Janis Pugh on Chuck Chuck Baby

Janis Pugh is a force of nature. On a shoestring budget, this 50-year-old filmmaker has created Chuck Chuck Baby, a rapturous queer musical set in and around a chicken packaging factory in her hometown in north-east Wales. The film’s centre is Helen, played by Louise Brealey. At the start of the film, she’s a broken woman living a life of drudgery and self-sacrifice. She's pushing 40 and lives with her bullying husband, Gary, who has moved his 20-year-old girlfriend, the mother of his newborn child, into the house they share. Helen stays around in this humiliating domestic situation partly because she’s nowhere to go, and partly because she’s the sole caretaker of Gary’s infirm mother Gwen, whom Helen loves dearly. 

A spark of joy (and lust) returns to Helen’s life when Joanne (Annabel Scholey), who she had a massive crush on in school, returns to town after 20 years. Much of Helen’s pent-up emotions are released through music, with the cast often liable to burst into song when one of their favourite ditties comes on the radio. The 60s musicals of Jack Demy (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Les Demoiselles de Rochefort) are clear influences, but Pugh’s charming film also calls to mind classic crowdpleasers of British cinema like Billy Elliot and The Full Monty in its winning mix of working-class grit with Hollywood glam. 

Chuck Chuck Baby had its world premiere at Edinburgh International Film Festival last year. Ahead of the screening, we sat down with Pugh to discuss the film.

The Skinny: The film industry loves to celebrate young first-time filmmakers but you’re making your feature debut, Chuck Chuck Baby, a bit later in life. What was your route into filmmaking?

Janis Pugh: I was definitely drawn to cinema from a very young age, but I always thought it was out of my reach. I moved to London when I was 19 years old, and I worked in restaurants and did a lot of bar work, things like that. But then I eventually opened this little cafe bar which was connected to Central Saint Martins [a college of the University of the Arts London], and I became really good buddies with a guy who was studying production design there. And through him, I just started falling in love with the whole thing of art and, you know, making things and I started just doing small films. I eventually got into film school at 32.

Do you think going to film school a bit later was useful? Did having a bit more experience of the world help you?

It was good, but it was also overwhelming. I'll be honest with you, when I went in to do my MA, I think I had one O Level. It was in drama – I was really good at acting in school. So I was a little bit academically overwhelmed, but I just dug in and kept doing it. It was two years. And, you know, I won a scholarship thankfully, and carried on from there.

Where did the idea for Chuck Chuck Baby come from?

​​It was 2010, and I remember sitting and thinking about what to do. I'd had quite a long break from filmmaking for reasons to do with looking after people who were ill in my family, my mother and my aunt. And, unfortunately, I lost them both. And I just thought, 'God, you know what, I'm just gonna make a film about love.' So it's about love, and it's about strong women, and the women I’m missing. And that's where it came from, really.

The character of Helen is incredibly ordinary and unassuming. You don’t often get feature films centred on women like her. 

Everything I write comes from people I know, and I know a lot of women like Helen. Women who are financially stuck in situations that don't allow them to move on. And specifically, for working-class women, I think there are such expectations and responsibilities forced upon you. So for me this was about this woman who had such a difficult upbringing, and who found something that was quite secure then that fell apart, and she was left with nothing of her own making really. She just had what life had dished out to her. I think she's a woman millions of women will relate to.

What I love about Chuck Chuck Baby is that it’s about working-class people and set in this working-class community, but it doesn’t fall into any of the “gritty” cliches of British working-class cinema. Despite the tough themes it explores, it’s full of colour and laughter.

So often when I watch anything about working-class people, I'm always like, 'Have the people who made this ever been to a working-class house?' Of course it's hard. When I was growing up we didn't have much, but we had laughter and we had love, you know? And when I was young I did work in a chicken factory – OK, I only lasted about a week and a half, my sisters worked there much longer – but it was a scream, you know? We had so much fun. Even when tragedy strikes, death, there's still got to be humour there. There has to be.

I love the way you use music in the film, where the characters belt out their emotions to people like Neil Diamond or Janis Ian on the radio…

I've always written with music, and I love how we use music in life, which is very therapeutic to us. You know, my dad loved Annie's Song by John Denver, and that song was so different to me a year ago before he died than it is to me now that he's gone. From the moment I started writing the script, there was a lot of percolating going on. There was a lot of imagery, which I worked on, and then for me, the music comes in to start the story moving for the characters. What's so wonderful about music is it can really quickly inform the audience of a character’s emotional state, and their past story.

And often the characters will sing along to these songs. It’s essentially a musical. Was everyone on board with that idea from the beginning?

Not at all. When I told people how I was going to use the music, they were like, 'What the fuck?' But the cast was brave and bold and they had trust in me. And the crew too. You know, because we're all so used to doing realism here in the UK, and I was asking them to step out of their comfort zone and saying, 'Let's try something different.' It can still be hard, but I knew this was how it had to be done. I knew when I was writing, what kind of lines had to be sung from the songs and what didn't. You have to feel that emotion. You know, if you're not feeling it when you're writing it, it's not going to work. But if I got tingles, I knew that's how the audience was going to feel too. 

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Chuck Chuck Baby is released 19 Jul by Studio Soho Distribution