In her unflinching short film Watering Hole, writer/director Eva Blackwell-Rogelj transforms the sticky floors, dim lights and lecherous men of UK pub culture into a visceral exploration of female adolescence. Scribbled observations evolved into a nuanced examination of how young women navigate the treacherous waters of objectification and seduction whilst keeping a grip on their autonomy. The narrative backbone of Watering Hole comes from a fascinating character construction of two protagonists with contrasting perspectives, one who embraces the performance of seduction as empowerment and another who rejects it entirely. Blackwell-Rogelj examines the internal conflicts many women experience and most certainly recognise, and Watering Hole is an assured vision from a female filmmaker determined to dive deep into the opaquely murky waters of female sexuality. Accompanying today’s premiere on Directors Notes, we spoke to Blackwell-Rogelj about balancing the opposing perceptions of her young protagonists, emulating that giddy joy of a night out in her lighting and grade, and the challenges of shooting nightlife scenes amongst the rowdy pub goers of North London.
Watering Hole draws heavily from real experiences shared between you and your friends. How did you navigate turning these communal memories into a cohesive narrative while preserving their authentic emotional texture?
When working in pubs, I became transfixed by the sober exhibit of sexual uncertainty and sloppy subtext. As I watched regulars attempt to flirt with girls half their age I’d catch girls accepting drinks and turning to each other with downturned smiles. Even though I felt pity for the men, I completely understood the girls’ crave to take control of their objectification. It took me back so viscerally to the excitement and savagery of first going out as a girl and that omnipotent feeling of getting whatever you want. Understanding the exchange of drinks as such a microcosm of gendered power dynamics and performance in the modern world, I wrote a poem from the girls’ perspective and nurtured it into an experimental microshort Hyena using my camcorder archives. This birthed the narrative for Watering Hole.
I have these little black journals that I take with me everywhere. I scribble, sketch and scrawl fleeting images, desperate to capture a stranger’s story, juxtaposing visuals or girly memories from my past. When constructing the narrative, I flicked through drawings from communal memories between me and my mates and selected the strongest, then slowly compressed them into a structured narrative. A man leaving a voice note, furious you didn’t go home with him, saving money on drinks by nominating a mate to flirt herself off, a night out ruined because a mate won’t stop checking her phone for a boyfriend’s text, the taxi driver nightmare. Once I established the two protagonists with contrasting backstories and goals, I decorated their dialogue with the smaller moments I found. Doing your makeup on the bus after crying, blurting out trauma to a mate with manic laughter. I think a lot of the authenticity comes from these little moments. It’s all a concoction of communal memories from our female adolescence in the trial by fire to navigate UK nightlife.
I’m fascinated by the juxtaposition of them going out to reclaim their power but looking for men to buy drinks and the whole push and pull of being young and wanting the attention, but it getting too much.
When looking at my writing in prep for the shoot, I began to separate the two girls very obviously when I realised they mirrored each other as a kind of split psyche of the female brain. Liv’s dramatic enactment in her seduction is constantly shadowed by Ana’s disgust at her friend’s manic performance. As Ana watches Liv, to me, it emulates the split of one’s own consciousness rolling its eyes at your inauthenticity. I can trace this feeling back to my reading of Irigarayian philosophy where she frames the mirror as a polemical weapon of seduction that splits the female psyche between herself and another who will walk forward as a weapon of seduction in her place. Hence the intense use of the camera as a mirror in the toilet scenes.
It’s with the very different physical intrusions of two men onto the girls that smashes them out of their rigid ideologies.
When I understood my script in this way it was easy for me to balance the opposing perceptions prevalent in young girls by assigning the characters deeply contrasting morals. Liv celebrates her performance of seduction as a reclaiming of her power, framing her stealing from men as a proxy revenge for all the pain men have caused her. Ana doesn’t care for the attention of men and craves the love of her boyfriend. She just wants a mate to talk to and dismisses Liv’s manic slips of suffering because she’s never experienced sexual trauma herself. Then it’s with the very different physical intrusions of two men onto the girls that smashes them out of their rigid ideologies, exposing them to the perception of the other.
