It had been hot and bright all the days prior, with the sun blazing down from the clear blue skies over Cluj, during my visit to the Transilvania Film Festival in Romania. But the day of my interview with Francis Lee, director of the heartswellingly lovely “God’s Own Country,” which opened the Edinburgh Film Festival this week, dawned gray and rainy and stayed that way. Not that I’m accusing him of bringing the weather with him, but Lee’s stunning debut is so peculiarly sensuous, so deeply evocative of the chilly, damp, forbidding beauty of its Yorkshire farmland setting, that talking about it under bright skies would have felt all wrong.
“God’s Own Country” tells the story of Johnny Saxby (a revelatory Josh O’Connor) who lives on a failing Yorkshire farm with his father (Ian Hart) and who finds his life gradually overturned by a relationship with Romanian migrant worker Gheorghe (Alec Secareanu). It premiered in Sundance, and then went on to Berlin, (which is where I fell in love with it), and as it makes its way through the festival year prior to its September 1st U.K. release date, will undoubtedly continue accruing awards and diehard fans.
It is many things: a tribute to the landscape; a mulchy, earthy homage to farmwork; an immigrant song; and of course, it’s a story of gay love. The “Brokeback Mountain” comparisons are unavoidable, and apt, but also, “God’s Own Country” represents a shift in terms of queer cinema: it is unapologetic about its characters’ sexuality (and there are some fairly graphic, tactile, visceral sex scenes) but it is also not actually about their sexuality at all.
Lee, bearded and soft-spoken, agrees (in fact, gratifyingly, he brings up that point from my review as soon as we sit down).
Francis Lee: I loved your review, and particularly because of that thing you said about reclaiming queer stories rather than saying “it’s a universal story”! Because of course that’s what we’re told to say…
I’m so glad! Because even in reviewing, there’s this pull towards “well, it’s really about love!” or “it’s about gay men but it could be about anyone!” And while that feels peculiarly true here, it also feels dishonest, like you’d be apologizing for the perspective, or condescending to the characters’ sexuality, in a way the film never does.
It’s so interesting, because obviously as soon as you make a film, you start talking marketing and how to sell the film: who will see it, who is “the” audience. And marketing have all these comparable titles that they talk about. But I’d never thought about that — about the film’s position in the “canon” of queer cinema.
The only thing I thought about was telling a truthful story as authentically as I could, from the world I was from, in a way in which I saw it, the only way I knew how. I didn’t think beyond that.
But I knew I didn’t want to tell a story about coming out. I wanted to represent characters who weren’t actually struggling with their sexuality. I wanted to see a queer character struggling with something else! And the hardest thing that I’ve ever had to do was fall in love. To be open enough and vulnerable enough to love and be loved.
And yet it really does feel like we’re experiencing a golden moment for queer cinema gaining a wider audience right now, and your film does participate in that.
Well yes, when you look at this year, and you’ve got “Moonlight,” “Call Me By Your Name,” “Beach Rats,” “A Fantastic Woman” and the film at Cannes, “BPM” — if you can lump them all together in that LGBTQ bracket. These films that are being taken seriously as films first. And all of them representing characters in way in which I don’t think we’ve necessarily seen on screen before, it’s super exciting.
So you do see your film as part of that?
Oof, I don’t know, that’s a really difficult question…
I know I’m sorry. Francis Lee, are you the voice of your generation?
[Laughs] What generation even is that? God, no. But I think what’s brilliant for me as a viewer, as a consumer of cinema is that for the first time it’s not one film per year. Like when “Weekend” came out, it was like, there’s this one film! You have to go see it! And now there’s a choice within that bracket — all those films are not the same, they don’t depict the characters in the same way.
My only worry is that what tends to happen is a film pops — lets say “Moonlight” winning the Oscar — and we start to talk about a new renaissance of seeing black characters or queer characters or women or whoever has been underrepresented before. We start heralding a new dawn, and then it just goes away.
Or worse still, there’s a kind of pendulum swing, the “we elected Obama” or the “we gave ’12 Years a Slave’ Best Picture” effect which suggests that mainstream culture feels like it’s proven how broadminded it is and can now swing to the opposite extreme.
Exactly, and those things worry me. I just have to hope that as long as we, as filmmakers, keep telling the truth about our worlds, and making films that feel engaging and honest, hopefully people will continue to want to see them.
That’s all I tried to do. I wanted to see a story I hadn’t seen before that depicted a world and a place I was from. And I had to be very truthful, emotionally and physically, and even down to the farming stuff–because my dad is a sheep farmer ten minutes down the road from where I live now. So that kept me rigorous about the truth of that life.
That urban/rural split is one of the divides that your film hinges on, and one that gives it a very special sort of authenticity, an involvement with the hands-dirty, elbow-deep business of farming.
It was very important, that idea. I grew up on the Pennines in Yorkshire. I did escape when I was 20, because I wanted to be an actor and I moved to London. I had felt very isolated in Yorkshire, geographically and emotionally, a little bit like Johnny. I felt like there was a bigger world out there, and even that the landscape was a bit stifling.
But in London over the years I then became very tired of the urban existence and very aware of this idea of London as a “bubble.” It’s like a very separate country to the rest of the U.K., particularly rural U.K. My Dad is still a sheep farmer and hearing his perspective, his idea of farming and the land and belonging to land and the animals, made me really want to investigate landscape, and explore that difference between an urban existence and rural existence. Because I just see the divide getting wider and wider. And so for me it was also about reconnecting to the land and its people. And I am a big fan of working people, I come from practical people who really work…