EIFF 2024 – Interview with Writer-Directors Kit Redstone & Arran Shearing (King Baby)

Conducted By: Blake Simons

There’s a problem with men. Quite a few in fact. Kit Redstone and Arran Shearing, a trans and cis writer-director duo, are concerned about this, so they’ve made a film: King Baby.

Two men (Graham Dickson and Neil Chinneck) set up camp in the ruins of an old castle and establish a simple hierarchy of king and servant. The system appears to work. But then a wooden queen, a mannequin carved from a nearby tree, is thrown into the mix, and through jealousy, introspection, rivalry and lunacy, everything starts to unravel.

A riotously funny black comedy of roleplaying and manipulation in a similar vein to Peter Strickland’s character-driven sensory nightmares, King Baby has its UK premiere this week at Edinburgh International Film Festival, where it plays the Midnight Madness strand. It’s one of the first steps for a film that’s still discovering where it sits with audiences, a process that I’m delighted to be part of as I sit down with the duo over Zoom for a lively but laidback conversation where we discuss the complex simplicity and fortuitous coincidences of their project.

I’d like to start out by asking how you came to work together as a creative duo and develop your first feature. One of you has a theatre backdrop, and the other a background in music video direction.

Arran: Am I going first?

Kit: I guess so!

Arran: Usually, Kit goes first because I’m shy, but I’ll try and go first.

Kit: But if you want, I’ll get any point.

Arran: Thanks buddy. We haven’t been in the same place for a few months, and I’m missing that synchronicity that we sometimes have where we finish each other’s sentences.

We met years ago in the theatre scene. I would go and see a lot of Kit’s plays and just really admired the work that he was doing. And we had mutual friends. Kit ended up acting in my first feature [2017’s Forgotten Man]. And five years later, he was doing this play Testosterone, which was touring the world as sort of the best of England of that year. The British Arts Council was sending it around the world. It played in Vancouver, where I was living at the time, and we went out for a drink and talked about making a film.

But that’s only part of it. The film that we talked about making is actually the film that we’re making next. We spent so much time waiting for that to get financed that we decided to make King Baby in the meantime.

That’s so boring though! Kit, you’ve got to help me do better than that. How did we end up making King Baby?

Kit: Making King Baby, I think I was working on the bare bones of a play. Having written with Arran before, I just sort of realised that all our projects separately are better served together.

It felt kind of imperative for us to co-create and co-direct it as soon as humanly possible. When we wrote the first feature, the one that hasn’t been made yet, we had such an incredible collaboration that our separate writing was way better when we were together. Arran came on board pretty early in the process and the rest is history.

It feels fitting that the film has ended up in Edinburgh, because the film equally feels like a Fringe piece. How did it develop from its origins as theatre through to the film project that it’s ended up as?

Kit: It was such a stripped-down theatrical idea anyway, and we had very little money to put towards making a feature. It was quite early on that we were both like ‘let’s just make this a film’. It lent itself to cinema in a way that was quite surprising, even though it’s very dialogue-heavy and in one location.

Arran: It was fast-tracked into its film life. Its theatre life is brief, but important. The truest version of the story is in the film.

I think it’s interesting that it started life that way, because you’ve got a very improv theatre dynamic between your two principal characters, to the extent that it feels like a kind of ‘yes, and’ exercise that you’re building here. Did you feel you were straddling theatre and film developing the piece when it came to the script and performances?

Kit: Yeah, very much so, for lots of reasons. Because it’s a two-hander, which is such a theatrical conceit, because it kind of adheres to the rules of poor theatre. They are, in a sense, creating a theatre within the film, that becomes their life. I think we’ve always been very aware of and embracing of the merging of those two disciplines.

Arran: When we were in France in pre-production, before anybody arrived, it was just Kit and me. I would wake up at about seven o’clock in the morning, open the shutters and look down. And Kit would be chain smoking and reading the script to himself, acting out the different roles and thinking about every single line of dialogue.

