At this year’s iteration of the Edinburgh Film Festival, I sat down with director Will Seefried to discuss his debut feature Lilies Not For Me. The film explores the relationship between old school friends Owen (Fionn O’Shea) and Phillip (Robert Aramayo) as they begin a homosexual relationship in the quiet of the countryside, much to their own internalized, society-prescribed homophobia. Owen, a writer, is content in the quaint while Phil is a doctor whose studies have informed him that homosexuality is “wrong” and begins a harrowing medical process that is often undocumented within queer history. The film is split into two timelines; the relationship between the two men, along with the guest (Louis Hoffman) who appears to unsteady their dynamic; and of Owen, years after this relationship, who is confined to an institution, one designed to recalibrate his sexuality back to heterosexuality. The institution attempts to achieves through forcing gay young men to take part in formal dates with nurses of the establishment. Owen’s date is with Dorothy (Erin Kellyman), and the two soon find themselves less romantically inclined as Dorothy’s allusions to sexuality shift and transform after speaking at length with Owen. Beautiful and destructive in equal measure, Lilies Not For Me is a striking debut that touches on a part of history often seen as lost to the burnt texts of fascism.
The Interview with Lilies Not For Me’s Director Will Seefried
[Editor’s Note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.]
Connor Lightbody: So nice to meet you, Will. I was very surprised to find this out was your debut film. Where did you start the process with the story? How did you arrive at doing a story on the medical practice shown in this?
Will Seefried: I got kind of interested in the history of conversion therapy, noticing that it keeps repeating these cycles of these treatments over time. Different ways of people trying to change other people’s sort of fundamental nature. I went back to be like, where did this begin? And in the process I learned about this procedure and I also learned about these dates that men who were in psychiatric wards would go on with the nurses there to learn about heterosexual courtship and how to be with women. But the history of it is that all these funny gay guys and all these young nurses would form these amazing friendships. These women would become radicalized, working against these institutions from within to get these guys out and back to their lives and back to their lovers. So the story sort of came from these two pieces of history that I found really interesting and in the process of writing one day they just sort of fit together. I wrote the script in beginning of 2021, in lockdown, and then have just been fortunate that it has found a path to being made, which for a first feature is always hard and particularly a period drama
Connor Lightbody: Period drama that goes quite bleak. It’ll be a hard sell. Where do you imagine do you think the audience will come from for this?
Will Seefried: I imagine the queer audience is an important part of who this film is for, reflecting what our stories and our history are is important. But I also think that there’s a broader audience of people who are interested in period romance. So, while there is the bleaker part of the film, and that is a really big part of it, but for me it’s also about all the love stories that we never got to hear. I think that people who value a love story, even if it’s not necessarily a traditional happy ending kind, fluff story, they’ll hopefully get something out of it.
Connor Lightbody: I want to know why Lewis Hoffman eats an orange like biting into an apple. The conversation I had straight after the press screening were unanimous: why did he eat it that way?
Will Seefried: That’s so funny. I mean, that was all Lewis, that choice. I think the wording in the script is something that sort of suggests he devours it. The thinking behind that moment and what I think he was leaning into was how that character just has such an appetite for life, that he is someone who takes a big bite out of life and does things in his own way. He’s not going to just conform to the way you’re meant to eat in an orange if we’re to be digging way too deep into what that moment is. T moment is an expression of this character’s hunger for life. And where he winds up is such a journey from that relationship with himself, his body, his way of existing in the world. It’s a starting point, and we see that contrasted later on.
Connor Lightbody: I joked that it was the most harrowing fruit since Call Me By Your Name and then I found out that there are some producers overlapping between both productions. Can you talk about the relationship and experience with them?
Will Seefried: We were so lucky to have Naima Abed and Emilie Georges from Paradise City and Memento International producing the film. They read the script and were excited by the film but they were like, we don’t have the time. We have too many projects going. Then I was in Paris for a film festival and went and met with them and there was a connection. I felt like they really understood the film, they understood what we were trying to do. Also just on a personal level, Call Me by Your Name is an important film to me so it was really special to get to work with people who were a part of making something I cherish.
Connor Lightbody: I would love to pick your brains on Erin Kellyman. She’s kind of the biggest name in the cast. How did you go about acquiring her?
Will Seefried: Something that I love about Erin. She’s the most egoless, generous, open person you’ll ever meet. She’s the embodiment of sincerity and loveliness. She’s a total delight and I think that impacts the way she makes decisions about what she does. It’s never about the size of the role. That was more about her connection with the material. I had followed her work for some time. I think I saw her first in Les Mis when she did that years and years ago. I just always thought that she was a really fascinating enigmatic presence. And when we met about this role, within the first 30 seconds I was like, this is so clearly the right person for this. Thankfully she felt the same way and we had a terrific collaboration. Particularly her and Fionn. He’s her main scene partner for the course of the film. They’re quite similar actors with their intuitiveness and their connectedness. It was really a joy watching the two of them work.
Connor Lightbody: Is the film based on any actual real life characters?
