“I was reaching for life as it feels, not life as it is”: Naqqash Khalid on In Camera

Director Naqqash Khalid explains how Simpsons memes, geometric art and a course in person-centred therapy helped pave the way for his slippery satire of the British film industry, In Camera.

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Naqqash Khalid

As an English lecturer with no formal filmmaking training, Naqqash Khalid wanted to be prepared for his first day as a director on a feature film set for In Camera, an ethereal satire of the British film and TV industry. There was only one thing for it: take a 12-week course in person-centred therapy. Khalid decided that he wanted his camera to be a ‘therapist’ to the film’s taciturn lead, Aden (Nabhaan Rizwan), telling his cinematographer Tasha Back: “No matter what this subject does, we’re just going to accept it unconditionally”.

It might sound odd, until you see the film, which feels like a claustrophobic therapy session, where previously inarticulable feelings are wrenched to the surface, raising more questions than answers. It follows the suffocating transformation of Aden, a young British-Pakistani actor struggling to book gigs beyond playing a corpse on a mediocre police procedural. He spends a lot of time covered in fake blood, but the everyday violence he encounters is very real, the kind found in the gaze of casting directors who request a generic ‘Middle Eastern’ accent, then try to minimise the harm with a smile that says ‘hey, we’re all friends here, so just “have a play”’. Each aggression chips something away, until Aden hallows himself out altogether. 

It is a big swing for a debut director to mock the film industry while working within it. But Khalid seems more interested in finding a film language to capture how the industry makes marginalised people feel than taking shots at the status quo. A deep, analytical thinker, he explained over Zoom that his well of influences for In Camera included everything from the anti-colonial writing of Frantz Fanon to Spongebob Squarepants memes to Bessel van der Kolk’s book The Body Keeps the Score. Such disparate references offer some insight into the film’s anarchic atmosphere, but even for Khalid, its protagonist – or client ? – Aden remains unknowable. “I feel like I caught a lot of anxiety from him,” he says, “you feed off the work, and then the work feeds off you. You give so much of yourself away.”

I read that you pitched the screenplay for In Camera like an album, and presented a document filled with memes and descriptions. First of all, what kind of memes?  

It feels like ages ago, now. It was 2019. I had a really clear idea of what I wanted this to be. I’d been thinking about it for a few years at that point, and it had a Side A and Side B and every scene was a track. And there were interludes that punctuated the narrative. 

I started with a lot of geometric abstractions, and looking at tessellating patterns. I’m kind of obsessed with structure. I wanted it to have loops and almost be in dialogue with itself. I was thinking a lot about Anwar Khalifa paintings and Rasheed Araeen’s artworks. I had all sorts of memes: Simpsons memes, SpongeBob memes. When you’re on the internet a lot, which I was at the time, you just start thinking in all of these different ways. Memes feel like modern Dadaist art, they [have] this collective meaning that we’ve all agreed upon and encapsulate a certain time, and humour about the world. I felt like the film was quite like that in a way. 

I think I was very aware that I was quite naive and I was coming at this medium as an outsider, because I had no formal training or anything. And I wanted to hold on to that. I always start with a set of inarticulate feelings and I want to go on a journey to communicate those things, whether with memes or structural ideas. It culminated in this 57-page Word document. And I guess that Word document just allowed for a lot of fluidity. 

I eventually had to buy Final Draft – when I could afford it – and put it into something that looked like a screenplay. It’s like playing when you were a kid, you need to be left alone – imagine things and allow the process to be malleable.

You’ve described the film as a colonial fairytale. What do you mean by that? 

One of the first things I knew about this film is that it was going to be a fairytale. I was reading a lot of critical literature – Malcolm X, bell hooks, Angela Davis, Naomi Klein. I feel like everything I’m doing is in response to 2016 – the chaotic times out of uni and what was going on with the world. I knew that [there] were going to be three characters and I knew, in a subtle way, I wanted to have them share a colonial history. It was really intentional to cast three people who felt like they had shared colonial links with the British Empire. Rory [Fleck Byrne’s] character is Irish, Amir [El-Masry’s] character is Egyptian and Nabhaan [Rizwan’s] character [Aden] is Pakistani. 

I’m really interested in how capitalism kind of invented race, and how race can change over time, how people could come into whiteness. If this film was a hundred years ago, Rory could be the lead and he wouldn’t be considered white, considering the Irish struggle. I think I was going on a journey of Aden coming into a whiteness, in the film. They’re not things that an audience sees on the surface. But I wanted every single thing to be intentional. So to have this shared horror be colonial was really interesting to me.

