Also, it felt natural to me that it would sing because of Jamie’s exuberance. And I just thought, this feels like a universal story to tell. My brother’s a teacher, and I was constantly in schools. I went through a working-class, what we call comprehensive school, in Sheffield, so I knew that world, although it’s quite a few years ago, it still felt very similar. So all the school life, again, came from our own school experience. And actually the documentary, they weren’t actually allowed to go into school and film. So Jamie Campbell, for instance, doesn’t have a best friend, Pritti Pasha. When we first started working on the story, we’d never met Jamie or Margaret, deliberately so because we wanted to take the inspiration of that story but let our own imaginations fly. And I thought this story demands a wider audience, and because I’m a theatre-maker, I thought I’d like to tell the story. I get that, and I’m not of Jamie’s generation. That obviously is very particular, and I thought, well, that that speaks to me. And it’s a story that-when I looked at it and saw this work-ing-class, young 16-year-old boy get off a bus and reveal that he was wearing heels and say, “I want to be a drag queen” in a particularly working-class community in the north of Britain-I went, “This boy has such courage,” and I wanted to tell that story of that courage. JB: For me, I literally was watching TV and stumbled across the documentary, Jamie: Drag Queen at 16. JB: You mean in terms of transitioning from stage to film or taking from the documentary itself?ĬC: Why create this version of the story? Why do you think it was important? Since there was another adaptation of this real-life story, why do you think there was a reason for you to create another adaptation of ? So the scale actually sometimes can come in what is so small as well.Ĭolumbia Chronicle: I know the story of Jamie is based on a real person as well as a documentary, Jamie: Drag Queen at 16. And the detail that film can give you, the story you can tell-the minutiae-is something you can’t quite do on stage, and I loved that. Those moments are terrifying, but the exhilaration you get is just also amazing. And suddenly you’ve got 15 minutes to shoot a scene that really should have three hours to shoot. So you’re always against that amazing ticking clock that’s suddenly going in one direction, and then things that you kind of know, like weather and things like that, are suddenly eating at that time. It’s got to be there, done, finished, over and done with. Unlike theater, where there’s always tomorrow, there’s never tomorrow in filming. My Auntie Joan lived on this street, for instance, so I knew it from the inside out really. Also, this particular film is set in my hometown, so I feel a deep affinity to the vista of that town and how it looks, both in its scale of view and in its particularity of something that could be quite small. It allowed my imagination to completely open and fly in a different way than what stage does. What I loved about it was the scale that film can give you. So it’s just another vehicle for telling stories. I mean I’ve been a theater director-I worked in theater for 30 years-so I’m used to telling stories. Jonathan Butterell: Exhilarating and terrifying, both in equal measures. Loyola Phoenix: So how would you describe the experience of directing your first film?
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