We chat to director James Krishna Floyd about his new Unicorns film. Words: Adam Bloodworth
New British indie film Unicorns has achieved the vanishingly rare 100 per cent rating from audiences on Rotten Tomatoes, and critics have been equally warm. Praise has focused on the film’s representations of bisexuality and depictions of Asian subcultures that haven’t quite been seen like this in cinema before.
The story follows dad Luke, who meets Asian drag queen Aysha and finds himself questioning his identity when he develops feelings of same-sex attraction. Despite its success, the independent film was shot on a shoestring, and writer-director James Krishna Floyd laughs when he recalls how he had to impersonate one of the lead actors in a sex scene during filming to make sure they got the film wrapped in time and on budget.
“We never had enough money or enough time, and we didn’t get the shots we needed,” says Krishna Floyd. “One of the shots during a sex scene was super close up on Aysha, but Jason [Patel, the actor] had to be shooting another scene. We needed his hand, and whose hands are most like Jason’s? Mine! So there’s shots of Ben Hardy climaxing and it’s my hands on his face. Any means necessary, man!”
Ultimately it’s a love story. I’m not making a film as a sort of activism or polemic. That’s unwise. Then it becomes almost unartistic
James Krishna Floyd on directing Unicorns
Indeed. It wasn’t the only unconventional approach to filming. After keeping lead stars Ben Hardy and Jason Patel away from one another for the months before filming to enhance their chemistry, Floyd chose not to use an intimacy coordinator for the sex scenes after both lead actors said they felt comfortable getting racy on their own terms. (In an interview with City A.M., former EastEnders actor Ben Hardy explained that he felt the script was so powerful that he wasn’t going to let “fear” get in the way of him playing an LGBTQ lead and facing inevitable criticism from bigoted audiences and online trolls.)
“We felt like there had to be such a free flowing, almost improvisational nature to it, that we wanted the danger to remain,” says Floyd. “We didn’t rehearse it, we just shot it. It was all done by the actors and the camera following them. If you can capture a moment naturally, that’s cinema, right? You’d be surprised, a lot of that love scene is very free flowing. It’s them in the moment.”
Floyd, who is 38, began his career as an actor, winning the BAFTA Breakthrough Brit award for his role in My Brother the Devil in 2013. He has over a dozen film credits to his name, as well as roles on the stage and TV, but while he was acting he had also been quietly working to secure the budget to make Unicorns.
“I’m very proud,” he says. “Just to get into British cinema is very hard. Eight years to get a film made. I’d rather not do that again but it is what it is. Maybe the industry wasn’t ready for this film years ago. The world changed, the industry changed, there’s a new generation coming through who can really relate to a film like this, they demand films like this to be made. If you look at bigger, perhaps more simplistic films, they don’t make the money they used to. That’s the young audience speaking.”
Read more: Unicorns star Ben Hardy on labels: ‘I don’t know. I’m just Ben’
In Unicorns, Luke agrees to drive Aysha to drag show performances across the UK as a chance to get money for his young son, but for Aysha it’s a way to get to know Luke more closely. It’s a captivating story, with Floyd’s directorial style stamped across it: from those intimacy scenes to snapshots of hedonistic parties, there is a fluidity to his direction that captures the intensity of these men and their experiences.
One of the most memorable moments captures a discreet party for Asian men who are straight-passing in ordinary life but want to experiment with their sexuality. To maintain their anonymity they travel the length of Britain to Mujra drag events so they can experiment in a safe space. These events are a mainstay of real life for men in Asian Britain, and Floyd attended events for years as research. “We’re showing a sub subculture that I think almost no one has seen,” says Floyd. “For like two years I spent pretty much all of my free time going deeper and deeper into this sub sub culture.
“These men pay good money to have a bunch of beautiful drag queens dance for them. You can use your imagination about other things happening behind the scenes. To see that is quite rare. You have to really be in the know.” Really it’s about identity, something you believe Floyd had played with as a concept in his mind for the whole of his life.
He talks about the topic in-person in stream-of-consciousness, thought trains extrapolating into wider discussions, and those discussions into debates. If you left him to it, he wouldn’t look up for hours. “I’ve always felt very confused, and I still don’t know who the hell I am. I don’t think any of us really do. When it comes to sexuality, when it comes to my race. Many of my identity labels and hashtags, they’re constantly changing.”
It inspired the narrative of Unicorns, which he hopes is realistic: “Like what happens in the film, you can feel one thing on a Friday, have an experience on a Saturday, then who are you on the Monday? I think we should embrace that. The world is more ready to understand a film like this.”
Mostly though, it’s just a lovely romance. He veers away from calling it a rom-com, but I like to think it is. It’s about feeling the spark when these two roll around together after years of imagining how rolling around together might feel. “All these things are really great to talk about, but ultimately it’s a love story,” says Floyd, his shoulders relaxing. “I’m not making a film as a sort of activism or polemic. For me, that’s unwise. Then it becomes almost unartistic.”
Unicorns is in selected cinemas and gets a streaming release later this year.