Intimacy 101: Harry Wootliff

Welcome to Filmmaking 101, an interview series in which Massive speaks to creatives about the topics and themes that fuel their process, the emotions that make them tick as people. A crash-course and a deep dive, we lift the curtain on the things that excite them as filmmakers and inspire them as humans. This week, Savina Petkova speaks to master of romantic dramas Harry Wootliff for Intimacy 101.

Harry Wootliff is interested in the way human relationships are moulded, how they grow, and she is fascinated by endings as much as beginnings. After the Leeds-born director’s first feature Only You premiered at the 2018 London Film Festival, its nuanced emotional impact didn’t leave UK audiences for a while. The film, which follows an emerging love story between a 30-something year old woman and a man ten years younger than her, was nominated for a BAFTA for Outstanding Debut. Wootliff’s works feel intimate and expansive at the same time, as she dives deep into a couple’s world kindly, and with precision.

For her sophomore feature True Things, the filmmaker uses a book as a point of departure Deborah Kay Davies’ 2011 novel True Things About Me, which follows the intoxicating relationship between a stuck-in-a-rut benefits office worker named Katie (Ruth Wilson) and a charmingly enigmatic claimant (Tom Burke) who is only credited as Blond. To understand Wootliff and her new film it’s important to focus on her most prized skill which is also the most revealing: her knack for characters, and stories, that feed a tightly-knit world dominated by intimacy.

Definitions 

What would you say are the characteristics of true intimacy, the ones you brought to the screen with this couple?

The title partly alludes to my perception – there is no absolute truth. When you look at those relationships, and as Katie gets told many times, “He’s not into you anyway”, I think he was into her but he couldn’t carry through that intimacy. My point of view has to do with not wanting to vest him with that power, of not being interested in her. 

I think he’s in love with her but he’s scared: he’s terrified, so he pushes and pulls. But Ruth was often saying that he’s just not in love with her at all, and of course I let her do as she thought. In the bigger picture, who knows? There’s never going to be a truth, looking back at such relationships, you can never know: was it love, who knows? 

Chance Encounters 

Both Only You and True Things start with chance encounters, although very different ones. What changed for you as a filmmaker when approaching this idea of opportune meetings in time? 

Even if [True Things] has a book as its springboard, I always try to find the personal connection to the stories. I think it’s a different chapter of me, even though it’s not me, of course, it’s Katie. Only You is about an infatuation that becomes love, and about the challenges of an enduring relationship, while this one is about the challenges of something that doesn’t become anything. I’m not sure if it’s a female thing, or maybe a male thing as well, maybe both men and women relate to it – I think we all hang in there for too long trying to work someone out. 

But we have to start somewhere, to attempt to relate to another person? 

I guess it’s my experience of how relationships start. In the book, it does start like that but for me, in life, it does start with a chance encounter rather than someone introducing me to a friend of theirs. And what I find fascinating also is how you leap into someone’s life.

I mean, it never happens like that unless it’s some kind of sexual relationship where you literally one day don’t know this person, and the next you’re in their house. I’m also fascinated with the adventure of an accidental encounter and where it takes you. I don’t think that women initiate it in a very straightforward manner. We give signals…

But you mean it as a form of an active participation, rather than some passive reception? 

What I came to realise while making this film is, even though in such relationships you feel like you’ve got no power and you’re a passenger, you aren’t. Katie isn’t. I’ve looked back on my past and thought, “Actually, I was very active and very determined, in a way that I hadn’t thought of before.” You’re not just the victim of something happening to you. 

Katie falls quite quickly, as if she was seeking a gravitational centre. Do you see your characters as if they lack one in the first place, even if they freely express their sexuality? 

In the edit, it felt like the film was over when she no longer wanted to have him. That sense of pursuit needed to stay very strong throughout. A lot of what Ruth and I talked about regarding women’s sexuality was that I don't like the way the role of the pursuer is always relegated to men. I think this is insulting to us.

Because we’re not just looking for love and marriage, pots and flowers. There’s such a judgement on women, of how you’re not allowed to play the field without judgement, which is strange. The courting dance is still at play even now, as I learn whenever I talk to my young niece about it. 

A curious trait of Katie’s infatuation with Blond is her adapting to repeating his words and copying some of his responses in her own life. 

Yes, and also there’s that scene where she goes on a date and makes advances to the man who then rejects her because she’s being “too forward”. I like that scene because she’s empowered and she’s kind of using him to make herself feel better after Blond’s gone. It’s controversial, Katie’s not all good and she’s attempting to do to this guy the thing that Blond does to her. She wants him to be Blond, she’s enacting a ‘Blond’ situation.

The Mechanics of Tenderness

Whenever they’re alone, it feels like Katie and Blond are like a teenage couple, retaining so much of the immediacy of encountering one another. How did you go about translating their chemistry on screen? 

I wanted to film to have a bold beginning, to be full-on. I wanted the opening to set the tone, to feel extraordinary and common at the same time. I wanted to keep the ordinariness of sex but also take the viewer on a flight of fancy. 

