Ben Hardy, Jason Patel and co-directors James Krishna Floyd and Sally El Hosaini take us through the making of their brilliantly entertaining drama.
When Ben Hardy and Jason Patel met for a chemistry read on their new British drama, Unicorns, their connection was obvious to everyone in the room.
“When they did the first take of the first scene”, co-director Sally El Hosaini says, “It was just magic. James [Krishna Floyd, writer and co-director] and I just looked at each other, and we knew we had the film.”
Now, the filmmakers just had to keep that chemistry intact. On a giddy tube ride home, El Hosaini and Floyd hatched a plan. For the two months before cameras were set to roll, the film’s leads would be kept completely apart – no exchanging numbers, no joint rehearsals. They were even separated at the table read.
“They had such an immediate connection, we didnāt want them to lose that,” Floyd recalls. “But we also didnāt want them to become too familiar. We wanted them to basically fall in love with each other, and connect and discover each other on camera.”
On top of that, the duo would reconvene moments before probably the film’s most challenging scene. After weeks of a slowly blossoming relationship, single dad Luke (Hardy) and drag queen Aysha (Patel) finally make love. For Patel, for whom Unicorns marks his feature debut, it was something of a trial by fire.
“Iām one of those people that likes to dive in headfirst,” he says. “It was exciting, but very nerve-wracking. But thatās kind of the energy they wanted. I was just like, ‘If we can do this and have a really great day, then we can conquer anything.’”
While intimacy coordinators for these sorts of scenes have become something of an industry staple in the last few years, both Unicorns’ stars and its directors were keen to make this scene work without one.
“The whole point of it is it’s these two people who are very vulnerable, who are discovering each other,” Floyd says. “There’s a real danger and a tension in that scene. We were shooting it very, very intimate, close ups of eyes and details of bodies and all that. You can’t act that, you know? We wanted to really feel that vulnerability.”
“I’ve worked with lots of intimacy coordinators”, Hardy adds. “And we did have one on for the opening sex scene. I’m still all for intimacy coordinators. But in ideal world, we wouldnāt have to have them, because it does kind of disrupt the flow of things a little bit in terms of in terms of filming.”
By this time, Unicorns had been percolating in Floyd’s mind for nearly eight years. Starting as a feature script, it briefly sparked plans for a TV series and a very different kind of lockdown project for its directing duo. As partners in the real world, Floyd and El Hosaini thought this would be a fitting project to make their co-directorial debut.
“Sally, obviously, is a writer-director,” Floyd says. “But she did do some acting when she was younger, and she has an incredible empathy for the actor’s process. And Iām an actor first, but Iāve been learning and thinking about writing and directing for a long time, so I probably know more about cinematography than the average actor does. So we kind of knew a lot about each otherās process already.”
“We chatted a lot about it before we started, and we over-complicated it, like we always do,” El Hosaini says. “Then when we actually came to shoot it, we realised we both wanted to do everything together. So we let go of any preconceived ideas in that way. We have such a shorthand in life, as well as in work, that just fed into the project.”
For Patel, the physicality of his drag queen persona was only half the battle. Where Ayesha is sassy, confident and extroverted, Ashiq struggles to escape the expectations of his deeply conservative family.
“I actually treated them both as two separate characters,” Patel says. “I printed the script twice, so that I could write my thoughts on it like two separate people. My whole objective was, like, ‘How do I bring these people together?’ It was kind of like Jekyll and Hyde.”
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The monstrous analogy is particularly apt, because Unicorns emerges into an environment which often seems intent on demonisation. But it was important to the filmmakers to address the characters on the screen, as well as the audience, with the authenticity and respect they deserved.
El Hosaini says: “We wanted to honour the real people of those communities, not just the Gaysian scene or the majority Muslim family, but also the Essex family.”
“You know, mainstream audiences so far have really loved Unicorns,” Floyd adds. “Ultimately, you know, it’s a love story. And it’s about family. It’s quite a classic setup.”
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That focus on empathy and accessibility is visible from the off, and is just one of the things that makes Unicorns feel like a special kind of film.
“Sometimes when films deal with quite serious thematic issues, they can get quite heavy with that,” Hardy says. “Thereās no right or wrong about that, you know, itās just a subjective thing. But sometimes they end up in this sort of arthouse world and it becomes a little bit like youāre watching something to learn something as opposed to like, having a piece of entertainment and learning on the way.”
It’s a statement once again echoed by Floyd. “This film is currently playing in Vue cinemas up and down the country as their lead film,” he said. “That audience is not just the queer audience. Itās the average Joe and Josephine, who want to have an experience like this about family and love and trying to be yourself. That’s the power of cinema.”
Unicorns is in UK cinemas now.