Typically, when the Melbourne International Film Festival announces its Bright Horizons competition selection, the most newsworthy feature is that annual reminder that the festival’s $140,000 prize is one of the biggest in the film world. This year, the announcement that the jury president would be Charlotte Wells was met with a ripple of happy surprise at the program announcement. Wells, writer and director of Aftersun, has kept a low profile since the film’s unexpected success. The semi-autobiographical story of an 11-year-old girl on a Mediterranean holiday with her father went on to win more than 180 citations and awards worldwide, beginning with a Jury Prize at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival and culminating in a Best Actor Oscar nomination for Paul Mescal.
As the film world waited to see what she would do next, Wells quietly stepped back. In her absence, Aftersun only grew in stature, recently appearing on both the critics’ and readers’ lists in the New York Times’ Top 100 Films of the 21st Century. As Moonlight director Barry Jenkins wrote in his assessment, “One of the really powerful things to me, as a producer on this, is how much Charlotte believed in this story and these performances to communicate this really deep feeling that she had from her childhood with her father. And the ending is killer.”
Reflecting on the praise from Jenkins and the life-altering success of her first feature film, Wells puts it down to the multiple ways in which the film can be understood narratively, yet how clear the emotional through-line is.
“Although I have a clear sense for myself narratively what's going on, I never minded different takes on that so long as everybody was feeling something,” she says. “Part of deepening that connection was being deliberate while also giving people space to draw subconscious links between the film and their own experiences. I think if you give people the space to do that, then that's how you give them the opportunity to connect. But it's a balance. I felt I was always walking a knife edge of losing people to boredom or confusion.”
Born and raised in Edinburgh, Scotland, Wells and her family moved to Glasgow and Cambridge, which meant she spent a lot of time in London. In 2012, she relocated to study an interdisciplinary filmmaking course at New York University where she joined a cohort of aspiring producers, directors and cinematographers. Though Wells enrolled as a production student, she soon gravitated toward directing, where she met future collaborators, cinematographer Gregory Oke and editor Blair McClendon.
“I think Blair’s was the last short film I produced,” she says. “Directing was something I never thought I’d find. Producing was a rational decision, one that satisfied my interests, but directing was what felt creatively fulfilling.”
Wells’ second short film, Laps, won a prize for editing at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, where it was spotted by producer Adele Romanski. Romanski introduced Wells’ work to her partners, Amy Johnson, Mark Ceryak, and Jenkins. Together, they backed Wells’ next project, then a very early version of Aftersun. After developing the script through Sundance Labs and several careful rewrites, the film emerged as something more personal than she had originally intended.
“The experience I had with my shorts was that not many people fully understood them, but the ones who did felt deeply connected,” she says. “That connection lingered with them, and I liked that. I spent so long writing Aftersun, I had time to ask, how do I strengthen that connection? How do I serve the people who will respond, rather than trying to reach more people? That was never my goal.”
“I tend to think about film as feeling,” Wells continues. “I ask myself: what feeling am I building toward? Once that’s clear, it becomes a question of how to fully realise it, and how to bring the audience along so they might feel it too.”
Since then, Wells has been reflecting on what comes next. Her creative instincts have recently been reignited by a filmmaker she has long admired, and who is receiving a festival retrospective this year.
“I have a project in which Chantal Akerman’s News from Home has been top of mind,” she says. “Because I’m speaking on the panel at MIFF, I’ve been re-watching her work and she’s so profoundly inspiring. The range of her projects, and her willingness to just pick up whatever camera was close to hand. I’ve been reconnecting with film school friends lately, and it’s reminded me that we’ve made things from nothing before. I don’t want, having made a film that reached more people than I expected, to limit me from continuing to work that way. I’m not saying I’ll make every film like that, but lately I’ve felt the urge just to grab whatever camera is nearby and start making something.”
This grassroots approach has long shaped her worldview, both growing up in Edinburgh and now in the U.S., albeit in different forms. Aftersun bore the influence of Lynn Ramsay, Terrence Davies, and Margaret Tait, and Wells considers herself a product of independent traditions on both sides of the Atlantic.
