'Queer Edward II' Courtesy London Film Festival There is much to discover and much to think about when watching British creative Theo Rollason‘s Queer Edward II.
Their directorial feature debut provides an intimate look behind the scenes of a film set of legendary British director and gay rights activist Derek Jarman, including such famous names as Tilda Swinton and costume designer Sandy Powell. What is more, you can expect a pack of beagles let loose, drag nuns taking a smoke break and an incident involving queer rights activists and British pop star Cliff Richard, who was rehearsing for a tour on the same studio lot where the film was shot, among other things. Of course, you also get an insider’s look at how Jarman’s 1991 film Edward II, his gay love story with a bloody ending, came to life.
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But Queer Edward II also puts a spotlight on the harsh political climate that queer people in Britain were facing back then – at a time when the climate has turned harsher again. “With anti-trans rhetoric and attacks on queer rights again intensifying, I hope the film can function not simply as a snapshot of a historical moment, but as a reminder of what collective resistance can look like – and what role art has to play,” Rollason explains.
The film weaves together archival footage. Irish cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, who later became known for the likes of Atonement, The Hours, Nocturnal Animals and The Greatest Showman, was actually invited by Jarman to shoot behind the scenes. The resulting 30 hours of footage remained unseen for decades – until Rollason was asked to look through them. Queer Edward II, a Lightborn Films production in association with March 13th and John Gore Studios, world-premiered at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival and is now screening at the 70th edition of the BFI London Film Festival (LFF), starting on Oct. 11. After Hours and Cinephil are handling sales on the doc.
Rollason talked to THR about how they got involved in the film – and ended up directing it, surprising scenes and the current political climate, particularly regarding gay rights.
Parts of the film feel really timely again. How early did you realize that?
Really early on when I started watching the footage. One of the first things that struck me was how it felt like a lot of things they were talking about on sets, even stuff that didn’t make the final cut, felt so contemporary. And then the next realization was: Oh my God, how depressing! A lot of the problems that they’re facing are still completely contemporary. And even over the course of making the film, a lot of things have come up that have felt particularly relevant to what was going on.
That guided the shape of the film to some extent. I guess that sounds like a bit of a contradiction but on the one hand, I wanted it to feel incredibly contemporary, but at the same time, the film doesn’t leave its period, and I wanted it to be very evocative of a super specific period – this late ’80s, early ’90s moment in Jarman’s life, but also in gay right’s history.
i kept being surprised how recent a past I was seeing in the doc and started reading up more detail about various things you show. How does that make you feel, and do you expect other viewers to do the same? Yeah, I hope so. It definitely opened my eyes. Part of the reason that the film became what it is and has this focus on queer rights was really because I didn’t realize how recent this was and how bad it was not so long ago. I think a lot of people are aware of the AIDS crisis in the ’80s and the significance of that. But coming off the back of that, there was all of this legislation that was pretty awful and generally, there were a lot of homophobic attitudes, still quite extreme, even as late as the 1990s.
I think because there have been a lot of positive steps forward in the last decade, it’s possible to make that seem more like it’s ancient history. But really, it’s my parents’ generation. Section 28 [, introduced by the government of Margaret Thatcher, which prohibited local authorities from “promoting homosexuality”], which gets mentioned a bit in the film, was a really huge deal in the U.K. That was only repealed in 2003 while I was at school, and I wasn’t really aware of that happening at the time because I was too young,
Realizing how little I really knew about this made me first a bit ashamed, and then feel a bit like, “No, wait, this is great. There’s an opportunity to put all of the research that I’ve done into this film!” I hope it makes people go out and find more about it because what you can fit in a film is just a tiny little thing. But I wanted to put in just enough so that people will get on Google or read a book, or whatever.
Theo Rollason, courtesy of Theo Rollason We have mentioned progress over the decades, but there has also been a recent backlash against queer rights…
That’s another interesting parallel [between today and the period shown in the doc]. In that period, things had gotten a bit better. And then, largely as a byproduct of the scaremongering around the AIDS crisis, there was a sense of things going backwards. And if you look at public opinion polls from that period in the U.K. about people’s attitudes towards being gay, they’re much more accepting until around this mid-’80s point, and then they start dropping off a bit.
So, that was another really interesting parallel: What happens when things start to get bad again. How do you respond? So, one of the questions in the background of the film is about the protests [by queer activists that are depicted].
It’s awful, but we’re not [beyond these debates]. In the U.K. and in a lot of other places, trans rights have just really quickly become a real and completely out of proportion issue, just a really nasty issue. The way that people talk about trans people in the U.K. is just awful, and it just has such a resonance with the way that LGBT people were being talked about back then – I suspect largely as scapegoats for lots of other issues.
How did you end up directing Queer Edward II?
I didn’t join the film as director. I mean, there wasn’t really a film as such. I was invited to look at the tapes. I like Derek Jarman and am interested in the process of filmmaking itself. I was working as an archivist, and so was used to watching large quantities of material with a historical bent and giving a perspective. I watched the stuff, and I was really blown away.
And then they made you the director? I started editing together scenes just to kind of give a sense of what could be there. At first, it was really just a sizzle, and then a sizzle turned into 40 minutes, and 40 minutes turned into an hour, and by that point, it was kind of a adraft of the film. I guess at some point it just went from I’d love to help out because this is a subject really close to my heart to pitching it as a film and bringing on a small team around that.
’Queer Edward II’ You had made shorts before, right?
Yes, I have made fiction shorts before, but I wasn’t planning on making a documentary. I watch a lot of documentaries, and I love the documentary form. But I wasn’t desperate to make a documentary. I just loved the material and got so excited by what it could be.
Could we see you make more docs?
Yeah, probably the big revelation is that I would definitely keep making documentary films alongside fiction. I found it really interesting, and I especially loved the archival-only way of making something. It is a very different proposition from picking up a camera and going and filming things.
The research process was really exciting, and then it felt like a puzzle to assemble. “Okay, we want a scene where this happens, but it doesn’t exist, and we can’t go out and shoot it. So, okay, well, what’s another way of telling the story?” There was never a script as such. It was really about responding to the material we had and then finding additional material from all sorts of different sources and piecing it all together.
‘Queer Edward II’ Brenda Prince/Bishopgate Institute I was fascinated to see the likes of Tilda Swinton and other famous names in Queer Edward II…
It’s amazing how many people came through the Derek Jarman school of filmmaking. He worked with the same people a lot of the time, and would bring in new people, and they became part of the filmmaking family. And it’s just amazing how many of those people went on to become extremely successful. Sandy Powell, who is in the film, became a celebrated costume designer, and one of her first breaks was through Derek’s films.
Sandy Powell and Tilda Swinton are also executive producers on the film. How did that happen?
Well, the first person we got involved was Seamus McGarvey, and then I met Simon Fisher Turner, the composer of loads of Derek Jarman films. I told him that I’d been looking at and working on this footage and asked if he would want to have a look. He watched it and then sent it on to Tilda, and then we went from there.
There’s still a very strong network around the people who worked with Derek, and we just got really nice responses, and people would just say: “Tell me what I can do to help.” It was just amazing. We weren’t going to people askingh for money to fund this film or help us get loads of prestige. I think that was the attitude of working on a lot of Derek’s films. There wasn’t ever a lot of money to go around or resources, but it was just people getting stuck in. When you mention a filmmaker or an artist like Derek, people get what it’s about. It was about just come and get involved in whatever way you want to do.
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