We chat to writer-directors Sam H Freeman and Ng Choon Ping about the feature-length adaptation of their own short film, Femme.
With both iterations of Femme, Sam H Freeman and Ng Choon Ping have brought LGBTQ+ protagonists to the typically hyper-masculine crime thriller. The 2021 short – featured in Film Stories issue 31 – made us fear for the safety of Paapa Essiedu’s Jordan as he gets in a car with flirtatious drug dealer Wes (Harris Dickinson). The gripping neo-noir feature shares the bones of that film, but otherwise goes off in its own direction, presenting a murkier, morally grey world inhabited by complex protagonists. Freeman describes making the feature as having “levelled up,” and he couldn’t be more correct. Femme stands among the best films of the year, and it’s marked the pair as filmmakers to keep a close eye on.
Femme is led by Nathan Stewart-Jarrett as drag artist Jules, who finds freedom and power in his drag act and the costumes and make-up that go with it. A homophobic attack perpetrated by the ultra-masculine Preston (1917’s George MacKay) and his friends makes the previously outgoing Jules withdrawn, but when he runs into Preston in a gay sauna, he sees an opportunity for revenge.
Ambition
The writing and directing duo had big ambitions to begin with, pitching Femme as a feature despite never having made a film. The short was the idea of producer Agile Films, which requested a proof-of-concept short to show that the pitch worked – and the duo could deliver.
“It was sort of their believing in the idea of believing in us, but sort of saying ‘No one else will unless you prove that you can make a film’,” Freeman explains. Winning the BIFA for Best British Short and being longlisted for the British Short Film BAFTA presumably cleared up any doubts.
They used the themes and characters from the short as the basis for the feature, but soon realised they needed to bring new ideas to the script.
“This is a completely different story,” Ng asserts. “We have been asked how do we ‘extend’ the story from the short, but it’s very clear to us, every story is as long as it should be and the story in the short was finished. So really we just threw everything out and started from a feeling of the themes, and the world that we want to explore and an entirely new story that needs the length of a feature to tell.”
Clashing characters
Back to the drawing board it was, then, and the first idea that emerged was one of two protagonists who were much bigger characters.
“Jules is in a way quite quiet in the film, as in there’s a lot going on inside. He internalises a lot. But he makes very big, bold decisions and he’s driven by quite big emotions, and then I think the Preston character is much more of a mess than the Wes character from the short ever was,” Freeman says. “There’s something in that idea of these two versions of masculinity clashing that is actually really compelling.”
The casting of the two couldn’t have been an easy feat. They couldn’t be more different, and yet they seem to have a strange and unlikely chemistry, too. Ng confirms that casting wasn’t easy, but when Nathan Stewart-Jarrett and George MacKay came into the picture, they knew they had their leads.
“It was difficult because they have such a range of qualities and actions they need to be capable of, but easy in terms of like when they arrived, they arrived. When George and Nathan came in for a chemistry read, we were like, ‘Oh, thank God, there’s a film.’
“I think that was the really lucky part, wasn’t it?” Freeman adds of finding Stewart-Jarrett to play Jules. “It’s a really tough role. He needs to be able to do so many different things, and there’s a level of maturity that needs to be there, I think. There was a real search to find him.”
MacKay came in much sooner, having been on the directors’ radar since the beginning.
“But what was really lucky was as soon as we saw them together, they just – even just as two people – they were instantly very comfortable with each other, and when they read together the chemistry was just there.”
Drag
Drag features heavily throughout Femme. The opening scenes feature a grand, joyful and celebratory drag performance by Jules (stage name Aphrodite) as he lip-syncs in a way that oozes confidence. But there are more forms of drag than the one we’ve come to recognise, and Freeman and Ng theorise that every way the characters choose to physically express their gender is, in a way, a kind of drag.
“I think their bodies are part of the drag that they wear,” Freeman expands. “Particularly for Preston in that the tattoos and the muscles are a part of how he presents himself to the world so no one questions his masculinity. And Jules is a drag queen, and is playing with gender, and playing with his feminine side on stage all the time.”
It’s clear that Jules and Preston are physical opposites, and yet there’s more to both of them than what you see on the surface. Preston can be sympathetic, and Jules can make morally questionable choices.
“Having these two characters physically be in opposition to each other was really important to us,” Freeman continues. “Because, I think, as the film goes on, internally they’re quite similar. When you first meet them you can’t imagine two people further apart, but actually a lot of what drives them, a lot of what’s happened to them, a lot of the way that they deal with the world and what’s important to them about holding power in the world, actually, they’re quite similar. Two very similar people have gone down very different paths.”
Masculinity
The concept of masculinity and the ways we present ourselves to the world are big parts of the film, and that was important to the duo for a couple of reasons.
