Glasgow Short Film Festival: James Ley on Sleazy Tiger

Scottish cinema hasn’t yet produced a great queer feature film. We don’t have our own My Beautiful Laundrette, My Summer of Love or Weekend. When it comes to short films, however, we have wonderful LGBTQ+ stories aplenty, and the latest to add to the pile is Sleazy Tiger, a funny, sweet and wildly horny comedy from James Ley.

The film begins conventionally enough. Alan, our gangly twink hero, played by Jay Newton, arrives at a pub for a first date with Blair (Jack Douglas), a dreamboat who makes his own kimchi. Alan doesn’t want this to be another one-night stand – Blair is husband material, after all – but his increasing arousal sends him on a nightmarish trip to Horny Hell where he discovers an underground cabaret serving up cake-adjacent kink and a dungeon filled with more deviants named Alan – who include Hollywood star Alan Cumming, who's sporting an icing-covered derrière.

This is Ley’s first short film, but he’s well-known in the theatre world. One of his earliest gigs was when he was living in London after studying acting at drama school. “My first piece was actually directed by Miranda Hart in a pub in Islington. She did quite well out of doing that, and I went off in a different direction,” laughs Ley. The title was Overpowering Mother. Ley played a gay man living in London whose mum turns up at his flat and moves in. “He's having a bit of a crisis because his mother is like, I don't know, just a lot more interesting than him. I guess it was a bit like a gay, male Ab Fab.”

Gay men going through an existential crisis also feature in the trio of plays that finally put Ley on the map: Ode to Joy, Wilf and Love Song to Lavender Menace. Sleazy Tiger also fits neatly into this theme, but while it shares much DNA with his theatre work, Ley says he was determined to make his short a true piece of cinema. “I didn't want to do something that was like a chamber piece, or like a conversation, because I think sometimes if you come from theatre, people can think, 'Oh, that's what you're going to do.' I thought, if I force it to have action, then I'm not going to get lost in dialogue. I love those dialogue-heavy films as well. But I think you have to be able to master telling a cinematic story first.”

Sleazy Tiger.

The film's premise came to him after a revelatory night at a queer speakeasy. “I remember being a bit freaked out by the experience. I was like, 'Why is this fun? What's going on?' The rules inside were really quite twisted, and I thought, 'What is this world?' That was the spark of Sleazy Tiger, and the script just became super gay and pushed me out of my comfort zone.”

Like Alan in the film, Ley manages to have his cake and eat it with Sleazy Tiger. It's a glorious celebration of queer sex and romance, but it doesn’t shy away from the darker aspects of queer life either, and asks the fundamental question: how does a queer person discover their authentic self when they’ve been raised in a mainly heterosexual world? “I think we've been navigating that question for most of recent queer history. How do we express ourselves authentically? When I was growing up, that wasn't at all on the agenda. It was about a baseline of acceptance and kind of coming out, but now we're at an interesting place where we’re asking, 'How do I express all the parts of myself and fit in and not make it all about us?' Because in a sense, cis gay men have become part of the mainstream as well."

Sleazy Tiger is only 14 minutes long, but as well as exploring its thorny and horny themes, it also squeezes in more genre nods and film references than a Tarantino flick. “That was a bit chaotic,” admits Ley of his magpie approach. “It's got its Amélie moment at the start, and that's me going, ‘Hey, can we make a queer romance where we are behind it in a wholesome way?’ And then there's a kind of Candyman reference. So, that’s, 'Can we have a queer horror? Is that a space that we can go into?’” Add to these homages an action setpiece that could be straight out of John Wick and a scene involving a toilet that will be familiar to anyone who grew up with Scottish cinema in the 90s. “Maybe it’s just the rookie filmmaker in me trying to prove myself, going OK, let's do some references,” suggests Ley.

As well as being hilarious and horned-up, Sleazy Tiger also has a trump card in that delightful cameo by Cumming as himself. Did he have any qualms about playing an amorous deviant who hangs around Horny Hell for fun? “When we were developing the script, I did write quite a boring, safe version of that scene, where it was just very reverent to him as a queer icon,” Ley confesses. “But then we were like, 'No, Alan needs to be part of this sex party and to be having fun.' So we passed him that and he was, like, ‘Yeah, I’ll do it. Absolutely.’ Of course he'd be at the centre of all that.”

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Sleazy Tiger screens at Glasgow Short Film Festival on 19 Mar as part of Scottish Competition 1: The Inner Chamber

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Filmography: Sleazy Tiger (2025)

Plays (selected): First, Let Me Ask You Some Questions (WIP) (2025), Ode to Joy (2022), Wilf (2021), Sally (2020), Love Song to Lavender Menace (2017)