Interview: Georgia Oakley on the Complex Catharsis of Blue Jean

Two events from 1988 give profound shape to Blue Jean. First, the conservative British government under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher enacted Section 28, a law prohibiting the “promotion of homosexuality” by local authorities, especially schools. Second, writer-director Georgia Oakley was born. She never knew the world before the regulation, yet she’s also not entirely sure that there’s a world after it either.

Oakley’s frustration with the narrow victories achieved at the cost of great psychological harm to the gay community flows into her feature directorial debut. Blue Jean homes in on how the solemn Jean (Rosy McEwen) has set up a handy compartmentalization between her work life as a gym teacher and her personal life, during which she frequents lesbian bars with her girlfriend, Viv (Kerrie Hayes). But that division collapses when one of her pupils, Lois (Lucy Halliday), begins to explore those same spots. Oakley’s perceptive character study pinpoints the pernicious effects of how a homophobic society influences individual choices—and frequently not in the heroic direction of resistance that cinema has primed audiences to expect.

I spoke with Oakley prior to the stateside theatrical opening of Blue Jean. Our conversation covered its depiction of the nuances of homophobia, both narratively and visually, as well as the role camerawork and sound played in conveying Jean’s fraught psychological headspace.

There’s a real intentionality to Jean being a P.E. teacher. Was ensuring that Jean’s craft had something to do with physicality crucial to ensure you weren’t whitewashing her sexuality to something purely intellectual or emotional?

I was thinking a lot about how there’s this conflation between homosexuality and pedophilia and that, as queer people, we’re often made to feel in some way predatory. I was obviously aware that if we were telling a story about a P.E. teacher that her experience would have been very different from, say, a history teacher. Her job is so concerned with physicality and bodies, and she has to enter the space of the changing rooms. We spoke to many real P.E. teachers who inspired the story, and they all spoke about how the showers were just this battleground for them. It was a part of their job that they couldn’t escape from. There’s a throwaway comment in the film where one of the kids calls her a “perv” for passing her a towel in the showers.

I was looking at what the specificity of that experience is as a queer woman, with all of these messages that we’ve internalized, and attempting to allow an audience into that and speak to people who maybe have no experience of being othered in any way and show them how it changes the way that a person feels on a day-to-day basis. That was the starting point. I found these first-hand accounts with P.E. teachers back in 2018. In the U.K., anyway, you might be more likely to become friends with your P.E. teacher than you are with your English teacher, let’s say. I was interested in how this character straddles all of these different worlds and the P.E. teacher’s place as being somewhere between the students and the teachers.

So much of the film is about the masks that Jean wears in various settings and her code-switching. Did you and Rosy align on who she thought she was behind all those masks—if such a “backstage” persona really does exist for anyone?

Jean is so used to shape-shifting between all of these different versions of herself. I would say that if you aren’t acknowledged, cherished, and loved for being your true self from childhood, and you enter into an adulthood that looks like Jean’s, I don’t think there’s a true version of you lurking underneath that you’re hiding from the world. I think you’re really so out of touch with yourself that you don’t really know. There are moments where Jean’s true essence seems to come out, often when she’s with Viv. There are moments of lightness that punctuate the story, but I don’t think I would say we’re seeing the true version of Jean there. It’s more complicated than that. If you grow up being told that you are in some ways wrong just by existing, and you don’t fit in the into the world, then you become very adept at changing yourself to fit into a certain environment. And when you do that too many times, the real you is lost in the process.

How did you develop the conflict in the film? It’s not a typical drama where a lesbian individual might fight against some avatar for societal homophobia. Jean is fighting herself and how she’s internalized society’s expectations of her.

I love a lot of films that are more overtly political queer films about somebody that fights against any given law or something like that. But I felt drawn to telling a story that was less about heroic acts and more about somebody who just wants to get on with their life and not really think about any of this stuff. But it’s kind of thrust upon her, and through her resistance and desire to not have to get wrapped up in this, she ends up making some very questionable decisions. Her fear, not her inability to be heroic, was what drew me to tell a story that was more of a portrait of one woman that interrogates her life and choices rather than a more explicitly political film.

Jean is set up as an antihero in the film, but I still wasn’t expecting her big moment of self-identification as a lesbian to come from a moment of complete frustration rather than courage. Were you building to this outcome from the beginning of writing, or did it come as a realization along the way?

