‘Femme’ filmmakers on their fierce debut feature: “We didn’t want to make a film that felt moralistic or simple”

In early November, nominations for the 2023 British Independent Film Awards (Bifa) were announced and, to nobody’s great surprise, a quartet of lauded UK titles featured in all the major categories: Searchlight Pictures’ Rye Lane and All Of Us Strangers; and festival prize winners Scrapper (Sundance) and How To Have Sex (Cannes’ Un Certain Regard). Joining these high-profile films with 11 Bifa nominations, including for best director, screenplay and British independent film, was Femme, written and directed by Sam H Freeman and Ng Choon Ping. Suddenly the duo’s queer neo-noir thriller — which had premiered to relatively little fanfare in the Berlinale’s Panorama section in February — was catapulted to the heart of the UK awards conversation.

Whatever the outcome at the Bifa ceremony on December 3, these nominations bring validation to a film that is notable for its commercial ambition and bold risk-taking. Nathan Stewart-Jarrett stars as Jules, a drag performer who loses his whole sense of self when, still in stage costume, he gets into an altercation with a group of thuggish young men, and is violently attacked by one of them. But when he meets his closeted gay assailant, Preston (George MacKay), at a sauna and is not recognised by him, Jules infiltrates the man’s life, plotting revenge.

Freeman and Ng — who are both gay men and former flatmates — had a shared affection for elevated genre storytelling, as well as an ambition to make a film together. The pair found themselves discussing the crime-thriller genre one evening after watching the Safdie brothers’ Good Time. “It sparked this conversation about how much we enjoyed the genre, but how we also felt strangely alienated from it by the fact queer characters don’t make appearances and definitely never lead films like this,” explains Freeman, who trained as an actor at Drama Centre London before pivoting to screenwriting and storywriting with BBC TV series Industry and This Is Going To Hurt. “We had this idea that we wanted to do a take on the genre, but we wanted to centre ourselves.”

So far, so bold. But what gives Femme its true provocative and risky edge is the arc of Jules’ character. He takes on a new masculine persona to fit into Preston’s world and — at least it is open to this interpretation — finds himself seeing attractive qualities in a man the audience almost certainly wants to hate.

Singapore-born Ng — whose background is in theatre, with work for the Royal Shakespeare Company, National Theatre and Young Vic — addresses this point head on. “We were very aware, before we made Femme, during the making of the film, and when people responded to it, that there was some pushback on the way the story went. We might have offended certain orthodoxies of queer cinema of not thoroughly punishing the villain.

“What we were interested in was the humanity of these characters,” he continues. “Humanity, people tend to think fluffy warm things, because it’s linked to the word ‘humane’. But the humanity of it is also complicated and messy and fucked-up. There is a fashion for queer characters to be positive role models, but we have destructive tendencies and we have a dark underbelly to our emotions.”

Freeman jumps in, explaining, “Ideas like justice, redemption, they weren’t the axes we were building the story on. We didn’t want to make a film that felt moralistic or simple. In fact, in every way the film is against binary categorisation of things, be that gender or sexuality or ideas like hero and villain. They don’t feel real to us.”

Dummy run

Freeman and Ng were not going to find it easy to get Femme funded, having never made any kind of film nor even been to film school. However, when introduced to producers Sam Ritzenberg and Myles Payne at London’s Agile Films, they received backing to make a short film as a proof of concept. The resulting $37,000 (£30,000) 18-minute film, also called Femme and starring Paapa Essiedu and Harris Dickinson, won the Bifa for best short in 2021 and was Bafta-nominated in the same category.

The feature version — which shares themes with the short but has a different storyline and named lead characters who are played by different actors — received backing from Agile, BBC Film and Anton, and shot for 28 days in the summer of 2022. Utopia and Signature respectively went on to acquire US and UK rights, with the latter distributor releasing Femme in December, thus qualifying it for the current Bafta Film Awards.

After making the Femme short, the co-directors started to reconceive their feature, leaning into the themes of costume as armour. “Originally, drag was a neat way for our lead character to be unrecognisable to his assailant when he meets him later on,” explains Freeman. “We realised that, actually, all of the characters in the film are wearing a form of drag. Preston and his friends are kind of drag kings, they’re all putting it on, they’re all trying to pretend to each other that they are the epitome of masculinity.

“There’s that RuPaul quote, ‘We’re all born naked, and the rest is drag,’” he adds. “That went into every aspect of the filmmaking, the costume choices, make-up choices. What is the story that this character is trying to tell the world in this scene at this moment? The actors got very involved in that, and it became a really fulfilling part of the creative process.”

A case in point is Preston’s neck tattoo, which was initially in the script so that the character will be recognised as the same man who attacked Jules when they meet again at the gay sauna. But MacKay and hair and make-up designer Marie Deehan went big and bold with the tattoo design.

“George felt it gave him a lot,” explains Freeman. “The tattoos, the clothes, everything is about screaming at the world, ‘I am this man, be scared of me.’”

MacKay, who when the directors first met him had just had a baby with his partner (“Young father, exhausted, thin,” says Ng), quickly gained pounds of muscle. And despite being, as Ng says, “the sweetest, most well brought-up young man, so lovely to be with”, they never doubted he could make the leap. “When we saw his back catalogue of film performances, they’re all very different characters, but the one thing that was consistent was that George always threw himself into each character with every fibre of his being. He was always able to embody the genre, and he knew what film he was in. That gave us the upwelling of confidence that we needed for him to play Preston.”

For the character of Jules — who in the words of Ng goes from “fierce drag queen to destroyed drag queen, to fierce person who is able to take on a new persona to infiltrate the world of Preston convincingly, and then by the end of it to fuse these two personas into a third creation” — the filmmakers saw “loads of great actors who just didn’t feel quite right”, says Freeman. “We started to wonder if we had written a role that couldn’t be played.”

Casting director Julie Harkin all along had an instinct for Stewart-Jarrett (TV’s Misfits) but he was initially unavailable. “When Nathan walked in, we were relieved that here was someone who could embody all those different personas and work it into a consistent film character,” says Ng.

Stewart-Jarrett and MacKay are among the film’s Bifa nods — nominated together in the joint performance category, where they face off against the lead actors of Rye Lane and Scrapper. And at the end of a long and discursive Zoom with the filmmakers — in which they disclose they are in a professional “open relationship”, and both working on upcoming projects, together and apart — conversation loops back to the Bifa validation.

“Hopefully these nominations are our version of Cannes’ Un Certain Regard or Sundance,” says Freeman. “We haven’t had that in the same way the other films have, so this then becomes our version of that moment.” 

• Screen digital edition: November 24