud and angry piece of work.” She even thought, for a period, that it had been buried completely. Something she says she’d started to come to terms with, until she met producers who really got it, had no desire to compromise it. They didn’t want to get their “hands in and soften the piece” or make characters more likeable. “That felt really important to me,” she says. “Because if it was going to be shaved off or shaved apart, I just wouldn’t have bothered.”
But bother she did, and now Rare Beasts is out in the world, along with Piper’s intent as a filmmaker. And it’s not one that she’s going to let lie. She mentions an idea for her second film, one she keeps coming back to, but one she hasn’t been able to commit to yet. “I really needed to get this film out of the gate,” she says. “For it to feel real as an experience, because for a while, in my mind, it was almost like I imagined making the film.”
But for Piper, it’s not about this year or even the next or the one after. It’s about what she calls the long game. “This is what I really want to focus on,” she says. “And I want to do it in this way. Hopefully, through time and experience, it’ll become more refined — but that’s something to look forward to.” Not just for Piper, but from what we’ve already seen, for us all.
RARE BEASTS IS IN CINEMAS AND ON DIGITAL NOW