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With TIFF premiere “Ancestors,” Irish filmmaker David Turpin creates a story about the simple acts of human connection, love and how our dreams and fantasies can boost our spirits when everything else fails.
Set in the late 1980s in London, when the HIV-AIDS crisis was killing off generations of primarily gay men, “Ancestors” asks the audience to remember.
The character-driven narrative focuses on Beau (Éanna Hardwicke), an Irish immigrant looking for community in London, and a place to be himself, freely. He lives with best friend Michelle (Jessica Reynolds), works in the cafe run by aging “auntie” to the young gay men in the neighborhood Maurice (Ruper Everett). Maurice also makes sure the youngsters understand the importance of the movie stars he loves — their pictures are all over the walls of the cafe and his house. Christina Hendricks plays one of those stars, in a role that is as much metaphor as it is real.
When Tiny (Jack Wolfe) enters their lives, Beau’s carefully built life changes irrevocably. “One of the things that I did with all the cast was I got everybody a cassette Walkman and made them a tape. And this was quite a sobering moment because some of the younger cast had never seen a cassette before,” says Turpin. “But it was really helpful to give them just the music that their character would have been listening to, because especially with music, it can bring you to places that you could talk and talk and never quite get there, and music will just teleport you there.”
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Why did you want to tell this story?
I was born in 1982, so I was a small child at the time that people think of as the height of the AIDS crisis, and yet it’s reverberated through my entire life. Continues to reverberate through my life and many people’s lives, I think in ways that we’re not always conscious of, or aware of, or don’t stop to think about. And often when there is an event like this, a kind of a fissure in history, our instinct is not to look back at it, not to not to think about it, and then sort of not to be aware of the ways in which it’s continuing to haunt us. And I suppose, for me personally, I think a lot of people of my generation and even later generations feel this absence of our elders, and whether they were people who died or people who were just so hurt by the by the crisis that they withdrew and became inaccessible to us.
There’s certainly been times in my life when I felt very alone and wished I had some sense of continuity, and I wondered what it might have been had it been possible to have that, and I think the film grew out of that.
What was it like to have Rupert Everett in the film?
It was a privilege to have Rupert because Rupert was there and saw it with his own eyes, and he was very generous with me in telling me about his real experience of being in London at that time.
His character reveres the old screen goddesses. Why?
I think that people have a very small and often very wrong idea about camp now, and about, for example, the relationship that older gay men might have had with stars like Joan Crawford or Bette Davis. It’s all a bit of a joke. But it’s not a joke because you’re looking at people who were shut out of religion, shut out of politics, shut out — we all have to find our own route to spiritual experience. And for many people, that was Bette Davis, that was Joan Crawford, it was Elizabeth Taylor. I think that kind of cheap to call it worship because it’s not that, but it’s the courage that it takes to find your own path to the divine in a world that tells you that you’re dirty and you don’t belong. I think it’s a really beautiful thing, and I wanted to show that, and I wanted to respect it.
Éanna Hardwicke brings so much to the film.
I think he has a really fascinating presence because he can be very vulnerable, but also Beau pushes people away, and he can make that very real. He can also be somebody who’s sort of tender. But he also has that Montgomery Clift, young Marlon Brando thing as well.
Christina Hendricks plays on of the screen goddesses, which seems perfect casting.
I had no concept that Christina would ever read [my script]. Because she’s an icon to me. I mean, I remember growing up, watching “Mad Men” when I was in college, and the way you would sit up a little straighter in your chair when Christina’s character came on. .. I guess I thought of her the way that Rupert’s character Maurice thinks of these women on his wall, that they’re just on another plane. But she read the script and she just really she really responded to it. I think she just wants to do things that interest her and matter to her, and it was amazing. She’s really real and she’s really incisive, and very meticulous as well in how she builds a character.
What’s next?
I am working on my next feature film, which I’m hoping to shoot next year. It’s quite different, but it’s a love story — I can’t ever really imagine making a film that’s not some kind of love story. It‘s called “The Foundling.”
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
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