“I guess one of the big things in the zeitgeist is chat about toxic masculinity,” Ng explains. “But more specific to this, within the queer community there is a lot of awareness and discussion and actual experience of how different presentations of masculinity are tied to desire and feelings of safety and feelings of status.”
But the pair also spent a lot of time watching, and enjoying, classic crime thrillers. While they’re both fans of the genre, it tends to present a very classic, outdated, form of masculinity – one that the directors couldn’t relate to or see themselves in.
“We just thought that it would be really cool to flip it and insert a queer protagonist into this genre that I don’t think we’ve ever seen with a queer protagonist,” explains Ng.
“I think there was something in watching those films and loving them, the kind of Safdie brothers, the classic Scorseses, Nicholas Winding Refns,” Freeman adds. “Loving a lot of those movies and really enjoying them, but also feeling like it was a sort of club that we didn’t have access to.”
Hurdles
Ng and Freeman both recall an intense 27-day shoot that took place in the middle of the summer. It wasn’t made any easier by the fact that Covid protocols were still in place and there were various people unfortunate enough to catch it. Including the leads – both of them, at the same time.
“Honestly, much better that they got it together than they got it separately because we could only afford one week out,” Freeman reflects.
“They both got Covid, our DOP got Covid, our line producer got Covid, our focus puller got Covid,” Ng adds, painting a picture of a really disastrous week. How do you get around that? Build a tent, apparently.
“James [Rhodes, DOP] got Covid and they built a tent and we got other operators in, because usually in the filming it was James operating as well as being DOP. But there was one week of the film where James was essentially on a mic to an operator and we were all on radios to James,” Freeman recalls.
When both Stewart-Jarrett and MacKay were out with the dreaded C-word, there was little else to film except shots of screens – mainly phones and TVs.
“We shot some close-ups of phones, and we used other people’s hands that weren’t theirs. We got hand doubles,” Freeman says. There’s also a scene where the characters play Street Fighter, so someone got to have fun playing video games while the duo filmed the screen.
Nocturnal
A lot of the movie’s scenes take place at night, so another challenge of making Femme was making the most of the few darkness hours available in June and July. “Every day was a race against time,” Ng says. “And some of the shots were literally ‘Cut!’ and then the day ended.”
“We also kind of missed that summer. The entire middle of that summer was spent inside buildings, pretending it was night,” Freeman recalls.
“Or at night running around in a forest or desolate industrial areas!” Ng adds.
When they were awake in the days, they were working in hot, and cramped, conditions.
“Some of the hottest days, Freeman and I and the script supervisor were in a small closet, because that was the only place they could place us in Jules’s house. And it was hot, and smelly, and we were doing sex scenes. And I mean, it was all driven by adrenaline and the joy of making, but if you think back to it it’s like, ‘Oh, my God, these are quite challenging conditions.’ ”
Hard work
The running around at night part of the shoot might sound fun, but the reality is that it takes its toll. “It really felt like we’d left the rest of the world,” Freeman explains. Even at the weekends when you’re off, you’re just fixated on it and you walk around in a daze. And I moved house at the end of week one as well, which was not a choice. I had to. So for the other four weeks of the shoot I was living in this place that I didn’t really know, and barely being there. It was quite a weird experience.”
“Someone took a picture of us at the end of the shoot – on the last night – and we look horrible!” Ng exclaims as Freeman laughs. “Completely washed out and drained.”
The sacrifice was clearly worth it, as they’ve achieved something great with Femme, and go out of their way to praise the abilities of their cast. They cite the opening drag show as one of the most challenging scenes to film, and are clearly impressed with how hard Stewart-Jarrett worked on it.
“Shooting the performance at the beginning of the film was a huge scale operation. It was our biggest set piece in terms of how long it took to film. I think it was challenging for Nathan because he had to have stamina for that. It was like a whole day, shooting that performance and the camera was going round and coming in, and he would just get up and do it again and again and again. He is like a soldier. His stamina is insane,” Freeman says.
“Nathan was shooting every scene every day, so it’s not even like a film where you’ve got a call. Nathan knew he would be in from the beginning of the day till the end, and then on Saturdays we’d go to base to do rehearsals for the performance.”
Ideas
The pair have successfully conquered the crime thriller and their debut feature, but what comes next? I ask whether the duo would like to bring LGBTQ+ themes to other hyper-masculine genres. They seem open to the prospect, but are currently waiting for that special spark of an idea to really hit them.
“When something really hits you, you just sort of know. It’s an instinct,” Freeman explains. “You just have to grab something and see where it takes you. Like this. We knew when we said it to each other, because we’d spoken about other ideas before and gone ‘Oh, that’s interesting. Maybe we should do that, maybe we should do this.’ We wanted to work together for a while. But it really was only when this one came that we went ‘quick, let’s do it.’”
Ng Choon Ping and Sam H Freeman clearly have exceptional instincts, and are bound to have more exciting films in their future. In the words of Ng – “watch this space.”
