“You can only truly tell stories if they’re in your skin”: Rebecca Lenkiewicz and Fiona Shaw on Hot Milk

For director Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s debut behind the camera, the accomplished screenwriter of Ida (2013), Disobedience (2017) and She Said (2022) chose to adapt Hot Milk, the acclaimed 2016 novel by South African novelist Deborah Levy.

Set chiefly in a quiet Spanish coastal town where Rose (Fiona Shaw) and daughter Sofia (Emma Mackey) are staying, the film follows the pair’s last-ditch attempt to get Rose to walk again by enlisting the help of Dr Gomez, who runs an unorthodox clinic nearby. Rose has been in a wheelchair since her husband left them when Sofia was four, and Sofia has been her primary carer for many years, a situation which has perhaps hindered progressing a career in anthropology. A hot, tetchy atmosphere is given some relief when Sofia meets mysterious German seamstress Ingrid (Vicky Krieps), but this burgeoning relationship has its own complications.

On a suitably scorching day amid London’s June heatwave, Lenkiewicz and Shaw sat down to discuss the film and its tricky parent-child relationship in a plush office building near King’s Cross station.

What was it about Deborah Levy’s novel that appealed to you?

Rebecca Lenkiewicz: I loved the three female characters and how the stories wove together. I thought there were so many colours in it. It’s so much about female resilience and sensuality and sexuality. It was a wonderful feast, and I thought it was very cinematic. People have said, “Isn’t it a challenge?” because it’s first person and it’s very circular in many ways. I loved how intense and beautiful the relationship was between Rose and Sofia.

Fiona Shaw: I love the scale of the character, that this is a huge person trapped in a wheelchair. You could say the main plot is not Rose, or you could say the other is a huge subplot, but she’s fundamental to this relationship of mother and daughter. And so it’s very exciting to explore that with a very good director.

Do you feel damned if you do, damned if you don’t? If you are really faithful to a book, people go, “How predictable.” If you go wildly off-piste, they say, “How dare you take such liberties?”

FS: I think she [Lenkiewicz] did both. The great thing was she’s writer and director, but she’s made it into a film. For that you have to leave the book, sometimes quite dramatically. She made Rose Irish and gave her a different story. I felt that was a real leap away from the book in a good way.

RL: You have to depart, because else it’s not under your skin. You can only truly tell stories if they’re in your skin. Otherwise you’re following and that’s not really art.

How do you overcome the question of an interior narrative without resorting to a voiceover?

RL: I did think about voiceover but very soon thought it was wrong. It was just about watching her and seeing the journey of Sofia’s character exploding and how much can be thrown at her. With Rose and Sofia, there’s such a lot going on inside, so you need actors who are so exciting to watch, because it’s not necessarily about speeches. It’s just about the subtext and their expressions, and it’s very delicate work.

FS: I think Rose does speak her own interior dialogue. She just says it all. I don’t think there’s anything else going on, except what she says. I don’t think she’s inhibiting. In that way it was very freeing. Of course, she’s not necessarily the most pleasant person in the world, but I love that Rose says everything she feels.

Do you empathise with Rose’s situation?

FS: We all have massive blind spots about ourselves. I find it very hard to admit that. I’d like to think that I don’t have blind spots about myself. But one of my favourite lines in the whole thing is when she speaks about the doctor and says, “I didn’t pay all this money for a chat.” It never crosses her mind that the ailment is not physiological. I think that’s clearly very inadequate to the situation, but very funny, because we all live in the gap between who we think we are and who we are.

How much of Rose’s condition is psychosomatic?

RL: We decided on a real condition where people can walk and can’t walk, and it’s a very harrowing condition, because it’s a grey area for doctors. In the book it’s more mysterious, but I think it’s from trauma in our version. That trauma is so deep in Rose’s body. As she grew up, she was somebody who didn’t know who she was. That shame in an Irish family, that’s in her body.

