The Yorkshire director sparked a storm by portraying fossil-hunter Mary Anning as a lesbian. He explains why the film, which stars Kate Winslet as the lead, is his most personal yet
The love story Ammonite, starring Kate Winslet as the 19th-century fossil-hunter and palaeontologist Mary Anning, was chosen to close last year’s London film festival, but its director, Francis Lee, has yet to see it with an audience. “I live in Yorkshire,” he explains. Behind him are wooden beams, a kitchen table, red and yellow tulips bursting eagerly from a vase. “We were in local lockdown and it didn’t feel appropriate to travel when no one else could.”
Ammonite certainly doesn’t need any additional controversy. Two years ago, before Lee had even shot a page of the script, he was pilloried in the press for having portrayed Mary Anning as a lesbian without any evidence to support his conjecture. What he still doesn’t understand is why historical figures are presumed straight until proven otherwise. “Also, I wasn’t making a biopic!” says the sparkly-eyed 51-year-old, who has an immense grey beard in which woodland creatures could frolic unnoticed for days.
Several of Anning’s finds can be seen at the Natural History Museum in London, though comparatively little is known about her. “One description I found said she was warm and friendly and good with children,” says Lee. “The other described her as grumpy and miserable, and said she had a dirty shop. That was it.” His script, and Winslet’s performance, follow the second description, although things warm up gradually after Charlotte – a younger woman of higher social standing, played by Saoirse Ronan – enters the picture.
Lee considers himself an outsider. “There just aren’t that many queer working-class people in the film industry,” he says. So he was taken aback to be informed that he shouldn’t tell lesbian stories. “It’s been a real lesson for me in identity politics. I know I can’t talk for Mary because I’m not a 19th-century palaeontologist, but I do think I can talk with her. What I tried to do was to take this working-class woman, who hadn’t been recognised in her lifetime, and elevate her. I wanted to contextualise her in terms of a relationship. And because men had blocked and overlooked her, and reappropriated her work for themselves, I felt that this relationship couldn’t be with a man.”
Gay, rural, working-class love stories are Lee’s speciality. God’s Own Country, his exhilarating 2017 debut, was “about two queer lads on the side of a hill in Yorkshire in bad weather”. But while Lee, like Johnny in that movie, is a farmer’s son, he says it is Ammonite rather than its predecessor that represents the nearest he has come to self-portraiture. “Like Mary, I have found it very difficult to find my voice, professionally and personally. I feel very closed a lot of the time. I find it hard to be me, and to be truthful about me.” The networking side of the film industry is one he finds especially traumatic. “It makes me want to die,” he says.
Success hasn’t helped. “It amplifies the discomfort and has caused issues for me. You go somewhere like a dinner party – listen to me, a dinner party! – and people want to talk about your work. Sometimes, I want people to talk to me as Francis, not Francis who made some films.” Would he liketo feel more at ease socially? Or is he content to chisel away quietly at his work, the way Mary does with her fossils? He gazes out of the window, to the hill where God’s Own Country was shot. Five seconds pass, then six, then seven. Eventually, he gives a little growl, as if annoyed with himself.
Contributor
Ryan Gilbey
Ryan Gilbey writes about film and theatre for the Guardian
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