#jonathan butterell

[olympain]

Mike Faist and Lucas Hedges in Soho Place's Brokeback Mountain

#theatreedit #mike faist #lucas hedges #brokeback mountain #ashley robinson #dan gillespie sells #jonathan butterell #annie proulx #original #*gifs #HD footage.... let's fucking go

[heavenlycinema]

Everybody’s Talking About Jamie (2021)

Jonathan Butterell, Dan Gillespie Sells, Tom MacRae dirs.

“A boys in a dress is something to be laughed at, a drag queen is something to be feared.”

#movie #watchlist #favorite movies #film #favorite films #films #movie musicals #musical #everybody’s talking about jamie #etaj #etaj movie #jonathan butterell #dan gillespie sells #tom macrae #john mccrea #richard e grant #sarah lancashire #musical comedy #lgbtq movies #lgbtqplus #lgbtq #drag queen #bianca del rio #lgbtq musical

[moviemosaics]

Everybody’s Talking About Jamie

directed by Jonathan Butterell, 2021

#Everybody's Talking About Jamie #Jonathan Butterell #movie mosaics #Max Harwood #Richard E. Grant #Sarah Lancashire #Lauren Patel

[dearfilm]

“Everyone’s a work of art Jamie New; but you are a masterpiece.”

Everybody’s Talking About Jamie (2021) dir. Jonathan Butterell

#everybody's talking about jamie #jamie new #film stills #movie stills #cinematography #jonathan butterell

[letterboxd]

Wigging Out.

Choreographer and director Jonathan Butterell tells Gemma Gracewood about stepping behind the camera for Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, his love for Sheffield, and making sure queer history is kept alive. Richard E. Grant weighs in on tolerance and Thatcher.

Of 2021’s many conundrums, one for musical lovers is why the narratively problematic Dear Evan Hansen gets a TIFF premiere and theatrical release this month, while the joyously awaited Everybody’s Talking About Jamie went straight to Amazon Prime.

And yet, as the show’s lyrics go, life keeps you guessing, along came a blessing. There’s something about the film streaming onto young people’s home screens, with its moments of fourth-wall breaking where Jamie speaks straight to the viewer, that feels so important, given the content: a gay teen whose drag-queen destiny sits at odds with the less ambitious expectations of his working-class town.

Director and choreographer Jonathan Butterell, who also helmed the stage production (itself inspired by Jenny Popplewell’s 2011 BBC documentary, Jamie: Drag Queen at 16) agrees that the worldwide Amazon release is a very good silver lining. “I made the film for the cinema but, in 250 territories across the world, this is going to have a reach that—don’t get me wrong, cinema, cinema, cinema, collective experience, collective experience, collective experience—but it will get to people that it might not have got to before.

Jonathan Butterell on set with star Max Harwood, as Jamie.

“It feels as niche a story as you could possibly be. But also for me, I wanted it to feel like a universal story, that it didn’t matter where on any spectrum you found yourself, you could understand a young person wanting to take their place in the world freely, openly and safely.”

Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, with screenplay and lyrics by Tom MacRae and songs by Dan Gillespie Sells, sits neatly among a series of very specific feel-good British films about the working class experience, such as Billy Elliot, Kinky Boots and Pride. The film adds some historical weight to the story with a new song, ‘This Was Me’, which allows Jamie’s mentor, Hugo (played by Richard E. Grant), to take us into England’s recent past—the dark days of the discriminatory Section 28 laws, at a time when the HIV/AIDS epidemic was still ravaging the community.

Hugo’s drag persona Loco Chanelle (played in the flashback by the stage musical’s original Jamie—John McCrea from Cruella and God’s Own Country), sports a wig that looks suspiciously like the Iron Lady’s unmistakable head of hair. Grant confirms that was Hugo’s intention. “His heyday was in the 1980s, so as a ‘fuck you’ to Mrs Thatcher, what better than to be dressed up like that, at six-foot-eight, with a wig that could bring down the Taj Mahal!”

Richard E. Grant as Hugo, getting to work on Jamie’s contours.

In light of the current pandemic, and the fact that the 1967 legalization of homosexuality in Britain is only “an historical blink away”, Grant’s hope is for more tolerance in the world. “Maybe Covid gives people some sense of what that was like, but with Covid there’s not the prejudice against you, whereas AIDS, for the most part in my understanding, was [seen as] a ‘gay disease’, and there were many people across the globe who thought that this was, you know, whatever god they believe in, was their way of punishing something that they thought was unacceptable.

“The message of this movie is of inclusivity, diversity, and more than ever, tolerance. My god, we could do with a dose of that right now.”

Read on for our Q&A with Jonathan Butterell about the filmic influences behind Everybody’s Talking About Jamie.

