Upon exiting Sasha Nathwani’s debut feature Last Swim I felt myself buoyant on a wave of nostalgia, heartbreak but most of all a love for film and the places it takes me. Last Swim, longlisted for the BIFA Douglas Hickox Award and made entirely independently of public funding, is a testament to the universality of youth, a love letter to the director’s treasured city of London and a beacon of hope in a time where everything seems a bit bleak. Nathwani, who is a self-professed “specialist in failure”, knew what film he wanted to make and fought for it every step of the way. Whilst Last Swim is a coming of age drama, which Nathwani was told nobody wanted to see, he doesn’t shield the audience from real life – there are no 35 year old actors playing the roles of 18 year olds, there are no green screens projecting an alluring but CGI powered world – it is a film as honest as it is from the heart. As we await a UK cinema release date for this striking debut, we spoke to Nathwani about constructing his cast around his protagonist and representing the diversity of London through her group of friends, how he built a glowing feeling of nostalgia into a very contemporary narrative and standing his ground to make an entirely independent film despite the industry’s challenging headwinds.
[The following interview is also available to watch at the end of this article.]
Welcome back to Directors Notes, we had a brief chat at the London Film Festival but I was very eager to get you back so we could properly dig in. So, for those who don’t know please give us a brief introduction to yourself and the film.
I’m Sasha, director and co-writer, alongside Helen Simmons, of Last Swim which just premiered in the UK at LFF. The film is a British Gen Z coming of age story told from the perspective of an 18 year old British Iranian girl, Ziba, who on A-level results day drags her friends on a journey through London, ticking off items on her teenage bucket list.
What was that co-writing process with Helen like?
I did the first draft on my own and took the script as far as I could take it then hit a brick wall. My producer, Campbell Beaton, brought Helen on board and I had a chemistry meeting with her and I really liked her. I knew that I was confident in some aspects of the story, but there were some things that I needed reassurance and help with. For instance, the camaraderie between the boys, I went to an all boys school, I know how boys chat. I’ve been in the car with my friends and I understand what that atmosphere feels like but I wasn’t entirely sure that the emotional journey from the female perspective of Ziba was authentic and accurate which is where I needed Helen’s help and she was amazing. She’s also a little bit of a structuralist. The initial drafts of the script were focussed on dual protagonists but Helen strongly felt that it needed to be from a single perspective, we needed to be with Ziba and stay with Ziba for the entirety of the film which I think made it stronger and we reframed Malcolm more as the antagonist. It was a really lovely experience working with her and we are now working together more collaboratively on another project, which feels like an anti-companion piece to Last Swim.
I knew then she had that quality, that thing that you cannot teach, this instinctive response to the atmosphere in the room
In addition to the film centring around Ziba’s experience and her POV, when we spoke briefly at LFF you mentioned it was important to you that all of your actors were genuine representatives of that age. There is an amazing chemistry between all of your actors which is so crucial to the essence of the film.
We started with Ziba as we knew that that was the main piece of the puzzle. I worked closely with our casting director, Shakyra Dowling, and I had worked with Deba Hekmat on a music video a few years ago and she had left a real impression on me. Her background is mainly in modelling but she’s also an activist and an influencer. She’s been in one other film, a small role in Luna Carmoon’s Hoard, and she appeared on a list of about a dozen or so British-Iranian options for Ziba. She sent in a tape and I narrowed it down to three and she came in for a callback.
In the audition, we did the diagnosis scene, which originally in the script was a much larger scene than it ended up being in the film where we just see fragments. But in the audition, I just kept the camera on Deba and we heard the diagnosis, she didn’t have any lines, there was no dialogue but as you hear the diagnosis I asked her to show me and to reveal to the camera a feeling of a loss of hope then as the diagnosis continues and she realises the gravity of the situation. She knows that she’s losing her grip on her life, her future and she did the most incredible audition, communicating so much, mainly with her eyes – it was really powerful. I knew then she had that quality, that thing that you cannot teach, this instinctive response to the atmosphere in the room so we offered her the part and then we constructed the rest of the cast around her.
