By James Mottram
“I grew up on that hill where the film is set and my dad is a sheep farmer on the same hill. For years and years, I was obsessed with the landscape and the people and the world and I had never seen it depicted on screen in the way that I saw it so I wanted to write about it.”
The landscape is sheep farming country in Yorkshire, and the film is God’s Own Country, which marks an auspicious feature debut by actor turned filmmaker Francis Lee.
“I trained as an actor and I was an actor for 20 years and I knew I always wanted to write,” says Lee when we spoke to him at Berlin. “I always told stories, and I always wanted to tell stories visually but I was never confident enough to sit down and do it until I got to 40 and I wrote my first short film and at that point knew this is what I need to do so I stopped acting. I got a job in a junkyard to pay for making 3 short films. I made 3 short films, one a year and then I made this.”
God’s Own Country follows Johnny (Josh O’Connor), a young sheep farmer who is emotionally shut off, but starts to open when Romanian migrant worker Gheorghe (Alec Secareanu) turns up on the farm, forcing Johnny to confront his feelings of love.
“I always knew that I didn’t want to write a film that was issue based around sexuality,” says Lee. “I wanted to make a film that was first and foremost a love story and about how hard it is to fall in love and to make yourself vulnerable and to make yourself open to love and to be loved.
“His family see Johnny as angry, sad, lonely and it affects his work,” says Lee when asked about the farming family’s response to the obvious gay themes in the film. “They need him to be there to work otherwise if he isn’t, they’ll lose the farm. You then see when he meets Gheorghe, not only is he able to do the work and get up for work and not get drunk every night, he’s also a bit nicer to be around and so they support that. They want him to be happy first and foremost but they also want him to work so I don’t see why they wouldn’t support that.”
One of Francis Lee’s biggest credits as an actor was in Mike Leigh’s Gilbert and Sullivan riff Topsy Turvy. Did Leigh’s famous improvisational techniques inform God’s Own Country? “I always loved building character and that’s the way Mike works and I love that part of the process,” admits Francis Lee, who also says that unlike Mike Leigh, he likes to start and end with a very solid script.
“The bit I was not very confident with is improvising, so the way in which I worked with the boys was three months where we built the characters from scratch, from the moment they were born to the moment we see them in the film. We worked out everything, their day to day life and all parts of their life up to that point. We work out who they are, why they are like that, where the emotional things happened in their lives that changed them – it’s all detail, I love detail and then for example with the family, I took them up to the farm and I’d say to Josh, ‘okay this is Johnny’s bedroom. Where does he have his bed? Why does he have it there? What is the warmest part of the room? What would he have on his shelves? What’s under his bed? What’s in his drawers? What’s in his pockets?’ It’s all detail and so when we got to shooting, we could work very quickly.
“I like actors to be free in the space,” Francis Lee continues. “What I don’t like is improvised dialogue. I don’t want to go down a rabbit hole but the way Mike Leigh works isn’t just improvising. He orchestrates the scene, he directs the scene, he edits the scene and you build and improvise until the scene is set then you learn it and you don’t deviate from it on camera so it’s still crafting script but in a different type of way. My difficultly with improvising per se is that it can be very random and not very directional and I like well-crafted dialogue that I supply to people who can deliver it as if it is improvised. Does that make sense?”
God’s Own Country is in cinemas August 31, 2017
