‘We thought with The Crown: 'Is anyone going to watch this?'' director Benjamin Caron on risk, realism

The Guardian

16 hours ago

It's quite a schlep from Buckingham Palace to the mean streets of working-class Portland, Oregon, but it is one that Midlands-born film-maker Benjamin Caron and actor Vanessa Kirby have undertaken with their new thriller Night Always Comes, adapted from the taut novel by Willy Vlautin. Caron and Kirby met nearly a decade ago when he directed episodes of The Crown, in which she played the young Princess Margaret from behind a cloud of cigarette smoke.
Now Kirby stars as a former sex worker called Lynette, toiling in multiple jobs and living with her disabled brother (Zach Gottsagen) and their wrecked, wayward mother (Jennifer Jason Leigh). They have cobbled together the funds to buy their dilapidated house at a snip, only for Lynette's mother to recklessly blow her half on a new car. Cue one manic night in which Lynette must make back the dough, by fair means or foul, or else be turfed out on to the streets.
Caron cites the Safdie brothers' Uncut Gems and Good Time as an influence on his picture's breakneck momentum. But, along with films such as Late Shift, On Falling and the forthcoming Urchin, Night Always Comes surely belongs to a wave of neo-realism that reflects our ongoing cost of living crisis. 'The idea that you can work three jobs and still not be able to afford your own home is a universal modern tragedy,' says the affable 49-year-old director. 'Lynette's story represents millions of people who are just one or two pay-cheques away from collapse. Of course, the film is in the thriller genre but I also wanted to get across the idea that nurses or caregivers or whoever are being priced out of the very cities that they help to keep running.'
The situation first struck him during a visit to Los Angeles. 'I remember being genuinely shocked by seeing the housing crisis there. People are like: 'Oh, they must be drug addicts.' It's very easy to throw labels like that around. But they can't all be addicts. People are not just falling into homelessness: they're being pushed.'
Wealthy characters in Night Always Comes, such as the client who recoils in disgust when Lynette tells him of her straitened circumstances, are naturally insulated from economic turbulence. This is a film where it's poor versus poor all the way, and kindness is in short supply. 'It's a cliche,' says Caron, 'but desperate people do desperate things. And the film is full of desperate people. Everyone has their reasons for doing what they do.'
Kirby is in every scene, her vitality and desperation propelling the movie in much the same way as, say, Gena Rowlands in Gloria or Mikey Madison in Anora. As Lynette, she lies and schemes, steals a car, loots a safe, and isn't above taking the nearest blunt instrument to anyone who crosses her. 'Being back with Vanessa was like reuniting with a dance partner,' says Caron, with a smile. 'It's been a while but you still know the moves.'
Actors bring baggage, however. The casting of Kirby – privately educated and so often labelled 'posh' that she has even moaned about it in interviews – as a traumatised, penniless sex worker, appears to plunge the film into the territory of Frankie and Johnny, which starred Michelle Pfeiffer as a dowdy, unremarkable waitress. 'You're absolutely right,' Caron says, 'but, as an actor, you want to avoid being pigeonholed. The more you can jump off the cliff, the wider range of offers you'll get. Vanessa has this unpredictable energy. There's no safety net with her, no filter. She makes these wild decisions in real time, in the middle of everything.'
Don't forget, he says, that even The Crown looked risky to begin with. 'There was a moment before it went out where we were all like: 'Is anyone going to watch this?'' Similar jitters surrounded another streaming hit that became one of Caron's springboards into cinema: Andor, the gritty Star Wars spin-off that revived interest in the franchise just as Disney was in the final stages of flogging a dead Wookiee.
One outwardly unorthodox choice by Andor's writer and show-runner Tony Gilroy was to put Caron, a self-confessed lapsed Star Wars fan, in charge of several episodes, including the first season's finale. The lack of reverence that Caron brought to George Lucas's universe might have been one of the keys to the show's excellence. 'You can get too drawn into trying to please the fans,' he says. 'That's a dangerous trap.'
Sign up to Film Weekly
Take a front seat at the cinema with our weekly email filled with all the latest news and all the movie action that matters
after newsletter promotion
Caron became a safe pair of hands in the television world – he cut his teeth on the likes of Scott & Bailey, Skins and Wallander, and also directed the final episode of Sherlock – but he says making movies was always the endgame. His 2023 debut, Sharper, a deliciously slippery thriller starring Julianne Moore, spent just a week in US cinemas before streaming globally on Apple TV+. As a Netflix production, Night Always Comes will likewise have only the merest brush with the big screen. This can't be what he has been dreaming of all these years.
'Oh Ryan!' he cries, throwing his hands up. 'That's so sad! Don't say that. Look, I remember in the 1980s and 90s, you'd hear about a film in America and it would take six months until it reached the UK. There was this feverish anticipation: fomo, really. And it's true that doesn't exist in the same way. But I'm a romantic. I like to think the world sort of had a stroke during Covid, and everyone retreated into their rooms and drew the curtains. Slowly, they've been coming back, blinking into the daylight. Look at Barbie and Oppenheimer. Those are moments when the audience feels that connection of sitting in a cinema and having a shared experience. For those two hours, you can be sucked into this portal and taken on a journey. Whereas, at home, you're always going to be distracted.'
Perhaps the message, then, is: death to Netflix? 'No, I love Netflix,' he says. 'They changed my career: I owe so much to those guys. With The Crown, I was working with the budget of a mid-sized movie, with actors who would normally be in films. And people have bigger screens now; it's not like in the 1980s. No director would say they wouldn't love viewers to sit in the cinema and watch what they've made. But you also want lots of people to see your work. And, hopefully, a few million might watch it.' In Caron's case, it seems, Netflix always comes to the rescue.
Night Always Comes is on Netflix from 15 August.