Alice Lowe: ​‘I do want to make some­thing timeless’

We have been neg­a­tive­ly con­di­tioned into expect­ing way too much from our film­mak­ers. If a direc­tor doesn’t deliv­er a new movie on the dot of two years since the last one, then snipey lit­tle rhetor­i­cals are float­ed into the dig­i­tal ether. ​“What­ev­er hap­pened to X?”, ​“I wish Y would hur­ry up with a new movie!”, ​“Hey Z, u OK hun?” Some might even think that our obses­sion with artists and their errat­ic work rates occa­sion­al­ly bor­der on the psychotic. 

Alice Lowe, whose new film Timestalk­er is a won­drous, psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly pro­found explo­ration into the mind­set of the roman­tic obses­sive, feels that the con­tent-hun­gry com­men­tari­at have lit­tle sense of the hur­dles that need to be leaped before a film can come into glo­ri­ous fruition. When she made her micro-bud­get debut, Pre­venge, in 2016, she had one child and man­aged to work them into her pro­duc­tion and pro­mo­tion­al activ­i­ties. This time around, she has two, and they’re both a bit old­er and require more atten­tion. She talks about her expe­ri­ence attend­ing film fes­ti­vals and the types of peo­ple who can plunge time and resource into tak­ing such jaunts: ​“You’re with direc­tors who are men on the whole and they’ve got chil­dren but they’re just not with them. This is real­ly dif­fi­cult to nav­i­gate if you are the pri­ma­ry car­er for your chil­dren. It’s tricky.” She then dead­pans, ​“This is why it’s good that I only do a film once every sev­en years.” 

Obvi­ous­ly, as pro­fes­sion­al con­sumers of cul­ture, it’s hard for a jour­nal­ist not to want their appetite con­stant­ly whet­ted. But in the case of Lowe, Timestalk­er is, to use the old cliché, a labour of love, one which has been shaped in a very spe­cif­ic and per­son­al way – and that nur­tur­ing takes time. In this case, the Covid pan­dem­ic added to the delays, but it’s still sad that a vision so unique and ful­ly-realised would take so long to reach our screens. ​“After lock­down I was think­ing I won’t ever get to make anoth­er film. A lot of female direc­tors nev­er get to make a sec­ond film.” The film address­es the idea of our end­less striv­ing to reach some­thing that always remains just out of reach, with the only respite com­ing through death. ​“I def­i­nite­ly had a feel­ing to make this one about mor­tal­i­ty,” she says. ​“I treat it as if this is my last chance. The whole thing is a big metaphor for filmmaking.” 

Lowe her­self plays the hap­less Agnes, a wit­ty, kind­ly woman with a dis­tinct set of predilec­tions and who exists across a num­ber of tem­po­ral planes – the Dark Ages, the Vic­to­ri­an era, Ancient Egypt, the ear­ly 1980s. Her des­per­ate yearn­ing for a very spe­cif­ic type of roman­tic love leads to, at best, con­stant dis­ap­point­ment, and at worse, skull-crack­ing vio­lence. It’s a film whose clever con­ceit ini­tial­ly rais­es many ques­tions (and many big laughs) before all the var­i­ous strands coa­lesce into some­thing that is at once play­ful, poet­ic and emo­tion­al­ly rig­or­ous. ​“I’ve seen peo­ple do bad things for love, and it dri­ves you mad,” says Lowe. ​“You’ve told them not to do some­thing and they keep doing it, giv­ing your friend advice and they keep going back to their awful boyfriend or what­ev­er, and it dri­ves you insane. Yet you can have a type of admi­ra­tion for some­one who’s crazy because they actu­al­ly have a belief sys­tem, and we’re in a world where we don’t have reli­gion any­more. It’s not the focus of the west­ern world, so what do you lose through that?”