Hugo in a reverie, surrounded by his drag menagerie.

Can we talk about the new song, ‘This Was Me’, and the way you directed it in the film? It’s a show-stopper, with Richard E. Grant singing in that beautiful high register, and then moving into Holly Johnson’s singing, as you go back in time to show that deeply devastating and important history. Jonathan Butterell: It felt inevitable, the shift, and necessary. Myself, Dan Gillespie Sells, the composer, and Tom MacRae, the screenwriter, we created this piece together, the three of us, and it’s a film by the three of us. We lived through that time, we went on those marches. Actually, in one of those marches [shown in flashback], Dan’s mum—actual mum—is in a wheelchair, by a young boy who was holding a plaque saying “my mum’s a lesbian and I love her”.

That is Dan with his mum back in the day, and it all speaks to our stories and it moves me, I can see it’s moving you. It moves me because I lived through that time, and it was a complex time for a young person. It was a time that you felt you had to be empowered in order to fight, and you felt very vulnerable because of the need to fight. And because of that disease, because HIV was prevalent and we lost people—we lost close people—it was a difficult time. I wanted to make sure that that story kept being told and was passed on to the next generation.

It’s so important isn’t it, to walk into the future facing backwards? It still exists, that need to fight still exists. The conversation, yes, has moved on, has changed, but not for all people and not in all communities.

What would be your go-to movie musical song at a karaoke night? My goodness. There’d be so many.

I mean, is it going to be a Cabaret, a Chicago showstopper, or something more Mary Poppins, something from Rent? I think what I would go to, which is what I remember as a little boy, is Curly singing ‘Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin’. It’s such a kind of perfect, beautiful, simple song. That, and ‘The Lonely Goatherd’, because I just want to yodel. It would be epic. Trust me.

What is the best film featuring posing and why is it Paris Is Burning? It’s always Paris Is Burning. Back in the day, I was obsessed with Paris Is Burning, I was obsessed with that world. In fact, at one moment I even met [director] Jennie Livingston in trying to make a theater piece inspired by that. I lived in New York for eleven years and I met Willi Ninja. I just adored everything about him, and he would tell me stories. And again, it was so removed from the boy from Sheffield, I mean so far. That New York ballroom scene was so removed from my world, but I got it. Those two boys at the top of the film, I just wanted to be one of those boys who just hung out outside the club.

Harwood and Butterell on set, with Lauren Patel (right) as Jamie’s bestie Pritti Pasha.

What films did you and Tom and Dan look at to get a feeling for how to present the musical numbers? Actually, a lot of pop videos, from present day to past. There’s an homage, in the black-and-white sequences, to a little ‘Vogue’ Madonna moment. Pop is very central to me in this story because pop is what a working-class kid from a working-class community will be listening to. That’s in his phone, that’s in his ears. Not that many young people listen to much radio at this moment in time, but that’s what will be on Margaret’s radio, that’s what’s coming into the kitchen. And that was central to the storytelling for me.

Bob Fosse also really influenced me, and particularly All That Jazz and where his flights of imagination take him. I felt that was so appropriate for Jamie, and again in a very, very different way, but I could see how Jamie’s imagination could spark something so fantastical that would lead him to dance, lead him to walk on the most amazing catwalk, lead into being in the most fabulous, fabulous nightclub with the most amazing creatures you’ve ever met in your life.

For me personally, the film that most inspired me was Ken Loach’s Kes, because that is my community. Both the world in which Jamie exists—Parsons Cross council estate, is my world, is my community—and the world of that young boy, finding his place in the world with his kestrel friend, I remember identifying with that boy so clearly. He was very different from me, very different. But I got him, and I felt like Ken Loach got me through him.

Ken Loach made a few films set in Sheffield, didn’t he? But also, Sheffield is a setting and an influence on The Full Monty, The History Boys, Funny Cow and that brilliant Pulp documentary. So Jamie feels like a natural successor. It absolutely does. Sheffield’s where I grew up, it’s my hometown. Although I moved away from it, I always return. To have a chance to celebrate my community, and particularly that community in Parsons Cross council estate. If you’re in Sheffield and you’re in a taxi and you said, “Take me to Parsons Cross,” they’d say, “Well, I’ll drop you there, but I’m not staying.” Because again there’s a blinkered view of that community. And I know that community to be proud, glorious and beautiful.

And yes, that community, particularly through the ’80s, really suffered because some of that community would serve the steelworks and had three generations of unemployment, so they became disenfranchised because of that. But the community I grew up in, my Auntie Joan, who lived on that road, literally on that road, was a proud, working class, glorious woman who served chips at school.

