BFI Flare and Edinburgh premiere On The Sea marks UK author Helen Walsh’s return to filmmaking, following her 2015 feature debut The Violators, and a detour into TV writing with 2024 Channel 4 thriller The Gathering.
“Of all the art forms I’ve inhabited, novel writing, writing for TV, film feels like my natural habitat,” says Walsh. “It’s a language that comes most fluently to me. But it’s also the most elusive.”
On The Sea is a drama set on the Welsh coast starring Barry Ward as a man who risks his small mussel farming business and relationship with his wife and son after a spark ignites with new deckhand Lorne MacFadyen. It is loosely inspired by a married man whom Walsh knew of in her hometown in the northwest of England. When his sexuality was outed in his 40s, he was shunned by his local community.
The producers were David Moore and David A. Hughes of Red Union Films, based in north-west England, near Liverpool, as is Walsh. They had previously teamed on The Violators.
The film was shot on a £1m budget, far lower than originally planned.
“The producers managed to raise some initial finance through private equity. From there, we hoped that we would secure more funding, but that fell away,” Walsh explains.
“We had to diminish and really scale down the budget. It’s initially a body blow, when you think you’re going to be making a film for £5m and then you learn it’s under £1m, but in many ways, it was completely liberating for me as a director,” says Walsh.
“More financiers and funders inevitably involve more notes, more voices, more noise. If you’ve got a singular vision, it can diminish or compromise it.”
To balance the budget, the team had to work efficiently on the four-week shoot in Anglesey in March 2024. “I wanted a week of sea days, then it became three sea days, then we had really bad weather. All our sea days out on the scallop dredger were shot in a day,” Walsh recalls.
Seasickness was ignored. “It’s really strange sitting in a cinema and watching this really lovely intimacy play out between Jack and Daniel [Ward and MacFadyen], because I know that their guts were absolutely roiling all the way through,” she grins.
There was one thing Walsh wouldn’t cut back on – the “integral” intimacy coordinator Lisa Jen Brown, who also has an on-screen role in the film. “Lisa Jen Brown is really special. Wherever I go next, she’s coming with me.”
On The Sea is sold by Finland-UK outfit The Yellow Affair, with distribution deals including UK-Ireland and North America soon to be announced. Rowan Atkinson collaborator Chris Clark and Good Chaos’ Mike Goodridge are executive producers.
11-year journey
Walsh says she did not plan to take so long to make her second feature. “I’m not on social media. I do live quite a simple, solitary life at home in Merseyside,” she says. ”I tend to swerve industry events and leave the heavy lifting to my producers. Being in BFI Flare this week and meeting other filmmakers and producers reminded me how incredibly tough and difficult [independent filmmaking] is.
“I tend to be drawn towards characters and stories that sit slightly outside the mainstream, relatable outliers, and that poses its own set of problems. Financiers and funding bodies are often looking for now, I think in this environment, what you call propulsive content, or genre-driven films, or they’re interested in this actor, or that actor.”
Walsh, who has also written prize-winning novels Brass, Once Upon A Time In England and The Lemon Grove, began work on a different second feature soon after The Violators came out but was disillusioned by what it became during the development process. “It spent many years sagging in development,” she explains. “This is something you hear lots of director-writers talking about – it developed into something alien and incomprehensible.
“It was a really noisy film about female desire. It wasn’t intentional; it’s just that so many different voices come on. It gets pushed this way, it’s pushed that way, and what I was left with was something really safe and apologetic. It’s enough that female desire is policed in real life, but to have it policed in art was quite a painful process, so I walked away and went back to novel writing, which became [TV series] The Gathering.”,
Walsh is now in early development on her next feature. “It’s occupying my every waking thought, which is always a really good sign… I just hope it doesn’t take 11 years.”
BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival runs until March 29.
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