by Dov Kornits FilmInk August 16, 2022
“This is the only project I’ve ever done which Closer isn’t producer of,” Sophie Hyde tells us during the promotional junket for her latest directorial effort Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, an entirely UK production.
Closer Productions is the Adelaide based company that has brought us formally and thematically progressive works such as feature films 52 Tuesdays and Animals, documentaries In My Blood it Runs, Life in Movement, Sam Klemke’s Time Machine and The Dreamlife of Georgie Stone, and series Fucking Adelaide and Aftertaste.
Hyde is co-owner and one of the directors at Closer, and says that it’s “sometimes nice to go and do something else,” with regards to Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, starring Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack.
“Australia should be producing things like this. This is the only film I’ve ever done that I’m not a producer of… Silly me,” Hyde says about the film, which is getting a big push around the world.
“I think this is exactly the kind of thing we can be producing out of Australia. As producers, we don’t look at the international world. It’s a real tight balance because Australian audiences in the cinema for Australian films are not necessarily the same… We seem to have films that are successful in Australia in cinema, and then not as successful overseas. Or they’re successful overseas and not as successful in the cinema here. I don’t know why. I don’t know how to grapple with that. I just know that I make films that feel like they’re international, but they feel Australian to me too. I hope that we open up and want to see more kinds of stories. That’s always the thing, more different stories … for everybody.”
Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is certainly a different kind of story. Essentially a two-hander set in a hotel room, the film stars Emma Thompson as a former schoolteacher of religion, a recent widow who hires an escort, played by Daryl McCormack, so that she can experience delights of the body that she has repressed for so long.
Written by comedic performer Katy Brand, and with Emma Thompson attached, Hyde was sent the script off the back of her work on Animals.
“It was a very early draft of the script, a very short draft. I had a meeting with them and said what I wanted to do with it. Then we worked on the script for 11 drafts quite quickly.
“Katy had sat down and written a story about these two characters. She’d written a script where they met three times, and she knew it was an early draft. She knew she wanted to go further with it, but it was short at 70 pages. It was dialogue. And then we expanded it to be the fourth meeting and changed a bunch of the story.”
When we bring up the fact that the story could have equally lent itself to the stage, Hyde is quick to point out her reasoning for the cinematic approach.
“For me, we’re looking at intimacy between two people and two bodies,” says Hyde. “That never feels like a play because that’s not my art form. All I see is movie, especially when it’s as intimate as this. I think that’s much more the pleasure of a movie where you can be close to someone, you can feel with them as opposed to looking at a distance. These kinds of films are the ones that I think of as the most cinematic in some ways. I never felt like I wanted to make it bigger. There was always a sense of emotional terrain, and the landscapes of their faces and their bodies was enough.”
Speaking of intimacy, did Hyde work with an intimacy coordinator on the film? No, though I think that it’s such a good advent in film. There’s been so many instances where actors have been really mistreated. I think as a director, in the most part, it means you can push harder for what you want because you know you are safe in the boundaries.
“With this though, Emma and Daryl and I talked about it a lot, and we were just really comfortable with the idea that we had each other. And another voice felt like too much for this. I think I work in some of the same ways that an intimacy coordinator does, which is very much about continual, constant, enthusiastic consent. That’s something that is present all the time in the shoot, and in the way that I work with actors. But on something bigger, where I’m not just dealing with two people, I would bring someone in.”
Working on such a contained project, shot in 19 days with a minimal crew, also allowed Hyde to work at her best. “I had a monitor, and I was offset a lot, just outside the hotel room. As a director, I have to have direct line to my actors, even if I’m a long way from them, because I go to them a lot. If anyone stands in front of me and the actors, I get really annoyed. It’s one of the only things that annoys me on a set, actually. That’s really important to me, that direct line to them and the sense that I can get to them fast, as soon as they cut.”
Even though this was not technically a Closer production, Sophie Hyde certainly had the support of her team, including her partner Bryan Mason [above, with Sophie on set], who was cinematographer and editor on Good Luck To You, Leo Grande. “We spend so much time together developing, and he’s there from the very start,” Hyde says. “I had really strong ideas about this film, about the way that light would be in each shot and the way that it would look, the neutrality of the space. And so we just had to build the set with the production designer, and to make sure that we could get those kind of shots. It wasn’t storyboarded, but we knew exactly how we wanted it to look all the time.
“A lot of our [Closer] team helped in the development of the script too. And post is a lot of the same team, so you still have the same DNA in a project like this.”
Good Luck To You, Leo Grande is in cinemas August 18, 2022