Nabhaan Rizwan as Aden

 

In Camera grapples with the violence film inflicts on actors through its gaze. How did you approach that dynamic on set as a new director, when you’re dealing with a satirical view of this world? 
It’s a question that I asked myself a lot at the beginning of this process. I was very conscious that I’m coming at this medium as an outsider. I’m inheriting tools that were not built for me. But I, too, am not immune to reproducing the same type of violence, just because I’m from a marginal identity. It sounds quite pretentious – I’m hesitant to say this – but making the film was like a process of trying to decolonise my own mind… I really wanted to study the foundation of this medium, and how so much of it is wrapped up in that kind of violence…. We have created all of these new biases in people and they exist like that in the collective imagination not because we just inherited them, but because visual culture is dominated by really toxic imagery. I was really aware that I didn’t have the answers, and I still don’t have the answers. But I’m very conscious of ways of looking, and how that’s so wrapped up in power. I would go through the whole script and for every scene, I would allocate who’s doing the looking. 

I read this really interesting comment you made about the idea of actors as sociological documents who embody a specific period in time. You described how you wanted to create a generational portrait with this film. Now you’ve been through the process, what kind of generational portrait do you feel you’re painting with In Camera?

I think this medium is just so interesting, because it’s so wrapped up in humans. At the end of the day, regardless of any technology, or how people have been presented, there’s a person on screen, and there’s such an intimacy with that. And that is loaded in so much that is beyond our control. I was thinking a lot about the British New Wave films: This Sporting Life [1963], Saturday Night and Sunday Morning [1960], A Taste of Honey [1961]. All of those films collectively paint something really specific about the men at that time. I think a lot of that is down to, not necessarily the filmmakers, but the bodies of the actors and what the actors represent. And I was thinking a lot about the angry young man, and how that to me today kind of dissolved into this anxious young man, or this passive man. I guess I have an intention at the beginning that I would like to represent but as soon as it becomes a collective thing, I’m giving it back to the audience. I lose my authorship and the authorship is with the audience.

Nabhaan Rizwan and Naqqash Khalid on the set of In Camera (2023)

It’s interesting what you’re saying about the anxious young man because Aden’s so quiet and passive. And yes, there’s a sinister element to it, but it’s also a coping mechanism to deal with that gaze. Is that a feeling you recognised from your own experiences?

I do think it’s a feeling that a lot of us have, because we live quite chaotic lives. I think everyone’s read this book now: The Body Keeps the Score. I was reading a lot about how people cope during traumatic situations. And it felt like this character would withdraw. I think a lot of us do, in situations or workplaces or environments where we don’t feel fully safe; we tend to withdraw as a way to protect ourselves. But without getting too personal, I have felt like that. It was about collectively tapping into those feelings. 

Nabhaan [and I] worked together for six months before shooting this film. It was really like an exercise of trust, sharing lots of personal experiences, tuning into each other’s frequency. I remember we dedicated a day of rehearsal to how he was going to walk, and what his body was going to feel like. There’s so much politics in a body, and how you show a body moving in the frame. [Frantz] Fanon talks a lot about the colonial body, how colonised people have these wild dreams, where they are active, and they’re doing all this stuff in their life that they can’t do in the day – the difference between an active body and a passive body. It sounds very academic, but when you’re just working with someone, and you’re just considering that body and how it moves, it’s really instinctive.

I think what people don’t understand, people who don’t act – including myself – is just how incredibly difficult it is to look like you’re doing nothing. Passive is a loaded word, but being passive or ‘non-performance’, it’s the most difficult, to create a whole world and to let an audience into your interior. It’s so much easier to be like, “I’m going to capital A act now”. 

It must have been an interesting process, satirising the British film industry, while working within it. Were there ever any moments where people on the crew looked through the monitors and recognised their own past behaviours playing out? 

I was an academic in Salford. I didn’t know anything about how films really were made. So it was all in my imagination and drawing on my experiences in different spaces. People were like, “You’ve been an actor before haven’t you?” No, I’ve not. So when people tell me their story, and how accurate it was to their experience, it’s actually quite scary. I feel like I can’t give specific examples because they’re not necessarily my stories. But I think I was always reaching for life as it feels, not life as it is.  

A lot of recent British debuts by younger directors, for example Sky Peals, Hoard and now In Camera, really embrace ambiguity. I’m keen to hear your thoughts on that. How much of that do you feel is tied to growing up with internet culture? 

I am so excited to see work made by people born in the 1990s, and 2000s. I think our brains are wired differently. I have to remind myself that this is such a young medium. I hope that it gets the space to keep shifting and changing. I had this really romantic idea that cinema is all about this one language and everyone is expanding it, sharing it and stretching it. I personally don’t think the three act structure is really fit for purpose. Everyone has their own way of articulating things and I feel like we shouldn’t have one default. We should be testing the boundaries. 

► In Camera is available to stream on MUBI UK now. 

Originally published