Simon Bird and Monica Dolan on Days Of The Bagnold Summer – Everybody’s Coming Of Age Film
They’re both familiar faces from TV comedy. Simon Bird was The Inbetweeners’ awkward and put-upon Will, while one of Monica Dolan’s most memorable roles is as “seen it all” communications manager Tracey Pritchard in W1A. Their first collaboration was originally intended for the big screen – and, indeed, Days Of The Bagnold Summer had a cinematic outing at last year’s London Film Festival – but this coming of age story is now launching on digital platforms at a time when it’s unexpectedly relevant.
Like everybody, their experience of lockdown has been personal and different. For Bird, who makes his directorial debut with the film, life has been all about his two young children and getting to grips with home schooling. For Dolan, a flurry of work has seen her recording in her own home and learning a whole new set of technical skills, but it’s also helped following the death of her brother from coronavirus and pneumonia. “I’m talking about Bagnold and obviously I’m excited about it but most journalists are asking me about how my lockdown has been going and I can’t talk about it without talking about that. I think it’s important. People are experiencing very different things in this lockdown. I do feel very lucky to have been this busy, but it’s been eventful and very hard. When you have such a large shock, it creates a big surge of energy so I had somewhere to put that because it came at the busiest time.”
A delicate mix of the comic and the touching, Days Of The Bagnold Summer focuses on middle aged single mum, Sue (Dolan) and her teenage heavy metal loving son Daniel (Earl Cave) during a summer that doesn’t go as planned. Daniel’s holiday to Florida to visit his father doesn’t materialise, leaving him at home having to spend time with his mother, whether he likes it or not. Yet what starts out in unpromising fashion becomes a turning point in their relationship and their individual lives. Dolan also sees parallels between the film and the current situation. “I think it’s something that’s quite special for the moment because it’s about two people who are forced to spend time together and, although their circumstances aren’t as extreme as ours are currently, I think it’s something that people will really be able to relate to as they can’t choose their situations at the moment.”
While “coming of age” usually indicates a story about teenagers, Bird is clear that it applies to both mother and son and insisted that both characters had equal time on screen. For Dolan, it’s a phrase which can be associated with just about anybody and her character is facing a time of change as her son starts to become an adult. “That boy she’s cherished is starting to disappear and she’s beginning to be a bit overwhelmed by that and her misunderstanding of him. What’s beautiful about it is that they both need this relationship and the situation that they’re trapped in to be able to grow up. It’s gentle and it’s what Simon [Bird] calls plot light. There is a plot in there, but it’s not something that you notice until it’s happened.”
It’s that focus on character rather than narrative that led Bird to decide on the graphic novel of the same name as the source material for his first feature. “I think a lot of the films that I love and keep going back to are light in terms of their narrative. I’m not really a big action blockbuster kind of guy! I’m drawn to character led films that are more tonal pieces and that’s one of the things I loved about the book, that very little happened yet somehow you’re so emotionally invested in the characters and that felt very real and true to me.” He admits that directing had always been in the back of his mind since starting out doing comedy at university. “I think secretly somewhere in my sub-conscious that it was something I’d always wanted to do. It’s not something that suddenly happened. I’ve been putting the groundwork into [it] for years. I did a short film in 2014 (Ernestine and Kit) so I’ve been slowly working my way up to doing a feature.”
But, despite being an actor and a writer, he decided to concentrate on directing the film. “In both cases, I think there were better people for the jobs! On the writing side, I’ve written a few things in my career but with this I knew that directing was going to be a real challenge in itself, given that it’s my first film and I was taking on a lot and I wanted to be able to judge if I’d done a good job and if I’d written the script as well I’d have been paralysed by it and self-analysis and self-flagellation. And if the film was terrible, I wouldn’t know if that was because I was a bad writer or a bad director, so I’d be back at square one!”
For Dolan, his approach to directing clearly worked. ““I was very lucky with Simon. He has brilliant taste. When I felt that a take had gone well, it was the one that he liked too. To me, it felt like we were very well matched as actor and director. Earl [Cave] and I were very much inside what was being filmed and so everything was quite earnest, but when you look at the film it’s very humorously shot – there’s an awful lot of wit just in the way that it’s been framed. I guess the moral of the story is to trust your director – and he was certainly to be trusted. There’s so much truth and depth in the film but there’s so much humour as well and that’s down to the way he shot it. He definitely knew what film he was making.”
Would she consider following Bird’s lead and moving behind the camera? “I get asked this a lot and my immediate reaction is no. But if somebody gave me something and asked me to direct, I think I’d know what to do. Obviously I’d need help, but I feel I’m fairly good with pictures and I know that, when you’re telling a story, everything in the frame needs to mean something and having worked with Stephen Frears, everything that he puts in a shot means something. There’s nothing that doesn’t add something to the story or a character. He says that all he does is follow the story. So I think I might be a quite literal director, but I’d know how to do that.”
Simon Bird and Monica Dolan were talking to Freda Cooper
Days Of The Bagnold Summer is released on Monday, 8 June 2020 Read our Review here.
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