Aside from Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, what would be the most important queer British cinematic story to you? (And how do you choose between My Beautiful Laundrette and God’s Own Country?!) You can’t. My Beautiful Laundrette influenced me so much because, one, Daniel Day Lewis was extraordinary in that film, and two, because of the cross-cultural aspect of it. I went, “I know this world”, because again I grew up in that world. And it affirmed something in me, which is the power and the radicalness of who I could be and what I could be.

With God’s Own Country, when I saw that film—and that was Francis’ first film, which I thought was extraordinary for a first-time filmmaker—I knew he knew that world from the inside, from the absolute inside. And I know what that rural community was like. I read that script, because we share agents, and I was blown away by it—again, because of the two cultures coming together.

Jamie Campbell, the film’s real-life inspiration, with screen-Jamie Max Harwood.

Richard E. Grant’s character, Hugo, is such a pivotal mentor for Jamie. What did you need to hear from a mentor when you were sixteen? Don’t let yourself hold yourself back, because I think it was me who put some limitations on myself. And of course I came from a working-class community. I was a queer kid in a tough British comprehensive school. And did I experience tough times? Yes I did. And did I deal with those tough times? Yes I did. But the song that speaks to me mostly in this is ‘Wall in my Head’, in which Jamie takes some responsibility for the continuation of those thoughts, continuations of the sorts of shame, and that’s a sophisticated thing for a sixteen-year-old boy to tackle.

I also was lucky enough to have a mother like Margaret—and a dad like Margaret as well, just to be clear! And I remember my mum, at seventeen when I left home, just leaving a little note on my bed. It was quite a long letter. She said, Jonathan, you’ve probably chosen to walk a rocky path, but don’t stray from it, don’t steer away from it. That’s the path you've chosen, there may be rock-throwers along the way, but you’ll find your way through it. That stayed with me and I think that’s what resonates with me. And when I saw that documentary, Jamie: Drag Queen at 16, I felt that that sparked the need for me to tell that story.

Sarah Lancashire as Jamie’s mum, Margaret New.

We need more mums and dads like Margaret, don’t we? We do, we do. And the wonderful thing is, Margaret Campbell will say it and I think Margaret New in the film will say it: she’s not a Saint, she’s an ordinary mum. And she has to play catch up and she doesn’t understand in many ways, and she gets things wrong and she overprotects. But she comes from one place and that is a mum’s love of her child and wanting them to take their place safely in the world and to be fully and totally themselves.

Related content

Eternal Alien’s list of films Made in Sheffield

Letterboxd’s Camp Showdown

Persephon’s list of films recommended by drag queens

Passion’s list of films mentioned by Jaymes Mansfield in her Drag Herstory YouTube series

Follow Gemma on Letterboxd

‘Everybody’s Talking About Jamie’ is streaming now on Amazon Prime Video.

#everybody's talking about jamie #max harwood #john mccrae #richard e. grant #sharon horgan #jonathan butterell #musicals #drag queen #queer film #lgbtqia cinema #british cinema

[unlimited-rice-puddin]

Everybody’s Talking About Jamie Film Review: Beautifully Uplifting

Everybody's Talking About Jamie as a stage show is spectacle with little substance. The film adaptation remedies this, producing a far more nuanced, emotive coming-of-age tale that proves heart-warming, uplifting and moving.

Everybody’s Talking About Jamie’s film adaptation demonstrates what all good musical theatre films need: a coherent narrative drive (more…)

View On WordPress

#Adeel Akhtar #Dan Gillespie Sells #Film Review #Jonathan Butterell #Lauren Patel #Max Harwood #Musical Film #Ralph Ineson #Richard E. Grant #Samuel Bottomley #Sarah Lancashire #Sharon Horgan #Shobna Gulati #Tom MacRae

[mijardinbipolar]

Everybody’s talking about Jamie

#Everybody´s talking Jamie #Max Harwood #Richard E Grant #Jonathan Butterell

[ulrichgebert]

Irgendwie unterschlagen bzw. verdrängt habe ich die Verfilmung von Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, die trotz putzigem Jamie-Darsteller und Richard E. Grant im Fummel leider nicht ganz zu dem fabelhaft knallige Musicalspektakel, auf das wir uns so gefreut hatten, geraten, sondern irgendwie auf dem Weg zum wohlmeinenden, aber etwas drögen und ein bisschen billigen Fernsehspiel geronnen ist. Schade eigentlich.

