It’s officially December, which means it is time to start compiling those best film of the year lists. Before you do, we highly encourage you to first seek out the fantastic Femme. THN caught the movie back at Berlin Film Festival and were immediately smitten with this “intense, beautiful, thought-provoking, and devastating” movie. Written and directed by duo Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choo Ping, Femme is a neo-noir revenge thriller that will get your heart pumping.
Jules’ life and career as a drag queen is destroyed by a homophobic attack, but when he re-encounters his attacker, Preston, in a gay sauna, he is presented with a chance to exact revenge. Starring George MacKay as Preston, and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett as Jules, Femme is so intense that audiences will dare not even breathe. It is honestly one of the best films, not only of the year, but also of the decade. Femme is out now in cinemas across the UK, so make sure that you make a date with Jules and Preston at your earliest convenience. Ahead of the release THN were able to speak with co-directors Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choo Ping to discover more about this very special project.
Femme is one of the most intense viewing experiences that I have had in years. The tension is almost suffocating at times, how did you work at crafting it?
SAM H. FREEMAN: It was driven by the films that inspired us. Our direct references when we came up with the idea, which was before we made a short or the feature, we were really inspired by a genre of film that really pushes into that. Particularly the films of the Safdie Brothers; they were big inspiration. We really wanted to explore that genre and queer it for ourselves. The tension of that felt like such an important element of it, and I suppose the set up of the story gives you a lot of that for free.
We paid a lot of attention in just building the story and the script when we were beating it out together and working out where it goes to just always be looking at how we are building a layer on to that tension. How do we complicate the situation? Make sure that every moment in it builds in some way into something else. Hopefully sometimes in unexpected ways, but there are maybe a few moments in the film where you feel like it lets up for a second maybe, but then he pushes himself back into it. It was definitely a conscious choice by us.
NG CHOO PING: I think what’s important to us as well is that people really care about the characters. I think that really feeds into that tension that we’re trying to create because everything is so high stakes if you really care for them and they put themselves into such, if not physically dangerous, then emotionally very dangerous situations.
At the beginning we were talking about the short film and the feature and this feeling of heterophobia of how queer people just feel really stressed in super butch or hyper-masculine situations. So we ran with that feeling and as Sam said, we’re trying to queer a genre. This is a genre that we feel in watching all those late night crime thrillers, is a very hyper masculine space that very often queer creators or imagining queer characters don’t really have a place in it. So it is from a real life feeling, but also an artistic feeling of what it is like to be queer in a situation like that, or in a genre like that.
SAM: I think a lot of the tension comes from the fact that the film is so much told from Jules’ perspective and we tried at every stage of the creation process, whether it be from writing the script, to the film making, to the choices we made in the edit, to make sure that you always feel like you are in his head that you are seeing the world from his perspective and he puts himself into a lot of situations where he’s incredibly vulnerable. We want it to make you feel like you were him and to experience the world as he does, and I think that this film is a very stressful place to be.
I think as the film goes on, I suppose the construction of the story is that, even as the relationship between them might, at certain points seem to feel safer, it’s almost your emotional investment in that which makes the tension rise because you’re waiting for the inevitable point where it goes wrong.
As much as the film is told from Jules’ point of view, you do allow the viewer glimpses into who Preston is. How important was it that you did have a little bit of balance there to show that he isn’t necessarily a one-note closeted homophobe?
NG: I think it’s important to us that it is a moralistic film. It is not a black and white film, it is not didactic. It’s not even boldly polemical. It is about very human characters and exploring what it is about their worlds that made them the way they were, and the Limited way they are able to respond to other people and emotions. I suppose the character of Preston is quite easy for us to turn him into a villain, and get the film to punish him in a way that is satisfying for some people who just want to punish villains. But I think more important than that to us is to have a very human view of the complexity there is in these characters.
SAM: Of course, we’ve crafted a genre film, hopefully it’s thrilling and there’s entertainment and you should feel on the edge of your seat and invested emotionally in the characters, but we did want it to provoke conversation. A big part of our wanting for it to be entertaining was the idea of hiding the pill in the food. I think if you emotionally invest, if you feel drawn into the story, if you feel invested in that way, then actually you are more likely to come out really talking about what happened on screen and how you feel about it.
