Unicorns, co-directed by James Krishna Floyd and Sally El Hosaini, is smashing the 2024 British Independent Film Awards with seven nominations across the board – including the all-import BBC Film sponsored Douglas Hickox Award (Best Debut Director) which we here at DN are partnering with BIFA on – and it’s clear to see why. Unicorns is at its heart a romance drama but one that engulfs us in the radiant, unapologetic and fierce subculture of drag and the gaysian community. Floyd has brought his self-professed “creative baby” to audiences in a time where identity, the shedding of conformist layers and being able to explore who you are is more important than ever. Unicorns is a film about acceptance, not only of others but of ourselves, and treats this with consideration, care and authenticity which was heavily informed by Floyd’s direct knowledge and long-time friendship with Britain’s first out Muslim drag queen and LGBTQ+ activist Asifa Lahore. Not only is Unicorns interrogating boundaries within its depicted world but also within the cinema landscape of now. Directors Notes had the privilege of sitting down for an extended interview with Floyd, where we go into detail about bringing the communication skills he honed as an actor to bear in his role as a director, the difference between typical American style and South Asian realism drag and why he pitched Unicorn’s transformation element as akin to the relationship between Bruce Wayne and Batman.
[The following interview is also available to watch at the end of this article.]
James, welcome to Directors Notes, please introduce your film to us.
Unicorns was very much my creative baby. It is a romance about two people who come from the same geographic location but from opposite ends of the world. A young single dad from Essex who enters into a very unusual relationship with a South Asian realism drag queen. All set in Essex, East London and Manchester, based on real people, on things that have happened to me and people I know.
Your background is in acting and if I’m correct, this is both your directorial debut as well as your feature debut?
It is the first thing that I’ve written and directed that’s been made which has always been my dream. I’m a big film head and it was always my dream to be an actor, writer and a director in film. I love television too, but I believe that independent film is where everything starts. Certainly all innovation in terms of visual storytelling and we’ve got to keep it alive. It’s no secret to say that independent film is going through a very rough time and I feel very proud that Unicorns is doing its thing, being enjoyed by audiences and critics, and I hope that lasts a long time.
How did you translate your years of experience acting into direction and what skill set do you feel you were able to bring across?
I was actually talking about this this morning and I think one of the things that’s a huge advantage about being an actor going into filmmaking is communication. Kubrick said that filmmaking is daily problem solving, which is very true, and to problem solve you have to have a certain level of communication, you’ve got to be very versatile with different types of people and that’s very much a skill that gets sharpened a lot as an actor which I’ve found to have been a big advantage. I think the disadvantage, which luckily isn’t a problem for me as I’ve always been very interested in the technical side, but a lot of actors who do go into filmmaking can get a little bit caught up in just character, which is obviously where everything starts, but telling a story, especially in a visual medium, you’ve got to understand the basics of the technical sides because in order to start breaking those rules you’ve got to know them. I really do just feel so lucky to have made a film that I’m very proud of, the whole team’s very proud of it including my co-director Sally. It’s ridiculous, you feel like you won the lottery and now I just want to keep that going and keep making as many films as I can.
I believe that independent film is where everything starts. Certainly all innovation in terms of visual storytelling and we’ve got to keep it alive.
So how did you hone the craft of the technical aspects that informed you in the director’s chair?
I’m still learning them and I think we all are because what’s incredible, I know this is quite a controversial topic for a lot of filmmakers, but once it went digital anything became possible and it’s an infinite medium now. The technical side is evolving so quickly and I’ve always been interested in that side even when I was a young actor. I was always fascinated with why the director was choosing a certain size, what the cinematography was doing, and why the grip was operating in a certain way. With filmmaking, there’s a left and right brain and you’ve got to understand the science of it but you’ve also got to understand the art of it. As an actor, you do need both sides of that but you need to really focus on the emotional journey and that’s certainly the way I like to act. I’ve always had a left and right brain, I’ve always loved maths and science but I’ve always loved Shakespeare too so I think in some ways being a filmmaker brings those two things together a bit more.
This might sound really pretentious but I do think that filmmaking is one of the ultimate art forms. We’re in a space now where with the kind of cameras that you can use, and the things you can do in post-production and how advanced we are now with character, storytelling and understanding of acting that actually, you can almost make a film about anything. Obviously, you need a certain budget for certain things but if I was around as a filmmaker in the 60s or 70s – which was a great period especially the American indie cinema period in the 70s – they were so limited on what they could do so it’s pretty incredible they were able to make all those great films.
