Sunday Morning Coming Down

Sunday Morning Coming Down is a dramatic response to my memories of coming out. In contemporary England gay sex is available on tap - swipe right or wink in a gay bar and you’re bound for the sack. Yet so often the sex is devoid of any emotional connection. It can be fun and filthy, but time and again you wind up feeling isolated and deflated. What’s more, with a lack of LGBT sex-ed in schools and scant friends in the same boat when it comes to orientation, you’re left looking to porn for your sexual vocabulary. A fracture exists between the bravura mask expected of the “out-and-proud”, and the internal feeling that you’re poking around in the dark, trying to find your way. Setting the film in the early 1990s, I deliberately sought out a pre-Internet period where gay representation was less visible. Accordingly, I developed a character (the protagonist Max) lost by this under-representation and struggling to navigate beyond his sexual uncertainty.

Crucially though, I didn’t want to make a “coming-out” film. I prefer queer cinema which respects the specificity of gay ordinariness. The gay and heterosexual experience needs its due after decades ghosting about as subtext in the mainstream, but I search out filmmakers who resist the cliches of LGBT cinema. With this in mind, I shifted the focus onto a relationship between brothers. We don’t watch a tortured gay man head to a cottaging spot to satisfy his desires. Rather, we follow Max and Jordan as they fall back on the comfort of their twinned history (football teams, music tastes, pretensions) - mutual ground on a day where their sexual differences are unspoken but palpable. You wouldn’t necessarily think a film where the climactic scene is set in a glory hole would be touching and sweet, but I hope we achieved that balance.

The British seaside photographed by Martin Parr in the 70s and 80s was a landscape heaving with holiday-makers in garish swimwear. By the 90s many of the lesser known resorts had been reduced to little more than a shell. Lacking the visitors who boosted the economy, the seafront’s peeling paint became symptomatic of a faded British institution. Resisting panoramic wides, our choice of aspect ratio (4:3) weds Max’s claustrophobic experience to a landscape void of its former majesty. At the same time, lingering takes and static frames emphasise the indifference of this landscape to the brothers’ adventure.

Coming to terms with your sexuality isn’t something reducible to binary terms like “in” and “out”, and the ambiguity of the final scene resists neat, singular interpretations. Is Max genuinely buoyed up by Jordan, or is he playing along to mask his disappointment? Max’s experience is distressing, but I was determined to balance the melancholy with moments of lightness that captured the playful nature of the brothers’ relationship and prompted the audience to look beyond the chapter presented in the film