In one scene, Katie and Blond go swimming. Then, after he comes back from his dip, his mood shifts really quickly when she makes a move. There’s this sudden abruptness, this breakage of the bond between the two.

It was very interesting for me to hear about Tom’s experience when shooting the scene. Because I asked him, “When you turn away, what do you feel?” And he said, “I felt really sad, like a sad heaviness.” But I think what's brilliant about Tom, as an actor and as a person, is that he’s so emotionally intelligent that he always added an extra layer of pathos. He didn’t play it like that all the time but he let it bubble underneath the surface. 

I think this keeps Blond very human, and it’s very important that we keep the intrigue with him and we keep liking him because at the point where we’re no longer interested or trying to work him out, we don’t want to see him again. And this is where Katie arrives at the end. 

Filming Sex

Their encounter starts as a sexual one, and the sex scenes are very much centred around Katie’s pleasure. What was the process of shooting like?

It’s very challenging, shooting those scenes. Firstly, we’re outside, it’s open and logistically we need to find a way to make it private for the actors. Then we need to make it feel very intimate – they’re laying on rough ground, they’re naked. It’s really tough on them, and as a director you have to be very mindful if they’re okay when asking them to perform difficult things. These sex scenes are so constructed and that’s good. I trained as a dancer, so I try to choreograph the dance they’re doing, so they really know the pattern of movement. 

How do you articulate that out loud? 

“...And then you do three thrusts, and then you’re gonna move away and kiss for five seconds, and your arm is going to go there…” I don’t tell them that straight off, but we talk through it. I ask them to lay where they want to lay, suggest what they could do, if they wanted to. And then I ask Tom, “Can you touch her breast?” 

It’s hard for the man as well, to feel comfortable. They’re often sensitive towards the fact that they’re crossing some sort of line with a female actor, but it’s hard for everybody. With this scene in particular, I had an embarrassment of riches when I was editing. There was so much beautiful footage, the cinematography was so sensitive. 

How did you find delicacy and severity, in this fragile moment of disillusionment?

I think we, the audience, are with Kate at that moment and we dislike Blond for his lack of connectivity, for him saying, “What are you trying to do, climb inside me?”

I was really thinking about how to shift and keep it subjective, without placing too much emphasis on either of them. And it’s got to be crushing  – I love that he says something so subtle. It’s like when you go home after such a thing, you start thinking about how terrible it felt, but then start second-guessing. “Was it that bad? Or was he joking? Maybe it was a compliment…” You turn it over in your head, and this is a trickiness I wanted to salvage. 

Intimate Aesthetics

Did you envision the look of the film as free-floating before you started to work with Ashley Connor, your director of photography?

Yes, but I was stuck! And then I stumbled across Ashley’s work – she’s incredibly good at filming women, she’s passionate about collaborating with females, which worked great also because I wanted to show a lot of Katie on her own. I’m quite fascinated with people in their homes, when nobody’s watching them, things like female grooming. I felt Ashley was fascinated with the same kind of thing. There was a poetry, a subjectiveness to her work which I like a lot. 

There is also a sense of captivity in the choice of format: you shot in a square 1:33.

At the beginning, I kept wanting to shrink the frame to capture Ruth’s face. I partly felt that the frame really fitted into that shape of the screen and there was this claustrophobic element to it, as she was boxed into her mind. In that time, when your mind constantly defaults to the same subject – in this case, your lover – and I felt that decision also illustrated this feeling. 

Emotional Ambiguity

How important is ambiguity for you? 

I really like the idea that she’s projecting onto him what she wants him to be and what she thinks he is offering her. When I saw the film with an audience I was thinking, “Did the sex scene in the car park even happen?” Her waking up the next day is so abrupt, so I really wanted to sustain this fluidity.

Where are we? Are we in her dreams, in reality, sharing her imagination? This way of playing with the audience’s perception wasn’t planned, but I like it because it also feeds into the cycle of Blond playing with Katie. It’s about feeling destabilised. 

Relationships like the one between Katie and Blond often reveal more about the infatuated person than the one they’re chasing after. How did you envision Katie as a character, after she’s emerged out the other side of such a toxic bond?

The place where we shot, Ramsgate, has a certain timelessness to it. It reminded me of the Shakespearean tale, you know how in “Midsummer Night’s Dream”, the woman falls in love with a half-man, half-donkey, because she’s under a spell. At the end, she looks up and the man is no longer a man, but a donkey. I really wanted to capture that feeling, and I have experienced it myself, with someone whom I felt was everything, and then six months later when he finally gets in touch, I’m walking towards them, I’m thinking “Oh gosh, what was that?”. It’s when they don’t have that power over you anymore. 

True Things will play at the 2021 London Film Festival. There is no UK release date confirmed yet.

Savina Petkova (@savinapetkova) is a film critic/PhD candidate based in London who lives from one film festival to another. She specialises in animal representations in contemporary film and writes for Electric Ghost Magazine and MUBI Notebook.