Women have long had to shoulder the burden of contraception and the gender disparity inherent in family planning is as vast as it is onerous. When Director Sophie King (whose film Swan was one of our highlights of the 2021 edition of British Shorts) was presented with Danielle Papamichael’s script for Does Your Condom Make You Fat? she immediately connected with the material and having wanted to explore a more hybrid directorial space, found herself drawn to its genre straddling potential. Does Your Condom Make You Fat? presents us with a world where men, instead of women, are responsible for taking the morning after pill and so we follow Owen, a 27 year old man, deathly hungover, battling his own failures and having to suffer through the indignity and publicly degrading experience of getting his hands on that ever so necessary emergency contraception. Does Your Condom Make You Fat? doesn’t seek to judge or mock but instead focuses on the small moments, those prim awkward silences and disapproving glances where what is left unsaid is deafening. King approaches the film’s reversed imbalance with a deft touch of hilarity and absurdism making it both a compelling and hilarious watch. As Does Your Condom Make You Fat? premieres on Directors Notes today we speak to King about casting Angus Imrie, an actor with the right level of innocence and tenderness for the role, their crucial sponsorship with Girls in Film and Panavision, and ensuring the tone of the short was relevant, fresh and not a patronising imagined experience which would fail to engage an audience.
What do you feel about your work drew Producer Siona Davis and Writer Danielle Papamichael to you as a director, and what was it about the script that captured your imagination?
Siona and I first crossed paths when we were both part of the inaugural Uncertain Kingdom scheme. Siona’s film was a doc and mine a comedy, but regardless I think we both felt a stylistic affinity and an appreciation of each other’s approach to storytelling. Danielle I met because of this project, I was just so blown away by the humour, nuance and emotion in her script (can you believe this is her first script?!) and we soon found out that we loved all the same film and TV (aka we were both massive A24 nerds). My work tends to always have an element of humour but also combines this with other genres – whether drama, horror, fantasy – and Danielle wanted to tell stories in this hybrid space too.
I found Does Your Condom Make You Fat? really refreshing as I tend to find ‘issue films’ a little heavy going sometimes, but here was an opportunity for us to make something that tapped into a societal problem in a way that wasn’t blaming or shaming or depressing, merely shedding light upon injustice through humour, and in doing so provoking conversation (I hope). This was the element that drove me to tell this story. I’d just come off the back of directing the second series of an ITV sitcom which was a hugely valuable learning experience I’m so grateful to have done, but I wanted the chance to direct something where I had more creative freedom to imprint my own style and to be bold with my choices, which is why short films are such fantastic fun and so necessary as a training ground.
Here was an opportunity for us to make something that tapped into a societal problem in a way that wasn’t blaming or shaming or depressing.
Huge congratulations on the selection for the Girls in Film x Panavision sponsorship!
This one really is all thanks to our incredible Cinematographer Carmen Pellon Brussosa. It’s so difficult to get shorts made these days, and without GiF and Panavision we just wouldn’t have gotten there. It gave our project a real legitimacy which has lasted right through to audience interest to this day, and Carmen really deserves the spotlight it’s given her. She’s not only an insanely talented cinematographer, she’s organised, brave and calm – a combination of qualities which make her a dream to work with. Shout out also to our tireless producers, Siona, Mustapha Wehbi and Cat White who also gave so much to make this film a reality. Shorts, even when ‘funded’, are never easy to pull off and they approached it with the same professionalism as a proper movie and that was so generous.
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Could you tell us about defining the film’s cinematography and how that reflects the fraught journey Owen finds himself on?
From my perspective, we always knew the way we wanted to shoot the film. When Owen first wakes from his night out, he’s living a kind of fantasy of his own making and so everything’s hazy and smooth; he’s had a good one. As he realises his contraceptive misstep, however, everything becomes more out of control. The camerawork feels more frenetic, matched by the editing and sound design, as his hangover grates and the world around him becomes a sensory overload. He’s unsteady on his feet and so is the camera, he’s spiralling both emotionally and physically. The equipment we were able to get as a result of the grant meant Carmen and her team had the tools they needed to bring our vision to life, whilst working with the inevitable limitations of a two day short film shoot on location!
Angus Imrie is a delight to watch as Owen, there is a tenderness which comes through his performance, obviously so integral to the role. How did you put him in the mindset of a woman who has to go through this arcane gauntlet?
Angus is hands down, one of the most lovely people I’ve ever met. The tenderness really comes so much from his own soul and I’m really glad you’ve picked up on that. The danger with this film would be casting someone who had too much bravado or even just too much inculpable boyish innocence – it’s vital that the audience connect to Owen and feel all the facets of his emotional journey, just like a woman would in the same situation. He’s not a victim but he does have to save himself. Honestly we spoke about the character and how he was feeling at each beat, but I didn’t feel like I had to put him in the mindset much as he was already there.
