A MOVIE’S METAMORPHOSIS
Led by powerhouse performances from leads Andrea Riseborough and Brenda Blethyn – with the pair scooping Best Joint Performance at the Tribeca Film Festival – Dragonfly explores an unusual friendship between two vastly different neighbours. Behind the camera, Girls on Film Awards nominee Vanessa Whyte BSC made the most of Super 16 film and a unique Yorkshire location to capture every intricate detail.
Like the insect from which it gets its name, Dragonfly changed and evolved during its life cycle. Reading more as a black comedy back in 2020, and initially named Magpie, the earliest script differed notably to the finished version audiences will have seen in cinemas. Rather, it was “very scary” and “darkly funny”, its director of photography, Vanessa Whyte BSC, explains.
The process of evolution from script to screen undoubtedly shaped the final story, with Paul Andrew Williams’ latest feature constantly shifting – tonally, narratively and visually – across its runtime, never quite letting the viewer sit comfortably in what they are seeing. Following the unlikely friendship between insecure care leaver Colleen (Andrea Riseborough) and retired pensioner Elsie (Brenda Blethyn), there is a persistent sense of unease throughout this story. While their odd couple dynamic becomes increasingly charming, even moving, there’s always a feeling that it could quite quickly implode. This ambiguity is what drew Whyte to work on the project – once again teaming up with her regular collaborator Williams behind the camera.
“Paul sent me the script back in 2020 and I loved it. I just thought it was a brilliant story, very gripping,” she explains. “It’s quite different, the script that I read, to what the final film is – not in terms of plot as much as tone. It was much funnier. It was like a dark comedy, but very scary as well, yet it still had elements of that sweet heart. But I think we made a much kinder, sweeter, more sensitive film than what I read originally. I love what it became too.”
Driving that sweet, sensitive side of the film is the relationship between Riseborough’s Colleen and Blethyn’s Elsie. Neighbours for around a year before having a proper conversation, the pair quickly find solace in each other’s company; Elsie gains a carer who actually cares, Colleen gains – for the first time in her life – a proper friend. Despite the original script being almost half a decade old and conceived during COVID, the themes of loneliness, class and ageing remain prevalent, with the core messages, and that core friendship, hitting home with force.
For Whyte, bringing this friendship to life centred around one thing. “I think a lot of it is about physical proximity,” she muses. “When they’re in the same scenes together, at the beginning they’re still quite apart. They’re talking through the doorway. They have a cup of tea in the living room, but they’re sitting on other sides of the room. Then they slowly come together. And I think a lot of that is just blocking and staging. There’s a scene where Elsie’s in her armchair, and Colleen is upright on the sofa, trying to be really polite. She doesn’t really know how to speak, and she’s got these fancy teacups. She’s never really had tea made for her before, so she doesn’t really know how to interact, she’s not comfortable with that. Often, Elsie’s having to turn around to see Colleen, because she’s not quite aligned with her. And that was actually written in the script, that Colleen is behind her, so she’s always having to turn and include her.
“But then you get to these very warm scenes where Colleen’s massaging Elsie’s wrist, or she’s drying her hair, and that’s where you really see the intimate connection that’s being built. So I think it’s a combination of performance, how it’s shot, how the characters fit into the room and the dialogue. Hopefully, we reach a nice spot where everyone meets in the same place to sell the same story.”
Powerful performances
As well as telling the tale between the two, Dragonfly carves out time to explore each individual character’s mental state, often spending extended sequences diving into their psyche without saying a word. One particular scene, where Colleen follows a makeup tutorial on YouTube, only to have her self-esteem lowered even further in the process, provides a microcosm of Whyte’s ability to capture an actor’s performance with maximum impact on the viewer.
“That makeup scene, I was in tears by the end of it, it was so moving,” Whyte reveals. “I think that might have been our first or second day with Andrea. She’s an incredible actress, and she totally inhabited Colleen. For this scene, it was only Andrea, myself, my focus puller and the boom operator – not even the director was in the room. He just said, ‘I just want her to watch the video on her own. She’s got her makeup. We’re going to do it once, and we’re not going to do it again.’ That’s how Andrea wanted to do it and how Paul wanted to do it. So it was up to me, but we hadn’t planned the scene. It wasn’t like, ‘Then we can do mascara, and then you’re going to do your lipstick.’ I just had a zoom on my shoulder and we just went for it. We did one roll of film for 10 minutes, and that’s the shot.”
To use a cliché, there is a third main character in Dragonfly – the location. Shot in semi-detached bungalows in Knottingley, Wakefield, the audience almost instantly feels a sense of place in this quiet, bungalow-filled housing estate, with the buildings, gardens and people bringing the suburban melodrama to life.
“We had to shoot in Yorkshire because it was partly financed by Screen Yorkshire,” Whyte explains. “But obviously Yorkshire is an incredibly vast county, so we spent a long time looking. I’ve seen 1,000 bungalows between Bradford, Leeds and Wakefield. It is a great place to film in terms of getting a crew and kit. Every shoot has to be serviceable – we didn’t want to be so remote that we didn’t have an easy base.
“What was really hard about finding the location was finding two houses that were willing to do it. We’d looked at so many different locations, and then this particular estate where we ended up, in Knottingley, we loved, but the people initially weren’t interested. We were going to be there for four weeks in that place, it’s a very tiny selection of houses, most of them are elderly residents, and it’s very disruptive. We weren’t a big unit – we didn’t have 20 trucks or anything, we probably had three. But we’re still running a generator every day, it’s still noisy. We’re still turning up at six in the morning, leaving at eight at night – it is disruptive.
“Thankfully, we had this amazing location manager, Jamie Gordon, who is this lovely, kind soul, and he just befriended everybody on the estate and made everybody feel brilliant, and was so sweet and kind. He actually plays the postman in the film, and there’s a really sweet scene where he walks past one of the other residents and they have a little chat, and it was like, ‘That’s exactly him.’ In the end, because of him, everybody was on our side and was really interested, and they helped us to make the film.”
Whyte often uses long, lingering, static shots on Super 16 film to take in this third character, giving audiences time to soak in the location, its personality. For this, she used the ARRI Arriflex 416 with a mix of Panavision Super Speeds and Zeiss Ultra 16s.
While the shooting format often adds a dreamy, enigmatic quality to these scenes, using film was a natural decision for Whyte and her team. “Super 16 is such a look now, because we’re so used to digital, but obviously 10, 15 years ago, it would have been really normal,” she says. “Paul had really wanted to shoot on film. That was something that he’d suggested originally. I had naturally assumed we couldn’t afford it because our budget was so small. But we went Super 16 – and we loved it, it felt really organic. It just felt right for the film and the story, the nostalgia and Elsie’s age – everything felt right about it.”
Without diving into specifics, Dragonfly takes a dramatic turn in its final act, with the film’s sensitivity and sweetness replaced with something far more sinister. It culminates in a shocking finale – one that posed Whyte some of her toughest challenges. “The finale was always in the script,” Whyte explains. “From the very beginning, I knew it was like that. As I say, the first script I read was much darker, it was extreme, so that ending was less surprising. But because this film becomes so sincere, it turns into something devastatingly bleak.
“It was really, really hard to pull off the final sequence. We just didn’t have any prep time. I had nine days’ prep on this film in total – for a feature, that’s bananas. I was really nervous about it.But I think it does its job. When I’ve been to see it with audiences, it often leaves them speechless at the end. So I think it worked out.” As speechless audience members ourselves, we have to agree.
