One of the highlights of this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival, Queen at Sea is director Lance Hammer’s first film since Ballast (2008). Premiering earlier this year in competition at the Berlinale, the film won the Silver Bear Jury Prize, as well as the Silver Bear for Best Supporting Performance for Anna Calder-Marshall and Tom Courtenay. They play Leslie and Martin, an elderly couple navigating life with dementia after Leslie begins to lose control of her faculties, affecting the lives of her daughter Amanda (Juliette Binoche) and granddaughter Sara (Florence Hunt). The Reviews Hub sat down during EIFF with Hammer, Calder-Marshall and Courtenay to discuss the film.
Why did you choose London and this particular house as the setting?
Lance Hammer: I chose London because of Tom Courtenay. I wrote the film so that I could change it to any major city, which I thought would give us some flexibility with financing. But when I wrote the script, I had to set it somewhere. I’m American, so I said New York. We were thinking about American actors, but when it came time to casting, I cast Juliette Binoche first and she’s not American. It still made sense to shoot it in New York, but Martin needed to be American, or so we all thought. Then I realised I really wanted Tom Courtenay to do it. I thought I should give the script to him and see if he was interested. If he wanted to do it, we had to shoot it in London. It didn’t make sense to have Juliette and Tom in New York when neither of them is American. He read it and said yes right away, so we switched to London.
And how did you choose the house?
Lance Hammer: Once we got to London and started choosing locations, we initially chose a much more ornate house. But something was wrong with it. It was too ostentatious. We realised it should be more modest and plain. Then we saw this house. It had those stairs. When I saw the stairs, I realised they were part of the story. They would constantly be labouring on these stairs, with an element of danger and peril to their bodies. It showed how a house can be a place of comfort but then become a real impediment to your safety and quality of life. This is the house where you find all your comfort, and it becomes dangerous to you. They labour on those stairs, so I thought it was a very important visual element that speaks to declining cognitive and bodily functions. It was visually metaphorical, and you could viscerally feel their struggle to keep their vital life force alive.
How did you manage to keep a balance of the situation, particularly when depicting the different perspectives of the characters and institutions?
Lance Hammer: Every scene. The goal, when I first started to think about organising the story, was to tell it from a position of neutrality. I never wanted to take a stance or convey a moral position through storytelling. When we saw the house, those white walls also conveyed a kind of neutrality. But throughout the writing process, the struggle was how to keep neutral and not make judgments on any of the characters or institutional characters, such as the police, the SARC medical examiner and the social worker. When you’re writing, you can go over the top and then you have to pull back. It wasn’t until I started talking to real people, which was an extensive part of the process, that I understood how the institutional response would actually work. It had to be accurate, so I went to the real people who actually do these things, and then I ended up casting some of them. We sat in workshops with the actors and professionals and went through every scene, asking, “Is this accurate? Would this actually happen?” They would tell me, “No, that would not happen. This would happen instead.” So I followed the truth. Whenever there was a choice, I relied on my research consultants, who then became actors, to tell me how the responses would actually work and what language they would use. They contributed their own language and dialogue. I trusted that because it’s important not to make judgments of people. I saw that these people are well-meaning and compassionate, but institutions can also harm people. Both things can be true at the same time.
The young characters are also present in the film. When did you decide to bring that part of the story into the script?
Lance Hammer: That was actually the first part. It came partly from another story, but my first thoughts were about the young character in relation to the old character, and about showing how life is cyclical. It’s not just death and decay. Something is always replacing it, and it’s beautiful. There’s a beautiful cycle. I always knew I wanted to speak to that. Death is occurring all the time around us, in nature and in humans, and that’s okay. I wanted to speak to that cyclical idea from the very beginning. But it was very difficult to interweave the two into the same film. That was my biggest struggle in the whole process, and I’m not sure I did it properly. It was also difficult to write the scenes for the kids. In the end, they were all improvised and the script was very skeletal because I knew the material had to be brought by the kids themselves. I’m not 16 years old, so I can’t do that truthfully.
Did you know it would end that way from the beginning, or did it develop as you wrote?
Lance Hammer: I did not know that was the ending when I started writing. I wrote it pretty linearly. I had a strong idea of how the film began, but then I just started writing it sequentially. You start thinking ahead and asking, “How is this going to end?” I didn’t know, but I thought it was okay because I wasn’t there yet. I let it percolate unconsciously. Then one day I realised it needed to end that way. I had a different way that he died for a while, but he always died. When I first had the idea for the ending, that was it: he dies. I never changed that. It just felt right. I thought about different ways, but I could never think of anything that made sense. I knew it couldn’t be redemptive or hopeful because that wasn’t realistic to me, based on my experience with dementia in our families. It’s very rough. There is meaning that comes out of it, and there is a lot of meaning for family members who go through the experience, but there isn’t a happy ending or a warm sense of redemption. That’s not what happens in life in this space. It can be very meaningful, and that’s the most important thing. I wanted to be very truthful.
How did you work with the ensemble, particularly Anna’s character, to create that intimacy without many words?