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These days we all carry around a device at all times which we can make films with!
Look at what happened when the internet came along, everyone flipped out. I think once the world just steadies and calms down a little bit, people will realise that ultimately all these things are tools for your art. It’s very easy to look at the negatives of all this stuff but as an example, I was talking to a friend of mine the other day who works in post-production sound and they were talking about this extraordinary AI plugin. Without going into the boring technical detail, it can do things with ADR that are so quick, so real – it’s phenomenal. Obviously, that tool can be abused and end up cutting out the need for an actor for certain things which it shouldn’t be used for, but I was so happy when I heard about this plugin and could see what we could have done a lot quicker and a lot easier with the actor. I think we’ve got to work with technology, just like when the internet came along.
Realism drag is the opposite, it’s all about passing in a very subtle realistic manner. We’ve had this for a long long time in South Asian culture.
The film immerses us into a fairly unknown and niche world, I had never heard the term gaysian! I know you spent time with Asifa Lahore, who has been described as Britain’s first out Muslim drag queen, and I think it’s safe to say the authenticity of your world is most certainly resonating with audiences.
As I mentioned, everything that happens in this film has either happened to me or to Asifa Lahore who’s now a very close friend of mine. When I first met her, she was a cisgender man who was a very famous realism drag queen in the queer South Asian, gaysian, subculture. In South Asian drag, for a long long time, we’ve had realism drag which is very different to the American RuPaul style that we all know and which I love which quite literally came out of a human rights protest. It was all about being in your face and deliberately putting on a mask and being over the top – it was a protest. Realism drag is the opposite, it’s all about passing in a very subtle realistic manner. We’ve had this for a long long time in South Asian culture. Asifa was the the most well-known realism drag queen when I met her, nine or ten years ago, and has recently come out as a trans woman. I dabbled in the gaysain scene a little bit when I was younger and went to a place called Club Kali which was very well known within the underground club scene. That was the most well-known gaysian night in the 90s and 2000s. I always thought it would be interesting to make a film set in this world but I never really got to the core of that scene and the only way was through someone like Asifa. So that’s probably why people feel that it’s very authentic.
Casting was also so important and getting the right HODs. Jason Patel, who plays the lead drag queen Aysha, is living a very similar life to what he’s portraying on the screen. Val The Brown Queen, Zina, who plays the best friend is one of my favourite characters and is really living that life too. Even our costume designer, Nirage Mirage is a queer South Asian man who told us he had been dreaming about using the kind of cloths and fabrics that he used in this film and he hadn’t had a project before he’d been able to use them in. This project is a very unusual thing where the movie gods were just smiling down on us when we got it made.
I want to ask more about Jason, there is such a raw vulnerability to his performance which felt so natural.
I think with all performances that are that raw, it can’t just be acting. Mine and Sally’s job as the directors was to create an environment where Jason could be comfortable enough to bring it out. It was his first film and I often joke on this press tour that we found him on a rainbow! Our incredible casting director, Laura Windows, found Jason somewhere. There are so many different stories I now actually don’t know what the real one is and I almost don’t want to. Jason has talked a lot in the press that in a weird way, he felt like he was rehearsing for this role his whole life because there just hasn’t been a role like this, certainly not in mainstream cinema. I know directors always say this, but if we hadn’t found Jason I think we would have been really struggling with this film because there were a couple of moments when we were casting the role where we just thought, “Is this uncastable?” Sally and I both work in a way in which you can smell that character off the screen. We really love the details and we don’t really like acting. We’ve known Laura for many years. I know she’s done a lot of incredible work in the shadows and I hope this film is really going to launch her as a casting director in her own right. Vulnerability is something that I know as an actor, that we all have and we need to be in the right place, the right atmosphere, the right vibe and have the right actors around us to bring it out.
I’ve also got to give Ben Hardy a lot of credit who plays the other lead role Luke and who’s a very experienced actor. Ben and Jason had this amazing chemistry together that you couldn’t buy – it was just extraordinary. Ben’s a really nice bloke, it might be a weird thing to say, but I’ve been doing this for a long time now and it’s amazing to me that people are only starting to realise that this business has a lot of people who lack empathy for other people’s jobs and feelings. It’s such a weird thing because you’d think that in an art form, people would be a bit more sensitive to other people’s feelings.
