Page and director Dominic Savage discuss their improvised film, which follows a trans man in his late 30s returning home for the first time in years for his father’s birthday
Elliot Page, who first appeared on screen at age ten, has arguably never not been busy. Even coming out as trans in 2020 – known to reduce work offers at the best of times – has hardly slowed him down. The fourth and final season of Umbrella Academy, in which he stars as Viktor Hargreeves, just dropped on August 8; he founded his own production company in 2021; his bestselling memoir, Pageboy, was a New York Times 2023 Book of the Year. But there’s one noticeable gap in his recent schedule: film acting. (Page last appeared in the Flatliners remake in 2017, which he has described in his memoir as a traumatic and unsafe production.)
For his first film role as the most famous trans man in Hollywood, Page has picked an unorthodox vehicle: a film whose dialogue is almost entirely improvised. Close to You is directed by Dominic Savage, a BAFTA-winning TV and film director known for his heavy use of improvised dialogue and his creative partnerships with actors. Page came to Savage’s work through I Am… Kirsty – a collaboration between Savage and actress Samantha Morton – and the two worked together to co-write the story and shape the production of Close to You. (The film was shot in Toronto on Page’s request; “I moved there when I was 16,” Page notes, and he has a strong working relationship with the city.)
Close to You is a contemplative, delicate drama about a trans man in his late 30s, Sam, returning home for the first time in years for his father’s birthday. His family is nominally supportive, but the film explores how brittle that support is in practice, as new strains and old grievances quickly start to make the house feel claustrophobic. Meanwhile, Sam rekindles a connection with an old friend from high school, Katherine, who feels torn between her settled life and her desire to pursue Sam back to Toronto. Full of intimacy and complex conflict, and heavily led by the decisions of its leads, the film is an ideal gentle return to the big screen for Page: one that feels designed to honour, and explore, transness as process.
Dazed spoke to Page and Savage about the nuts and bolts of making an improvised film, representation on screen, and why trans stories compel people – even, sometimes, too much.
Almost all the dialogue in Close to You is improvised. What was the experience of making an improvised movie actually like on set? What was your process?
Dominic Savage: The root of it is establishing trust with all the actors; everyone in the film is very carefully chosen for how they fit with this kind of project. I was very clear about how it worked, and they were very interested and involved in the process.
The film was shot chronologically in story order, and the environment and atmosphere of the film developed as we shot it – in a way it’s just feeling one’s way through it, it’s a very organic process, there are no absolutes. It’s just about creating it so that everyone feels like they can be as free and as true to the character as possible, and about facilitating pure moments of interaction, and anything that interferes with that I get rid of.
We just kept trying things, and we used quite long takes, which allow for lots of freedom and mobility with scenes. I don’t like hard resets – the only scene we had to do it with was the one involving food, you have to reset that if you want to do another version – and I like early takes. There’s something new and raw and unknown about the first take that’s very wonderful.
The shoot took about four weeks – short, really, by normal standards. The days were very full, because it’s good to have that energy when you’re making work; it’s very involving, the actors are fully in it, it’s quite intense.
“I hope with all of the characters in Close to You that it’s clear that there’s something else going on, something unspoken that’s lying under what they say and do. I’m always hoping that that comes across in all of my work” – Dominic Savage
There’s this character, Paul, Sam’s brother-in-law, who’s at the heart of a lot of the conflict at the family reunion. In a simple sense he’s just more transphobic than the others, but there’s a lot more going on with him – he’s very anxious, very antagonistic, he’s trying to get integrated into the family and is failing conspicuously at it. And it feels like he’s very fixated on Sam as an obstacle. What about Sam do you think threatens Paul so much?
