Interview: Director Harry Wootliff on the "unromantic" True Things

British director Harry Wootliff is no stranger to the turbulence of love on the big screen.

After making a big impression with the emotional Only You (2018), she takes a decidedly darker approach with her sophomore feature, True Things, an exploration of a toxic relationship between a woman whose life is on hold and a mysterious and manipulative charmer. The attraction is instant, the affair escalates quickly and she glows with the feeling of being alive again, but her willingness to be open with him isn’t reciprocated and, much as she can’t admit it to herself, the feeling that she’s being kept dangling on a string just won’t go away.

The film is taken from the novel by Deborah Kay Davies and in the exclusive interview below, Wootliff describes the challenges that go with adapting rather than writing a screenplay from scratch. “I couldn’t adapt a book that I don’t connect with on a really personal level,” she says. “What I loved about it was the feeling of infatuation, of addiction to somebody or a situation and floating around, not thinking about real life.”

She discusses working with the film’s two lead actors, Ruth Wilson and Tom Burke, as well as Wilson’s involvement as a producer in the project. And she reflects on her reasons for wanting the audience to be actively involved in the emotional journey of Wilson’s character. She describes the film as essentially “unromantic”, a story that she found many people identified with. “You know those relationships where you think ‘why did I ever go there?’ It’s one of those.”

Interview