Charlotte Wells
“Aftersun”
The story of “Aftersun” marks the end of an experience for its two main characters, Sophie (Frankie Corio) and Calum (Paul Mescal) — her childhood innocence and his ability to deflect the pressures of adulthood.
But the daughter-and-father summer holiday is just the beginning for writer-director Wells, who took inspiration from her real-life experiences and transformed it into one of the 2022’s most celebrated feature debuts.
“It began as something more conventionally structured and plotted,” she says. “And it was just over the course of writing that I gradually realized what my creative and personal ambitions for it were.”
Encapsulating the sensation of a moment that the people involved don’t realize is pivotal until after the fact was a challenge that taught Wells lessons.
“I’ll think about in the future is, when you’re writing a detail, is it film-friendly? Because sometimes you lose things that are really important to you because you couldn’t quite articulate it in a way that could really be sufficiently captured on film, because some things can’t.”
Despite the specificity of the story, Wells insists that she didn’t intend for “Aftersun” to be directly autobiographical. “I was drawn to this because I needed to ask myself some questions I hadn’t been willing to ask myself before,” says the director.
“But I’m not really able to give myself partially to anything, so it needs to be something I’m willing to give this much of myself to again.
“I’m a believer that we’re all making the same film over and over again, no matter what shape it takes,” she says. “I think your interests betray themselves as you go. So I suspect it will be true that memory and grief are two things that I’m grappling with, in films as in life for, for always.”