There’s no improvisation whatsoever, and the intentionality of the delivery of those things was agreed upon by both of us, and worked to the bone by Kit to articulate that to the actors, so that over the nine or ten days of rehearsals that we had – because of the nature of our shoot, Kit was primarily leading those rehearsals and I might be doing some logistical stuff, it was a divide and conquer sort of thing – but that improvising, and that ‘yes, and’ feeling was scripted. The playfulness that the actors had with each other was designed by Kit and [developed] as we collaborated for our shared vision. I love that it feels spontaneous and yet it was so deliberate.

Kit: Graham is primarily an improv guy, so even though pretty much every single line, bar a few, were as scripted, he brought a playfulness within that framework.

Neil is a very classical theatre actor. Graham is also, but mostly he’s done film and TV. Most of their stuff is live. It was interesting merging those two acting styles, and seeing how we could make them flourish on screen and create an acting language between two very different actors.

I’m curious about your rehearsal process, and the fact that you’re a duo of writer-directors and you’ve got a duo of actors that you’re directing – what was that dynamic like?

Kit: I think we have very separate skills, but we also discuss everything. We could have been directing the actors together at every moment, but the constraints of a low budget production meant that there were times when we had to divide and conquer separate facets of creating the film. I find it hard to articulate, but our creative dynamic is just so seamless.

Arran: The only reason not to describe it as dividing the work is that both of us are so connected to every aspect of the storytelling. The technical stuff, the visuals, blocking, rehearsals, all of those are opportunities to tell your story more clearly. By the time we’re walking on set, we feel exactly the same about what the story is, but coming from film and coming from theatre, I think part of the reason that we started working together was to learn from each other. We give each other a lot of space to do the thing that they have been doing twenty years, learning from that and not being shy to jump in and discuss.

Kit: We’re able to trust each other to carry out and realise our shared vision. Even when we had minor arguments, there was never a point at which we clashed on vision. I’ve collaborated before, with varying degrees of success, but I’ve never had a collaboration like this. It’s very precious to us.

I want to talk about the specifics of that collaboration further. One of you is cisgender, and one of you is transgender, and you’ve consciously made that part of your brand, which I think is a very cool thing. How have your differing experiences and contexts of ‘maleness’ informed the development of the film?

Kit: It’s so interesting, because I think, in some ways, Arran is more careful than I am. Because he carries the heavy weight of being a cis man. In some ways, I feel I can get away with things, because I’m not. There’s an interesting thing going on sometimes where I’ll be a little more irreverent than Arran, and Arran will be like ‘can you say that?’, and I’m like, ‘yeah, I can say that’.

All our work to date, the projects that we have yet to make, they’re all centred around identity, and they look at masculinity, and the range of that, from the most awful men to the most wonderful men. I feel that both of us are striving to understand how to be a good man in a patriarchal world, so it’s something we talk about all the time, whether it’s around a project, or just us chatting over a coffee. Obviously, we’ve had different experiences, but in some ways we’ve had similar, we faced similar challenges in early life.

Arran: I think that we’ve both been affected by terrible men that have power or use their privilege, and everyone in a way has that experience. On top of exploring what’s a positive and what’s a negative expression of masculinity, it’s also a desire to strip some of the power of masculinity away through humour and just make fun of the thing that holds so much power and affects everybody.

It’s a curious thing to have made a film about masculinity where the object of the men’s affections is a literal object who cannot reciprocate those advances at all. How did you navigate that? Because I feel it’s the kind of premise that could very easily be mishandled. I’m curious about how you navigated having a literal object for a woman in your film.

Kit: It was very clear to us that she represents the metaphorical objectification of women. We could do and say things in a way that didn’t mean humiliating and degrading an actor. And the fact that she’s a mannequin exposes men, their frustration and their anger and their violence and their sexuality towards her are so pathetic and ludicrous.

Arran: When you take the stakes away from the female character, you can focus in on the men’s behaviour in a way that you couldn’t if that was played by a person. The threat of violence and all the repercussions of their behaviour might be compelling, but it would be really distracting.

I like the naturally exposited, somewhat casual world building that you’ve built around the characters. It’s at once immediately understood but appropriately bewildering when you introduce elements like jelly meat. Did you start from something simple and build on it piece by piece until you had a sense of the world, or did you trim ideas back until it felt economical enough?

