Shuttlecock

Badminton and masculinity. To me, no two words feel more synonymous. Tight gripping of rackets. Strong lunging calf muscles. The hard smashing of shuttlecocks.

My relationship with masculinity has always been introspecting. I come from a family of tradesmen, and having a fascination with the arts at a young age often felt like a dichotomy of manliness. As my family inadvertently nurtured me into a typically male mould, curiosity in the arts allowed me to explore a personal definition of what it means to be a man.

This contrast between how men feel and how men feel they should be is what I wanted to explore in Shuttlecock. After putting individual ideas of masculinity under the microscope, I aimed to question what it means to be a modern man and how the social ideas around gender have changed over the last 30 years. I wanted to interrogate how someone who subscribes to traditional male values would struggle to accept society's evolving attitudes towards gender.

To do this, I placed my story in the manliest, most testosterone-fuelled sport I could find. Badminton.

I knew my story needed to be in the sports film genre. I chose badminton as a sport I rarely saw on film, but also one that didn't seem typically associated with masculine values to allow space for comedy. Having a men's only club created an all-male microcosm, exaggerating the ridiculousness of the alpha-male mindset presented. To articulate this alpha-male mindset of the protagonist, I chose a 1970s aesthetic, rooting the story to his past-tense worldview and riffing off popular manly genre films of the time.

I knew there was one crucial component in crafting a film all about men. Women. Working with an all-male screen presence, I insisted Shuttlecock had a 50/50 gender split in production roles.