the alchemy of short filmmaking with alex lawther
Alex lawther speaks to short stuff about his second short film rhoda
Interview by Molly Lipson
2 April 2025
Alex Lawther
You’ll most likely recognise Alex Lawther from his roles in Black Mirror, The End of the Fucking World or Star Wars: Andor. In 2023, Lawther turned his hand to writing and directing and made his debut short film For people in trouble. After its resounding success – it premiered at Tribeca Film Festival – he started on his second short film, Rhoda, which premiered at the BFI London Film Festival in 2024.
Rhoda tells the story of the film’s namesake, played by Juliet Stevenson, who decides to bring a lodger, Louis (Emma D’Arcy), into her home. Having lived alone for many years, Louis’s arrival is already a departure from routine, but there’s something specific about Louis’s presence that causes the fabric of Rhoda’s life to rapidly disintegrate. A leaky pipe that we can hear through the walls leads to a dreamlike destruction sequence of the physical wall between Rhoda and Louis’s rooms, and a real flood that Louis helps to clean up, despite being told to leave by Rhoda.
“This intrusion into Rhoda’s house by Louis, although it's an invited one, is a trespass against Rhoda’s body and the unclear line between where Rhoda ends and where her house begins – and vice versa,” Lawther explains.
It’s a quietly unsettling and deeply spellbinding film, infused with Lawther’s typical ethereal whimsy. The metaphors seem endless, but not frustratingly so, and everything from the characters and set, to the sound design and colour grade are so carefully crafted it makes it impossible to look away. Dave Pimm’s extraordinary cinematography doesn’t go unnoticed either, with shots that convey both the chaos and symmetry of Rhoda’s life following Louis’s entry into it.
Having been an actor for over a decade and establishing himself as a highly respected name in the industry, it’s no surprise that Lawther’s foray into filmmaking has been received with great acclaim. For Lawther himself, the switch from being in front of the camera to behind it has been nothing less than a blessing.
“Filmmaking is such a privilege. You get to work with all of these people with such expertise and experience, and they bring a whole wealth of that with them. I love having these long conversations with artists of different disciplines and collaborating with them in such a meaningful way…It does take a village to make that sort of alchemy of a good workplace. It takes everybody to be complicit in being respectful and listening to one another, and not losing your temper.”
And in so many words, that’s exactly what short filmmaking is: alchemy. A combination of parts. People, ideas, passion and skills. Here, Alex Lawther speaks to Short Stuff about the specific alchemy that emerged in the making of Rhoda, the joy of collaborating with two of his favourite actors, and the detailed and intricate weaving that took place behind the scenes.
Rhoda is currently screening on the festival circuit.
Short Stuff: What made you decide to write a short film?
Alex Lawther: I knew that I wanted to write something at some point in my life, and a combination of factors pushed me to stop just talking about it and actually do it. Amongst that was COVID and there being no in-person acting work, my partner was also really encouraging, and it seemed like there were just no more excuses. As I started gathering people into the project it became something that I couldn’t avoid - in a good way! Of course I really wanted it to happen, and I was amazed that people were taking it seriously.
SS: And the experience was so great that you just had to do it again?
AL: Yeah, we shot Rhoda in January 2024 and it was four of the happiest days of the year for me. It’s such a beautiful experience because you’re making a short film where people aren’t getting paid very much, but they tend not to be doing it for the money. They’re doing it because they're passionate about it, or they love the people that are involved and want to work with them. And so you end up really feeling like people are there for reasons of creativity or passion.
SS: What was the biggest difference between shooting your first and second shorts?
AL: I really feel like my first short was me thinking, what's this going to be like? And then with the second short that question switched to, what else can I learn? Which I think was a more fruitful question in many ways. I learned so much technically from making Rhoda, whereas with For people in trouble the focus was more just on keeping my feet on the ground. Also, in For people in trouble there was a heightened feeling to things, but we were still very much in a relatively literal world. There's the burning bench in the last scene, but apart from that, what you see on camera, the characters can also see and touch. It was fun with Rhoda for me to do something that was in more of a liminal dream world.