That moment was always in the film but didn’t necessarily look the way that it does. It wasn’t at the party, but there was always a moment when Jean said to somebody that didn’t mean anything to her that she was a lesbian. That moment of catharsis was always there in the film. I don’t know that I saw it as being the climax. It’s a complicated one, because she embraces the moment and, obviously, something shifts as a result of it. Like anything, if we’re scared of it and we work up the courage to do it, we pop the balloon and suddenly realize it wasn’t that scary in the first place. But I also wanted to tell a story where the audience is given a sort of slightly false sense of the progress that’s being made here. Jean is able to make this great leap in her personal life, but, actually, it’s not such a great leap. Things didn’t change for 15 years, and even when the law was repealed, they didn’t really change. Yes, it provides the character and the audience with catharsis, but I wanted it to be more of a reminder for when she goes back to school. Nothing has really changed, and it won’t change for a very long time.

You’ve spoken about calibrating the film to play for a more contemporary audience, which limited how present you made homophobic incidents faced by the characters in the film. How do you handle the balance of emphasizing microaggressions without making the film feel like an act of erasure of the violence lesbians in the era of Section 28 might have faced?

It was a difficult call to make because stories of women having bricks thrown through their car windows and things like that were very true to that moment in time. However, they were still experiencing the microaggressions that I explore in the film—and continue to experience those microaggressions as older women now. It was also just a question of where the point is that my own experience and this character’s experience meet. The plot was built around some of the women that we met and their experiences, but a lot of the ins and outs of what happens in the scenes in Blue Jean are actually just taken from my own life and experiences.

I was keen to speak to people outside of the queer community who’ve had any experience of being othered in any way. I felt that focusing on microaggressions was the better way in. I hope that people don’t think that it’s an erasure of what was actually happening because I’m very much aware that these more overt violent acts of homophobia were happening all over the place—and continue to. I think people who were part of the crew were very surprised by some of the homophobia that we experienced whilst making the film. It was there, it was in the air, and we were talking about it in all sorts of ways. It’s not just in terms of what the characters experience.

I’m curious about how the camera captures Jean’s relationship to the body. Whenever she becomes aware of how people might perceive her as a sexual being at work, there does seem to be a real shift in the frame rate and visual style.

There aren’t any hard and fast rules in terms of frame rates and things like that. We looked at each scene as a standalone, as it were, with regard to Jean’s relationship with those bodies. Sometimes the frame rate did change. There was a lot of discussion around how much of the film is about looking, what it feels like to be looked at, how much of the story pivots around these characters kind of looking at each other, and how to address that in terms of the shooting style of the film. We also use zooms quite a lot in the film, which isn’t something that I’ve used before. But that was just one example of attempting to get into the character’s psyche to allow the audience this sort of extra window into Jean’s world.

How does the sound design augment that mission as well? You had quite an impressive team, including James Mather, your supervising sound designer, who recently won an Oscar for Top Gun: Maverick.

James is an absolute genius. He and I worked together on most of my short films. I don’t know how I ended up being lucky enough for him to help me out on a short film. But it happened once, and then it happened again. It was fascinating because James’s team is so used to working on big action films that some of the Foley artists were really relishing the opportunity to work on something that was so quiet and about the tiniest rustle of a piece of clothing. Because it was such a change from what they were used to, I think that brought a special energy to our work in sound. It was a balancing act, not trying to kind of do anything too crazy in terms of manipulating the sound but, at the same time, using sound to provide that much-needed window into the character’s mind. We worked on the sound for as long as we worked on that edit. James was always saying, “You’re never done with sound, you just run out of time.” I could have happily worked for another three months on the sound of this film with James.

On a different note of directing, you gave Rosy and Kerrie the opportunity to have private moments between their characters that you didn’t know about. What led you to that decision, and what effect do you think that had on their performances?

I think it’s important, particularly if characters have some sort of special relationship in the film, for them to have some sort of a secret history that you’re not necessarily a part of as the director. We didn’t just use that approach with Rosy and Kerrie. We also sent the women who all live in the lesbian housing co-op off on a night out together with various activities when they arrived in Newcastle. At one point I was going to go, and then I was like, “Actually, I think it’s better if they just go.” None of them knew each other as well. Anyway, they had a wild night out, and they all turned up to set extremely hungover on the first day! But they had made this amazing bond, and they came back with all these Polaroid photos and stuff. There it was: They had this history, and we had nothing to do with it. I think that’s part of the magic that’s needed for films.

For non-Brits like myself who might not be as familiar with the Blind Date show that’s a running motif in Blue Jean, can you explain a little bit more about what that reference is and how it came to be in the film?

Blind Date was a dating show from the ’80s and ’90s that every single household, more or less, would watch on a Saturday night. It’s not too dissimilar from contemporary dating shows in that it’s incredibly heteronormative. I watched it in my household and had no idea the kinds of messages that I was absorbing by watching it. It was so much a kind of cultural signpost for the U.K. in terms of everyone remembering that moment in time, so it was always in the script. But it wasn’t until I started rewatching old episodes to play while we were filming that I really understood the full extent of the kinds of things being said on that show that children all over the country were watching. I won’t give too much away on that. I’ll let you watch them to see.