Miss Flicks

Georgia Oakley on Blue Jean and queer representation in cinema

During the London Film Festival in October, I had the absolute pleasure of sitting down with writer/director Georgia Oakley to talk about her feature directorial debut Blue Jean.

In the powerful drama (here’s my review), Rosy McEwen plays a closeted PE teacher leading a double life in 1980s Newcastle. When one of her new students bumps into her in a bar and threatens to expose her sexuality, Jean goes to extreme lengths to keep it a secret.

Oakley shot the film in 26 days last February and got it ready to premiere at Venice’s Giornate degli Autori festival in September, when it won the People’s Choice Award. Blue Jean has been racking up rave reviews around the film festival circuit over the past few months and Oakley is currently nominated for the Outstanding Debut BAFTA.

To celebrate its release in cinemas on Friday, here’s my conversation with Oakley:

I watched Blue Jean last night. I thought it was fantastic. Rosy blew me away, she was just incredible.

She was a joy to work with and be around. If I could make every film with Rosy, I would.

I was watching interviews in preparation for this and I had no idea that wasn’t her actual accent, the Geordie, it was incredible – so convincing.

Some people who do self-tapes, they kind of do a little speech about the film first and why they loved it, but with Rosy, she just started talking and it was Jean and I just knew. I had such a clear vision of who she was in my head that I was very doubtful that I would be able to find that and I thought I would have to reimagine the character slightly but (I didn’t).

I read that Jean was originally envisioned as a 40-year-old?

She was going to be in her late 30s and we aged her down. In my mind, the character in the film is probably like 32. Rosy’s younger than that but I felt she had the soulful energy that she could play (her). The reason she was older (initially) was really just because I always imagined somebody who had lived a whole other life and then was starting almost like a new life. And when I really thought about it, our casting director encouraged me to widen the net age-wise so I could find more actors that might not have been able to apply for the role.

I must admit I didn’t know about Section 28. I was born in ’89 and I think you’re a similar age to me. Did you know about it? How did you come to know about it?

No, that’s the thing, I didn’t know it. I was looking for a framework through which I could tell a story with the themes I was looking to explore. That’s a very vague way of explaining it. I knew I wanted to tell a story about somebody who wears multiple masks in different aspects of their life and I knew it would be a queer story and I knew it would have some of my own experience and then hope that I would be able to find a framework that already existed, you know, a real person or a real moment in time.

Through that research phase, I found an article about the lesbian abseilers who abseiled from the House of Lords gallery into the House of Lords when they were debating Section 28. I didn’t know anything about the law at that point. The image of these women throwing themselves off the balcony wrapped in washing line – that was the first thing that stuck with me, then it was the law and what that meant, researching when it was repealed, and then as soon as I found that out, I realised how much of a profound effect that law had had on my life without me knowing it existed.

That was the interesting thing: ‘Well if I don’t know, then surely not many people know that are of my generation.’ It’s just been swept under the carpet. Even my parents didn’t really know. The only people who seemed to really know everything there was to know about it were the queer community who were active and fighting all the battles already in the ’80s and people involved in education. But it wasn’t something that was broadly spoken about.

Did you speak to people who were directly involved or affected by it at that time to inform your story?

Yeah, I started by finding a PhD online (containing) interviews with PE teachers who had worked in the late ’80s and early ’90s about their experiences under Section 28. I met those people and interviewed them myself. We probably met upwards of 40 different people who were involved in different ways, whether it be activists who were involved in the pushback against Section 28, people who started the Pink Paper (LGBTQ+ newspaper), we spoke to people who started LGBT History Month, we met the abseilers I spoke about originally, we met everyone we could possibly meet, including lots of lesbians who were in Newcastle at that time. They shared photographs with us and talked to us in detail about what the scene was like, how it was set up across the city, where you’d have to go to get this, that and the other, how these magazines were passed around, how they were brought up from London, how the money was collected.

There was a long research phase, probably about a year, during which time I was also writing the script. We sort of started with a framework and then we’d do all these interviews and we would add in texture based on whatever anecdote we’d been told that week.

Are there any aspects of Jean or any moments in the film that are directly autobiographical?

Yeah, there’s a lot. It’s not really so much about the specific moments. I guess what I would say is that the story arc, about a teacher who’s gay in the ’80s and runs into a student in a bar, all of that came from real women that we met and their experiences. But the emotional knottiness of how much somebody chooses to define how out there they are in their lives and all of that, that side of the character is all really my own personal experience.