The film is anti any idea of binaries. Nothing is binary in the film, gender isn’t binary, sexuality isn’t binary, and I think ideas of hero and villain are also very binary and they weren’t interesting to us in that way. We wanted to create two characters that felt real and we wanted to put them in a situation and try to create a story about human beings.
NG: I think part of the thrill with Preston is that he is quite unpredictable. The fact that he’s a complicated character I think adds to the thrill of experiencing his character. As with Jules, I think there is a fashion for audiences who like queer films or characters to be ‘nice’, I think it’s really thrilling for us and actually very authentic for us that a queer character has the full range of human emotions both nice and dark.
SAM: I think sometimes there is a pressure on any kind of minority storytellers to almost create stories that are sort of like an advertisement for queer life or a puff piece for our existence. There’s a lot of media out there that’s doing that’s great and really fulfilling and joyful. But we also felt strongly that we wanted to create something else. We wanted to have the freedom to really create the character that we wanted to create and not feel like we have to sit within a box.
NG: An Orthodoxy almost. It is almost becoming an Orthodoxy that minority stories have to be warm and uplifting.
Whether it be physically, psychologically, emotionally, or sexually, this is a very intimate film. How did you go about creating a safe space for your performers to explore this gamut of emotions?
SAM: Well an intimacy coordinator is the headline answer. We had this amazing intimacy coordinator called Robbie Taylor Hunt who we worked with Nathan and George, and created real boundaries between us and Nathan and George. Whenever it came to choreographing sex scenes, we would talk about what the story was and we would talk to Robbie about what the film needed from the scenes and we would leave them to go away and choreograph something together that they felt comfortable with, that they felt able to commit to.
We really wanted to make sure we create an atmosphere where they felt like they had full permission and there was no pressure on them to say yes, they could say no to anything they wanted to, and they wouldn’t have to bring that to us or feel like they would be disappointing us in some way. They worked really closely together. They created all sorts of onset rituals they would do together to get into the scenes to make sure that they were able to come out of them and go into them in an emotionally safe way. I think all of that was helped by the fact that Nathan and George had very natural chemistry with each other from the first time they read together. They just got along; very real fun, light-hearted energy to set.
NG: I think the intermediary of a good intimacy coordinator is so important in creating a structure on set that allows actors to say ‘No’ without feeling like they were offending some idea of a power structure. I think filmmaking is moving in a very positive direction where there is hopefully less and less of such problematic power structures where you feel like you’re to say yes or else, you’re doing something wrong. This was absolutely not the case and it was very important to us that everyone could speak as equals on set.
After an international festival tour, Femme is finally coming to UK cinemas. Why do you hope that audiences take a chance on your film?
NG: I suppose it’s amidst all the Christmas films that are coming out that this is a bit of counter-programming. If you need a place to go to feel your dark feelings about Christmas and Christmas dinner, Christmas Gatherings, this is a space to go for your dark feelings. It is exciting. It is stressful. It is erotic. All good feelings to have if you want some form of catharsis at the end of an hour and a half. Come watch it if you love the genre because it is unabashedly a genre film with a queer protagonist in the middle of it. It might be something that people might not have seen before so it could be refreshing.
SAM: Our film fits into the box of queer cinema, which is often seen as a very niche category of film, it is a label that we absolutely embrace, and we hope that queer audiences come to the cinema to watch it. We think it’s a real cinematic experience, it looks great on a big screen. I think thrillers, horrors, this kind of genre of film is a real social experience, you go with people to feel. We hope we’ve created a film that makes you feel first and think later in a way and I think those films work really well in the cinema because they’re quite visceral experiences.
We want queer audiences to come see the film, but we also hope that it’s a universal story and maybe queer cinema being seen as being something that fits into a niche box, we hope we break out of it a little bit. At festivals, straight audiences have flocked to this film in the same way that queer audiences have and have come away feeling the same emotion. We hope that it’s something that it’s a film that, maybe because of its genre status, crosses some bridges.
NG: Sam and I have watched this film like a billion times in the making of it and it’s starting to feel a bit like we’ve seen it too many times, but when we saw it at the festival with a big audience, as Sam said, it is a social experience. It feels a lot more different when you can clutch your friends beside you. As Sam says it really does make a difference when you see it on the big screen.
SAM: You see people hand grabbing the person next to them. We’ve heard a lot of reports of that. I think it does well in a public viewing setting.
Signature Entertainment presents Femme exclusively in cinemas 1st December.
