FRANCIS LEE
The director reflects on his one-two filmic punch.
When you were a little boy, were films a big deal in your house?
No, not at all. We very rarely went to the cinema; it was like a birthday treat, generally. Or we went to see Grease and Star Wars, but beyond that, we didn’t go to the cinema. It was the films that were on the telly on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon. My dad liked Westerns, so there was always one on, usually with John Wayne. The only access I got was watching films on telly.
And you went to college to study Drama. So where did wanting to become involved in acting come from?
It’s a bit of a cliché, but an uncomfortableness of being myself or feeling like I didn’t really have a voice as a person. And I felt that if I could be a character, and be somebody else, then that would be liberating in some way. I remember having a conversation when I was a little kid with my parents and saying, “I really want to write and direct,” but then going, “I haven’t a clue how you do that.” And I don’t know anybody who’s done that. I had seen people from my background go to drama school and be actors and have careers. And every time you turned on the telly, you could see working-class, Northern actors working. So that felt accessible.
But there came a point where you wanted to tell stories yourself rather than embodying somebody else’s?
It got to a stage where if I got a job, I just spent the whole time arguing with the director. And I think that was problematic, obviously, because the director just wants you to get on and do it and I’d be like, “But no, don’t you see, this is how it should be, and this is what it should be like.” I gave up acting and I got my job in the scrapyard and it felt like that was all done. I wasn’t really going to come back to it. And then I met a guy who I quite fancied at a party, and he said he was a director. And so, to impress him, I said, “Oh, I’ve always wanted to write. And I think I’ve got
a good idea for a short film.” and he said, “Send it me and I’ll see if it’s any good.” So, I worked with him on that. But the process of me being the writer and him being the director didn’t work for me. At that point I was like, “I have to make my own work. I can’t write and give it up to somebody else.”
And that short, Bantam — where had that idea come from? Had you been carrying it around for a while?
Yeah, a long time. Because when I was a kid, I used to show bantam hens. Things weren’t happy at home and I was shunted off every Saturday with this man called Mr Woodward, who was a very lovely older local man who showed bantams. And so, me and him would go off in his car with our bantams and take them to hen shows and show them. So, I’d long had a passion for hens. And it felt very, again, retrospectively, one of the very few safe spaces I had in my life as a kid, where I was with this guy who actually listened to me and was interested. So it felt quite emotional.
You made three more shorts, but what was the very beginning of God’s Own Country?
I’d always had this idea of a lad on a farm being miserable, and when I made [first short] The Farmer’s Wife, my friend said to me, “If you take this film out on the festival circuit, you might get some interest and people will ask you if you have a feature film script, so you’d better write one.” So, I’d had this idea of this lad on this farm, basically because of the landscape where I was from, that I wanted to explore. And it was as basic as working out what the beginning, the middle, and the end was, and sitting down and bashing it out.
The BFI funded it and then you took it to Sundance. Can you remember when you heard it had been programmed?
It was Bonfire Night and every year my family, we have a bonfire. And me and my then boyfriend were at the bonfire, and it was about eight o’clock at night. It was on a Saturday, and I had just happened to check my emails and there was an email from Sundance saying, “You’ve got in. We’re very, very pleased to show your film.” So we opened the whisky and celebrated.
And what was your experience of going to Sundance?
I was so blessed to go with [stars of the film] Josh [O’connor] and Alec [Secareanu], because we’d become such brilliant friends, and just being with them was wonderful. And that kind of took away the pressure. Then it comes to the actual screening, and they’d had the worst snow they’ve ever had in Park City. We get there, and they were like, “We just want to tell you, this is a sold-out performance, but a quarter of the audience couldn’t get here.” We were there for a week, and it wasn’t until towards the end of that week really that we started to see the reaction to the film because everyone’s very polite when you stand up and do a Q&A. They might hate it. You don’t know. There’d been some reviews that had come out which were amazing. So, we knew that critically it might do alright. And then towards the end of the week, it became apparent that people really, really loved it and there’d been a buying frenzy for it.
