SEBASTIAN
A Film by Mikko Mäkelä (award-winning director of A Moment in the Reeds)
Starring Ruaridh Mollica
Hiftu Quasem, Jonathan Hyde, Ingvar Sigurdsson, Leanne Best, Lara Rossi
DVD/ BLU-RAY RELEASE DATE: 23 JUNE
- with extras exclusive for Peccadillo edition
Also available on streaming platforms including Peccadillo Film, Apple, Amazon, BFI Player, Sky and Google
Mikko Mäkelä’s provocative and intimate drama SEBASTIAN follows Max (Ruaridh Mollica), a young writer who embarks on a double life as a sex worker to research his debut novel. Praised for his breakout performance, Mollica was nominated for Best Breakthrough Performance at the British Independent Film Awards (BIFA). The critically acclaimed film premiered at Sundance and BFI London Film Festival.
Max, a 25-year-old aspiring writer living in London, works at a literary magazine and is on the verge of finding success in the local literary scene. By night, however, he moonlights as a sex worker to research his debut novel. What begins as a series of furtive meetings soon evolves into a secret nocturnal life as his alter ego, “Sebastian.” In a fearless lead performance from newcomer Ruraridh Mollica, Max’s emotions shift from ecstasy to shame and exhilarating liberation. Far from merely informing his autobiographical fiction, Max’s experiences as Sebastian awaken a deeper sense of self—unshackled from societal expectations—all while threatening his carefully-earned status in the literary community.
SEBASTIAN explores the transgressive power of queer sexuality and the transformative impact of embracing a new identity.
Exclusive UK extras : interviews with Mikko Mäkelä and Ruaridh Mollica UK trailer
Audio description for the audio impaired
Q&A with Writer/Director Mikko Mäkelä
Tell us about the origins of Sebastian. Where did the idea for the film begin?
I moved to London following my BA, and as I began to engage with the city’s queer scene I started to become aware of an increasing number of young gay men, my peers, involved in sex work; people whom you wouldn’t perhaps have associated with more traditional ideas of sex work, but students and recent graduates, young people trying to forge careers in the creative industries but struggling to make ends meet. Facilitated by hook-up apps and escorting websites, some would casually accept a paid Grindr proposition here and there, with others becoming full-time entrepreneurs, marketing their services online with what seemed like little sense of stigma or shame. For many, sex work seemed to be becoming just another, increasingly normalised option in London’s gig-economy instead of the last resort it has sometimes been viewed as.
I wanted to craft a portrait of a character for whom selling sex was out of choice rather than something done for lack of other options – a character study of someone with many other avenues open to them in life, yet who is still drawn to sex work – and someone specifically who conducts the work within today’s context of the internet and apps, marketing themselves via an online persona while still doing in-person sex work. But I wanted to combine this with a reflection on the very nature of storytelling, and to craft a portrait of a young artist in the process of becoming, of finding their voice and their place in the industry. Max’s story became a way to turn my gaze on my own creative process, to examine and reflect on the relationship between lived experience and creative output: exploring not only how we shape the narratives we choose to tell but, crucially, how those narratives end up shaping us.
What did the process of casting Max look like, and what ultimately made Ruaridh Mollica the right person for the role?
From the start I knew that I wanted a relative unknown for the role. The film is a story of self-discovery – the most significant relationship in the film being that between Max and Sebastian – and I wanted the audience to be able to go on this same journey of discovering Max on screen, with no baggage of characters previously played.
Working with casting director Martin Ware we set out on a search for up-and-coming talent in the UK, going through several casting rounds in the process. But from my first viewing of Ruaridh’s tape, he jumped out at me with this intensity that clearly shone through. There is an audaciousness to Ruaridh that comes out at certain moments, combined with a control and precision that captures Max / Sebastian’s duality perfectly. Max is such an internal character with a usually controlled exterior, and Ruaridh such a precise actor who is able to communicate the subtlest shifts of thought and emotion with the smallest of gestures. I’m very much a performance-driven director and I knew that I needed to be able to work with someone who could craft the performance with the subtlety that it demanded.
The film is a very nonjudgmental portrait of sex work, exploring the range of emotions that Max experiences without falling into cliche; Max even talks about not wanting to tell a “sad sex worker story” in his book. What was it like navigating that balance as you worked on the film?