One of my favourite scenes in the film was the transformation scene when Jason is going from Ashiq to Aysha which is so beautiful in the way you filmed it.
I’m glad you picked up on that, no one has really zoned in on that scene because it seems almost like a montage but it’s not because actually we really go into the details. That scene was in the script right from the beginning in a lot of detail but where it was in the story, where it sat, changed quite a lot and even in the edit we made a little shift. Often, when I was talking about this film and pitching it, I would try to communicate it as a superhero film. A lot of people didn’t understand, this is a subculture within a subculture and as you said, you’d never heard the word gaysian. One of the things I said was, you’ve got to look at the Ashiq/Aysha character as a Bruce Wayne/Batman scenario where they are the same person but when Ashiq goes to war so to speak, trying to find love and trying to find work and live, he dons his caped crusader outfit which is Aysha, a beautiful Bollywood starlet. I think when people understood that, it really helped them. Rather than looking at it as these two separate people because they’re not, they’re the same. When you put on your armour so to speak, you don’t necessarily become someone heightened, you sometimes become a truer version of yourself and that’s really what that whole sequence is about. It’s actually even though Ashiq is putting on layers and literally putting on makeup and a wig and all these things, really Ashiq is taking off emotional layers and truly becoming who he is.
It was an example of where I had written a very detailed sequence but I knew I wanted to cast someone who could do their own routine.
It wasn’t that difficult to shoot, that day it was just me, Sally was away. It was very simple and all about covering it in a certain way and following Jason’s real routine. It was an example of where I had written a very detailed sequence but I knew I wanted to cast someone who could do their own routine. I wasn’t going to be too strict with what I’d written so I’d say it was about 60 per cent of what I’d written and about 40 per cent of what Jason’s actual routine is. It was the best location in this tiny little flat which was just what I wanted. Our brilliant DOP, David Raedeker, was squished into a bathroom, and he could only have two or three angles. What really makes that scene is also the sound design which is very subtle. I love sound design, I think cinema really is sound and a lot of people don’t quite understand that but it really is such a huge part of it. Also the tone of the editing from Iain Kitching, who’s fantastic and who Sally and I work with all the time, he made some wonderful decisions in the edit. And as well, that song Trevi Fountain by Leo Kalyan is just perfect and that was a song I’d honed in on years before when it came out.
We also see that shedding of layers which is the true self coming out and a battle of identity flow through Luke alongside the journey Ashiq takes in the film which I really loved.
Luke is based on people I know very well and I think you’re right, in many ways Luke has his own form of a mask and his own form of a drag, which we all do. I think in particular when you’re a single parent, which was a very important thing for me. I’ve got a son who’s eight years old and even though I’m not a single parent, I’ve got friends who are single parents and I spoke to a lot of them when I was writing this as they really are real life superheroes. What they do is pretty extraordinary and very seldom do they get the time to really be emotionally honest. Ironically, they wear their mask more frequently than a drag queen does and that was something really important to put into the film.
Ben’s performance is extraordinary and he has this really interesting quality that is very hard to find these days with actors of our age and younger. He can play a character that’s seemingly very simple on the surface – he’s a very straightforward guy, he’s an alpha male, his testosterone leads him in the direction that we expect as a society – but actually underneath all of that the rivers are running deep, they’re really bubbling. That complexity and that depth is very hard to play. I don’t know why Ben has it, but he does. I think a lot of great actors can actually be quite distracting sometimes because they take a role like this and they put all the complexity on the surface, all the little flickers of emotion and little changes, but Luke is the opposite. I’d seen a lot of Ben’s work but no one else on the team, the producers, the financiers really knew about his work so I actually put together this little reel. I’d illegally filmed some of his stuff online on my phone and I put this little thing on my Vimeo, a three or four minute reel of just bits of his work that I felt were Luke-esque and that was when people got it. I’m so happy that he and Jason are also getting a lot of awards alongside me and the film. I was so impressed by how hungry they were for the roles.
I’m blown away by the diversity of films in the BIFA Douglas Hickox Award this year, how do you feel being up there amongst the other nominees?
