Naqqash Khalid • Director of In Camera
“The intention was to create this portrait of what it's like to exist in our late capitalist society”
by Elena Lazic
- The Manchester-based writer-director discusses his debut feature, centred on an actor desperate for a part to play
After premiering in Karlovy Vary, In Camera [+see also:
film review
interview: Naqqash Khalid
film profile] plays in the First Feature Competition at the BFI London Film Festival. We talked to director Naqqash Khalid about this bold debut, centred on Aden (Nabhaan Rizwan), a struggling actor whose sense of identity crumbles more with each casting. His roommate (Rory Fleck Byrne), a nurse, is plagued with unsettling nightmares, while the arrival of a successful friend of the latter (Amir El-Masry) provides Aden with the role of a lifetime.
Cineuropa: Was there ever a more classical version of this film?
Naqqash Khalid: No. I would never want to make that film! I'm obsessed with structure; as soon as I had that, it was just a commitment that this is the film that I want to make. I really approached this film as if I'm never going to make another film again.
Cineuropa: Much of the film is about racism in the UK, especially the internal experience of being on the receiving end of that.
The core thing that I always held on to was, I want to represent how life feels, not how life is. I think making a film always starts with the desire to communicate a feeling that is usually quite inarticulate, and often that's about creating an atmosphere. The discomfort I felt in certain situations, I wanted to communicate it through Aden, but also through the film’s atmosphere. I also think cinema is about inarticulacy and interiority. Interiority is so subjective, it leaves lots of room for the audience to insert themselves. I think there's a real universality in that — we're not actors, but acting is a metaphor in the film, and we can all have felt like Aden at some point. Really the intention was to create this portrait of what it's like to exist in our late capitalist society. But also, I feel like actors’ bodies are like sociological documents. They bring their race, their gender, everything that is visibly present to them, and you can't just ignore those things. I think sometimes there is a violence in this medium where a director is telling us to ignore those things, and as an audience member, observing that has created discomfort in me. I was really interested in taking that and using that.
How did you cast Aden? And how did you work with your actor?
When I was writing Aiden, he felt really unknowable. I kind of wrote him like an alien, I didn't want him to have a conventional backstory. And I wanted him to feel really, really alive. When I'm writing a character, I'm usually writing 60%, and looking for 40% in a co-author, another artist who would give so much more than just turning up and performing. Nabhaan and I had a six month period where we went over the script very forensically. He would contribute ideas and responses, and I would then rewrite the script. Same with Amir and Rory. I see scripts as live documents, they have to be responsive to your collaborators.
I wrote my screenplay, but I also wrote the circumstances in which I wanted to make this film and how collaborative they were. To account for that, there needed to be rehearsal time. My whole process is to kind of over-prepare, then throw it in the bin. Some of my favourite stuff in the film happened when we'd be rolling and I would rewrite the script in the middle of the take. I think your job as a director is also to facilitate the perfect circumstances for the best work to happen.
The character of the nurse is kind of horrible, but he is part of the story and you show his pain.
The film is a colonial fairy tale. I knew that I wanted to cast an Irish actor; Nabhaan is Asian, Pakistani; and Amir is Egyptian. So all three actors, but also all three characters, have history with the British Empire. 100 years ago, Rory could have played Aden and he wouldn't necessarily be white. I was really interested in this construction of whiteness as this thing that changes over time. Whiteness is all about capitalism, and that has a currency and that changes, and Aden throughout the film kind of comes into a type of whiteness. When I was constructing the film, I was thinking a lot about degrees of whiteness, and having these three men share a colonial history was really important, even if it wasn't going to be translated in the plot. I also wanted to paint a portrait of contemporary masculinity in this country. Really what I'm interested in is the performance of everyday life.
What about the fashion designer?
I wanted this character to be constantly consuming. Aden was a character tied to starvation and I wanted the structure of the script to be bulimic, with periods of narrative starvation then narrative excess. I wanted Nabhaan’s and Amir’s characters to be polar opposite. So much of that character represents modern capitalism, where we feel the need to consume everything. There was a real horror to that, and I wanted horror to be associated with food throughout.