So much of previous sex worker representation has focused on or implied the presence of trauma – either as a reason behind going into sex work, or as an inevitable consequence – and this is something that I very much wanted to avoid. While the potential for exploitation in sex work is very real, this shouldn’t be taken to define the profession as a whole. The fact is that there are also plenty of happy, empowered sex workers who enjoy their work and are well rewarded for it.
A couple of times during development I did get the note about what Max’s “wound” was. A shaky sense of self-worth perhaps (though what twenty something doesn’t experience these feelings?), but it was essential for me to suggest a sense of support and even a safety net behind him, as well as fairly traditional expectations from his family as to his career and path in life. In some sense it is against this backdrop that the transgressive lure of sex work for Max can be understood – the sense of pleasure in exploring the taboo, the forbidden.
While I didn’t want to tell a “sad sex worker story”, however, I did want to stay cognisant of the needs of the script, and not fall into the trap of undoing the drama out of fear of featuring any kind of trauma – which can be a tricky thing to navigate as a filmmaker making work about queer lives. Queer people seem particularly sensitive to aspects of “good” and “bad” representation which sometimes suggests that characters mustn’t be shown to undergo any sort of suffering or hardship; there’s a definite audience movement for “happy queer stories”. Striving to paint a non-judgemental portrait doesn’t mean glamorising or deliberately trying to avoid showing any negative aspects or dangers, and my goal was always for the film to feel frank and honest in its treatment of sex work. Of course there are potentially dangerous situations and risks along the way, but in many ways it is the writing of the novel that drives Max to these places – more than anything else it is the pursuit of the story that drives him to pursue more marginal experiences. Max’s arc through sex work goes from hesitation to empowerment to loss of control, and the very reversal of feeling empowered – but his lowest points follow as a consequence of his double life, rather than any inherent negatives to sex work itself. Whatever it is that Max experiences, he does not see himself as a victim.
You moved to London from Finland to attend school, and Max is a London transplant from Edinburgh. How much of your own experience of young queer life in London made its way into the film?
While the story is fictional, the film explores and plays with ideas of auto-fiction, posing a number of questions about the relationship of an author’s life and their work. There is certainly a large element to Max’s perspective as well as the milieu of the film that draws on my own experiences (as well as on people around me): I have also been a twentysomething freelancer in London, living in Hackney, going out to Dalston Superstore or The Glory, trying to build a career in that city and find my voice as an artist, feeling the precarity of the gig economy as well as the pressures to succeed at a young age. I’m also an artist working within a commercial system, who has had meetings about my work as a queer creative and discussions with executives about a sex worker story (this very film).
There are certain London locations that have defined my life and movements through the city that I was very eager to try to capture in communicating a certain texture to existence in the city. But even when you begin from a perspective close to yourself, very soon you have to allow for the characters to live their own lives and allow yourself as a writer to go on a journey with them that is ultimately fictional and something separate from yourself and your own experiences.
The relationship between a writer’s life and work is a frequently explored theme, and there’s been a rise in auto-fiction among emerging young writers. Talk a bit about the relationship between authenticity and experience in storytelling. It is such a double-edged sword: on the one hand, there is so much currency today around authenticity, true stories, and autobiography, but on the other, aren’t storytelling and creative writing also supposed to be about imagination and empathy? While the premise of the film hinges on Max subscribing to the former school of thought, my interest here isn’t to try to argue for either side, but rather to examine auto-fiction as something like a way of life; the ramifications for one’s life and sense of self when it becomes so completely intertwined with one’s art that it seems no longer possible to separate the two – when one can no longer live their life without reference to their art – and one is constantly as much an observer as a participant in their own life.
Within the realm of cinema, Almodóvar has said that “daily reality is simply there to provide material for [his] next film”, and Mia Hansen-Løve has suggested that she no longer can distinguish between her real memories and the film accounts of those events that have come to replace them. An auto-fiction creator’s life seems in some sense to be led within this fuzzy, undefined space between the “real” of their life and their creative process (if any such boundaries can be said to exist) and it’s here that so much of the intrigue of the film is located for me. It is in this space where, through his activities, Max is discovering (a version of) himself by effectively becoming his own muse. Not by mining past experience for material, but by projecting a version of himself, an alter-ego into the present with a conscious intention of amassing experience to write about. Max is, effectively, living for his art.
The film is very frank in its depiction of sexuality without falling into the trap of being exploitative, nor overly-sanitized. Can you discuss your approach to sex on-screen, in terms of what you wanted to communicate as well as avoid?
