Goran Stolevski−Of An Age, You Won't Be Alone—2/6/2023

Macedonian-born writer-director Goran Stolevski moved to Australia with his family at the age of 12. There, he developed a love of movies, borrowing scores of them from his local library. Many short films (including Sundance prize winner "Would You Look at Her") and three episodes of International-Emmy-winning series Nowhere Boys later, Stolevski made his feature directorial debut with the well-received folk-horror film You Won't Be Alone, starring Noomi Rapace. During a sitdown with Groucho Reviews, Stolevski discussed his sophomore film, the gay romantic drama Of an Age.

Groucho: So, you've said this film was inspired by a line in Lauren Groff's short story collection Florida. Do you remember the line?

Goran Stolevski: No, it's terrible. 

(Both laugh.)

Goran Stolevski: I should. I'll go back to it one day. No, what happened is I even don't remember the title of the short story, which is ridiculous. But it was in Florida, and it's a story where obviously a high school boy in Ireland has a sexual affair with a cadaver. So you can see how that led to Of an Age.

(Both laugh.)

Groucho: Right. This is a direct line, yes. 

GS: No, but the line I remember what happened is that boy goes to a party for the first time, and I don't even—like normally when I'm reading, I'm very much lost in another world And in this case, especially because I love her writing. I find it—I read it for the transporting nature of it. But in this case, suddenly I just got a flashback to the one party I went to in high school. And then the kid I was in my brain who didn't think real life happened to me in my day-to-day life. It happened in books and movies. And just kind of thinking back to it in the context of who I was. And then what I was looking for, what I thought I would have at the time. And then suddenly there's two guys sitting in a car, and there's all these words flooding at me, and I ran off to the laptop to try and type as fast as I possibly could 'cause all this dialogue was flooding in. 

GR: So you mentioned that party in your youth. Did anything memorable happen at it, or was the whole point that nothing memorable happened to you? 

GS: I mean, I wouldn't say anything unusual. It was really, like I didn't meet anyone if that's what you're asking me, special to the rest of my life. No, I think for everyone else, it was a non-event. Even to me it was sort of like, I remember it partly because it was the one big party I went to, you know? I was 16 at the time, and yeah, there's elements in the film, like there was a racist thing that happened to a close friend of mine And how it happened, you know, is how racism usually happens around me. So I tried to kind of touch on that. There's no violence in this film because I'm really sick of watching violence happen to minorities. But I tried to put that in. There were other little elements and personalities that come in, but yeah.

GR: Mm-hm. So the film is by no means literal autobiography, but would it be fair to say it's emotionally autobiographical? 

GS: Oh, extremely. (Laughs.) Yeah, no, absolutely. I think everyone assumes I'm the ethnic kid, 'cause I was the ethnic kid in life, but really, I'm present in all three, I would say, of the main characters psychologically and emotionally. But then again, you know, no one believed me last year with my previous film that it was really me split between two different women, my brain split between two different women who were witches in the 19th century. But again, there was a lot of my feelings and kind of experience of the world and questions about the world that, you know, shaped the personalities and then the story kind of happens.

GR: Let's talk about gay relationships. So what do straight people sometimes fail to understand about gay dating and how it differs from heterosexual dating? 

GS: Which one's the woman? Which one's the man? Seriously. There's a lot. I think one thing, actually, that sometimes even gay people seem to forget about: there is something extremely sexy about being the only two people in the room who have a secret that no one else knows about. And sometimes secret because of circumstances that are horrific, but sometimes the circumstances don't need to be that bad. There is a poignancy, like there has been, and especially when I was young, that me and my partner at the time—and today, for that matter; it's the same guy—but when we were young, we were lucky that we were able to at least blend in on the outside, partly because there was less awareness of gay people existing in real life. Y'know, back when I was young, gay people were just on TV. They weren't on the streets. So, there was something, in those cases, circumstances that made us pretend we're just friends, we're not always ideal, obviously, but there was something super-sexy that we're going to go home and fuck, quite frankly, and it's going to be great. 

