‘Femme’ Directors Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping On Making Their Queer Revenge Thriller
Mary Beth McAndrews
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The erotic thriller is irresistible, especially when done right and it gives you the vapors at least twice. But, unfortunately, the subgenre responsible for films such as Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction is incredibly straight and white. So, co-writers and co-directors Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping decided to do something about it. They wrote and directed the new queer revenge thriller Femme, starring Nathan Stewart-Jarrett and George Mackay in a tantalizing game of deception.
In Femme:
Jules’ (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) life and career as a drag queen are destroyed by a homophobic attack. But after a chance encounter with his attacker, the deeply closeted Preston (George MacKay), he is presented with the opportunity to exact revenge. Unrecognizable out of his wig and make-up, Jules infiltrates Preston’s life and in doing so discovers the lines of seduction, revenge, and power are blurred.
We spoke with Freeman and Ng about crafting a queer erotic thriller, working with an intimacy coordinator, and cold plunge showers.
Dread Central: We do not get enough gay revenge thrillers. So when I heard that we were getting a gay revenge thriller, my little gay heart was very excited. I’m very excited to talk with the two of you. I’ve read your director’s statement about Femme, but I wanted to hear from both of you, starting with Sam, about what it felt like for you two as queer artists to tackle specifically the revenge sub-genre.
Sam H. Freeman: Yeah, I suppose that’s where the impetus came from. For us, it was that feeling of lack and a slight feeling of, I don’t know, being shut out of the club. I love genre films. We set out to make, I suppose, a thriller that became specifically a revenge thriller. Ping and I, we’ve been friends for a long time. We lived together. We wanted to work together, and we had been watching a lot of these kinds of neo-noir late-night thrillers. A lot of very what feel quite exclusively straight, quite butch, classic Scorsese movies, the Safdie Brothers.
Good Time was actually the film that started the conversation for us. We’d watched and we were saying, oh, we love this genre, but we also feel like we would not be allowed in. You know what I mean? We are not represented in it. There are no queer characters in any of these movies.
DC: Very white, straight, cis male characters.
SHF: It felt like we wanted to kick the door down, I suppose in a way… Queer characters should be able to exist in any story that we want to exist in. And that was, I suppose, kind of a statement that we were making
Ng Choon Ping: You look at the history of queer representation in film, it starts with figures of fun or grotesquery, and then it moves on to figures of villainy. Then suddenly there was this jump into figures of being role models, like happy queer characters. Now that we are noticing that queer characters are going into a genre where they’re allowed to misbehave without becoming grotesque or becoming villains, we are finally afforded the full humanity of being both well-meaning and fucked up.
SHF: Yeah. It’s funny isn’t it, there’s always a stage where it feels like people are scared. They’re like, okay, you’re allowed in now and you are really going to be the very uncomplicated good guys in this situation, and you’re never going to do anything questionable. It’s boring and it’s not real.
DC: It’s so boring. Well, especially in films, you see a lot of queer characters experiencing violence because of their sexuality, but it’s never them trying to get agency back. It’s usually more of a sad story of looking at how hard it is to be queer. Femme is a rare film where the sense of justice is being taken back by a queer person. It is about active participation and trying to get justice for yourself, whatever that means.
SHF: And he wants to fuck shit up. You know what I mean?
DC: The casting is incredible in Femme. I love your cast, especially with Nate and George as these characters that are so similar and so different at the same time. What was that casting process like and who was cast first?
SHF: George was actually because Jules was such a hard character to cast. I mean, we saw so many people and we saw great actors. We had two great casting directors, Julie Harkin and Nathan Toth, who brought in a lot of people, and a lot of them were great and very different from each other. But it’s like when Nathan talks about the character, there are four different Jules that he plays in the film. Jules presents himself so differently and so convincingly because Jules is a character who is actually a phenomenal actor himself. So you are getting an actor to play an actor in a way.
We saw loads of actors who felt like they were one Jules, but maybe not so much the other. I remember we got quite anxious. We were like, does this exist and we made this too hard? Or is it unplayable? And then Nathan, when he turned up, we were like, it’s all there. There he is. He’s a chameleon.
