There is nothing more satisfying than seeing the progression of a filmmaker’s body of work and here at DN, we are fortunate enough to follow incredibly talented directors over the years and witness how they evolve across their careers. Having first spoken to writer/director Ben Lankester back in 2016 when covering his co-directed feature documentary A Divorce Before Marriage and now eight years later featuring his BIFA 2024 nominated short Delivery, is a perfect example of that. Ben has hit the narrative sphere with a bang and in Delivery has crafted an incredibly gripping, high stakes, pressure fuelled story following a newly qualified midwife on a gruelling night shift with a poignant delicacy, yet white-knuckle intensity which has engrossed audiences. It is a film that I keep hearing coming up in conversations at festivals this year and seems to have resonated with all who watch, demands to be discussed and deservedly continues to be recognised and awarded prizes on its festival run. As Ben triumphantly returns to DN’s pages, we speak to him about working with real midwife Rosie Chappel – who also stars in the film – to develop the narrative from the initial inspiration sparked by her description of the pulsing of babies’ heartbeats which remain long after her shifts, shooting long unbroken handheld shots in a way which led seamlessly into the edit and offering his audience moments of respite from the incredibly tough subject matter whilst treating it with a considered honesty and authenticity.
[The following interview is also available to watch at the end of this article.]
We previously featured your 2022 advocacy drama Who’s Counting which I know served as the jumping off point for the making of Delivery.
It’s very much an evolution from that project which was created with my wife and producer Bophanie Lun. Who’s Counting is the first proper short that we have made as a duo and is very much based on our own experiences with miscarriage. We went to Tommy’s charity and pitched them the idea of a couple going through recurrent miscarriages and how challenging that is both physically and psychologically. Tommy’s came on board and we partnered with them to essentially make a short film, but an impact advocacy short that they were able to build into a campaign they were running at the time about the fact that women had to experience three losses before they could receive support. I’ve been working and still work in commercials but Who’s Counting was a very deliberate step into narrative work which is where we want to be.
On that project we met Rosie Chappel, the midwife who would eventually play Mary in Delivery, who played a very small role as a nurse in Who’s Counting. I remember being really impressed with her, it was a small role with just a few lines of dialogue but she was brilliant, well prepared and she brought a lot of empathy to it. When I saw that she had just qualified as a midwife I thought that maybe there was a story there centred around a midwife and I pitched Rosie the idea for Delivery which was just over two years ago now.
The genesis of the entire creative approach to Delivery was Rosie telling me that when she comes home in the early hours of the morning after a night shift she can still hear the CTG – the sound of the babies’ heart monitor – which I immediately felt was the key to the film.
I know you had countless conversations and voice notes with Rosie to really dig into her experiences. How did you then collate all of that into your narrative?
The idea was very much to build a story around Rosie’s lived experience as a midwife. In Who’s Counting we combined actors with real sonographers, nurses and people in those key roles which allowed us to create that total authenticity in the narrative. We wanted to do the same thing with Delivery and what better way to do that than to build the whole story around a practising midwife in the lead role? Rosie and I started talking over Zoom, we had a running Google doc where sometimes when she got back from work she would note down some things that happened in her day, some of which ended up in the film. The genesis of the entire creative approach to Delivery was Rosie telling me that when she comes home in the early hours of the morning after a night shift she can still hear the CTG – the sound of the babies’ heart monitor – which I immediately felt was the key to the film.
We wanted to create that really immersive experience and get in the head of this character. Rosie would tell me things like that and they would feed into the script in a very direct way. She told me about coming home and finding something in her pocket that reminded her of a loss which again, we built into the script. The process was very much led by Rosie giving me these nuggets of real life and then me finding a way to blend those into the narrative.
From the perspective of the patients, we have two pregnancy cases existing in parallel side by side as the story unfolds and the idea with that was very much to show two very different cases and two very different outcomes. As Rosie would feed me her anecdotes and interactions with her colleagues and patients I built those two narratives and slowly but surely the whole thing started to take shape and from there it was about giving the film a structure. We really wanted it to be a 25 minute film, that was always the plan to make it a longer short, and my intention from the outset was to have that three-act structure and that build and release.
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Tell us about finding a hospital location that would work practically from a production standpoint.