How did you move into production once the idea was locked?
From the initial concept and first draft, pre-production took about a year, mainly because my DOP Ravi Doubleday and I were both working different assistant jobs on TV shows. In that time, I just kept trying to get people on board and asking for script feedback from young girls and older men I was working with in the industry. We applied to different short film funds but managed to fundraise £5000 on Kickstarter – that was mental. It was also so interesting because lots of our backers reached out to me with completely different stances on girls stealing free drinks. Older men were saying these women need to be outed and girls were commenting things like “lol so me”. Then we shot it in my old local The Prince Edward who let us shoot for free as long as we came in past closing. We did a rough three night shoot in the depths of December, with days split between outside and inside scenes (7pm-6am). All the crew of about 30 worked on it for free (except the actors) and I genuinely couldn’t believe they all stuck around.
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I’m fascinated by the feedback you were getting from backers as you were raising the funds. Did any of that affect or alter the approach you took and how did you feel hearing this, as you knew what you wanted to say with the film?
I was thrilled with the feedback when fundraising. The initial display of media discourse where women were tagging their friends saying “us” and men were celebrating “finally” the exposure of manipulative women told me I was onto something. I was excited to expose, to both sides, the futility of this proxy revenge and the humanity of these men.
I was unsettled by the constant reminders of female sexualisation.
It was only when I got to the shoot that my mind was slightly changed. There were some horrible moments of sexism from older men (pubgoers we used as extras on set) who were referring to the actresses as ‘the sluts’. Even the man at the end turning to stare at Liv – he wasn’t an extra – he was just a random man checking her out! While this added incredibly to the film’s exposure of gendered power dynamics, I was unsettled by the constant reminders of female sexualisation. And I felt a deep responsibility for the actresses and by this point, even their characters. Because of this, for the rest of the shoot and the edit, I decided to focus more deeply on the girls than previously prepared for. It became a story to expose men to women’s realities and validate women with the complexities of objectification.
Peter York’s performance as Ant leans so perfectly into the norms of a creepy man, out hoping to pull.
With a craving to delve the viewer into Liv and Ana’s perspectives, I wanted Ant to become a sort of caricature, a concoction of the forward and assuming men whose advances decorated those memories of my adolescence. Both his boldness and his cluelessness were essential in injecting snippets of comedy into the film and in heightening the status of the girls as they cackle behind his back. It was important for me that he lacked any sense of seduction that could send the girls off track. The girls see him purely as their prey and that’s what’s so tragic.
We worked together to bring out a sort of hyper performance that Ant leans on to hide his class struggle and loneliness.
I met Peter York on a Gordon Ramsay commercial we were both working on (he was Gordon’s stand-in). We connected well on set and he had this great London accent. I chose him for the role and we worked together to bring out a sort of hyper performance that Ant leans on to hide his class struggle and loneliness. Of course, he’s sitting in the pub waiting for someone to speak to – he’s all alone up in a new city grafting to send money to his kid. And when these two lively girls turn up, he can’t believe his luck and falls into this hyper masculine dance only to make a fool out of himself.
How did you work with Ravi to visually capture the duality of the magic of the pub, but also the sad, uncomfortable undertone we all know?
The pub setting always excited me. Sticky tables, deep red carpets, open crisp packets that look like treasure. As a teenage girl, entering an old man’s pub felt like this magical unknown kingdom. But then you’d get stared at and suddenly feel naked under the bright, sweaty lights. I always knew I wanted it to be handheld so it feels like we’re going on the night out with the girls. Ravi did an incredible job with an Arri and a stabiliser, moving to the rhythm of the scene and really keeping up that energy of the constantly moving night out.
In terms of colour, my lighting and grade references consisted of flash rave photos captured on disposable cameras I’d collected from me and my mates. I wanted to emulate the bright, energetic snapshots, high contrast and vibrant colours of an ephemeral night out tainted with a tipsy joy. The pool table scenes really lean into that vibrant digital magicism, whereas when the girls first enter, Ravi kept it slightly softer to evoke the awkward adjusting phase of feeling suddenly watched. When the girls finally split up and Liv starts coming down to the tour of Ant’s camera roll, we had the lights bright and harsh to evoke that sudden urgency and exposure to reality – the sickening realisation of potential danger as a girl is left out on her own.