FS: Dr Gomez is so interesting. He doesn’t name it or diagnose anything. But he gets on to the fact that he doesn’t think it’s entirely physiological. And so he’s in blind territory too. He doesn’t know the answer. If he did, he’d say, “You’ve got this, and we’ve got to do this.” He doesn’t. He just prods and dares to take them into a much more dangerous area of both not knowing. He’s an instinctive person.

Do you empathise with Sofia’s position?

RL: Sofia’s been a carer since she was four, and that is huge to take the weight of someone’s condition on you. They adore each other, but it’s so hard and the codependency has become habitual; Sofia hides herself through her mother’s condition. It’s a good excuse not to go out into the world, and only in this environment touch paper happens, and ignition happens with a love affair.

Was there anything unexpected that Emma Mackey brought to the character?

RL: She brought a life to it that was very vivid. When you watch her, thinking both mother and daughter, there’s a lot of kind of close-ups where you just are fascinated by what is going on.

FS: I love working with Emma, and she is very intelligent, very brave and very elegant. Somehow that was good fun too, because the mum is not elegant, but she has this beautiful daughter. Sometimes Emma would slightly mimic Rose: when they’re really into it or when they’re quarrelling, she sounds slightly like Rose. I thought that was a very good idea.

RL: Fiona stayed in the wheelchair, and Emma would wheel her around all day through the set. They were very much a couple.

Do we as a society place too much obligation on children to look after their parents or not enough?

FS: I think in this instance Rose doesn’t want to let go of Sofia at all because she’s been her friend, her main thing since she’s four, since the husband’s left. I don’t believe Rose has consciously done anything. It’s not conscious what she’s done in the wheelchair. But it does certainly control her daughter. She doesn’t really want her to leave. I think a lot of mothers don’t want their daughters to leave. They say they do, but they don’t, not really. I remember my mother saying that: “You now live in London.” I said, “Well, I did all the training, so I have to be there.” What she meant is, she wouldn’t mind me having a job down the road and coming for Sunday lunch. I think that’s fair enough.

We go through these states of being very young when your parents are everything, and then you get older and it’s “Oh, maybe they don’t know everything.” And then as you get older again, it’s like, “Actually, they did speak a lot of sense.”

FS: Yeah. And they are everything. You have to worry about them. I worry about them, my mother, all the time. But the problem for Sofia is that she’s not even able to concentrate on her work. That’s the really terrible thing. Because the mother has no self-editing powers to say, for the next two hours, “I’ll just read my book.” Two minutes later, she wants something. I think that is selfishness. Beyond, sort of, narcissism. 

Did you have any other films or filmmakers in your mind as an influence while preparing for the film?

RL: Myself and [cinematographer] Christopher Blauvelt built up a big folder of shots and scenes, and actually the references we went for were more static than other films. We did talk about Fear Eats the Soul [1974]. It’s nothing really to do with our film, but it just kept coming into my mind, in terms of the colours and the mise en scène, and how the bodies react in space there. It’s very sparse. Beautiful. It’s so much about love, and how love just happens.

We talked about a lot of photographers. We had Bill Brandt, with very abstract bodies on beaches, Francesca Woodman’s very mysterious photos, and quite a lot of lesbian photography in the 1970s.

Fiona, did you come into it with any other characters or ideas in mind?

FS: [Samuel] Beckett, probably. I think Winnie in Happy Days has an element of Rose. She actually is much more gabblish than Rose. But I think women full of life, despite being trapped, is a very interesting dynamic. Quite hard to play and very rewarding to play.

What made you go ahead with filming in the hot Greek summer in 2023 despite warnings not to from producer Giorgos Karnavas?

RL: It was just the logistics. It was the only time that everyone could be together, and it was the only time we could get our amazing cinematographer. Because he always works with Kelly Reichardt, and there was a gap. So we had to do it then, and I thought they were being a bit dramatic. They were saying, “Nobody films in Greece in August.” I was like, “We’ll be fine.” Then of course we realised why. It was absolutely crazy. But we got there, and we swam and there were good diversions from the heat.

Hot Milk is in cinemas, including BFI Southbank, now.