SS: The film mostly focuses on the two main characters but there’s a scene at the end with a larger group where, in a surreal quasi-dream state, Louis seems to be having a party in Rhoda’s house. What was it like filming this scene?
AL: It goes without saying that I was very, very lucky to work with Juliet and Emma, who are both quite extraordinary creatures and artists. I also had the luck on the last day of shooting of inviting all of my friends to come and be part of it. It was a beautiful challenge for me to be the director of lots of people in one very small space, and for all of them to be people that I knew personally and love. It was a really special moment, and it's one of my favourite bits in the film.
SS: You’re a very collaborative writer and director and I know you worked closely with Emma and Juliet on creating the characters and story. What did working with them from such an early point bring to the project?
AL: It created a real intimacy for sure, and that’s really one of the joys of short film. It’s so hard to make and pull the money together for a short, but you get to really spend time in that intimate place. Emma had a real sense of the world in which the story was taking place, as well as their character’s place in that world. They have a background in design and a fine arts degree, so if you think of a film like a painting, they understand not only their own portrait, but also what the canvas is actually made of. One example was when Emma came to set on the first day with a brooch that they thought was something Louis would wear. Not only is it a nice detail for the character, but the colours looked great in the frame, and I’m sure Emma was conscious of that.
Juliet’s choices come from a point of searching around in the dark until something feels exactly right, which I really understand as an actor. It’s a hunch that she has, an innate gut feeling for the character. Juliet came up with this idea that Rhoda was told as a little girl that she wasn’t attractive but that she had really beautiful hands, and so adult Rhoda takes really good care of her hands. Juliet added in all these small, untold details – she got a manicure before the shoot, and there’s a moment where she’s sitting on her bedside and rubbing in hand cream.
SS: I know that it was quite a feat creating Rhoda’s house for this film. Can you talk a bit about the production design?
AL: We wanted to create a sparseness, an emptiness to Rhoda’s life that would reflect something in her psychological and emotional state; she lives in this house amongst objects that mean something to her but that don't bring a lot of warmth into her life. We were lucky to find this house that was about to be entirely refurbished so we could do whatever we wanted to it, and our production designer Matty Mancey-Jones is scrappy in the best way – she makes things work for the least means possible. Some people had said my idea to build a wall that Rhoda pulls down could only be done in a studio, but Matty is a maker and she knew how to create it. I remember watching the Joanna Hogg film Souvenir Part II and there’s a moment in it where the lead character has a dream sequence that looks very DIY and there’s something very theatrical about it, and I wanted to do that in ours too. I wanted to lean into the DIY-ness of it, this idea of it all being paper thin, which really bleeds into this world that Louis’s creating with their own model houses made out of sort of a sort of a shared textural world.
SS: The sound design is also integral to the film, especially given that the first eight minutes contain no dialogue – talk me through some of the sound decisions.
AL: Because in parts of the film no one’s really talking, and that became a motif of the film, I realised that sound would be very important, especially silence and when it was used. The wonderful Anna B Savage did our composition and with her we found this breathy, guttural weird sound that repeats throughout. And by the way, she made the score only with sounds from her own body, there are no instruments.
SS: As the script consultant on For people in trouble, I remember us going through every tiny detail of the characters, their backstories, so much information that we knew would never make it into the film. The amount of work that goes into creating the characters and worlds of short films is staggering, and yet we still seem to undervalue them so much. Why do you think that is?
AL: It’s interesting – people talk about short films as though they're the poem equivalent to where a feature film is maybe a novel, but obviously we spent entire English literature classes at school analysing poems in depth. The intense, selective, distilled nature of making a short film means that there is so much that has to go on underneath because otherwise it would be quite floppy, and you don't have time for that in the fifteen or twenty minutes that you have to tell a short film in. I didn’t really know that before making a short, and I hadn’t spent much time considering it as a form, but now I’m obsessed with them! It’s so hard and there’s so little room for error, I just feel very inspired to be part of this filmmaking community.