The danger with this film would be casting someone who had too much bravado or even just too much inculpable boyish innocence.
It’s a repeated mantra of mine that if you cast the right actors a director’s job on set can be very easy (in some ways, very much not so in others!). You just create the right conditions and then let your cast play, tweaking things slightly where needed for the tapestry to all come together just right. I’m not here to teach anyone how to act – I suppose I expect an actor to already know that, that’s why we’ve hired them – when you’re on set it’s about how do we tell this story together in the way that will connect with the audience the most. And Angus just brought that energy in spades.
The comedy in the piece is so important, it widens audiences, and it opens up people’s understanding and enjoyment of what is essentially a serious subject.
Absolutely, the comedy was crucial to my interest in the piece and key to its ultimate success or failure. For someone who predominantly works in comedy I still find the term ‘comedy’ makes me prickle a little for some reason. I think because it insinuates something larger than life, silly, goofish, Carry On. Whilst there’s absolutely a place for that kind of humour, it’s not my kind of humour. I was raised on the black comedy of Nighty Night, Black Books, Green Wing and the like, and for me, the closer comedy is to darkness the more interested I am in it. Recent examples of the pinnacle of this dark comedy greatness in my mind would be White Lotus, Triangle of Sadness, Severance and so on.
The comedy was crucial to my interest in the piece and key to its ultimate success or failure.
In Does Your Condom Make You Fat? we had to let some moments play out seriously in order to respect our characters and the real life experiences they’re based upon. It’s not appropriate for the audience to be guffawing at Owen as he slips into his despair and frustration at the difficulty in rectifying his situation – we’re laughing empathetically at the absurdity of it all because either we’ve been there or we know someone who has. It’s one of the reasons I’m always keen to hire actors that have also come from drama, not solely comedy performance. I want them to play it straight and then the laughs will come from that, from the beats between reactions, from the nuances of their physicality, the way they deliver simple dialogue with such loaded emotion, rather than focusing on what’s the funniest one-liner gag as if we’re generating viral memes (which is a whole different skill set and not one I possess!) My frequent editor Joe Haughey is also a huge part of what makes my work even vaguely funny and I live in a constant state of panic that I may someday have to make a project without him.
I read that you wanted to keep the look and feel of the film current, fresh and modern. What was your approach for holding true to that stated desire?
I suppose this is all sort of tied into the same thing – there’s been a history within (especially) British comedy of not focusing much on the look and feel of a piece and concentrating with an almost razor focus on performance and dialogue. Whilst this has its place, for me one of the things that made me want to get into filmmaking in the first place was a love of the visual craft – the richness of cinematography, the subtleties of production and costume design, the extreme power of score, and so forth. As with actors, I feel my job as a director is really so much just about bringing all the right people together.
We all wanted to create something fresh and real rather than a patronising imagined experience of what a twenty something’s life might look and feel like.
I was lucky to be able to work with a majority of crew who I’d worked with before, so we already had that language and they knew what I liked, and I knew that we had the same inherent taste. That meant we all wanted to create something fresh and real rather than a patronising imagined experience of what a twenty something’s life might look and feel like – I suppose it also helps that most of us aren’t that much older than that either! Through communication across departments and a visual treatment that everyone was on board with from the start, we were able to sing from the same hymn book and make something that hopefully feels fairly fresh…although I already redesigned the poster as I didn’t like the font I chose six months ago so I guess the ‘freshness’ may not last long! But such is the nature of the beast.
We are HUGE fans of Hollie Buhagiar’s talents here at DN, at what point did she get involved and how was the process of working together? And of course the quirky little song in the credits (which annoyingly got stuck in my head!)
Hollie is such a wonderfully collaborative person and full of inventive ideas. Music is one of the areas I know least about (despite furious attempts to re-teach myself piano at the moment to rectify my childhood failures, a story for another day…) and so I often just prefer composers to come to me with ideas rather than being too prescriptive. I knew I wanted it to sound contemporary and Hollie and I were both inspired by scores like that of White Lotus which integrated haunting sound design vocal elements, so that was our starting point really. We were lucky that the subject matter gave us these ethereal orgasmic noises to play around with which Hollie subtly centered her score around, and of course, the jingle was a fun tongue-in-cheek cherry on the top. Hollie also composed a whole pop track for the radio in the kitchen which you may mistake for an existing piece – composers do so much work that we don’t even notice at first and Hollie did this so graciously and fast!
What are you putting your directorial talents to next?
I’m just starting work on a new Channel 4 series that I’m incredibly excited about with a lovely team and my dream production company, so that’ll keep me busy for a little while now. Ironically, given Does Your Condom Make You Fat’s subject matter, I’ve been on maternity leave for the last year or so, and so I’m really thrilled to get the chance to use my brain again for things other than sleep schedules and pureeing vegetables. As lucky as I am to do those things too.