That was absolutely the most challenging thing finding the locations. The film is pretty much 50/50 split between two locations in terms of the hospital setting. Half in a disused wing of Hemel Hempstead hospital which is hired out as a film location and I know is used by a lot of people industrywise. Then we were lucky enough to be able to combine that with a university hospital in Greenwich which is where we filmed the theatre scene and where Mary goes to have her cry in the drugs cupboard and all the staff room scenes. It meant when you see her coming out into the corridor that’s a completely different location so we really had to be careful to blend the spaces. One was very new and the other was a very old space but we worked hard in the production design to make it feel like a lived-in NHS maternity ward.
I wanted to talk about your DOP Rachel Clark because as we all know hospitals can often be cold and harsh feeling places with insipid green coloured walls but you bring a softness and life to them here.
There were so many conversations about what colour those walls should be! We wanted it to be very neutral, generic and to just stand for UK hospitals. In this actual hospital those floors happen to be maroon and they often are these odd colours. The NHS is this brilliant thing but obviously, it doesn’t have endless resources and so we really wanted to make sure we captured that feeling of a real hospital. In terms of the colour palette for Rachel and Jason Synnott, our production designer, those conversations were very much around authenticity which was the number one objective and so often it was a case of just leaving it and not doing too much. We needed to bring in the equipment we needed, which obviously Rosie as our medical consultant and a midwife herself made sure we were on point – especially with the smaller details like the staff lanyards and the badges and making sure that the details around the space were were really authentic and that detail was there so that the location felt lived in and real.
I know Who’s Counting was very much built around the sound and alongside the CTG in Delivery, it’s the sound of the hospital combined with the actors and the mounting pace of the sonic design which fully envelops us in the franticness of the world.
You’re absolutely right to go back to Who’s Counting. The idea with that was the music came first so I created the music with with my composer because I knew I wanted to tell the story backwards so the music came first. With Delivery the idea and the spark of the entire project, as I said earlier, was Rosie hearing that CTG in her head so from a sonic perspective I wanted to make sure that it was as immersive as possible so that we were really in her head as much as we could be. That obviously led from a shooting perspective to Rachel being as close as possible to Mary throughout the experience. An entirely handheld camera that was with her and we were really in her point of view.
We wanted to be very decisive with our cutting, to make sure that it felt as dynamic and as tense and as true to life as possible.
When Rosie first told me about the CTG that led me to approach the entire thing really like a a thriller. I knew the character would be rushing between each room, it’s around the eight minute mark that the shit starts to hit the fan in that hospital and that moment really has to unfold in a way that is life or death. It’s high stakes, it’s a race against time and so I wanted the music and the sound design to be one existing element of the film that was in her head and in our head as the audience. We created three elements, that original idea of that heartbeat in her head which is obviously the real sound that you hear in the hospital when you’ve got a healthy or unhealthy heartbeat so it adds that drama – it has that incredible tension to it. Then we wanted to add additional elements which created this idea of a race against time, so we have this subtle ticking element that comes into the music and our brilliant composer, Sarah Warne, created the music around that sound design. Then a huge amount of it was done in the edit with Sacha Szwarc.
We wanted to be very decisive with our cutting, to make sure that it felt as dynamic and as tense and as true to life as possible and all of that work was done very early on so that we knew exactly where we were. A good example is where Mary comes into the drugs cupboard when it all gets too much for her and she has to have a moment on her own, her crying is replaced with the CTG, she puts her hand on her chest and the sound increases and intensifies. When she went into that room on the day to film she obviously had a microphone on her and me and my script supervisor could hear her actual heartbeat. She was crying and so that mix of what we captured on the shoot and the sound we created, put together during the edit process was very gratifying to see all those moments come together.
We would follow Rosie from the staff room all the way into the patient room and even though in the film you’ll see it cut up, we actually did it all in single takes.
Speaking of the edit, as you mentioned it’s a 25 minute three-act structure short in which I found the whole pace and rhythm relentless but also so beautiful.
