Char­lotte Wells: ​‘Adults are locked in the roles that they per­form for kids’

Cin­e­ma is root­ed in the explo­ration — and manip­u­la­tion — of mem­o­ry. This notion feels ever true in Char­lotte Wells’ direc­to­r­i­al debut After­sun, a qui­et­ly dev­as­tat­ing por­tray­al of a sum­mer hol­i­day shared by a young girl and her father (played beau­ti­ful­ly by ris­ing star Paul Mescal and new­com­er Frankie Corio). It is a strik­ing work by a film­mak­er whose name you are bound to hear again.

LWLies: A lot of the film is pre­sent­ed through the eyes of 11-year-old Sophie. How was it for you to get back to that mind­set of a child?

Wells: I spent a lot of time think­ing about the right age for Sophie. I con­sid­ered younger, and I con­sid­ered old­er. Ulti­mate­ly, the most inter­est­ing thing about 11 is that it is the point where self-con­scious­ness kind of emerges, it’s a step toward ado­les­cence that you can’t take back. It just seemed like the best of the best of both worlds in a cer­tain way, being able to inter­act with the old­er kids while also still hav­ing that real child­like inno­cence up to a point.

It was fun to look through pho­to albums and think back to mem­o­ries of a real­ly spe­cif­ic moment in my life. At age 11, I was mov­ing schools, it was the late nineties, the height of the Spice Girls, and it is a peri­od of time I have a lot of mem­o­ries of. It’s a point of child­hood where you retain quite a lot, rather than ear­li­er years, which are more like glimpses, the kind of mem­o­ries you won­der if it’s a pho­to­graph you’ve seen a hun­dred times rather than the mem­o­ry itself.

Much of After­sun is about that piv­otal point in your life when you start fig­ur­ing out your par­ents are peo­ple of their own. I think this age aids that idea.

A hun­dred per cent. That was one of the things on the very top of my mind when I was writ­ing, that age when you start to have an aware­ness of your par­ents as peo­ple. I think it takes until your teenage years for it to real­ly set in, and maybe a ver­sion of Sophie who was 16 would’ve gone into the ten­sion of that a lot more. I think 11-year-olds start to see it but don’t real­ly have the capac­i­ty to under­stand it, so it’s just kind of spe­cif­ic obser­va­tions that don’t quite coa­lesce into a real per­cep­tion yet. Adults are locked in the roles that they per­form for kids.

It was always very impor­tant to me that Sophie be pro­tect­ed from what’s going on with Calum, and that he suc­ceeds, for the most part, in pro­tect­ing her from his own strug­gles. So much of the film is Sophie look­ing back with more knowl­edge acquired about what her dad might have been going through, and try­ing to fig­ure out if maybe there was some­thing that she missed. But of course, she could have nev­er seen it because she was a trust­ing kid for whom her father was just her father.

Being on this cusp of adult­hood brings me to Paul Mescal. What drew you to him for this role?

Paul has an amaz­ing inher­ent warmth and sense of sta­bil­i­ty. As I’ve been talk­ing more about the film recent­ly, a few peo­ple have asked me about the phys­i­cal­i­ty with­in the film, which isn’t some­thing I had giv­en a lot of direct thought to. And I do think a big part of it is that there is some­thing very phys­i­cal­ly sta­ble about him too. And it felt essen­tial for his strug­gle to be unex­pect­ed, for him to present as some­one who felt very ground­ed and Paul real­ly brings that. But more than any­thing else, he just real­ly respond­ed to the script. We had a real­ly love­ly, very sin­cere first con­ver­sa­tion, he was very pas­sion­ate about the project ear­ly on and it was clear he was going to work very hard and that is some­thing I have a lot of respect for and respond to.

It’s so inter­est­ing that you’re say­ing you didn’t think a lot about the phys­i­cal­i­ty because I’m so moved by the moments where hands linger, feet slide on wet ground, limbs are made limp by the sun…

I def­i­nite­ly thought about bod­ies and Greg [Oke, cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er] and I talked a lot about frag­ments and the way you think of peo­ple. When I think back of peo­ple, to the idea of pierc­ing peo­ple back togeth­er in my head, I think of ges­tures and hands. So we def­i­nite­ly shot with that inten­tion, espe­cial­ly because the point of view in the film is fair­ly com­plex and one of the points of view we had was Sophie’s direct point of view, and for those, specif­i­cal­ly, we had a cer­tain way of shoot­ing. The hand drop­ping off the lounger, details such as that, reflect her kind of pierc­ing him back togeth­er, try­ing to recon­struct a com­plete image.

Can you tell me a lit­tle bit more about how Tai chi became a part of Aftersun?

I think I would do well with prac­tis­ing Tai chi in my life [laughs]. It’s a detail I took from my fam­i­ly. For some unknown rea­son, my dad and his broth­ers all taught them­selves tai-chi. It was just this weird and intrigu­ing fact that I incor­po­rat­ed into the film. It was an aspect of Calum’s char­ac­ter that reflects the process of search­ing. He’s search­ing for so many things and one of those things is a sense of peace. And speak­ing of phys­i­cal­i­ty, I think there was just some­thing inter­est­ing to me about cap­tur­ing that move­ment and the motion and allow­ing it to be a thing that she ridiculed at first and then found some com­mu­nion with it – and him – lat­er in the film.