We cast a really wide net. I didn’t have any clear thoughts about the ethnicity of the characters, I just knew that the ensemble had to naturally reflect the diversity of London and that happened in a really organic way. The boys were great, they were doing all kinds of things in their auditions. And Jay Lycurgo who plays Merf, was actually in Toronto filming Titans but he lit up in the audition over Zoom. Then, of course, the mother was very important. Played by Narges Rashidi from Gangs of London and Under the Shadow. What I knew from both Narges and Lydia Fleming, who played Tara, is as well as playing the characters in the film, they were also going to foster Deba through the process and they both took on the relationship of the mother and the friend on set. It wasn’t just when the camera was running, they really helped foster an environment where she felt supported and she could do her best work.
We were greenlit towards the end of 2022 so we missed our window to shoot because it’s a summer film which meant I had a good number of months to work with the cast. I brought them together in twos and threes so when it came to actually shooting, it was like filming with a real group of friends – they were messing around all the time, I felt like a school teacher constantly cracking the whip, telling them to get serious. They had this amazing ball of energy that I was constantly trying to get them to save for when the camera was running. Subsequently, they’re still really good friends, they hang out, send me selfies.
That sheer endurance of preparing yourself physically and mentally in the industry is something we don’t really talk about.
That connection comes through! How many shooting days did you have and was it a challenge to keep up that energy as you weren’t able to shoot in sequence, which was your first plan?
I think that was my naivety as a filmmaker. Any feature film schedule is taxing and challenging for everyone. I’m a grown man who has been working in the industry for 20 years up until getting to do this so I know how you need to retain your energy to work on a film set. It was a challenge for me so I can’t imagine how challenging it was for Deba, for instance, who was 20 when we filmed. It’s a lot of pressure for a young person, she’s in every single scene, she had to show up every day and be on point.
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That sheer endurance of preparing yourself physically and mentally in the industry is something we don’t really talk about. It’s not always about how I capture the scene, it’s more about how am I going to get through this week. Am I eating OK? Am I getting a sufficient amount of sleep? Am I showing up every day and being present? Because it doesn’t matter how much prep you do, we had four weeks of prep and the team were fully prepared and ready but there’s an aspect of filmmaking that requires you to throw everything you know out the window and react to the elements of the day. Depending on what the light is doing, what the location looks like, what the conditions are like, whether you’ve got as much time as you wanted, whether the scene is unfolding in the way that you envisaged. So being present and remaining present for the duration is one of the biggest challenges but it was exhilarating and fantastic and wonderful. Despite the highs and lows, it was probably the happiest four weeks of my life.
The film is a love letter to London, we have to shoot in London, on the streets of London, we need to feel that energy.
The whole film has this delightful energy to it and there was something you said to me about it being a “planes, trains and automobiles journey through London”. How did you cope with shooting in 11 boroughs and in busy London locations?
This was my cinematographer, Olan Collardy’s second film off the back of Rye Lane and we spent a lot of time together in prep. We actually went to LFF the year before principal photography and spent a lot of time together watching films, talking about everything. We had a hundred page lookbook. That meant when it came to shooting, we knew exactly how we wanted to capture things.
When we were trying to finance the film, at one point we were looking at a European co-production finance model which meant we were thinking about adjusting the story. Could they go to another European city? Could we shoot our interiors in Europe? If we had done some of those things, it would have been easier to finance because we would have had access to different pots of money but we felt that the film is a love letter to London, we have to shoot in London, on the streets of London. We needed to feel that energy. And it was, of course, the right decision. Amongst my producers, who come from the worlds of music videos, commercials and features, I had this incredible blend of experience so we were able to essentially look at each day in our schedule and assess the needs of crew size as some were more skeletal then we had on other days where it was all the bells and whistles.