When people are talking to me about the film and telling me what they liked about it, that is honestly the most gratifying thing to hear because that’s the hardest thing to do, especially across a 25 minute short which is, as we know, long for a short. It was very much in the writing, I made sure that it worked on the page and it felt like it had that structure. Obviously, you never know until you get into the edit room, and there were a few things we moved around, dropped some scenes, tightened some of the dialogue. Sacha was so instrumental in creating that rhythm and that pacing making sure that it ebbed and flowed in the right way and didn’t become too relentless for the audience. We know it’s a really tough subject matter and we didn’t want it to be just one roller coaster right to the top then to drop off – we wanted there to be these moments of slight levity peppered in and you absolutely need those.
With the edit, I’d also say that what Rachel did when she shot the film was instrumental to how we were able to edit. We would follow Rosie from the staff room all the way into the patient room and even though in the film you’ll see it cut up, we actually did it all in single takes. We’d always come and follow Rosie into the room as she interacted with the patients and then she’d leave the room and we’d do that all as a one-er. We knew we weren’t going to use it as a one-er but we did it that way so that Rachel could instinctively react to what was going on and that handheld camera would find the parts of the conversation that she needed to find without doing conventional coverage. That then meant in the edit Sacha had these incredible long takes that he was able to masterfully move between as needed so that we didn’t just have a selection of close ups but parts of longer shots. From the writing, in terms of making sure that structure was really on point and knowing it worked on the page through to the shooting of it and the way Rachel captured it, down to what Sacha had to work with in the cutting room was all part of the same ambition.
I know the audience reaction to Delivery has been incredible and huge congratulations on your BIFA nomination for Best British Short! Why do you think the film has resonated so well with people?
It was a huge surprise first and foremost being on that long list. When Bophanie, my co-producer and wife and I found out it was an extraordinary moment in our careers and an absolute career highlight, but mostly I’m just so proud that it’s a very British story. We made it because we thought it was a very important story that we thought needed to be told. It’s a very prescient time for this story to be told which I think is possibly why it’s really resonating with people. As you said earlier, we know what hospitals are like, a lot of people have experience of being inside those hospital walls and a lot of people have experience with having a baby and childbirth with many with successful outcomes which is fantastic but unfortunately, some without those successful outcomes. Whether that happened to you or you know someone that has happened to the themes of the story have really resonated with people.
From the writing, in terms of making sure that structure was really on point and knowing it worked on the page through to the shooting of it and the way Rachel captured it, down to what Sacha had to work with in the cutting room was all part of the same ambition.
I’m incredibly proud of Rosie. She had never acted in something like this and we discussed it being a big risk. It wasn’t something that was definitely going to work but I had faith, confidence and belief in her and I’m just very proud that the nomination has come for a film that has been made in this very authentic way. I’m also incredibly proud of these amazing people who have been a part of making it happen.
Careerwise, we’ve been covering you here on Directors Notes for nearly a decade and it’s beautiful to see your progression, especially into the narrative space. What does it mean to have platforms like DN supporting your work over the years?
I remember MarBelle interviewing me and my co-director Matt Hopkins for our feature documentary A Divorce Before Marriage on the podcast so it’s very special to have you guys be such advocates for not just me, but so many filmmakers who I know and admire, and it’s lovely to be continuing to talk to you about all these projects. Going back to your previous question about what the nomination feels like, this is my first proper narrative short film. The previous one was in partnership with a brand and the documentary we just mentioned is where I learnt three-act structure and how to tell a story over a longer period. It’s so gratifying to feel that evolution between these projects and I think that’s what Directors Notes champion in terms of seeing that journey come to life through these different projects.
So, I want to know what’s next?
The objective with Delivery was to make a good short film but Bophanie and I are also moving in towards our first fiction narrative feature and we wanted to have something like this that worked as a proof of concept. Whether that’s this story specifically or whether this works as a proof of concept for something else in the maternity space. The last few projects have been in that world, so we are actively pursuing projects that are in that world for the feature. There’s a book we’ve adapted that we’re hoping to make as a feature and we’re also talking to people about potentially what Delivery the feature might look like. It might not take the same shape and that’s the challenge and the the fun part to imagine what shape it might take, what elements of the short we might want to use. We’re only going to do it if it’s going to do something more than what the short’s done, we’re only going to do it if we feel that it needs to be made. That’s always the driving force behind our ambitions, we’ve set up a new company called Kingdom Born which is going to be the platform for our slated projects. We want to continue to tell these stories that we feel need to be told.