Lance Hammer: That’s largely Anna Calder-Marshall. Anna is spectacular. I wanted her to interpret the part. She’s very sharp in real life and not at all demented. She’s very articulate, and her mind is very sharp, so she really had to act, but she’s a great emotional performer. I wanted her to interpret it herself. This is the one person I did have more discussion with because I don’t like to direct actors too much. I want their interpretations. I cast them for what they are, and that’s the directing right there: making the right choice for the actor, then letting them be what they are. I cast Anna for her natural temperament in real life. The one piece of direction I gave her was restraint. It couldn’t be melodramatic or theatrical. We had to eventually know that she had dementia, but it had to be very subtle. The tendency in films or on stage is to overplay dementia, but you don’t have to. That’s not the way it really is in life either. She understood that right away. She went and researched at care homes with memory units and sat and watched the patients. She mainly saw that communication of their condition was through expression, not words. She naturally knew how to express it through her facial expressions and movements, and she did it.
How did Anna come to be cast as your wife?
Tom Courtenay: We were looking for someone to play my wife and weren’t getting very far, so I looked at a list of actresses of a certain age. I saw her picture and immediately knew she was the answer.
It was an instinctive thing. That’s what acting is. My instinct was that she would be the answer. And you’ve seen the film. So if you ask me what made me think Anna was the answer, I would say, have you seen the film? And if you say yes, I’ve seen the film, I say, I rest my case.
I told Lance, and he went to see her. Then we both went to see her in Kent and made a video to send to Juliette. Juliette fell for her, and the trio was complete. Then, of course, there was lovely young Florence Hunt, who made up the quartet.
What did Tom’s belief in you mean to you?
Anna Calder-Marshall: The belief that Tom had that I could do this was a big present to me, because suddenly being offered this was a real challenge. It was a present, but it was also a challenge, because we had to go into deep places.
The characters have both a darker and a warmer side. How did you develop that complexity in your performance?
Tom Courtenay: I remember seeing a man on television whose wife had very advanced dementia. He spoke about it and he was heartbroken. Lance pointed out to me that this is the love of your life, your intellectual equal, someone you shared music with, and that part of her has gone away. But you still treat her as she was. At the end, he says to Juliette’s character that he has to behave the way he has behaved because he can’t deal with the fact that she’s not there. He has to believe that she is there and treat her as though she’s there as she was, when she’s not as she was.
Did you share your understanding of the characters with each other?
Anna Calder-Marshall: When I saw the film, I was really struck by Tom, by the love I could see, the loneliness and his bravery. But when we were doing it, we would just instinctively play with each other. We fooled around and laughed a lot. The fact that we did know each other made it fun. In fact, I could be childlike with him. The woman developed as the dementia grew. The fact that I was a painter, that I could still paint, and that he encouraged that gave her a strand of strength.
Tom Courtenay: Anna does paint, and the painting she does is real.
Anna Calder-Marshall: I had to be in a state where you didn’t know how demented I was. That’s a frightening thing to be. Is she there or is she not? It’s for the audience to choose. You can’t look at her face and know. We felt very strongly that love was the core of the film.
How do you (Anna) approach a character who doesn’t have many lines?
Anna Calder-Marshall: It was an odd thing. It wasn’t acting, it was being.
Tom Courtenay: The best acting is when you don’t see it.
Anna Calder-Marshall: You don’t act.
Tom Courtenay: I like acting where you can’t see the acting.
Anna Calder-Marshall: It just happens. If I did too much, you’d see it. It meant you go to a still place. I did a lot of study, watching people with dementia, which really helped.
Tom Courtenay: I also took a lot of direction from Lance. We were both very clear that the main element was that love, whatever that is.
Anna Calder-Marshall: It is free, and it isn’t necessarily sentimental.
Tom Courtenay: This is the best love story I’ve been involved in on film, and I’ve seen it twice.
Tom’s character initially seems like a villain, but there is a lot of emotion underneath. How did you understand him?
Tom Courtenay: You tell me.
Anna Calder-Marshall: He is the character, and Tom has to do what comes to him.
Tom Courtenay: The director says, “Try this,” or, “Think of something else.” When you make things up as you go along, you put in lines. I like to improvise. He would let me; sometimes he took them out of the film but often he welcomed them, so we are both happy.
Anna Calder-Marshall: Tom has many different levels. You can see pain, loneliness and anger. I think that’s what’s beautiful about this film. Each character is very rich and full. You can interpret what you like. You can think of him as a villain, although I never saw him as a villain. Everybody is multi-textured. It was a real treat because we had three weeks to rehearse, get to know each other, live in the house and climb those stairs. Often in films you’re doing what I call microwave acting. You see somebody and they say, “Oh, I’m your husband. Hello, what are we doing? Oh, we’re doing a love scene. What have you done?” And you think, I don’t know anything about you. By God, does it show.
Was there a scene you loved that didn’t make it into the film?
Anna Calder-Marshall: I have one bit because I love wood and I paint on wood. We were going on a walk and my character suddenly saw the root of a tree. My fingers were going into the root of the tree. I love roots, and they took that out.
Tom Courtenay: I was amused by some of the things I knew I had said that he removed, but I was never hurt.
Queen at Sea was screened at the Edinburgh International Film Festival and is in UK cinema now
