Can you tell me how Goodnight Ladies came about, what inspired your screenplay?

 

It was a few different threads all coming together really. I have a deep love for films about theatre, about performance and backstage drama, things like Opening Night and All About Eve and Ken Russell’s The Boyfriend. I wanted to try and bring something from those movies, a sensibility maybe, into the context of queer nightlife. Goodnight Ladies is also an ensemble movie in miniature; it’s three different stories happening simultaneously one night in a drag bar, they’re all loosely tied together by the pressures of performance, professional or personal, on stage and off. Before I wrote it, I was finding it tiresome trying to write short films which adhered to a conventional short-form structure, usually involving the arc of a single protagonist. It just felt a bit laboured and conventional. I love digressive movies where the narrative is more like a baton, being passed around from character to character, and I thought it would be curious to try and do something similar in the short-form. It was an experiment in short-form narrative, but staged as a glitzy melodrama.

 

When you wrote Goodnight Ladies had you already had in mind who you wanted to play ‘Robert Lamore’?

 

I think a part of me constructed the whole film just as an excuse to work with David Hoyle again, who I’d worked with on Afterparty. David used to tell me that he always wanted a chance to play Norma Desmond in a Sunset Boulevard remake. The character of Robert Lamore, the has-been actor trying to make a comeback, was in some way a means of giving David what he wanted, but the character also draws from David as I’ve come to know him; his elegance, his anger and his wicked sense of humour. 

 

What was it like working with David Hoyle on this film?

 

It’s always a pleasure. He’s a wonderful screen performer, remarkably photogenic and a true professional. He adds an extra something to the film, he gives it this little extra kick.

 

What was the message you wanted to say with Goodnight Ladies, and do you think you achieved it?

 

I don’t really do ‘messages’, the films emerge out of a desire to see the film, to tell a good story. I think going into it, or at least during the writing stage, it was intended as a film about the spaces between people, between strangers, kind of like Linklater’s Slacker. The multi-story structure emerged out of that intention. But then the film became more interested in the characters themselves, their own private dramas, and it began to model itself a little more on something like Magnolia. I don’t know if I achieved what I wanted to do with the movie, but it still flirts with some of the early ideas.

 

What’s the biggest changes to your filmmaking style been since your debut short?

 

That’s hard for me to say because I don’t really have an objective overview of my work. I think the writing is tighter, the style is a bit more considered, maybe more expressive. The big change that I’m aware of is probably my relationship with actors, because I really didn’t know how to work with actors on my first short, and I’ve really tried to develop that since.

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How essential is the creative collaboration between you and your DOP Benjamin Leggett when working on a short like this?

 

Very. Working close with Ben was just integral to achieving the mood and tone we were after. The film is set in two different spaces within a single venue: the dressing rooms downstairs and the bar upstairs, and we had to work hard to give these spaces a distinct sense of atmosphere while also unifying them so that it all felt like part of one movie. We drew inspiration from some of the backstage footage in Cabaret; obviously it’s set in the 30s and people were smoking inside and the rooms are beautifully diffused with smoke, and we tried something similar with the backstage scenes in Goodnight Ladies because whenever I’ve spent time backstage in drag bars, it’s never minimal and pristine, there’s a really dense sense of texture to these spaces, and the haze just lifted all those textures from the room.  I didn’t realise it when the film was first finished, but when I rewatch it now I realise how much I owe to Ben, because it really is so closely aligned to what was visually intended from the start.