For instance, when we’re driving around London, we had a low loader which was its own challenge. I really love the scenes in the car because it feels like you’re with the characters but the talent were never all in the car at the same time – such is the nature of when you have to shoot in a moving vehicle. You have to separate the front of the car from the back, you’ve got your characters in the back of the car and your crew in the front. The DP Olan is six foot six or something so it’s pretty cramped in there. And then the talent who are supposed to be in the front of the car are in a follow vehicle, reading their lines through a walkie-talkie – it was this very strange way of shooting but in the edit, you’re able to piece it together.
In answer to your question, it was a combination of big days and small days. There were obviously some days where we couldn’t own the location, such as the shoot day in Haymarket or Primrose Hill but it was important that we were filming on the streets. I wanted to capture that energy. On some of the days, the locations were just flooded with tourists and one day, in the middle of a take, a tourist came up to me and asked me for directions! The shoot day on the tube was a challenging one. Firstly, filming on the tube is actually very expensive and at one point we were going to shoot those scenes on a bus, but it wouldn’t have had the same energy but we were stubborn and said it had to be on the tube. Now, that tube station scene for me is one of my favourites because there’s an energy in that space, especially when you think about the emotional journey the character is on. I don’t think we would have been able to communicate that in the right kind of way if it was another form of transport.
On some of the days, the locations were just flooded with tourists and one day, in the middle of a take, a tourist came up to me and asked me for directions!
I love the vibrancy of the colours in the film, they transport you and evoke those all-important feelings, what informed the rich stylistic pallet of Last Swim?
The first thing I would say to that is the reason we made the film, or I wanted my debut film to be a film about young people in London, was born out of a frustration of not seeing that growing up. I discovered my love of film and cinema in the 90s and noughties and British films of that nature just didn’t exist or I didn’t have access to them. Those British films that did exist, particularly those that were shot in London, felt in terms of the look of the films, very grey and dull and monochromatic. So that feeling of colour and vibrancy was intrinsic to the way that I envisaged this story. The film is a contemporary Gen-Z coming of age story but it does live in a very nostalgic palette – I wanted to recall when I was the same age as the characters. The best summer days, when I would sneak into my house and get in trouble with my parents because I’d broken a curfew or something, I’d get into my bed and I’d play this game where I’d try to piece together the day.
The really good days were the ones where I just couldn’t piece it together, I couldn’t remember how we got from A to B and B to C, what the order of events was and which friend arrived first. Obviously, there’d be things happening on that day that would affect my memory, but I wanted the audience and the characters to have that same day. That feeling of nostalgia and the moment the day is over, longing for it. The way that you imagine that day means that you’ve got a romantic memory of how it felt and what it looked like. So the way that we dialled that into the look of the film was through a very subtle progressive grade. Joseph Bicknell, our colourist and I worked on making the colours more pronounced over the course of the day. It’s subtle, you wouldn’t notice it if you watch the film from beginning to end but if you scan through the film, you can see a difference there. I think that that kind of adds to the atmosphere of the film, of things feeling a little bit more vibrant, a little bit more colourful, but more importantly than all of those things – that feeling of nostalgia, of a wonderful day that has just passed that we will be thinking about for many years to come.
Last Swim, in your own words, is a love letter to London and whilst as someone who lived in the capital for several years I was able to tap into all of the London-centric particularities, I know the film has had success way beyond a UK audience.
I’ve just come back from the Seminci Festival in Spain and they asked me to do a Q&A which was early in the morning so I didn’t really know what I was walking into. But as I arrived I could hear the end scene, then when it cut to black I just heard the room erupt. I’ve never heard anything like it. The film played in English with Spanish subtitles for an audience of local Spanish schools, ages 16 to 18 and it’s the first time the film has played to an audience where they are exclusively the same age as the characters so I really didn’t know how the film was going to land in that kind of space. Up until then, it had only played to festival going audiences which is obviously very different. But, the room erupted and they had so many questions and I could see some of the emotional responses.
The film is tinged with sadness, but it also has a feeling of jubilation and hope and they mimicked that in the way that they responded. They were asking me questions, a lot of questions about Deba, and it was really invigorating to see because the film is very much for a 16 or 18 year old version of myself and the fact that it’s landed in that way with a young audience is incredible. I’m so excited for the theatrical release and to see British kids of a similar age have the opportunity to see it and maybe even do a school tour.
