Paul Mescal calls 'Aftersun' 'dress rehearsal' for fatherhood

By Carlos Aguilar

Oct. 21, 2022 3:09 PM PT

To Charlotte Wells, memories can be truthful only to the person who holds them. Still, the Scottish filmmaker, 35, believes that the way an event or interaction made us feel is more important than its objective veracity.

“Feelings can endure uncorrupted a little longer than the specifics of a memory,” she told The Times in a recent video call from New York.

Inspired by her bond with her late father, Wells’ commanding feature debut, “Aftersun,” is a subtly calibrated, emotionally devastating tapestry of such loving and intricate recollections. The film, which premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, hits theaters Friday.

“I needed to make this, and I used it as a reason to step back into a period that I hadn’t thought about for a long time,” Wells said.

“Aftersun’s” autobiographical fiction evokes her innermost sentiments even if the characters and situations don’t entirely mimic her reality: Here, Wells’ mental souvenirs from bygone days now construct the story of Calum (“Normal People’s” Paul Mescal) and Sophie (newcomer Frankie Corio), a young dad and his 11-year-old daughter on a sun-drenched vacation at a Turkish seaside resort.

Over the course of their week together, set in the late 1990s, Sophie gets glimpses of Calum’s quiet unraveling, despite his efforts to maintain the appearance of strength expected of a parent. To formally stimulating effect, the main storyline of “Aftersun” is interspersed with candid home video footage captured on the fictional family’s camcorder, as well as scenes featuring adult Sophie in an otherworldly rave where she chases after a vision of Calum.

“There’s something very emotionally effective about having the main body of the film be a snapshot of their relationship in the past. And then trying to bring something into an imagined present,” Mescal said.

These interlocking layers of perspective create a multifaceted prism that reveals how older Sophie remembers that holiday, what was unknown to her then about Calum, what was recorded on camera and how she sees him now that she is the age he was at the time.

“She searches for new understanding of her father with knowledge acquired later, through her own lens as an adult and as a new parent, and through the love that she still carries from him and from the time that they had together,” Wells explained. “There’s a search for ways in which they are the same and a gradual grasp of ways in which they’re different.”

“Aftersun” originated as a follow-up to her first short film, 2015’s “Tuesday,” about a teenage girl silently wrestling with grief after her father’s death. That thematic ancestor eventually gave birth to her idea of traveling further back into her life for a drama about a father-daughter adventure.

As Wells started looking through old photo albums, she was struck by the realization of how young her father looked in them, despite him being near to the age she was when she conceived the project. Slowly, she dug through her memories, printed and otherwise, to outline the script: “That’s why it took me so long to write it. Years of sifting through memories and anecdotes and details that I wanted to include, not just from one holiday but throughout all of childhood,” Wells recalled. “I had to organize them to allow a progression of character.”

The first element that unlocked for Wells was the framing element of the rave, where Sophie scrutinizes the past to comprehend her present. At one point, Wells even considered playing adult Sophie herself. “It felt important in this film that there’d be a clear sense of authorship,” said Wells, though she now agrees with her producers that it would have muddled the concept. “We wanted to communicate to the audience that this came from me; even though it isn’t a literal autobiography, it is rooted in my experience.”

The video that young Sophie shoots of Calum with a consumer-grade camera provides yet another perspective. Immortalized via the device, these impressions — unlike human memory — remain unchanged and, in a sense, definitive. “I remember liking [the camera footage] as a factual record that offered a direct point of view from one character to another that could be then reviewed by the other,” she said. “Calum watches playback of Sophie capturing him unknown to him earlier in the evening and sees how she sees him, or how she saw him in that moment.”

Mescal agrees with Wells about the insights these hold, thinking about his own family’s amateur recordings of special events, such as a long video his parents took of their children opening Christmas presents. “What I love about [home videos] is that they feel innately private. They’re not for an audience,” the actor said. “As a result, nothing is uninteresting to the person holding the camera because a loved one is the subject.”