It’s a great con­trast to the more unruly, chaot­ic nature of club danc­ing, which is also used by Calum as a form of self-expression.

Yeah, and the breath­ing too. Breath­ing was some­thing I start­ed play­ing with in my last short film (2017’s Blue Christ­mas). I read this piece about foot­steps in Chan­tal Akerman’s work and how she allows them to serve a sig­nif­i­cant nar­ra­tive pur­pose at cer­tain points and the way they come to the fore of the sound­scape of the films and I love the idea of doing that with breath­ing. Tai chi was a nice way to play into that as well.

You’ve men­tioned in inter­views before that you didn’t have a lot of footage of your­self as a child, so how did you go back to this idea of using the Mini DV as a fram­ing device?

I have a lit­tle bit of footage of me as a kid at exact­ly the age Frankie is, but not much. When I went through the Sun­dance Lab in 2020, the director’s lab was vir­tu­al and they asked us to com­pile a pre­sen­ta­tion called The World of Film. A lot of peo­ple put togeth­er visu­al treat­ments and pre­sen­ta­tions and I worked with Greg, my cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er, to cut a 15-minute film that incor­po­rat­ed this DV footage that I had as a kid. That was def­i­nite­ly the foun­da­tion for the goofi­ness of it, like how goofy and annoy­ing I cer­tain­ly think I was age 10, 11, and also the kind of mun­dan­i­ty of it, so much of that footage is just a cam­era point­ed at some­thing total­ly random.

I have a lit­tle bit of footage from hol­i­days where I was just fix­at­ed on cap­tur­ing spaces, just record­ing where I was, which is some­thing I still do, albeit in dif­fer­ent ways. That pro­vid­ed the basis of the inspi­ra­tion for how it should feel. I felt very strong­ly from the out­set that the actors should always be the ones to oper­ate the cam­era and that we give them as much space as we could. So there are a few scenes in the film where it was real­ly just them, and we tried to cap­ture that spon­tane­ity and inti­ma­cy and goofi­ness of the home video phase. There were always excit­ing moments on set when we were able to do that, there was some­thing very free­ing about it.

There is some­thing so beau­ti­ful about this idea of cap­tur­ing spaces because it brings you back to the real­i­sa­tion that you only start look­ing at your par­ents when you’re old­er. Every­thing and every­where is more inter­est­ing than your par­ents when you’re a child.

I didn’t real­ly want Calum to appear in any of that footage for this very rea­son. I want­ed it all to be on her, for it to be almost his record of her — it’s his cam­era and I kind of imag­ined him going home with the tapes. I didn’t real­ly want him to be in any of the footage and if he was in it, I want­ed him to try evad­ing the cam­era as much as he could. This is why he ducks behind the cur­tain. I felt impor­tant that it most­ly be of her, either him cap­tur­ing her or her cap­tur­ing her­self. I tried to spare him from it for the exact rea­son that kids aren’t real­ly inter­est­ed in their par­ents, only when you’re old­er do you look back and wish you had tak­en advan­tage of the oppor­tu­ni­ty you had. But, of course, you nev­er would. That’s just not how it works.

Cer­tain songs are key to the emo­tion­al gut punch­es of the film, par­tic­u­lar­ly Queen’s Under Pres­sure. How did it come to be a part of the film?

There were many songs in the playlist I was work­ing with, and Under Pres­sure was not one of them. It was a late-night dis­cov­ery while cut­ting the rave scene, which I had been avoid­ing because it was real­ly chal­leng­ing footage to work with and because I knew it had to work and I was ter­ri­fied to find that it did not. Music is the thing I tend to go to when I’m pro­cras­ti­nat­ing or warm­ing up or both and this ver­sion of Under Pres­sure is one I some­times lis­ten to.

It was just one of those acci­den­tal yet beau­ti­ful dis­cov­er­ies that was, as some­body put to me, a cap­i­tal C choice. It takes a lot of con­fi­dence to wear your heart on your sleeve in the way the song does in the film and I am real­ly hap­py with it. It’s always the moment I’m most excit­ed to hear — when Calum falls back, sees both Sophies, and the music just surges. That’s always the moment I’m most excit­ed to expe­ri­ence in the cinema.

At one point, Calum says ​“there’s this feel­ing once you leave where you’re from, where you grew up, you don’t total­ly belong there again, not real­ly”. Is this the same for you or do you feel like you will always be drawn to Scot­land for your films?

I wrote that dia­logue and there are many aspects of Calum that are as much me as they are my dad, and that’s def­i­nite­ly one that belongs to me – and may well have belonged to my dad. It’s dif­fi­cult when you leave where you’re from, espe­cial­ly when you leave rel­a­tive­ly young and grow up trav­el­ling or in a mul­ti­tude of oth­er places. Some­times, when I’m express­ing this thought, I feel like I am just quot­ing the film, so I feel like this is one of the ways in which the film stands for itself. In a way, Edin­burgh will always be home.