Interview by
Benjamin Poole
Writer/director Sian Astor-Lewis's feature debut
To Nowhere
is a dark story of two young friends on an alcohol-fuelled journey of
self-destruction through a lonely corner of London. We spoke to Sian about
her film and the challenges of indie filmmaking.
The representation of adolescents in cinema is an evergreen staple.
Perhaps it is because that age is such a threshold state: anything could
happen in the approaching years, good or bad. But whatever happens, it
is still yet to come and seems so far away (I always look back on my
teenage years as a bit like being stuck in a drab waiting room, with all
the freedoms of adulthood out of reach, a state I was reminded of
watching To Nowhere). I was hoping you could elaborate upon how
To Nowhere depicts youth?
I definitely wanted to capture that tender life-stage in this story. It's
a strange time for everyone, and I very much drew from my own experiences.
It's just a phase of life which is so present and so raw. The past feels
like another life, and the future seems inconceivable, even though you
vaguely know it's coming. I wanted to portray the dreamy, disorientated
timelessness of being caught between childhood and adulthood, of dealing
with adult issues but with an adolescent's deeply flawed logic. At that
stage of life, every moment has so much meaning, which in hindsight is
quite beautiful, even if it's unbearable at the time. I didn't think I had
a "future" when I was that age, and neither do the characters—particularly
Finn. Yet somehow the eye of that storm offers a perverse kind of freedom.
If everything's doomed anyway, you can do what you want.
What motivates Finn and Tulip?
They are both in extremely different places in their lives, and this is
something that comes out increasingly over the course of the film. Tulip
is consumed with this complex infatuation with her best friend. There's
the question of sexuality, but also acceptance. She'll do anything, put up
with anything, to get what she wants. Her desire is overwhelming. Finn's
pursuit is a sense of power and control. She wants to feel indestructible,
to dominate those around her. But yet she's on a self-destructive path. At
a more subconscious level Finn is grappling with her gender identity. Her
fragile understanding of this important personal journey is in its early
stages and is often eclipsed, sadly, by other, traumatic parts of her
life.
I was intrigued by the character of Stanley, Tulip's uncle played with
great humanity by Orlando Seale, who seems to be undergoing a crisis of
solitude himself. How do you see this character? What's his game?
Orlando brought such nuance and fragility to Stanley. He's a profoundly
lonely character, and yearns for an intimate connection. He lives with an
overwhelming feeling of worthlessness, which grows into—or stems
from—something very toxic. Stanley is part of a relational triangle with
Tulip and Finn. He has a much greater impact on and control over their
dynamic than either of them fully realise, until, perhaps, it's too late.
Ultimately, he's probably the most complicated character of them all.
Throughout To Nowhere, music seems really important to
characters and the film. Could you talk a bit about how music is used
throughout the film?
All music in the film is diegetic (i.e. it occurs naturally in the
environment of the film). I didn't want a score or soundtrack.
Stylistically, I wanted to embrace a kind of Realism. I wanted to draw the
audience into a more immersive, organic experience, to step into the shoes
of the characters. Music has an incredible capacity to take you instantly
back to a specific time and place, and I felt that would be even more
powerful to experience through their perspective. The gig with Charlie,
where musician Sam Larner performs one of his own songs, felt like the
right kind of bridge between the thematic light of day and the dark of
night. It's dreamy, dissociated, and cuts to the heart of all three
characters' identities: they'd rather be "someone else, anybody else."
I'm always interested in how films get made and distributed. It seems
to me that each one that gets out there has succeeded against some
extremely stacked odds. Would you mind giving us an insight into the
process of making To Nowhere and the challenges/opportunities
that face indie filmmakers?
To Nowhere is a tiny film, made for a budget of £27,000 (a
fraction of the budget of The Blair Witch Project). For well over a decade, I knew making a feature was something I had to
do. In simple terms, I just didn't stop until I'd done that. It was
thrilling and gruelling in equal measure. Inevitably, funding was the
biggest challenge, and time was possibly the biggest sacrifice. If you're
making a film like that, finding the right people to collaborate with is
essential. There are a lot of people to choose from, but it can take time
to realise whether you have the same filmmaking philosophy. When you find
the right people, it's wonderful, you've made collaborators for life.
The actual shoot was two weeks, then post-production took two years.
To Nowhere's my baby more than it is anyone else's, so over the many years I've
worked on it I've had many very late, or indeed sleepless nights. You
sacrifice many things as an indie filmmaker, so you've got to ask yourself
if you really want it. I didn't make this film to tick any boxes, which is
probably a pro and a con. It certainly gave me a really liberating sense
of artistic freedom, amidst the chaos. I think that is one of the most
precious things I've experienced in my life.
Finally, if you were to programme To Nowhere on a triple bill,
what would the other two films be and why?
Naked and La Notte. Like To Nowhere, these two films are set in a single day/two continuous days, and I
wanted to emulate the episodic, spontaneous, microcosmic feel of such
narrative structures. La Notte—for all the wonderful things you could say about that film—has so much
meaning in every shot. Though I was working in a much lower-budget and
grittier context, I took on that intention of creating as much emotion as
I could through the camera, of capturing a way of seeing.
Naked, for me, is an incredible character portrait – someone profoundly flawed
and three-dimensional—and superbly performed. There's also another reason
I'm very attached to that film. When I was doing post-production on
To Nowhere, it was during Covid lockdowns. Everything was remote of course, and it
was an extremely intense time. I would go for a ritualistic and compulsive
daily walk, as many of us did. I always passed a house which looked so
much like the house in Naked that I referred to it as "The
Naked House." My first cinema trip of that era post-lockdowns was to see
Naked, which I hadn't seen in a while. Watching it on the big screen, I
realised that the house I had been walking past during that bleak time was
actually the house, and that during my daily outings I was literally
tracing the footsteps of Johnny's final journey. In such a tough period,
the magic of this discovery felt like some kind of sign to keep going.
To Nowhere is in UK cinemas from
June 30th.