I feel like I cheated a little because I co-directed with Sally but I know she wouldn’t mind me saying this, this is very much my film and it was lovely to have her on the journey. Sally was nominated for this exact award in 2012 with My Brother The Devil and I was an actor in that film and won a BIFA for my role in it, and I’ve been on the jury and have a great relationship with them. Making a movie is not easy but at the same time, it’s very important to take it in your stride and understand that there’s such a subjectivity to all this. I really hope these things can keep bringing attention to the film. Totally unashamedly, I want my films to be seen by as many people as possible. I’m a big believer that films are obviously there for us as filmmakers but also for audiences. There are some great BIFA movies this year, really bold voices and I think for all of the tough times that we’ve gone through in the last year or two with independent film, in particular British independent film, creatively we’re in a great space.
I think I’m probably one of the few people who is optimistic about where indie film is going to go because now we really do have something to talk about.
I was talking to someone the other day who was really worried about Trump and I could see they were really in the doldrums about it which I understand. I totally agree with that fear but I’m fascinated with the history of film and what’s really interesting is if you look at the history of Hollywood, and I’m pretty sure I’m right in saying this, the majority of Oscar-winning or certainly mainstream films that were made by the Hollywood system which have really lasted the test of time, have been made under very right-wing presidents. It makes sense when you think about it, you need something to be angry about and you need something to push up against. I think I’m probably one of the few people who is optimistic about where indie film is going to go because now we really do have something to talk about.
It is no secret that our industry is a left of centre, left-wing mafia. I was brought up by a couple of hippies, I’m probably as indoctrinated as everyone else in the tribe. But I’m very aware it is important to understand that if things are too easy or if we don’t have anything to talk about that can affect creativity. This is my weird way of saying I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing in the long run that Trump is president in terms of art. I think Hollywood will react with real passion and creative anger. It’s not just America, you look at the conditions that Tarkovsky was working under or in theatre the time that Checkov was in. If things are too easy and everyone is making loads of money, there’s a danger it all becomes homogeneous. You need something to be pissed off about don’t you, as an artist?
I want to congratulate you on your recent Netflix UK release. I know a lot of filmmakers will be interested to know more about that.
They bought the film pretty early. Netflix UK is probably one of the biggest audiences for our film, it’s a perfect fit. Signature Entertainment who distributed Unicorns in UK cinemas and Netflix both made offers early on after we premiered at TIFF just over a year ago. I think because of the subject matter in the film, there’s a younger audience on Netflix that works well. From a business point of view, Ben stars in this film called Love at First Sight which is a massive rom-com on Netflix and then also Sally and myself did a film called The Swimmers together – she wrote and direct it and I acted in – which was huge on Netflix too. Going back to what we were saying about digital film – I know there’s a big debate about streaming and I certainly agree that the most important thing about cinema is things need to be played in that dark room because that’s what they were designed for. There’s a reason why we’re all in the sound mix for months. You need to feel that rumble in the ground when you’re in the cinema but at the same time, obviously streaming is so essential to getting our film out. Netflix has half a billion people on their platform so why would you rail against that? I think it has to be a combination of the two. This whole idea of pitting them against each other is stupid.
I want to be able to express myself unfiltered as much as possible, I want to have a voice.
What are you doing next?
Too many things! I was just saying to my agent the other day I should really get rid of a few projects. I had a few projects before Unicorns that were bubbling away and I’ve kept a couple but my ideal next move is solo directing. Nothing against Sally, we’ll definitely co-direct in the future. I guess I’m very lucky as I’m at a point in my career and in life where I feel like I know what I want in the workplace. I must admit I didn’t expect the film to be quite as well received as it has been. I love the film, it’s great and I’m very proud of it but there is always a danger making a British indie film that it just gets put on someone’s shelf and never gets seen again, so it’s wonderful that it’s punching above its weight. I want to be able to express myself unfiltered as much as possible, I want to have a voice.
I’m not a pretentious filmmaker in the sense that I love a lot of Christopher Nolan’s work as much as I do Ingmar Bergman. I don’t really separate the two, they’re both incredible. It’s like food, it’s a different flavour. I’d like to have more resources as I make more films but I’m not averse to doing another film on this type of budget. The industry is in a strange spot and I think it needs to go through this metamorphosis. Cinema is in a very exciting space creatively, I really do believe that. And look, something like Unicorns, which is a classic love story in some ways might not have been made four or five years ago and I think that’s a really good sign. There’s something in the water and it’s new!