Kit: That stripped-backness and the ‘surreality’ of the elements of the kingdom were there from the beginning. In the same way that we treat the queen as a kind of cipher, these things were all ludicrous representations of pomp and ceremony, tradition, capitalist society, monarchy. It was taking the thing in the real world and asking ‘what is the absurdist version of this?’. The jelly, the tipping, the hunt – all those elements were in the first iteration of the script.

Arran: With the jelly, what I loved was the idea that the only thing that they eat is the one food that has no nutritional value. It’s the emperor’s new clothes of food. It’s just sugar water in a blob. The power of patriarchy is this imagined idea that this thing that has no nourishment is actually all you need and is good and is proper.

Kit: These men feel that they never have to grow up, that they never have to develop or change, that they can remain eternal children forever. Sometimes world politics feels like that, to a terrifying degree. We’re just watching these bloated babies prance around and make terrifying decisions.

I want to ask about bodies in the film, because it’s refreshing to see so much male nudity on screen, included quite casually here, but with clear purpose and intent behind it.

Arran: We were clear with the actors that it had to be that way, because we obviously didn’t want to spring that on them late. That was a part of the very first conversations. And they had read the script, and they just completely understood the reasoning behind it.

Kit: Again, this was all part of the exposing of them, laying them bare and all their weaknesses.

Obviously, they’re not showing erect penises. They’re just kind of flopping around as they go around the kingdom. And there’s such a puerile fascination with bodies from the king. There’s also this subtle, or not so subtle, homoeroticism. Fundamentally, they could only really love each other, they don’t have the capacity to love a woman, or to have compassion or empathy for anyone other than themselves.

Their male counterpart holds up a mirror to them. So, the nudity felt like it existed within that arena. It’s first and foremost a film about men. And their bodies, they’re kind of a microscope.

I love that you take the homoeroticism to the point that something almost develops, but ultimately it can only really tip over into violence.

Kit: Because they could never acknowledge who they truly are.

Arran: I wouldn’t even say it’s who they truly are, because it’s not about repressed sexuality in that sense, but something that’s contained within most men is a form of misogyny where you can only truly love and respect men. And so that admiration, that whole forest sequence where they’re drawn back together and realise that actually the queen is the source of all their problems. That coming together is that complicity and camaraderie. There’s something weird and strangely sexual about men loving each other because they enable each other.

Kit: I have a male friend who’s straight, but I’ve never known him to truly love any of his girlfriends. Yet he loves his male friends so much. There’s this dissonance between who he truly respects and admires and who he’s attracted to and, in some way, I feel that there’s this kind of messy sexuality patriarchy thing that’s very tangled and complex. I agree with Arran, it’s not what I meant when I said ‘who they truly are’. I don’t mean they’re gay, but, they just do not have the capacity to love a woman.Because how can you truly love someone who you see as less than human? That can’t be love.

There are a lot of laughs in the film, but the hardest I laughed was at the choice of music in the closing scene. Because I’d been thinking about the film Antichrist quite a bit in the final stretches, and then you cue that music. It’s curious because you’ve almost queered Antichrist as a film, which is fascinating.

Kit: There was something subconscious about that, I feel.

Arran: That song was interesting, because I was the primary editor on the film. And that’s not to say that Kit doesn’t have his fingerprints all over the edit, but the guy sitting at the computer tapping away at the keys is me. We were working on it together in L.A. where Kit lives, and he wanted to try that song at the end. He talked about Antichrist and said something quite beautiful and poetic about the song.

And this is when we were layering in temp music. We threw it in there knowing that there’s no way that we would actually end up with it. When Peter Gregson came on board, as every composer hates to do, we forced him to listen to all the temp music and get a sense of the ideas that we were thinking about for each section and the tone that we were trying to strike with the music. He had just finished his Bach Recomposed album for Deutsche Grammophon and, in and around that time, he had some scraps of music that he never found a home for. He had actually recomposed that song with an opera singer friend of his, and it was unreleased.

What was so wonderful is that the entire score is from Peter. It’s not that we licensed something for that ending sequence, but rather that Peter had it just kicking around as a total coincidence. It was a beautiful thing.