GR: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

GS: There's a romance that comes from that that I think is delightful. And I think that was also one of the elements that kind of drove me to—that came in that first flood of words and images, like that sense of, that poignancy when you're looking at someone, no one realizes what that look means except for you too. 

GR: Yeah, there's a secret language there. 

GS: Absolutely. 

GR: And the film is so much about the intimacy of when just these two are able to alone. 

GS: Yeah, yeah, yeah, but they can be alone, they can create a cocoon for themselves in a crowd. And I think that kind of intensity of connection is really something you want to treasure, and a lot of people who aren't queer don't ever get to experience as far as I'm concerned. 

GR: One aspect that many gay romantic stories deal with is a significant age gap. This one isn't large; it's comparable to that in Call Me By Your Name. But what did you think was important about the age differential in dramatic and thematic terms? 

GS: Yeah, the age difference is, I think, about—it's never specified, but in my head was always like four years, five years, maximum, which isn't significant, but it is when you're that age, when you're 17.

GR: Right, yeah.

GS: It was more: I wanted the dynamic between someone who doesn't understand the world at all, hasn't had experience of it, and someone who has been exposed to some things. You know, in the sense that, growing up in the suburb that's on screen, when I was little, I sort of felt like high school was just the waiting room you have to get through before life starts at university. And to an extent that's not true, but to an extent it kind of is. So I think the person who has had that, which sometimes comes with disappointments as well as bonuses, it's also a moment for Adam, the older character, to look back on who he was. It's never verbalized in the film, but even now when I meet younger gay guys, or gay girls, there's a very strong parallel; it's queer people in general. There's a part of me I recognize, so vividly, that I keep forgetting was there when I was little, you know? And I think that's an interesting experience to have, 'cause the film, you know, it's mainly from the younger guy's perspective, but I think both perspectives are very much included within it, and I think there's a way to look at the story from both sides that is, you know, interesting to me anyway.

GR: Yeah, well, romance is largely to do with empathy. And so to see yourself at a different age, that makes sense that that would be appealing. 

GS: And again, especially like, you know, I mean, every teenager goes through angst, but it's not just angst; it's a specific kind of experience and a very specific kind of loneliness you experience, especially in suburban Melbourne, heavily working-class suburban Melbourne, before the internet. When again, gays were just on TV. There was no way you were ever going to meet someone in real life. So that kind of loneliness, and to recognize it in someone that's sort of going through what you used to, once you've kind of overcome it, I think it is very moving. You know, I've found it very moving in my own life, not in a romantic context, purely a social one, but I think—I can easily see those feelings developing into romance that I think would be very, y'know, physically and emotionally intense. 

GR: Because this is a romantic film, I thought it would be interesting to ask you how you define love. 'Cause it is a hard thing to define, isn't it?

GS: Good God. I know.

GR: In words.

GS: 25 words or less. No, well, I mean, my own, y'know, main relationship in life took a very different trajectory in the sense that it wasn't intense for one night, and then you remember it. The intensity kind of grew across a period. I met my partner when I was—well, now, husband and boyfriend—when we were both very young, and there was something about, like, we're both very unformed, and then we've kind of grown around each other. And to me [it's] that intensity of connection where like you kind of shape yourself around each other as well, like if I'm going through a tough time, he goes into caretaker mode. If—and we're both very anxious—but one of us ends up going into the protector mode and vice versa. I'm much more of a drama queen for the last seven years, I believe, so he's had it a bit rough. (Laughs.) I think that sense of like, half of you becomes this other person essentially—that other person becomes half of you; in a way, you carry them in your chest. And I think that, to me, is love. 

GR: You've noodled around with the idea of revisiting characters over time, like Linklater's Before trilogy or Truffaut's Antoine Doinel films. Might there be sequels to Of an Age in your future? 

