Barry Jenkins and Adele Romanski Had to Give Up on ‘Aftersun’ Before Charlotte Wells Could Finish It

The director of the year's great discovery explains to IndieWire why she needed so much time to make her enigmatic debut — and where it will lead her next.

Eric Kohn

   

Charlotte Wells attends the “Aftersun” Opening Gala at the Edinburgh International Film Festival 

Getty Images

Charlotte Wells’ breakout moment has been a long time coming. Over the past decade, the 35-year-old Scottish filmmaker attended film school with business aspirations, directed a handful of short films, and produced a low-budget feature. By the time her feature-length debut “Aftersun” made waves at Cannes, scored distribution with A24, and established her as a major new filmmaking talent, she had been tinkering with the project for years.

“There was a mystery to the process of discovering exactly what it was,” Wells said in an interview with IndieWire from A24’s New York offices this month. “It was a challenging project to describe to people and a challenging script to read.”

That’s because “Aftersun” hovers in a state of poetic mystery from start to finish. The layered drama finds 12-year-old Sophie (Frankie Corio) on vacation at a Turkish resort with her father Calum (Paul Mescal) in the 1990s, while the adult Sophie recalls their time together. The movie exists almost exclusively within Sophie’s delicate memories as she sifts through recollections of her single father as a troubled man attempting to hide his full emotional state from his daughter’s prying eyes. Shot in lush 35mm, “Aftersun” is the most evocative look at an adolescent gaze coming to terms with the adult world since “Moonlight.”

It should come as no surprise, then, that “Aftersun” was shepherded along by Pastel, the production company co-founded by “Moonlight” director Barry Jenkins and his longtime producing partner Adele Romanski. It was Romanski who pushed her old film school pal Jenkins to get cracking on “Moonlight” after years of hesitation, and she found herself in a similar position when she first encountered Wells in 2017.

“Her short films were pretty fucking brilliant,” Romanski said in a phone interview, joined by Jenkins. Romanski recalled her first lunch meeting with Wells, while Pastel was shooting Jenkins’ “If Beale Street Could Talk” in New York, as an intriguing first step. “I was curious to hear what she was working on and how the storytelling style for her shorts would translate into that longer format,” Romanski said. “Then we waited patiently for years.”

Wells found herself struggling through the seed of an idea — a father and daughter on vacation together, where secrets bubble to the surface — but couldn’t get much further (the story is not autobiographical). “I kept promising them a script,” Wells said. “I kept saying, ‘Give me two weeks.’ It was always a constant source of stress. I knew that’s how long it would take me to write it. I just couldn’t quite make that day come. Eventually it came after they had stopped calling.”

On the Pastel side, Wells seemed to be dragging her feet even by their own standards.