I want to ask about other cinematic influences. Another director that came to mind was Peter Strickland, particularly The Duke of Burgundy. What films were in your mind as you were developing King Baby?

Kit: Yeah, very much so The Duke of Burgundy. The Servant, which is one of my favourite films, Joseph Losey. And Pinter in general, Pinter’s theatre.

Arran: Peter Greenaway obviously was on our minds.

Kit: Barry Lyndon. Dogtooth, early Yorgos Lanthimos.

Sally Potter’s Orlando came to mind, especially in the early sequences. You’ve got this kind of fantastical gender space.

Kit: That was one of my favourite films as a young teenager. So yeah, I’d say some aspects of Sally Potter’s work. It was a real blend of absurdist theatre and films that are playful. And even to some extent Lars von Trier.

Arran: Dogville.

I thought about Dogville. Because you’ve got these rules and roles that you put in place for the two characters within their microcosm that get shifted around.

Kit: Yeah. And I think people who aren’t familiar with that kind of quite sadistic, Antonin Artaud cruelty might find it jarring. There’s a cruelty to King Baby which has to be there.

Arran: I remember showing people the film and they’d struggle with the ending of it. It could only really end the way that it does, if you carry these ideas through to their authentic conclusion.

You’ve got two more feature films in the works currently, a kind of thematic trilogy as you mentioned. Could you tell us more about those two projects?

Kit: [The second of the films, How Dare You] is a satirical horror about a diverse queer bunch of friends who move to a house in the countryside and become haunted by the heteronormative right-wing family that lived there. It’s about who died there, and about queer erasure and identity.

Arran: But in a comedy that, like King Baby, starts out funny, and the humour doesn’t change, but the implications of the comedy become so dark that it’s no longer funny.

And then the third film we’ve been writing for quite some time, it’s longer than anything we’ve ever written. It’s a Western, and I think it can be amazing, we’re so excited about it, but it just requires so much creative energy and just being on it to get it right. Maybe with each project, we want to achieve something, even from the writing stage, that we haven’t achieved before. So they really do build in a way, not just the scale and the scope, but the writing and the technicality of the writing.

What do you want audiences to leave King Baby feeling? It’s a complex film with complex emotions.

Kit: I think angry, and questioning the foundations that we’re all a part of and all in some ways complicit in propagating over and over again. We want to leave audiences, men particularly, querying their own identities and our structures.

Arran: Kit and I talk a lot about how we want the audience to feel when they walk out of the theatre, even from the writing phase. How would the audience understand this? Are they understanding it the way that we want them to? I feel similar to Kit, I always wanted people to come out of King Baby a bit exhausted. A bit exhausted with putting up with men, and these behaviours that are actually stupid. They’re scary, and they’re terrifying, and they hold the threat of violence. As a concept that we hold up, we can do better.

Kit: There was a time – and we changed our minds, because it was so stupidly on the nose – when we wanted our ending piece of music to be this song that was originally by Ivor Cutler, and then covered by Jim O’Rourke, called ‘Women of the World’. It’s just the same refrain over and over again: ‘women of the world take over, because if you don’t, the world will come to an end’. I think that’s, in a nutshell, where we wanted to leave the audience.

That would have been even more of a von Trier move.

Kit: Yeah exactly! It would have been a kind of ‘Young Americans’.

Arran: But the reason why we didn’t – and we did agonise over it – was because [King Baby] is also a call for men to do better. It’s not just that message.

What we didn’t want was for people to watch the film, be grappling with what they’ve seen and how it makes them feel, and then right at the end tell them how they were supposed to feel and, in a way, let them off the hook for some of the things that they might otherwise have struggled with as they left the theatre.

Kit: My mum didn’t like it. We sent her a version that had that. My mum hated it. That’s my memory.

Arran: And that’s what killed it! You have to understand, we’re essentially making films for our mothers, who have no chance of liking them.

Kit: Yeah.

King Baby has its UK premiere at Edinburgh International Film Festival in the Midnight Madness Strand on the 19^th August.

With thanks to Kit & Arran for their generosity with their time and to Kyle Greenberg at Circle Collective for facilitating.