Will Seefried: No, none of the people are real. All the events that you see are based on true history, but all of the characters are fictional.
Connor Lightbody: Was the asylum a creation of your production team or was that based on a real historical hospital?
Will Seefried: There was a lot of research into the hospitals of the period, what the design was and how those places looked. The same with the cottage. There was a lot of creative inspiration, but neither is based on one literal place. Our costume designer, Grace Snell, who also was the costume designer for The Outrun, asked the question early in the process: Is this film a painting or is it a photograph? And it was such a valuable distinction for me to know that I wanted it to be like a painting and not a photograph, because it wasn’t about giving a to the letter accurate depiction of a time or place. It was more about what the emotional experience is. I think the environments were born out of that as well, of what is the feeling of that place and not the literal, exact representation of it.
Connor Lightbody: Speaking of costumes, there was a kind of fuchsia-coloured suit that Owen wears at one point that I loved. I would never be able to pull it off as I’m a bit of a bigger gentleman, but I wanted to ask about this ravishing costume design you have in the film.
Will Seefried: Well, that suit was actually inspired by one of the images from the history of Bloomsburg Group, where we looked at a lot of old photographs of that community and of their work.
Connor Lightbody: Did you have any specific photographs and paintings that you took inspiration from?
Will Seefried: It’s a great question. I am specifically inspired by the work of Salman Toor. I don’t have one specific painting, but it was sort of the body of his work. Particularly the way he works with the colour green. I think it’s such a versatile color that can feel so natural and organic, but also very sickly and very sort of haunting in a way. My cinematographer Corey Freeman and our production designer Birrie le Roux tried to incorporate a lot of green, using Salman’s work as inspiration for that. There’s also an amazing painter named Mia Chaplin, who’s a South African artist who we used; the painting in the dining hall that’s on the stage in the ward is based off of a painting of hers. Some of her work is peppered through Owen’s Cottage as well. You’ll see some of her work on the walls there tying in into two places.
Connor Lightbody: It is a very open film. I’m hesitant to use the word graphic, but it is vulnerable. There’s nudity in it, but it’s also never lewd. Can we talk about that, and did you have an intimacy coordinator on board?
Will Seefried: Absolutely. We had a wonderful intimacy coordinator. Their name is Loren Loubser. They’re based in South Africa, and they are incredibly sex and body positive, which I think is a real asset as an intimacy coordinator because they were able to navigate the whole process in a way that didn’t feel prudish. Which I think sometimes is the fear that directors or actors have with using intimacy coordinators: are we going to be limited in our ability to fully embody this?; is it going to be policing us?; will we still be telling the story we want to tell? And Loren was just an absolute maverick at making the actors feel so safe and really looking at the intimacy in terms of the story. They come from an acting background as well so they have that literacy of story and of seeking out the emotional truth of what’s going on. Working on the sex scenes became an expression of the relationship between the characters. And Loren was there to really provide this practical guide towards exploring the deeper event that’s taking place between these two people. I am a huge intimacy coordinator fan. It’s such a valuable collaborative tool for a filmmaker and is standard practice these days, especially for a film like this where you are putting people in really vulnerable situations. Then with some of the medical bits had Loren involved too. Making sure that we were keeping everyone safe while also still allowing us to show the danger of this story was important to us.
Connor Lightbody: Going to be vague about it as to not spoil, but what prompted the final moments of the film, with Owen seemingly reclaiming his story back, maybe?
Will Seefried: I guess it came from my own desire to take back the narratives that I inherited my own queerness and of wanting to take what could just be a story that is traumatic and to reclaim control over it. There’s a line in the film where a character says, if you want to hear my story, you have to hear all of it. You can’t just listen to the parts that are harmless and pretty. And I think a lot of times in queer stories that people only look at the trauma or they only look at sort of a surface version of positivity around it. And I think the reality is that those things are always in conversation with each other. So, I wanted to do justice to both parts of that. Ultimately, I think that our stories are ours to tell. And in the end, I wanted the character’s life force to be bigger than the things that are trying to extinguish it.
Connor Lightbody: Was it always to end that way?
Will Seefried: Actually, the final version of the film ends a lot sooner than we originally had anticipated. That sequence carried on into something else that we found to be overstating the message of the film. When we found that moment, where we reach at what is now the ending, it felt like the appropriate place.
Connor Lightbody: Speaking of cutting, did you have any darlings that you cut throughout?
Will Seefried: So many. I think that was one of the biggest lessons and surprises for me in the process was just how rigorous you have to be, how you really have to prioritize the story over your own fondness for a certain scene, a certain day, or a certain moment in someone’s performance. Because I was in love with everyone and everything. It was just this most sacred experience making the film. Everyone there were wonderful inside and out. Our first cut of the film was two hours and ten minutes, and the final is one hour and 36 minutes. So, there’s a fantastic thirty minutes of darlings that are left on the floor. But thankfully, I had an incredible collaboration with my editor Julia Block, who is a very kindred spirit and a creative soulmate in the sense that we share a deep love of the work and a deep love of making the hard decisions that are for the best of the film. So the editing suite was sort of like a war room, where we’d be like, this is what we need to do. This is the hard decision we have to make.