The film massively connected with audiences. Were you ever overwhelmed by it?
Yeah. People wouldn’t just send me an email or write to me and say, “I really liked your film. Thank you.” They would send me pages and pages telling me about their lives or their experiences or their emotional journeys or their relationships. And that felt like a big responsibility. And obviously I can never match up to maybe what they might want from me. But it was always, and still is, wonderful. And the same has happened with Ammonite. Every week I’ll get letters or emails telling me how emotionally they’ve connected to the work. And when I’m really fed up, because making film is so hard, I do think to myself, “Well, if I never make another film, there is work out there that has affected people and made them feel certain things, and that feels satisfying.”
When it came to your second feature, what kind of things did you need to consider?
To be absolutely honest, I didn’t think of it in a career way at all. I just wanted to explore a slightly different emotional space. And obviously I’d been totally fascinated by Mary Anning. And so, I literally just wrote a film that I wanted to see.
On God’s Own Country you worked with two brilliant men who weren’t hugely well-known, but with Ammonite, you worked with two of the most famous women in the world. What was that like?
It was like working with any other actor, really. Same process, same discussions. I was nervous and I felt a bit on edge until I got to know them, but I think I would feel like that with anybody. The difference that I had not naively thought about was the amount of attention that would bring on this film from before I’d even shot a frame of it. And then, the paparazzi when you’re trying to shoot. And then, the articles and the leaked photographs and the opinions. All of that, I had not thought about or thought what that would feel like, and all of that is pretty hard to deal with.
But the film was then picked up for Cannes — that must have been an incredible feeling.
Yeah, it was. My second film to get in official competition at Cannes, I just was like, “Fuck, that’s crazy.” And here am I still shopping in Aldi. And to even be selected amongst that history and those filmmakers and films just felt, yeah, overwhelming. And then massively disappointing that there was no festival.
How did the response feel compared to God’s Own Country? Especially as, because of the names involved, there was a certain level of expectation?
I think again, that was hard. And I’ll tell you why it was really hard — because there was no physical manifestation of being with the film, me meeting audiences, me talking to journalists. There was nothing because of Covid. And so, the connection to the film felt quite distant. And it felt surreal because it felt like it wasn’t really happening because we were all living in a virtual world. And I think that’s the biggest difference, really. Not the reviews, not people’s reactions or anything else. It’s being denied being part of your work, your film.
Does it become any easier to manage? Some people don’t read reviews at all. The longer you’re in filmmaking, does it become a little bit easier?
No. I tell really, really personal stories... In those two films, they are very much about me and my life. And so, if somebody criticises it, they are directly criticising me. If somebody doesn’t like it, yeah, it’s hard. And of course, you never remember the fantastic reviews... You don’t remember some of the most important film journalists in the world saying, “This is the best film of the year.” You just remember some online blogger who writes, “This is rubbish.”
Many people think it’s the performance of Kate Winslet’s career. Were you disappointed she was overlooked at awards season?
Yeah. I just think that not only Kate’s performance in this film, the amount of work that she put in to get that performance, the bravery of someone in her position at her point in her career to deliver that performance. To me, it was a performance that couldn’t be ignored.
Has anything changed in the way you work now?
I think in terms of my process, it’s the same. But the way in which I think about the work is slightly shifting in terms of what I want my focus to be and really what I want to delve into. I’ve been very, very lucky with these two films. And it’s meant that I’ve had lots of really exciting, wonderful offers from various places, America — and here. But what it’s really made me see, all of that, is that actually for me to go through the process of making film, which I find really, really hard, I have to really, really care. It has to be something that I think is resonant on an emotional level for me to be involved in it. I think what making these films has done has made me really focus on what I want to do.
AMMONITE IS OUT NOW ON DIGITAL, AND ON 14 JUNE ON DVD AND BLU-RAY