Dark Passion: Kieran Evans on Kelly + Victor
We talk to director Kieran Evans about his forthcoming film Kelly + Victor, life in Liverpool and the conservative nature of the British film industry
Kieran Evans' debut feature, Kelly + Victor, is one of the most authentically Liverpudlian films in recent years. But you won't see any picture-postcard shots of St George's Hall, or characters shopping in Liverpool ONE. Instead, Evans shows Liverpool as it's seen by the majority of its inhabitants – those on the outskirts, away from the glamour of the city centre.
“What's quite interesting about Liverpool is that it's used a lot in big blockbuster films,” says Evans over the phone. “I was watching Captain America with my son the other day – forgive my sins – and the bit with the docks, that part was all Liverpool! So it's used a lot, but just not in the way I see it.
“The interesting thing is that we started the film around 2005, when Liverpool was in that period leading up to becoming the Capital of Culture, when it was right in the middle of being regenerated and cleaned up. But if you just walked ten minutes up the road, towards Kensington and places like that, the regeneration just sort of stopped. I thought it was gobsmacking – this is just ten minutes from city centre!”
For Evans, who, though Welsh, loves the city like a native, the effect on people in such neglected areas can be devastating: “When you're in Liverpool you meet people who are not really as connected to where they live anymore... They've been left behind," he says. "People with no hope, or very little hope, finding other ways to escape, via drinking, drugs, sex, things like that – people end up doing all that because what else have you got?”
"Sex seems to be the last taboo subject that's finally getting discussed and filmed in the right way" – Kieran Evans
This is the world of Kelly and Victor. In their twenties and leading fairly hopeless lives, they meet one night in a club and quickly enter into a relationship that's as sexually violent as anything you'll see on screen: from the beginning, Kelly strangles Victor during sex with such determination that at first it seems like outright abuse. Victor, though, encourages her; and it's clear that they're interdependent, sharing what Evans calls “a dark passion." In order to make such brutal scenes believable, Evans points out, Antonia Campbell-Hughes and Julian Morris, who play Kelly and Victor, “went above and beyond the call of duty.” Especially Morris, he says, who “wanted to make some of the strangulation look real. And there's only one way you can make strangulation look real.”
Sticking close to the source material – Niall Griffiths' novel of the same name – the film, though in places filled with unexpected lyrical beauty, also contains scenes so harrowing they're difficult to watch. It was, unsurprisingly, far from easy to get it made: “It was obviously, and I'll put this in quotes, a ‘difficult project,'" Evans says. "Around that time people were very sensitive about films with strong sexual matter – I think Michael Winterbottom had just done 9 Songs and repulsed half the film industry with it. It was one of those things where if they'd seen 9 Songs they immediately said, ‘I don't want it.’ But we were trying to say: ‘No, it's something more beautiful than that, there's a tenderness to what we're talking about.’”
The industry's initial reluctance towards such a project speaks of broader problems. “For me, a lot of British films tend to focus on what they know best,” Evans says. “They don't tend to push boundaries enough. I mean you've got your zombies, you've got your gangsters, you've got your period dramas and you've got your rom-coms. And then you've got Danny Boyle, a slightly out-there character, and Ben Wheatley... But other than that it's very difficult to see what you can make out of British films.”
Evans believes his film explores an important topic the way it should be explored: “Sex seems to be the last taboo subject that's finally getting discussed and filmed in the right way – it's not just a bunch of Hollywood actors pushing each other up against the fucking wall and hiking their skirts up, doing these mad sex scenes on glass tables anymore. It's a legitimate subject to discuss." In Kelly + Victor, it's "more real than anything you could see in a Hollywood film, or a rom-com," and, he says – most importantly – "there are people like this out there. There are some really beautiful people out there, just with different ways of seeing the world. And that's the film I wanted to make."