Dominic Savage: I hope with all of the characters in Close to You that it’s clear that there’s something else going on, something unspoken that’s lying under what they say and do. I’m always hoping that that comes across in all of my work. With Paul, his whole life is under threat, his whole raison d’être is under threat, and he probably hasn’t done very much work on himself, he hasn’t attended to himself. That’s part of why I cast the actor who plays him [David Reale]; I liked him a lot, but he’s complex, he had a lot going on, he could embody the conflicts and complexities of the character, which I find much more interesting than just being someone who’s rather unpleasant.
Elliot Page: Paul has this discomfort going on, this paranoia, this emptiness that he feels angry about because it’s persisting, despite the fact that he’s supposedly ‘followed all the rules’. And then he sees this person who isn’t following the same rules as him, who’s just living their life and being themselves, and who doesn’t have the same concerns that he’s projecting all the time. I think that threatens people.
There’s this sort of visual vulnerability that trans people are on the sharp end of, this impulse to dissect and interrogate us, that you’ve obviously experienced more than most, Elliot, as a trans person in the public eye. How does that vulnerability influence your experience of making films now?
Elliot Page: I think that’s a big part of this film, exploring those reactions and those forms of paranoia in a nuanced way. As Elliot, obviously I deal with that same thing consistently, and I wonder about it… hopefully having more representation that is coming from us, and more stories, and a much wider variety of trans people’s experiences depicted in film, will allow for some of that to maybe start to ease off, and let people just live their lives.
It felt like the style of the movie was designed with that in mind – there’s a lot of long takes, a lot of focus on people’s faces and movements; it works against that paranoid impulse of ‘oh, what is this person, what are they doing?’, and makes you more attuned to different questions, like ‘how are they feeling, how are they experiencing this environment?’.
Dominic Savage: That’s something that I’m really proud of in the film. The films I like are those that are really able to make us feel, as opposed to making us understand – I hope that comes across in the viewing experience, that sort of heartfelt connection to what the characters are feeling. As long as we feel, that’s enough for me.
“I feel so lucky that being trans made me have to dig in deep, and made me have to work through my own internalised transphobia and work through the person that I am” – Elliot Page
An aspect of Close to You that I found really compelling – and underserved in other, superficially similar stories – is that Sam’s transness is threatening, particularly within the family, but it’s also very seductive for a bunch of the cisgender characters. With his sister, with the brother-in-law who follows him out of the house like an excited puppy, and obviously with Katherine… there’s this way in which Sam living his life is very compelling, and it makes them question a lot of the things that they’ve chosen not to do in their own lives. Why do you think transness creates that effect?
Elliot Page: I think everyone, I would imagine, relates to pressures of how one should perform, or exist, or speak, or what one should be interested in, in terms of their gender. I feel so lucky that being trans made me have to dig in deep, and made me have to work through my own internalised transphobia and work through the person that I am, but that took some real work, especially right now, with where we are – though it’s always work.
I think people can’t help but be intrigued by whatever it is in someone that manages to get to that place, and feels happy in who they are, despite society telling them they’re wrong or unreal or they don’t deserve to exist, and who says fuck that, I know who I am, I know what I’m doing. That joy threatens people. It can create this huge, baffling negative reaction, this state of being so fucking bothered by people just existing. And then you can get people, on the other hand, who are a little too into it…But it’s very universally interesting.
The film releases in the UK this week. Is there anything you’re hoping that viewers will take away, or that you’re worried they might miss?
Dominic Savage: What I feel about the film is that it’s a true reflection of the journey that we decided to go on together, and that we made the film in a very unusual but rather wonderful way, where we focused on it being totally collaborative and sensitive to everything that arose during the process of making it, and to the story that we were portraying. We did everything we could to make this film, and there’s nothing more that it should be, in a way. If you love something, that’s it.
Elliot Page: Naturally, of course, you want things for viewers. Of course we have such a lack of representation, you want people to feel okay about it… but like Dominic said, we threw our hearts into it. We made the film that we wanted to make. I hope that if people watch the movie they feel it deeply, and they go on a journey with it, like I did when I first watched Dominic’s work.
Close to You is in UK cinemas from August 30.