GS: Um, I sort of, I prefer to leave people wanting more rather than wanting less. (Laughs.) Y'know? It's sort of, there's even little patches of scenes that I took out of this because I was like, "You know what? Maybe don't verbalize that." I think with these guys, I feel already so intensely and vividly what their life was like and probably will be like, that turning it into something that's real and tangible and potentially mundane might wreck it. So, you know, initially I was just writing it for the 1999 scenes. So at that stage, I was like, "Yeah, no, this would be—because I felt like seeing them ten years later would deepen it in the way that it happens with—I mean the Before films: Midnight is my favorite, and I think they're all beautiful, obviously, but I don't think this film works that way. Ideally, I don't like to think I made something that's a copy of the Before trilogy. I really, you know, look, I never know what the future holds. 'Cause God knows I'm very connected to all three of these kids and you know the actors as well as the characters, but maybe we just make a different movie that touches on these feelings and completes them differently. 

GR: The car scenes in this film are particularly intimate. How did you approach filming those? 

GS: To me, film is always about what happens in the eyes. Even what's said isn't as important. It needs to—I hope it's engaging and entertaining, what's being said, but really the story is told in the eyes. To an extent that sometimes even I wasn't aware of until recently, in terms of what's driving me moment to moment. And so I wanted a sense of the surrounding chaos, but experienced not through cutaways and shots. At script level I thought I would need cutaways, but as we were filming, I realized I don't want to look away at all almost, because the story is happening in the in the eyes at all times. So yeah, it was just, y'know, I barely shot any establishers or wide shots. 'Cause I was like, "I don't need them." Nothing is more demoralizing or depressing on set than shooting things that you might need, but weren't really. There's so much to do. And if you're not driven by a feeling of, like, this is the most important thing ever, it's really hard to get through it. So, yeah, that's how it was shaped. And there was a lot of planning with my production designer, Beth Ryan, and obviously Matty C., Matty Chuang, the cinematographer, to how to convey it, especially on the limited budget. We couldn't rebuild 1999. So there was that. But mainly it was shaped by how do we showcase the connection between these two.

GR: And I suppose a car forces closeness. You can't run from the conversation. And in some cases, it allows it, for those without other safe spaces, to have sex. 

GS: Exactly.

GR: Both of those purposes in this story.

GS: Yeah, absolutely. 

GR: Was sexual orientation a consideration in your casting or was it always about simply finding the best actor? Because that's become a subject of some debate in the industry. And obviously it's complicated by many actors not being out. 

GS: Yeah, I mean, that was—the not being out thing was definitely something that caught me by surprise. The other thing that caught me by surprise is, especially at the beginning, where we're thinking of casting two different people at two different ages. So there was a lot of younger, y'know, 17, 18-year-old guys I was talking to, and especially 'cause I was looking for people who were believably working class, which almost never happens in any arts world, in any country. There were boys that—some of them I could tell were closeted, some of them I could tell were in denial, and I'm like, "Do I not give this boy an opportunity because he doesn't fit the Twitter version of who he should be?" I still think it's immensely important to have as many queer people playing everything—not just queer people, but certainly queer people. And, yeah, I kind of don't want to talk about this too much 'cause it complicates a lot of other people's lives. I can just talk about it as much as it pertains to me. I'm keenly aware of how little the prejudice you face and the opportunities you miss out on because of your career. I know there was a boy who didn't audition because he isn't out. And I'm not going to get angry because I understand. I think it's tragic. But, yeah, it's all I can kind of say. I think it's a really difficult thing to talk about, but I think it's also very important. And I do think there's a lot of progress that's been made. And ultimately, the more people are out, the easier it is for me to honestly make films. So I only ever encouraged it, but I remember on set, at one point, we were shooting in like a very impoverished suburb where I grew up, and there was a threat of violence at the actors from passers-by. You know, this is Melbourne, 2022. And I think a lot of people don't think about socioeconomics and cultural contexts when we talk about these things. So yeah, I have four contradictory feelings about it, frankly it's hard to quite narrow it down. 

GR: Right. Yeah, well we're about out of time here, but I just want to ask real quick, what genre does Housekeeping for Beginners—your next film to see release—belong to? 

GS: Oh, probably the same. I mean, it's drama. There's a lot of comedy in it. There's also a lot of music in it again, actually, but yeah, I would say drama ultimately, relationship drama. Not romantic necessarily.  

GR: All right, well it's been a great pleasure talking to you. Thank you very much. 

GS: Thank you, sir. It was fun.