A highlight from this year’s Manchester Film Festival, Lady is the debut feature from Samuel Abrahams. Starring Sian Clifford (Fleabag), the film follows a documentary filmmaker who has been employed to document the artistic journey of a deeply eccentric aristocratic woman.
A highlight from this year’s Manchester Film Festival, Lady is the debut feature from Samuel Abrahams. Starring Sian Clifford (Fleabag), the film follows a documentary filmmaker who has been employed to document the artistic journey of a deeply eccentric aristocratic woman (Clifford).
He begins by telling me how the idea of the film came about. “I had this character that I couldn’t get out of my mind. I was just starting this lady on YouTube who was making her first video posts, aspiring to be an influencer. And I was just hooked. She was such a character.”
“Every decision she was making, creatively, but also just in the content itself, how she would edit the thing, the song choices, every decision was so odd to me. I mean, initially, there’s the kind of like, slight car crash thing of – this is really strange. Like, who is this person? But then, of course, I’m hooked on this charm. I just felt very kind of affectionate or just a lot of compassion towards this person who is essentially doing something not too dissimilar from me, wanting to create stuff, put it out in the world and receive some recognition for it.”
This idea eventually became Lady Isabella, played by Sian Clifford in an incredibly fun, yet pathos-driven, performance. The other lead, played by Laurie Kynaston, is a director called Sam. Given the shared name, I wanted to ask Abrahams how much the character is an extension, or fictionalisation, of himself.
“It was very liberating,” Abrahams says. “In the process of writing [Lady], it was always a two-hander, we had Isabella but there was always a director character in my head. But there was this kind of eureka moment, which was just, well, these two characters have a similar desire but coming from different places, and it clicked that, oh no, it’s got to be me. It might be terrible but I’ve got to give it a go.”
“What helped was writing this with Miranda [Campbell Bowling], who’s my partner. I think she just really enjoyed taking dead aim at me,” he says, laughing. “And I’m here for that so it was really fun. It’s taking aspects of me whether it’s personality, desires, experiences and fitting it conveniently into the right shape that would be the right character. It was uncomfortable at times, but only really in the writing. And to be honest, it was more fun than anything.”
In terms of casting, Clifford was at the top of mind for Abrahams. “We sent the script to her as soon as the script was ready. And I was just really fortunate that it resonated with her and we met right away. She got it. She got the tone. She got the voice of it. And she brought so much to the character.”
“The thing that was so exciting for me, and I think everyone involved, was getting to watch every day what she was bringing to that character, both in the comedy and the pathos and all kinds of layers. All the layers of vulnerability beneath that you uncover was a joy to watch and be a part of.”
The film takes the form of a mockumentary, with the camera being a character in its own right. “It’s just a really really fun thing to play with. Although it’s something I was very conscious about going in, there’s always the critique of the genre that it’s been done to death so what are you going to do differently? And then is it going to be too televisual? How is it going to be cinematic?”
Abrahams tells me that to not fall into these trappings; he was “very conscious of it not being a straight mockumentary in that you’re really seeing a film unravel and the [fictional] director losing control of it. I was very concerned with establishing what the rules of our specific version of mockumentary was and then starting to break it as the film unravels.”
Another way the film breaks out of the traditional form is interspersing shots in 4:3 of Lady Isabella’s performance art, which look gorgeous but where the content is frequently ridiculous.
“I went to art school so that was a lot of fun for me to do. One challenge of [the mockumentary] is sometimes it’s hard to get a window into the character’s soul, to gain access to them because there is a distance between them and the camera; it has to be objective, you can’t be subjective. So the performance art, yes it gives you a lot of great gags, but also lets you see the character.”
“Isabella is such an exciting character to me because the gap between how she saw herself or how she wants the world to see her and who she is beneath, the vulnerable Isabella beneath that facade… the gap is so big. So you get a lot of funny stuff on the surface but also the vulnerability below. The performance art is a way of being ridiculous but you’re also shedding some light on what’s going on internally.”
The film is a tight 95 minutes, but watching it you get the impression there must have been plenty of antics that have been left on the cutting room floor. “The assembly edit with everything in was like 3 hours 18 minutes,” Abrahams says. “But the end result is very close to the script. I would often have the actors start the scene earlier, and end the scene later, and doing that you end up with a lot of fun stuff, sometimes you might end up with a really great button for the scene, or just give you a great visual.”
The film had quite a loose filming approach, Abrahams tells me. “It’s not an improv movie, but we had all this freedom on the set and we could allow for something spontaneous to happen and see where it goes.”
“Sometimes we’d have takes that go on for like eight minutes and then at the end of that take it’s like, oh God, okay I have these notes for Sian, these notes for Laurie, then with the camera we need to do this. It’s a lot to hold in your head but it gave a really great energy to shoot. We also really had to move, we shot the whole thing in 15 days so we moved very quickly on this film.”
The film also has a great setting – a beautiful, insanely big, country house estate (Somerlayton in Suffolk, the same building that stood in for Sandringham palace in The Crown). “We were really lucky to secure Somerlayton,” Abrahams says, “It was an incredible experience for everyone because essentially we were all living on the estate and getting to run around in this fabulous playground.”
“The vision for the setting was never just a regular, big country home but a gorgeous, huge, stately home. It had to be somewhere that, when you first see it, you don’t imagine that it could be a prison. But of course it is. She is trapped by it. And I wanted to have her alone in these big, ornate, beautiful, textured rooms to distract from the darkness and loneliness within. It just felt like the right thing for the character. And then also when a documentary crew turns up, they’d be more interested to just shoot that, not her.”
We finish by discussing some influences on the film. “I grew up on the high concept 90s comedies,” Abrahams leads with. “Like Groundhog Day, Being John Malkovich, where there’s this crazy concept that hooks you in but ultimately at the end of the movie it lands you with something deeper about human experience.”
“For the odd couple thing, it has to be Harold and Maud, I love the eccentricity and heart in that movie. It’s just divine. Also Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King, you’ve got to see it, it’s brilliant.”
Outside of film he also cites the photography of Slim Aarons. “His photographs were very inspirational to me early on. The way he photographed the aristocracy and really wealthy people. It’s kind of like what instagram is now, but, obviously a lot nicer looking and 80 years ago or something. I could go on and on and on.”
I sat down with director Elias Demetriou to talk about his film ‘Maricel’ which follows a Filipino domestic worker in Cyprus caring for an elderly couple who have a lot of unspoken family drama.