“When I think of earlier Scottish filmmakers like Bill Douglas, Bill Forsyth or Margaret Tait, they strike me as extremely independent in the truest sense. People who weren’t supported by the system, or didn’t care to be, and who soldiered on anyway. I find that really inspiring. The more I learn, the more I value that tradition of people creating at home.”
“The U.S. has its own tradition of independent filmmaking, partly because there isn’t national funding like there is in the UK,” she continues. “I appreciated coming to film school here, where there’s that do-it-yourself, micro- or zero-budget ethos. It’s not something you can do more than once because obviously there's a tremendous amount of sweat equity that goes into making a film that way, but that scrappy culture of making something out of nothing is something I really respect.”
Wells has served on film juries before, but this is her first time doing so in Australia. Melbourne was one of the first cities to screen Aftersun after its Cannes premiere, though Wells admits her memory of the IMAX showing is foggy, “I was very jetlagged,” she says. As jury president, she suggests she’ll approach the role with openness and collaboration.
“I’ve only done this a couple of times before but have always had good experiences. I’ve heard that’s not always the case,” she says, laughing. “Am I looking for anything different than I would when I go to see a film? I don’t think so. I get the most satisfaction from being pulled in emotionally, whether it’s something that articulates a feeling I’ve had in a way I’ve never considered, reframes something I couldn’t quite name, or reveals a world I could never have imagined. And stylistically or technically, I suppose I’m just looking to be surprised. There’s nothing more satisfying than when the elements of a film clash in strange ways or come together with real intent.”
“As a filmmaker who’s been in competitions, I know you’re always somewhat at the mercy of people’s taste,” she says. “I try to step back and assess a film that might not be what I’d usually gravitate toward and break down its elements in a way I might not otherwise. But everyone is led by what they respond to, which is why it’s good to have a variety of perspectives in the room.”
Wells credits her collaborative approach to both judging and making films as the reason for the strange power Aftersun exerts over its viewers and why she has taken so long following it up. The film’s six week shoot in Turkey was relatively straightforward. Even when forest fires threatened to delay production, Wells and her crew used the opportunity to film sequences indoors with the film’s younger co-lead Frankie Corio. The editing process however, took seven months, a process Wells puts down to her tendency to want to “turn over every stone”, one countered by her editor.
“It felt to us like we were always heading toward what the film would become,” she says. “It never felt finished to us until it was finished. And I think that helped us navigate a lot of different and often competing notes from other parties because we always felt like there was work still to do. So along the way, we did try absolutely every idea that was thrown at us, no matter how much of a step away from what was on the page it may have been. But I think by the end, and I think Blair would say this of me, I need to do it to know it. It's obvious sometimes that something won't work, but I like to see it enacted just to be 100 per cent sure that it won't work. I want to feel like I did absolutely everything that I could. Sometimes there can feel like points in the making of a film, as a director, that it can feel quite lonely. Ultimately, you're the one that will live with these decisions for the longest, and that if you make a decision that you regret in some way, it will haunt you in a much deeper sense than it might haunt somebody else involved with the process. And I don't want to be haunted by more than I already am,” she pauses. “I think I did get a little bit lost in the process and that's why I feel really lucky that my editor is also my friend who's able to say, ‘wake up, you're getting lost here, you're compromising in a way that you don't want to do’.”
Throughout the Zoom interview, a book has been sitting, splayed, behind Wells’ shoulder, on a wide, white windowsill. Before our time runs out, I ask her what it is that she’s been reading. “You’re going to laugh,” she says. She reaches back, grabs the book and shows me the cover of Melbourne on Film: Cinema That Defines Our City by Melbourne International Film Festival. “Kate Jinx gave this to me as I left Melbourne last time,” she says, smiling. “I’ve been revisiting it in anticipation of my return. So, there you go. There couldn’t be a better book.”