The teachers that we spoke to were so amazing and helpful, they shared diary entries with us from the time. There’s one teacher called Catherine who had a run into a student in a bar just like Jean and she shared her diary entry from the night that had happened; how she felt. We had all this really amazing first-hand research. But they also reported a lot of overt, violent homophobia and abuse. Things like bricks through windows, car windows being spray-painted, that kind of stuff. As horrific as that was, I felt that, partly because of things that people were saying around me at the time we were developing the film, I felt that the key to taking this story and communicating it successfully to a contemporary audience would be slightly deviating away from this overt homophobia and refocusing the narrative on the smaller microaggressions that queer people endure every day no matter what country they live in and no matter what year we’re talking about. And I knew, because a lot of that was my own experience, that it would be a way of forming a bridge from the source material, as it were, to where we are now.

This sounds stupid but I had so many people in my life that I was almost wanting to like convince of something I knew that they really didn’t believe. So I had to formulate this story in a way that wouldn’t alienate people too quickly and I felt the answer was to try and almost diffuse everything and slowly, slowly build you up with these little moments as opposed to telling everyone what it was like. People were being beaten up on the street, which they were, and I felt conflicted at times as to whether or not that was the right thing to do. But I think now I’m happy that we went in that direction because that does tend to be the feedback from people who’ve watched it, that not only does it hopefully make it more relatable for people who aren’t queer; everybody knows what it feels like to wear different masks in the different parts of our lives. To be one person at work, one person at home, one person with your kids, that kind of thing. But also, most people know what it feels like to have been othered in some way and to have experienced microaggressions in that way, and as a result, hopefully, it opens up that very specific experience of a PE teacher in a very specific time to something more universal.

**SKIP THE FOLLOWING QUESTION IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN BLUE JEAN YET**

I thought the ending was quite hopeful and that Jean seemed more at peace with herself. I wondered if there was ever a different ending or if you shot any more after she gets out of the car?

No. There was another shot after she got out of the car but it was basically just her walking into the school. That was always the ending. I always knew where I wanted the film to end. I didn’t want to tie everything up but I wanted the audience to feel hope and I wanted the audience to feel that if another student was to walk into the school that day, they were new in the school and they were to run into Jean in a bar, then she would behave differently from how she behaved with Lois. From all the women we spoke to, it took 30 years of self-discovery and therapy for them to get to a place where they understood their actions and could become more at peace with the things that they did that they then regretted. And so in the 90-minute timeline of a film, I was pretty adamant that we couldn’t go too far, we couldn’t show too much progression for that character because it just wasn’t realistic. I wanted to show that there’d been some personal work that she’s done on herself and obviously there’s a progression that she makes in small ways but I didn’t want to show anything more than that.

How’s the incredible reception to Blue Jean been for you?

It’s been amazing obviously. The biggest worry with this film and I think the biggest worry that other people had about this film was that it would be too niche and it wouldn’t appeal to more than a very specific audience and that was an ongoing battle that we had from the inception of the idea to the end of the post-production so to go to Venice was incredible but then to win the People’s Choice Award… it felt like we can finally say, OK, this film is not niche. If it appeals to the people, then we can get rid of that word for a moment. I’m still processing all of it, it’s been a bit of a whirlwind.

In your opinion, in terms of queer representation in film, what still needs to be improved?

The easier way for me to answer that is that I felt when we started developing this film that there was a real push to tell solely positive, happy-ending sorts of stories about the queer experience. And as much as I think that we deserve that and we have missed out on that for a long time, and you know, when I started watching queer cinema 10-12 years ago, all the films about lesbians, one of them ended up dead or whatever. But I felt like it’s not fair to start pushing everybody into telling a story that is entirely positive and that is possible to tell stories that uncover a bit more of the struggle of what it means to be queer but do that whilst showing some of the joy of that experience and that’s what we tried to do with this film. I think that happy ending (idea), for me, slightly misses the point of what’s needed in terms of representation.

I mean, I made a film that shows a lesbian relationship that is in full swing at the beginning of the film and that wasn’t something I had seen enough of. It was always a story about two women who were desperately longing for each other but couldn’t have each other, or whatever, and it was so rare just to see a couple that were together and were functioning like any other couple – or not functioning and having these little disagreements. For me, that’s where I feel like it could do better. I remember taking my parents to see The Kids Are All Right, I can’t think when that was but it must have about 10 years ago, and just seeing a lesbian family like that – that was the kind of representation I feel we need more of, where it’s just showing two people’s daily struggles of what it means to be in a relationship without focusing on happy endings or anything else. Just showing the reality of what it means to be queer but without pushing any agenda.

What is next for you?

I’m writing a new film for BBC Film, it’s very early days so who knows. I’m also co-adapting a novel called Expectation with Clémence Poésy, which is for her to direct, so I’m writing that at the moment.

Blue Jean is in cinemas from Friday 10th February