Whereas George, actually, George was an idea that we’d had. We’d watched his work and we felt like he felt really unexpected for Femme because he has a reputation for being quite a sort of nice young man from 1917. But if you really watch his work, he’s so different in every film. He never repeats himself. So it felt like this exciting opportunity to cast someone who felt unexpected, but secretly we know he’s going to be great at this. So versatile. And he throws himself into stuff so wholeheartedly.
DC: I feel like I’m so used to seeing him be, like you said, the nice kind of quiet, unassuming guy. Here he gets to just be obnoxious and rude and mean and terrible. It’s great to see him in that role again. He transforms, especially covered in tattoos.
NCP: He came back from World War I and in this film, he’s still processing the PTSD
DC: His sexuality blossomed and then everyone died. He doesn’t understand what’s going on. I like this throughline.
NCP: Yeah, I know. His friend died in 1917 and he’s been searching for the friend ever since.
SHF: The George Mackay Cinema Universe, GMCU.
DC: The thing I love about Femme is you are not afraid to make it sexy. We don’t have a lot of queer erotic thrillers. Now we have one that’s violent, but also super hot. And I wanted to hear about directing the sex scenes. Was there an intimacy coordinator?
NCP: Shooting sex scenes are some of the most unsexy things that you can imagine.
DC: I could imagine very clinical.
NCP: Very clinical and rightly so, so that there’s nothing problematic about it. Yes, we made a film about gray areas, but in the process of making it, there were no gray areas in the creative process. We had Robbie Taylor Hunt, who’s our intimacy coordinator, and quite often the intimacy coordinator will work alongside the fight director because there’s so much crossover between the violence and the sex. For example, the bashing scene at the beginning, yes, it’s very violent, but it’s also incredibly vulnerable, and Nathan ends up naked by the end of it. So we had Robbie help us mediate that situation.
I think what was really important to us was to come up with a structure onset that flattened the power structure so that there was never a case of, oh, I feel uncomfortable for saying no. Actors were completely in control. In fact, what would happen is that we would say to Robbie what we wanted, and then Robbie would go away with the actors. They [would make] something and then they showed it to us. We would often communicate through Robbie so that there wasn’t ever, or as much as possible avoid the idea of, oh, I don’t want to say no to the director.
DC: That’s so smart though. As much as you try as a director, there is still that hierarchy, unfortunately. So that’s cool that you guys did that to make it feel safe. I can’t imagine it was emotionally easy to direct, to act, to be a part of a movie like this.
SHF: I mean, Nathan and George as themselves, they get along really well. They struck up quite a strong friendship from day one. They brought a lot of lightness to the set. Actually, they had certain rituals kind of tapping in and tapping out and stuff like that. But you need a lightness to exist around the construct of what is being made that in a way highlights the sort of fiction that we are creating. And they were amazing leaders for that. I think that it made the set always feel like quite a joyous group endeavor.
DC: I love it when you hear that the most upsetting, intense movies have the best sets. Everyone’s just trying to make it through and they love each other, but they know it’s terrible. The subject matter is hard. But I’m glad it was light, at least again, this whole movie had me on the edge of my seat, terrified the whole time.
NCP: Can I just tell a quick story of how wonderful Nathan was?
DC: I would absolutely love to hear that.
NCP: If you remember the shower scene in the gay sauna. So before we shot that scene, Nathan came to me, I will own this, came to me and said, which is the hot tap? And I said, that one. And then he went away and turned on the tap, and then we shot the scene. After we finished the scene, he came to us and said, that wasn’t the hot tap. That was the cold tap.
SHF: Actually it was like the cold plunge shower. So there were two normal temperatures and one that was specifically if you want to have a freezing cold shower. He did multiple takes as well and did not say anything. We didn’t know! He also acted it so well that you could not tell. He looks like he’s having a great shower.
Femme comes to digital and VOD on April 30, 2024.
Categorized:Interviews
