Sam Yates is best known as a director for the theater, his most famous work being the one-man show of VANYA starring Andrew Scott. He made his feature debut as a film director with the erotic thriller Magpie, starring Daisy Ridley (Star Wars) and Shazad Latif (Profile) as a couple who finds themselves on unsteady ground.
We at FandomWire got to speak with Sam Yates, the director of Magpie, about his feature debut. Check out the interview below!
Magpie Sam Yates Interview
FandomWire: One of the things I love about Magpie is that it’s a slow burn, but it’s also consistently fun and a tight 90 minutes. How did you achieve this balance in the tension?
Sam Yates: Well, yes, tension is very important, isn’t it to a noir or thriller. I guess we create it in a few ways, through the actors, especially Daisy’s performance. Everything we tried to do in camera and like design was to give a sense of like something coming, something not being quite right, a sense of like paranoia and repressed aggression that threatens to bubble through. So there’s a mixture of things. The lighting too, trying to create a kind of steely, cold, restrained palette — and quite harrsh. We shot it in winter, which was quite harsh and gray. And to get that all to bear and bring it all on screen.
FW: Magpie is a very sensual film, but it doesn’t show much sex or nudity. How do you think the film is able to achieve such psychosexual tension without these elements?
Yates: I’m glad you found it sensual, because I think that’s what we all tried to do. I mean, costume is a big part of that. Natalie Roar was our costume designer and Amanda McArthur was our production designer. The house itself was designed to be kind of cold but also lush in a way.
We concentrated to create the sensuality where it was needed in the story. We concentrated quite a bit on faces and the mouth and eyes and the features of the face and the angles of the face, and tried to light them in such a way to give them either a softness or a kind of warmth.
And obviously, in the text messages in the film, there is a text message affair, and we really wanted that to be visual, to kind of express the feeling that you get when you’re into it with someone on text messages and express the theme visually.
FW: I think the soundtrack of Magpie, from the wonderful score to the needle drops, plays a big part in establishing the atmosphere. Could you speak a bit to the selection of these pieces?
Yates: So our composer is Isobel Waller-Bridge, and she does a great job. We were talking about the great composers of tension. Obviously, Penderecki, Jonny Greenwood, Morton Feldman were a big influence on this, and then Isobel took those references and took the picture away and came up with something wonderful and original.
And then I suppose we have three particular needle drops, the final one being the one I knew I wanted from the beginning tonally. I was like, “If we can get to that section and that song makes sense and works to picture, then we will have done the film right to my view.”
I carry around playlists for months, if not years, on projects. It’s actually one of the most pleasurable parts, building a soundtrack to a fictional world that you haven’t even made yet. And then when you can tap into it, it sends you down rabbit holes, and you’re listening to all kinds of stuff.
FW: Magpie is your first film as a director. Did you find it intimidating to make your debut on such a high-profile project, or perhaps not since you’ve done so many high-profile things for the stage?
Yates: I suppose this side of it, it feels natural. There’s a rule I try to live by which is if you’re not frightened, you’re not really doing it right. I think David Bowie said something like “You need to be just far enough out in the water that your feet can’t quite touch the ground, and that’s when you’re in a position to make something interesting.”
So I generally try to do the things that frighten me the most. I wanted to do a feature for a while, and of course, when this script dropped in my inbox, I was very excited. And Daisy was attached, Shazad was attached, that was incredibly exciting. I was definitely nervous for sure, but nerves are great. Nerves are a natural part of anything that you want to do, so I tried to use them to power me rather than destroy me.
FW: Magpie shows some of the challenges of working with child actors from a family perspective, while obviously you’ve had to deal with the challenges from a filmmaker’s perspective. What do you think are some of the biggest challenges and rewards of working with child actors?
Yates: Hiba Ahmed played Matilda in the film, and this is her first ever piece of screen work. So Daisy and I went to Hiba’s house once she’d been cast and took care to spend a little bit of time with her and her mum, Hannah, so that we wouldn’t be strangers to her on set. And Daisy was really, really wonderful in being with Hiba on set, and so was Matilda [Lutz], who had scenes with her.
And we brought on a wonderful director to sort of work with Hiba named Lizzie, who kind of just kept her kind of energy up because it’s really difficult for a kid to be hanging around for hours and hours and hours in a cold trailer. But she was so brilliant, and I treated her no differently than an actor of adult age. And you try to make it fun, you try to make it playful, but that’s true of any actor, I think.
FW: And with some of the darker subject matter, did you find that difficult?
Yates: She was protected from the context of some of the things that were happening. So she wasn’t aware of the full story, but she could read between the lines, and she would say very insightful things about the Shahzad character, Ben,understanding that some of the stuff he was doing was bad. Not to put any judgement here.
She was playing the scene she was in, and wasn’t necessarily aware of the rest. And she hasn’t seen the film. Her parents came to see our friends, cast and crew screening. We were very delighted, and Hiba was there afterwards, and we all got to say hello.
FW: I think many of the locations you shot the film in are incredible, almost becoming characters in the film in a way. How did you discover some of these locations?
Yates: Well, we have a great location manager, Ross Kirkman, so it starts there. The house is the hero location, and we looked at a lot of houses. And anyone who’s had shooting in the house will know that there’s a lot of people and equipment. So we needed something of a certain size, but more so we really like that the house is kind of oversized in a way.
It’s kind of like an enlarged version of the dream house. It’s in the country, has water by it, and it has a lot of glass, it has beautiful furniture. But in a way, having achieved that aspiration as a couple, it’s started to destroy them. It’s just too big for them. It’s too far away. It’s isolating.
And for Annette, Daisy’s character, when she’s left alone, I very much wanted this feeling that she was very dwarfed by it and that this house had some sort of agenda against her, or at least she felt that. So this house became cold, grim, and then when the kids came home, she made it into a warm family home. So we wanted it to feel isolated and scary when she’s by itself, and then warm and hospitable when the kids were home.
FW: This has been a huge year for you between Magpie and VANYA. Where do you go from here? Are you planning to return to theatre, do you want to stay working in film?
Yates: I’m really greedy. I really like all of them. I like television too. I’m just about to finish a miniseries — an Agatha Christie called Towards Zero for BBC. So I like all the genres, and sometimes I’m kind of driven by the story. Some stories are just suited better to one format. But my immediate focus after VANYA is feature number two, which I’m really excited about. So that’s where my energy is being channeled at the moment.
Magpie is now playing in theaters.
