29/01/2024 - We met up with the director of this very intimate portrait of a young man on a journey to find his place in society

Finnish-British director Mikko Mäkelä presented his new feature Sebastian [+see also:
film review
interview: Mikko Mäkelä
film profile] in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition of this year's Sundance. The film is a trip through modern-day London and its queer sex-worker scene. We talked to the director about his approach to the topic, his protagonist and his artistic concept for the film.

Cineuropa: How much of yourself has seeped into the story?
Mikko Mäkelä: One of the main questions I want to ask with the film is: exactly how much personal experience do you need in order to talk about a specific topic? Or are you allowed to just use empathy and imagination to craft a story? And also, what I'm really interested in asking the audience is whether their appreciation of a work is in any way predicated on knowing how autobiographical or not autobiographical a piece of work is. At the same time, there's no way you can write without infusing it with your personal experiences and your perspective. So of course, it's a film that's rooted in a lot of personal experience about being a young artist, looking for one's voice and trying to work within a commercial system. But naturally, it's also very fictional and imaginary.

Did you still do specific research? How precisely did you want to get to know the milieu?
I wanted it to feel authentic, although at the same time, I wasn't looking to create a documentary portrait about sex work. I did speak to a lot of people to try to get the details correct, and I spent a lot of time just looking at the websites that people use to connect with clients. I tried to understand the way people present themselves and the language that they use around it. I certainly wanted it to feel grounded in today's London and to feel accurate in that sense.

How did you find your protagonist?
We worked with a wonderful casting director with whom we conducted a wide search for someone who would come with little baggage from previous roles. I wanted the audience to be able to go on a parallel journey of discovery as Max is discovering himself. It was through self-tapes that I was first introduced to Ruaridh Mollica. I knew from the very first viewing that there was something really special in him: this incredible intensity, boldness and raw energy, but also a vulnerability and an incredible precision. He felt like the right person to really be able to express that very complex inner life of Max.

What were the most important elements for your aesthetic concept?
I wanted to reach for a style that was at once a very intimate character study, through a very close-up film language, but which would also have a slightly more distanced, observational approach. I wanted to convey the idea that we're with him, but then suddenly, we have an ironic distance from him, as if we are viewing him from the outside.

It was also important to make a distinction between the day and the nighttime world. In terms of the production design, through the interiors, we wanted the houses of the clients to express the character of their owners.

Did you also have the same concept for the music? Such as, for example, each character having a special mood?
The score was very much a way to gain access to Max's psyche, and we sought to use it in a psychological way, kind of indicating the psychological shifts. I wanted an electronic score that incorporated organic elements as well. I'm not a big fan of traditional orchestral scores, but I like to work with very simple, more ambient electronic sounds. It was a really interesting process to incorporate acoustic instruments into the score.

What were the biggest production challenges? You shot a lot in indoor spaces – was that a specific choice, or was it out of necessity?
The film is very much about the distinction between the public and the private spheres – that's why there is a focus on those interior spaces. It helped with the private exploration and discovery of the protagonist, who is leading a double life. Since the film is a co-production, we had to split the shoot across three cities. We did some of the interiors in London, Glasgow and Brussels, so that added to the travelling.