A woman underneath an umbrella with headphones around her neck

And though the story of “Aftersun” is deeply personal and specific, it nonetheless resonates with those whose relationships with their parents are distinct from Wells’ — like Oscar-winning director Barry Jenkins, who served as executive producer, and producer Adele Romanski.

“If you listen to [Wells] talk about her approach to cinematic tools and her approach to building stories, it does sound like the processes of the human brain, moving through emotions and moving through moods,” Jenkins said. “It’s a magic trick she pulls off.”

“[She] has so much trust in the audience to recognize collective experiences that we all have via memory and to pick up on what one could argue is incredibly subtle, but ultimately it’s so honest that you are never unsure of the space the film occupies,” Romanski added.

The Turkish location too stems from a trip Wells took there when she was 10 years old, one she couldn’t shake. “That holiday sat at that point between childhood and adolescence and wasn’t complicated by the pursuit of teens,” she said with a laugh.

In the film, Sophie isn’t entirely immune to the curiosity that being around older kids awakens. But while Corio does see plenty of parallels between her and the young protagonist she plays, she couldn’t yet relate to this interest in spending time away from her father to fit in with the cool crowd.

“The way she acts is a bit different than how I act. I don’t know what other people think watching it, maybe they think we act the same,” Corio said via video call. “The fact that she hung out with teenagers who were on holiday wasn’t something that I would do. I’d probably stay with my parents, but maybe things were different in the ’90s.”

Mescal, who was born in 1996, treasures memories of a teenage friend he made when he was around Sophie’s age who validated his desire to be seen as more mature in the eyes of his peers. “We had a foreign-exchange student from Spain who I was absolutely in love with. He was the most amazing, charismatic 16-year-old guy,” Mescal recalled. “He would play football with me and spent a huge amount of his time being kind and generous with me.”

For her part, what Wells saw in Mescal and Corio were performers who channeled her father and herself, physically and emotionally.

“It was hard to cast that character too far away, for me to still feel the connection I needed to feel,” Wells said of Calum. “I wanted him to feel very warm and very solid in a way that Paul does both emotionally and physically.”

Similarly, with Corio — cast after her mother saw a post about the role on a Facebook group for teachers — Wells confesses that she inadvertently looked for someone who mirrored her prepubescent self in looks and personality.

“My mom saw Frankie in Cannes for the first time and thought it was me now, which is troubling on so many levels, not least that Frankie is 12 years old and I am not,” Wells said. “I definitely cast a kid who has a fairly striking resemblance to me at that age.”

A girl leans against the edge of a boat and rests on her father's arm

Working with Corio — and in many instances guiding her through the scenes, since Wells didn’t share the screenplay with her youngest star — was “the greatest dress rehearsal of all for being a dad,” Mescal said. That meant establishing a “watertight” relationship between Calum and Sophie rather than concerning himself with the film’s larger ideas about memory.

“I appreciate the tone of memory, nostalgia and melancholy when I watch it, but when I was making it, I wasn’t focused on it. It was about the present moment being as rich as possible so that it would have the nostalgic impact of memory in the final edit,” Mescal said. “For the memory to be clear, it’s our job as actors within it to make it as alive as possible.”

Once Mescal watched “Aftersun” for the first time with the audience at Cannes, he became aware of what the director was after. “The film is profoundly upsetting to me, and not in a purely negative sense at all,” Mescal said. “I felt both full and empty at the same time.”

“He’s still growing up,” Mescal explained. “He’s just turned 30, and I don’t think that when I turn 30 I’ll have a full grasp of who I am. If you are also a father, I imagine it must be an alarming sensation to have this set of feelings inside you that you don’t particularly understand.”

Wells’ own father is not here to comment on how closely she, Mescal and Corio matched the real-life relationship on which the film is based. Then again, as Wells herself would admit, her father’s memories of those years, and that trip, would necessarily be different from those that come through in “Aftersun.”’

“Memories of times shared are held by more than one person, so what does it mean to be the last keeper of a memory of a shared experience? What does it mean to be the only person who remembers something that occurred between more than one, when the other perspective is lost?” Wells wondered. “It’s a strange feeling.”

For Paul Mescal, playing a dad was the ‘greatest dress rehearsal’ for being one

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