Cer­tain­ly, Agnes makes for a moral­ly abstruse lead: she’s prone to bouts of vio­lence; she’s blind to the peo­ple who actu­al­ly love her; and she can­not help but make the same mis­takes over and over and over again. Yet the film proves that her anti­so­cial ten­den­cies don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly lead to instant alien­ation and revul­sion. The hack­neyed impulse of moan­ing about an ​“unlik­able char­ac­ter” is, nine times out of 10, moan­ing about a com­plex char­ac­ter, or some­one who doesn’t just embody the plat­i­tudes pre­sent­ed by a genre or type of film. ​“I think a mis­con­cep­tion I some­times get from peo­ple is that they think I want to make weird stuff,” explains Lowe. ​“I think I’m more pop­ulist than I’m giv­en cred­it for. I actu­al­ly want peo­ple to see my work. I want peo­ple to enjoy it. I’m real­ly audi­ence focused. I start­ed out in live per­for­mance – the­atre, com­e­dy – and I like to know the audi­ence are hav­ing a good time and have felt some­thing and gone through a process. So part of me does want to make that Back to the Future – I do want to make some­thing timeless.” 

That sense of time­less­ness comes from the deci­sion not to have a McGuf­fin or some con­ceit­ed rea­son why Agnes is hav­ing a string of very bad dates across mul­ti­ple mil­len­nia. Instead, the sto­ry was inspired by ideas and con­cepts that are already com­mon and have tak­en root in the world, things that actu­al­ly mean some­thing to the every­day view­er. ​“I did lots of research into dif­fer­ent faiths, reli­gions and their thoughts about kar­ma and rein­car­na­tion,” explains Lowe. ​“I real­ly want­ed to make some­thing where I felt the char­ac­ters are not stereo­types – they are more arche­types. I love things like Com­me­dia dell’arte, and clown­ing. There’s lots of ref­er­ences to Tarot in the film.” From a cin­e­mat­ic van­tage, two gods of British film were very impor­tant when it came to Lowe’s sharp­ing of her eccen­tric vision: ​“I love Pow­ell and Press­burg­er, they were a mas­sive influ­ence on this. I was think­ing how to get British films back to the sense of colour and mag­ic. It comes down to belief, I think. It’s a belief in some­thing, even if it’s not religious.” 

In both Pre­venge and Timestalk­er, Lowe plays char­ac­ters who are try­ing to cloak their true iden­ti­ty and present to the world what they feel to be a more social­ly accept­able and gen­teel guise. ​“Loads of it is about iden­ti­ty,” she says, ​“with some­one wear­ing dis­guis­es and going against the very obvi­ous iden­ti­ty of, say, being a preg­nant woman who’s tak­ing con­trol of who she is or who she wants to be.” Iden­ti­ty and per­for­mance are inex­tri­ca­bly linked in terms of this idea of every­day role­play­ing, and Lowe sees Timestalk­er as an exam­ple of the audi­ence ​“roam­ing around someone’s brain.” In fact, it’s her brain if she’s being hon­est. ​“It’s my mem­o­ries and it’s my fan­tasies,” she admits. ​“And it’s a col­lec­tion of expe­ri­ences and influ­ences about cin­e­ma and what beau­ty is and what romance is – all these clas­sic tropes. All of these come down to the soul and mem­o­ries and dreams – an inte­ri­or world. And the ques­tion I have to ask at the end of all of this is, are we going to be allowed to make these films in the future? I do hope so.” 

This note of ret­i­cence, often laughed of ner­vous­ly, crops up repeat­ed­ly in our con­ver­sa­tion – the idea that Lowe may nev­er get to make one of ​“her” films again. And ques­tions of iden­ti­ty crop up once more, this time in rela­tion to art itself. There’s so much eye­ball-har­vest­ing ​“con­tent” out in the world, and the major­i­ty of it is made with­out the per­son­al sig­na­ture that serves to make some­thing spe­cial and worth­while. TV, in par­tic­u­lar, is in a bad place, with mas­sive shows writ­ten by 50 difer­ent peo­ple and AI mak­ing its unwant­ed incur­sions into the field of cre­ativ­i­ty. ​“It’s a sense of quirky iden­ti­ty,” is how Lowe describes it when pressed, ​“because that’s per­ceived as a risk – to real­ly say you like some­thing and not car­ing whether oth­er peo­ple like it too”