I really wanted to make a film that didn’t problematise the depiction of sex in any way, from either a moral or an aesthetic standpoint. To honestly and realistically depict sex work, it can’t be an ellipsis. I think my approach to showing the body on screen and sex on-screen is very much informed by European cinema, and I was quite consciously working against the too often puritanical confines of British cinema when it comes to showing sex. I don’t think sex scenes need any more justification to be included in a film than the depiction of any other activity that forms an essential part of human existence; their necessity should be questioned on exactly the same parameters as any other scene: what is it doing in terms of story and character development?
To understand Max’s journey and his evolving relationship with his body – his growing exhilaration at its potential for commodification, his alternating sense of shame and empowerment – we must see his hesitation, his pleasure, his growing confidence, all his vulnerability and tenderness in the moment of sex. This is partly the material for his writing, his research, the experiences that have the potential not just to add authenticity and value to his novel, but also to remake him into someone new. While being a commodity and a vector of power, crucially sex is also a source of pleasure, empowerment and identity in this story.
Your first feature, A Moment in the Reeds, is also a very frank and honest portrayal of queer sexuality. As a queer storyteller, why is it important to capture these moments of intimacy on screen?
There is something about finding the intimacy within and around sexual encounters that I’m drawn to in depicting them. I think that sex as a communicative tool is certainly undervalued in cinema. Yet for many people (queer and straight alike) sex is an essential mode of communication and form of intimacy, a way of connecting to the world around us, but also a mode of self-expression – and this is definitely an aspect of it that I’m looking to foreground in my work. So much of queer intimacy can exist within and around (casual) sexual encounters, but I don’t think that should devalue them – there seems to operate a moral scale on the length of an intimate relationship for how it should be valued.
Tell us about the visual style of the film.
At its core the film is a closely observed character study, so I always knew I wanted to follow Max’s days and nights in quite intimate close-up for a real sense of connection and immediacy with the character. I love studying the human face with the camera and also tend to favour close-ups from a performance perspective. Capturing Max alone in the more quiet moments of being alone was very important to me, whether that’s observing him in his room or on his various commutes through the city to truly capture the texture of his every day.
But I also wanted to punctuate this sense of immediacy with some carefully chosen wider compositions so that we also ground Max in the physical reality of his various environments – he’s not only someone who is constantly on the move with his work, but also someone who performs different versions of himself in these spaces – I wanted to see him as a commuter both to his office and to his sexual encounters in a late-night Uber; at a drinks reception for London’s literary elite and at a tech start-up’s conference reception which he is desperate to leave.
It was important for me to use the visual language of the film to interplay between the idea that we’re close to his subjective experience, and then suddenly, we have an ironic distance from him – the idea of visually alternating a sense of the 1st and 3rd person through the wides introducing the idea of Max, at times observing himself from the outside, from an authorial perspective, as a participant in his story, and at other times to emphasize his sense of alienation.
The film cites a number of authors as well as Pialat’s “A Nos Amours”. Can you speak a little about your influences as a filmmaker, both cinematic and literary?
In terms of a literary tradition of queer auto-fiction as a background to Max’s writing, I had on my mind figures like Bret Easton Ellis, Cyril Collard and Jean Genet – how each of them have involved their own lives in their work, with someone like Genet in particular fashioning his own life-story into a kind of transgressive work of art in itself. I was also thinking about how a character like Max might be inspired to model their life and practice as an artist after certain literary icons, having his life imitate others’ art or manifest notions of their creative ideals (like Cyril Collard in some ways being inspired by and modeling himself on Genet). Beyond the queer tradition, Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook has also been an influential work for me for thinking about auto-fiction and meta-fiction, in the way it lays bare and opens up for discussion the processes and practise of fictionalisation and the simple putting into words of a (writer’s) life.
As for films, many of my favourites and the influences behind Sebastian come from French cinema: particularly the works of François Ozon and Olivier Assayas, who both work in meta-narratives, constantly reflecting back on story-telling and art-making and, for Assayas in particular, the commercial systems within which that creativity takes place, as in Clouds of Sils Maria and Non-Fiction. Ozon’s frank focus on sexuality, and the cinema du corps movement in broader terms, has also been inspirational. I first saw Pialat’s A Nos Amours when I was writing the first draft of Sebastian, and there was something I instantly connected with Max. It struck me that there was a parallel with the film I was making, in the way in which Suzanne remains slightly opaque to the audience, but is in a process of looking for herself as a young person, discovering her sexuality and coming to understand herself through it.