FRANCIS LEE

The working-class writer and director who’s a singular voice in modern British film

You won’t find many, if any, filmmaking origin stories like that of Yorkshire-born writer/director Francis Lee. A working-class actor-now-filmmaker who was working in a scrapyard right up until the day production began on his Bfi-backed debut feature, God’s Own Country. It was a first film — about the brutality of isolation, the soul-scars of being an outsider — that struck a big old emotional chord with critics and audiences alike, and landed Lee the World Cinema Directing Award at Sundance in 2017.

Even bigger things were to come with his second feature Ammonite (starring Kate Winslet as 19th-century paleontologist Mary Anning and Saoirse Ronan as her lover), when it was selected for official competition at Cannes. It’s an experience that Lee describes now as “totally surreal. And actually the thing that I really wanted. And it’s rare, I think, that what you want, you get. And I really wanted that film to get into Cannes. And I daren’t say that obviously, but it just felt really good.” Even with it being an unrecognisable Cannes due to Covid, it was a huge achievement with his sophomore effort.

Lee’s now well underway on the writing of his third feature — a horror film with God’s Own Country star Josh O’connor — which, shift of genre aside, once again pulls Lee back to similar themes found in his first two outings: “So this film is about isolation and about landscape and about class and about a queer experience.”

That’s not all the filmmaker has up his sleeve, though, as he’s working on something alongside his third film, that he describes as “a secret project that’s quite small-scale”. Something that will potentially take him back much more to the world of God’s Own Country — made without attention or pressure or fanfare and starring lesser-known actors. “It’s about a young guy,” he says. “So it’s not someone super-famous [to star]. I think that, going maybe that way a little bit, will help to balance working with people like Kate [Winslet] and Josh [O’connor], which I am planning to again.” Lee may mean in two different films, but come on: a Josh O’connor/kate Winslet crossover? Wouldn’t that be just the best third act in this most original of filmmaker origin stories?

AMMONITE IS OUT NOW ON DIGITAL, AND ON 14 JUNE ON DVD AND BLU-RAY