Alongside audience success you were longlisted last month for BIFA’s Best Debut Director Award, how does it feel to have achieved what you set out to with your first feature?
It’s honestly mad because every step of the process has been really challenging. When we came to being greenlit, I was just grateful for the opportunity to make the film, then we finished the film and we got into Berlinale. I was grateful to premiere my debut film at an A-list festival and then to bring it to London. It’s just this snowball effect of really amazing things happening – none of it expected. Something that distinguishes our film is it’s exclusively independent. It’s basically a few people, production companies and backers coming together because they wanted to tell this story. We didn’t get the support of the public funders and the fact that it’s come together in this very independent way means that the gamble that everyone took is being vindicated. At LFF, we had our families there and I was able to explain why they haven’t seen me for the last 18 months. It’s so special to be able to do that.
Do you have any advice for independent filmmakers out there? A lot of them are fighting to get their films made and it’s not easy, especially in the UK as we’ve mentioned.
I think the UK is one of the hardest places in the world, if not the hardest. And the reason I think that’s the case is because of the volume of talent that we have. There are so many talented people up and down the UK in every part of the industry, from actors to writers to directors to crew and there are so many fantastic stories that need to be told. It’s not the fault of the public funders – there just isn’t enough money in the UK. When you think about the quantity of projects and the very few that actually can be made, it means that a lot of people are disappointed and I was one of those disappointed people. So anyone who has applied and has been unsuccessful, that’s OK. There are other ways to make your film. I’m hoping that the new tax credit will help people a little bit more.
It’s not the fault of the public funders – there just isn’t enough money in the UK.
You just have to use every knockback and rejection as an opportunity to keep working on the material, keep crafting the material and make it as good as you can. It’s also the way that we respond to rejection that determines how far we can go and that’s really hard. But I think that’s true of every industry – rejection is a part of it. I know nothing about making films, my speciality is in failure. I’ve failed my entire life and that’s what it is, you just keep failing, but you keep failing on bigger projects. I think if you believe in the material, this film is very personal to me, and if you’re writing something that’s personal to you, your experience, whatever that experience is and if you tell that story authentically, it will play to a room. Even if there are people in that audience who don’t understand what it’s like to live in your shoes. So anyone who’s telling a personal story, just keep trying to do that and it will find its audience.
So how are you bringing those lessons and that experience into your next production?
Well, my next film is about toxic masculinity – it’s quite different. Last Swim is a traditional drama and coming-of-age story and when we were making it, everyone kept saying to us, no one wants to see dramas at the moment, people want genre films. So, the next film is a genre film. It’s a character study that segues into a psychological thriller. In terms of injecting my own experiences, that came about in an odd fashion when we were editing Last Swim. I found the process very challenging as a creative person who suffers a little bit from ADHD. I love being on set, I love the variety of every shoot day then you’re in a room without windows for four or five months and it requires a lot of discipline – it was a slog. Halfway through, I was really struggling. Then my editor, Stephen Dunne, said to me, you need to do a few things. I want you to make sure you get seven hours of sleep. I want you to have a cold shower in the mornings and have a fruit smoothie and I want you to listen to this motivational audio. So I started doing all of this stuff and I was listening to this audio and it was really getting me going in the morning.
Then over time, the algorithm on the motivational audio was sending me down this dark path and I found myself listening to these really questionable characters – the likes of Jordan Peterso. Then you realise you’re only a few steps away from people like Andrew Tate and I was able to understand how young men are exposed to this stuff. So that experience of listening to all this stuff then helped me get into the shoes of this other character we’re developing at the moment. And I thought to myself – this is how they get you. This is how young men listen to these male voices and then they start developing these questionable character traits and we should dive into that and explore that and understand what it means to be a man in the age of Donald Trump. In the age where you can be accused of doing horrible things and still stand for the highest office in the world. So in terms of my own personal experience, there’s a little bit of fact and then a lot of fiction. It’s called Confidence Man.
