Claire Oak­ley: ​‘The whole film is about describ­ing the feel­ings of this young woman’

Claire Oakley’s first fea­ture is a bewitch­ing and mys­te­ri­ous jour­ney into the sub­con­scious of a young woman dis­cov­er­ing new, scary but thrilling desires inside her­self. Her fan­tasies come to life in the shad­ows of the maze-like, off-sea­son car­a­van park where her boyfriend works.

LWLies: This is such a rich film, with so many dif­fer­ent ele­ments to it. How did the project start?

Oak­ley: I wrote a ver­sion of it as a short film. It was one girl fol­low­ing anoth­er girl through some streets – a girl with red hair who kept dis­ap­pear­ing behind build­ings. Those were the first images that came to me, eight or nine years ago, and I was try­ing to write it as a lit­tle short film or mood film. I sent it off to this lab in Croa­t­ia, where there were about 20 or 30 oth­er direc­tors and we’d all read one another’s work.

At the time, I was in a het­ero­sex­u­al rela­tion­ship, very hap­py. When I arrived to the lab, this guy who’d read my mood film came up to me on the first day and said, ​‘Oh, so you’re a les­bian?’ And I was like, ​‘What?!’ It real­ly shocked me. He had read my film as being about female desire, and I didn’t have that read­ing at all. I thought it was real­ly weird, and I didn’t speak to him for the rest of that week. Then about five years passed, and things changed in my life. And I looked back at that moment and thought, ​‘Maybe he was right.’ Maybe I had some­how uncon­scious­ly writ­ten some­thing about my own desires that I had no idea about at the time.

When you have an idea for a film, is it always some­thing you com­plete­ly under­stand, or is it more of a sub­con­scious process?

I’ve been with this project for eight or nine years, if you include the short film. It’s got to be some­thing that inter­ests you enough to main­tain that pas­sion over time. So if it’s some­thing that I don’t com­plete­ly under­stand, I want to exca­vate it. With my work, it is almost like I’m going in blind and just let­ting things hap­pen. I always envy oth­er writ­ers or direc­tors who seem to have such a clear idea of what they’re doing, because it seems some­what more straight­for­ward. I sort of tor­ture myself over this. It’s also fun because images come to me and I don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly know how log­i­cal­ly they’re going to fit into the sto­ry. I try and feel free to trust that the images will con­vey some­thing around the sub­ject that is inter­est­ing, or that we might dis­cov­er later.

The way you fea­ture images which are not direct­ly, log­i­cal­ly explained, and give the audi­ence a sen­sa­tion rather than a clear mean­ing, made me think of the films of Nico­las Roeg, such as Don’t Look Now.

I was read­ing his auto­bi­og­ra­phy while we were shoot­ing! Don’t Look Now for me is the gold stan­dard, the most beau­ti­ful exam­ple of what true cin­e­ma can be. There is a heart­felt, beau­ti­ful sto­ry about a cou­ple, with per­for­mances that are so real, while the whole film is also very sur­re­al. So yeah, you’ve hit the nail on the head! We also looked at Jes­si­ca Hausner’s Hotel. She uses the hotel like it’s a maze and it becomes a bit of a labyrinth. We were look­ing at that in a more tech­ni­cal way, won­der­ing how we could make the car­a­van park feel quite maze-like and not ever quite know where we are in it. But I most­ly looked at pho­tog­ra­phers, espe­cial­ly Amer­i­can pho­tog­ra­ph­er Todd Hido. His work is very atmos­pher­ic, it’s all quite misty and in the twi­light. We want­ed to try and cre­ate that feeling.

The film is a mix of very sleek, stylised ele­ments, with real­is­tic per­for­mances, which gives it a beguil­ing and mys­te­ri­ous qual­i­ty. How did this con­trast come into being?

I think a lot of it came with the cast­ing. When we cast Mol­ly [Wind­sor], I was look­ing for some­one who had this very raw, nat­ur­al, hon­est, kind of unvar­nished act­ing style. So it didn’t at all ever feel like it was a per­for­mance. Through my shorts as well, I’ve always looked for actors like that. For me, the whole film is about feel­ing and describ­ing the feel­ings of this young woman. So the per­for­mances and the char­ac­ters had to feel very, very real, even though what was hap­pen­ing out­side of her and what she was pro­ject­ing onto the world had a sur­re­al or genre qual­i­ty. It is also a meet­ing of styles that I’m very inter­est­ed in. We were always bal­anc­ing every ele­ment of the film to not go too far into the genre and not make it feel unre­al, but also stay in keep­ing with the emotions.