Connor Lightbody: Do you have a most memorable day on set?
Will Seefried: I think the most memorable day was when we went to the beach. We shot in South Africa and the water is truly freezing. So the actors, our cinematographer, the whole camera crew were out in the water doing that, but even when everyone has a coffee and a cigarette getting ready for another take. But it was such an expression of everyone’s willingness to go to challenging places to tell the story. The cold water was such a literal expression of that. And then the romance and the getting to film, the more romantic parts that took place on the beach and the playfulness, it just was we’re all out there on this gorgeous beach. Our producer, Nima was in town at that stage for production, and it just was one of those days where we were all there. Yeah, I mean, that day I think was probably the most memorable.
Connor Lightbody: Can you tell me more about the poem that appears in the film and is the basis for the film’s title?
Will Seefried: The poet’s name is Digby Mackworth Dolben. He was a queer poet who from the late 18 hundreds who I found when I was looking for the poetry and the music of people who were connected to some part of queer history. I was wanting to plug those things into what we were making. I was researching queer poets of the time and stumbled across some of his work and was just reading some of his poems. Then I read Poppies Poem and as soon as I read the line ‘Lilies in the altar vases, not for me’, I was like, oh, that’s the title. It’s funny because I have had many projects where titles have changed over the course of their journey, but from day one, it was always ‘Lilies Not For Me’. I mean, I’m ironically allergic to lilies but the interpretation of the poem is that ust because something is presumed to be right, presumed to be normal, presumed to be beautiful, doesn’t mean that that is true for everyone. And for me, I read it as a metaphor for queerness and for Owen choosing his own path, even when everything is trying to confine him into this more traditional institutionalized version of what it means to love and to live in sacred spaces.
Connor Lightbody: Where did you shoot the pub scene? Was that in London?
Will Seefried: It was actually shot at the Cape Town Film Studios. We were able to shoot on the set of an HBO television show. It was off season, the set was abandoned there, and we were able to get permission to shoot there. And so that’s where that happened. But everything was within sort of 40 minutes of Cape Town, all of production. I mean, that made everything logistically easy, except getting everyone to South Africa in the first place. But the local crews and everyone there are incredible, I mean, it’s an incredible place to make a film.
Connor Lightbody: For South African readers. Where was the best place you visited while you were there? Restaurant location, museum?
Will Seefried: My husband is South African and he’s my producing partner as well. We have a production company that’s based between Cape Town and Los Angeles, so we spend a lot of time there. So South Africa, Cape Town is our second home really. But for people who want to visit, I highly recommend going to Babylonstoren, which is a wine farm. Walk through the gardens, have a beautiful meal. It’s a really magical place.
Connor Lightbody: So, you started writing this at the beginning of 2021. The two characters, Owen and Phillip, they have this kind of relationship that is separate from everyone around. Was that informed by your own interaction with the pandemic and the loneliness that people experienced?
Will Seefried: Potentially? That’s really interesting, I’d never thought of that. That could very much be true. I think what the more conscious thinking was at the time was how do we love each other outside of the view of others. These two old friends who clearly have such a deep love and connection with one another, who get each other, who are in this idyllic cottage in the countryside, that’s the perfect setting for their love story. And it’s hijacked by this fear and this violence and this desire to change who you are. I thought having that idyllic setting for their relationship where they got to be away on their own would help to make what ultimately happens more impactful and act as a stark contrast to the ward where everything is very supervised.
Connor Lightbody: Did the fact that Phil was a doctor inform his opinion on his own homosexuality?
Will Seefried: I think so. I mean, it’s a bit of a chicken and egg thing, I suppose, with that character. And I’m sure Rob would have his own strong opinion about it. I think that Phil really wants to fix himself and that doctor as a profession is kind of an expression of that. This becomes an almost playing God kind of role in some cases. And I think in the case of their story and of this specific procedure that is very present.
Connor Lightbody: Where does religion fit into the framework of this?
Will Seefried: That was a dialogue through the process. I think if you’re looking at the time period, and at the subject matter, religion traditionally would play a really big role in that story. And while it is present, for me, it felt like perhaps the most well-trodden path in terms of stories about this subject matter. And I was interested in telling it another way. What if we don’t explore it in that way? What if faith or belief isn’t through a religious lens in this story, but it’s about something that maybe feels a little bit more contemporary or maybe a little bit more accessible to a modern queer viewer. And so I think it’s there in the subtext, but again, it was a painting not a photograph. So there’s no crucifixes hanging around or anything. In some ways, religion and a psychiatric ward are both institutions that have a set of rules that they’re trying to get people to conform to, so I think that the institutional presence that it would’ve served in the story is mostly embodied by the ward.
Lilies Not For Me screened at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 2024.
You can learn more about the film at the Edinburgh site for the title.
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