In Conversation: 'Chuck Chuck Baby' Director Janis Pugh
I had the chance to sit down with director and writer Janis Pugh on her first feature, Chuck Chuck Baby (2023), set in Pugh’s hometown in Northern Wales.
Chuck Chuck Baby is a musical comedy that centers on working-class women and their friendship and love. It is a reminder of how second chances will continue to exist, as long as we muster the strength to reach out to them, and the many ways women mean to one another.
Chuck Chuck Baby is witty and funny. It is also a testament to real women and real stories, lived and fought for.
In your press release, you mentioned how it felt important for you to write a film between two women “who had suffered physical and emotional brutality in the past to come together.” You see Helen and Joanne were given a second chance after 20 years. And these are two women reminded to grab life by an older, dying woman. I thought it was pretty wonderful to see that spilt on screen. Why did it feel important for you to share the story as it was?
PUGH: I think it's really important to celebrate women and female friendship in all its forms. I wanted to make a film that was really about hope. And chucking down fences and opening up ourselves and the world to each other. I think that was my main message. The love story itself comes from a place. The only love I know is female love.
I think we learn a lot when we're losing people in our lives. When you're sitting beside somebody who's facing the final moments of their journey in life, there is something so beautiful that they can give you, and though it's so heartbreaking, there really is. You're holding up a mirror and going, you know, none of us will escape that. So while you see somebody whose life is ending, it really does open doors to your own life to make you think, “I'm here for a short time. I'm going to go for it.”
But with these two girls, specifically, it was always about the thread that had captured them as young girls, the thread they'd never let go of. And if you think of that physical thread that had a knot inside each of them, they've held onto it for each other. It's just about celebrating love.
When I first read the description of the movie, it was described as a musical comedy. And I went in expecting a traditional musical where these characters break out into perfect renditions, but your characters slip into these scenes where they belt and their voices crack, which just added to the humanness that we saw on screen. I don't know if it's blasphemous to say this but as someone more into sound than film, it felt very beautiful to see that intertwined.
PUGH: In most of my work, I use the same method. So I take the social realism form, then I take the musical form, but I take the musical form in a certain way. Despite how much I obviously love music, I love cinema as well. From the moment I started writing the script, the music was part of the storytelling process, and that music has to tell the story of that character.
Instead of just bursting into song, which I always feel removes the audience a little bit, I wanted them to stay within the heart of the character and the emotions. When we're doing this, it's all about feeling the lyrics of the song and the music that's speaking to them. It becomes a very, what you said, “a very human experience,” and that's what we relate it to. We use music in this film like we use music in our own lives.
If you're grieving and a song comes on—I have one for me, which is Together in Electric Dreams by the Human League, a very old song I sing about my mother who I lost a few years back. It’s a song that makes me open up and it makes me cry, where originally it was a song I would have danced around a room to in my 20s. It's that kind of connection with the music that's really important.
From the moment we started reshooting, it really is about saying to the actors, “I don't want to hear you sing. I want to feel your heart.” That's the most important thing. So instead of throwing the audience out by becoming a big track, we bring them in, and we bring them in very subtly, and they manage to stay with you, and then we can build.
I read that Chuck Chuck Baby is set in your hometown and you filmed over the course of just 26 days. I wanted to understand what that felt like, having your first big feature in your hometown.
PUGH: I always shot in my home area. It's a very industrial, rural area. The form that I use within the film … is very much like the landscape, which is industrial and rural. I feel very much that the landscape where I was brought up shaped a huge amount of my humour, and for me, it's a place in Britain that we see very seldomly on screen. We don't go to those areas to make films, which I think is a great shame, because they're incredible communities.
I think these lives, and the people's lives that live there, are wonderful to show on the big screen. Cinematically, for me, it's where my love for film was born. Sitting there and looking at the blue bridges and the factories across the water. It's all very much implanted in my landscape and my DNA. I just love shooting there. I will continue to shoot there.
With this film, we had a very tight shoot, 26 days—a testament to an amazing cast and crew and brilliant support from the community of my hometown. It was wonderful. Shooting in a place that you've got such a connection to can either terrify you or inspire you. I had a bit of both.
There was a scene in the film that stood out to me where you have this beautiful moment when you see all the fences and walls that were pulled down. These are the same walls that Joanne complains about after coming back home after 20 years. I think it's a perfect metaphor for the kind of world that we live in, but also the kind of world that we need to work towards. How necessary did it feel to pull that in?
PUGH:I wanted to make a film about love. I absolutely felt the world is losing its love. The undercurrent of that film is all about the fences and closing each other off and putting up barriers and shutting each other out. I think the whole world is going through this change at the moment, which is all putting your arms around your country and going, “It's mine. It's mine.” It's all very bizarre for me, and I don't understand it at all. It was really about making a film [where] I didn't want to throw politics down the throat. It was all done almost like a little current that goes through the film very much so. It's with the characters as well.
If you're going to make films, you have to say something. And if you're not going to say something, I don't want to watch them. I wanted to say to people, “Take down these fences. This is our world. This is not yours, yours, yours, mine, mine, mine.” We're all human. We're all one humankind, and we all have to share this incredible space with each other, and that's what we have to do, is love and share. So it was massively important for me to talk about the fences. I wish I'd got more of it in, but it's always tight on those things. But I think the message comes across.
As women, we're told that we're always running on this ticking clock, and I think seeing this group of women who are much older was so lovely to witness. Because you're always told that you're too old, or sometimes even too young, to do things.
PUGH: I think that’s what's wonderful about Chuck Chuck Baby. It was a very hard film for us to finance, because at the beginning I was presenting this film with women in their 40s, and most financiers were kind of going, “Can you make them 20?” Which we utterly refused to do because the beauty of this film was about women who actually know themselves very, very well. I'm not saying you don't know yourself at 24 but you will get to know more about yourself as life goes on. I think for me, we don't see enough women of that age on screen. We kind of go from the 20-year-old to the 70-year-old, and we kind of miss out on this whole middle section of these incredible, brilliant women from all over the world who have these incredible stories to tell.
I am receiving emails from everywhere, from girls as young as 17 to women as old as 80, who are saying, “Thank you for letting us see real women on screen.” And I think that's really important. It was massively important for me because I'm of that age, a little bit older than 40, and I want to see women like me on screen, because I think they're brilliant. So we fought really hard to keep the characters that age, and we did get our own way, and I think the film was far better for it, because we don't see these brilliant, clever, funny, resilient women. We don't see them enough. I think if we did, then things would shape very differently in this world.
I love that, and it also makes the whole process of growing up a lot less daunting to see such characters on screen.
PUGH:The tick tock, tick tock, you get it when you're young, and I'm afraid when you're older, it really is a reference to death as you get older. When you're young, it's a reference to something else, but it's you getting older. It’s a reference that time is ticking away, but make the most of it.