I wanted to emulate the bright energetic snapshots, high contrast and vibrant colours of an ephemeral night out tainted with a tipsy joy.
I’d say a lot of the uncomfortable undertone comes from the stark lighting and exposing composition of the toilet scenes. As the secret sacred female space where we get to hear what the girls really think, we wanted the toilet scenes to feel bright, exposing the girls stripped from their shyness and seduction. While it starts off pink and cuddly with fur coats and shared lipgloss, as the girls prepare to go their separate ways the mirror scenes feel awkward, claustrophobic, cold and sweaty. What really helped with this was the tension in the performance due to our obligation to get each scene in one shot. Cheated in a mate’s bathroom, we had no cutaway options. No shots of the girls sat in cubicles, the sink, the non-existent mirror. So getting the timing right was difficult but by the final toilet scene, this really added to the jagged awkwardness of their clashing views.
The images in the taxi are haunting and incredibly tense. What approach did you take to fully capture the horror of the situation, even though we don’t see anything?
Ravi and I had a long think about lights and darks and what’s seen and not seen. From a perspective point of view, not seeing what’s coming makes sense as Ana is asleep. But, without being too conspicuous, I wanted to slowly build that tension as we rolled towards the film’s climax. The sound design helped massively here. I wanted to elevate the natural sounds of the moving car with an escalating rhythm. We played with the churning wheels of the car, distorting it into this monotonous, eerie swirling. Paired with the strokes of streetlights gliding across her body as an allusion to the taxi driver’s glared scheming, I wanted the visuals and sound to subtly imply a future of assault whilst also being easily shrugged off as Ana’s nauseating holding down of sick as the taxi bumps along. In a desire not to lead the audience, it’s interesting to see different expectations of this part. I’ve had a lot of women saying they saw it coming as soon as she got in the cab, and a lot of men feeling like it came out of nowhere. Story-wise, it really does just slap you in the face when you least expect it. But, tragically, that is often reality.
So much of the power relies on the pacing.
I’m quite particular about pace, maybe because I’m so used to editing my own microshorts. A lot of our tweaks were almost frame by frame. It was important to play around to find the rhythm between the scenes to keep that nightlife energy high. The greatest challenge in post was editing around the pub sounds. By the second and third night shoot we had to flip our planned hours and shoot in the pub 7-12, then shoot outside for the rest of the night. That meant pub goers were specifically North London locals. In what was meant to feel like Manchester that was difficult to work around. Especially when every time we called action, people on the other side of the pub would cheers! It was tragically hilarious in the most stressful three nights of my life. If you crank the volume up I’m sure you’ll hear this gorgeous cockney girl begging our actor (the bartender) three times for a “tequila rose”!
By psychologically flipping the narrative, there’s a particular manic craving to take as much as we can almost as a compensation.
Why did you, as a female filmmaker, find yourself drawn to these stories and why are they also important to tell?
I wrote this story to expose the trauma behind Liv’s thieving ideology. Whether it’s being groped or attacked or shouted at, girls hold this constant awareness of their objectification. And I’m fascinated by the ways we counter this. There’s a specific hyper-performance to take control of one’s objectification and enjoy the perks that get handed to us in return for being objectified. By psychologically flipping the narrative, there’s a particular manic craving to take as much as we can almost as a compensation. But I’ve never found much investigation into the effects of this – whether it’s on the girl objectifying herself, the men being used or the friends cast aside feeling rejected. I wanted to investigate the traumatised psychology behind this particular seduction and the dangers of putting yourself into that situation. Yes, Liv succeeds in her attempt at a proxy revenge, but at what cost?
What are you working on next?
My next short Baba Yaga is a psychological digital thriller that blends together witchcraft and algorithms in a concoction of anti-ageing objectification and relationships in a world of echo chambers. We’re hoping to shoot in October of this year.