#Everybody's Talking about Jamie #Max Harwood #Richard E. Grant #Sarah Lancashire #Lauren Patel #Shobna Gulati #John McCrea #Film gesehen #Jonathan Butterell #Musical #Dan Gillespie Sells #Tom MacRae

[milliondollarbaby87]

Everybody's Talking About Jamie (2021) Review

Everybody’s Talking About Jamie (2021) Review

Jamie New is about to turn 16 years old and wants nothing more than to be a Drag Queen and attend his school prom in a dress! Based on the musical stage show of the same name as well as the very true story of Jamie Campbell. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (more…)

View On WordPress

#2021 #Adeel Akhtar #Based on a Musical #Biography #Comedy #Dan Gillespie Sells #Deavion Brown #Drag Queen #Drama #Dylan Galliah #Ellis Brownhill #Everybody’s Talking About Jamie #John McCrea #Jonathan Butterell #Kacie Doocey #Lauren Patel #Max Harwood #Musical #Ralph Ineson #Review #Richard E. Grant #Riya Gadher #Samuel Bottomley #Sarah Lancashire #Saskia Davis #Sharon Horgan #Shobna Gultai #Tom MacRae #Zion Battles

[screen1ne]

Review: Everybody's Talking About Jamie

"Everybody's Talking About Jamie comes across like a extended version of The Dumping Ground or for those reading this who are a little older a musical episode of Grange Hill." Read our review of Everbody's Talking About Jamie here #ETAJ #Musical #Review

Everybody’s Talking About Jamie is the latest musical offering in 2021, grabbed by Amazon Prime and released direct to the streaming platform bypassing cinemas entirely (Other than a appearance at the Edinburgh Film Festival earlier this year), now tries to entrance you all with charms after a rather successful stint in the theatre. Inspired by true events, Everybody’s Talking About Jamie…

View On WordPress

#amazon prime #Everybody&039;s Talking About Jamie #Jonathan Butterell #Max Harwood #musical #Ralph Ineson #review #Richard E. Grant #Sarah Lancashire

[kevrocksicehouse]

Everybody’s Talking About Jamie. 

D: Jonathan Butterell (2021). 

Everybody’s Talking About Jamie is the story of a sixteen-year-old gay teen whose desire to be a drag queen and to come to his prom in a dress runs afoul of the small-minded folk of a British town and you might be forgiven for thinking you’ve seen it before. It mashes up The Prom, Footloose, Billy Elliot and any number of Glee episodes into a readymade tale of empowerment. Even the true story that it’s based on seems to show up in some version every prom season.  This adaptation of a hit British musical seems shopworn until we realize how charming it is and how it’s brio and enthusiasm shame its forbears. As Jamie, Max Harwood shows the snarky arrogance and self-involvement that the only out gay kid in school uses to survive (his drag name MiMi Me, satirizes his own narcissism) and mixes in the adolescent insecurity of a kid rejected by his father (whose passive indifference is crueler than actual abuse) trying to find his place in the world. In his corner is his heroically supportive mother (Sarah Lancashire) whose birthday gift of Ruby colored heels changes Jamies life, and Pritti (Lauren Patel), his best friend who as the only Muslim in school is his partner in pariahdom. The songs are witty (“the boy so nice/he came out twice”) and sprightly and even the ballads (“The Wall in My Head”) avoid maudlin self-pity.

Best of all, Butterell cast Richard E. Grant as Hugo Battersby, the dress shop owner and (as “Loco Chanelle”) a former local drag icon, who becomes Jamie’s mentor. Grant plays him as a Mr. Myagi of drag dispensing both bitchy witticisms (“Don’t just linger like an old nun’s fart”) and an evangelism (“A boy in a dress is something to be laughed at, a drag queen is something to be feared.”) that bounds over camp into hard-won wisdom.

Butterel and score composer Dan Gillespie Sells give him a bravura sequence, the new song “This Was Me,” in which Hugo gives Jamie a history lesson in the drag community of the ‘80s drag community (“Poisoned patter on a barbed remark/ “Bette Davis playing Joan of Arc”) and it’s decimation by both Thatcherite repression and the AIDS plague ( “Every weekend was a wake”) which Butterell frames as a series of home movies shot by a lover who succumbs to the virus. Grant is largely absent from the sequence (his younger self is played by John McCrea who played Jamie onstage) and the song is mostly sung by former Frankie Goes to Hollywood lead singer Holly Johnson) but Grant’s face at the end is as moving a piece of acting as I’ve seen all year. The actor gives this innocuous feel-good movie a weight it needs in what theater calls a showstopper and that really isn’t like something we’ve seen before.

In theaters and available for streaming on Amazon Prime Video

#everybody's talking about jamie #jonathan butterell #max harwood #richard e grant #review #kevrock

[culturallyobessed]

2021 Outfest Los Angeles kicked off with "Everybody’s Talking About Jamie" 

2021 Outfest Los Angeles kicked off with “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie” 

 2021 Outfest Los Angeles LGBTQ Film Festival kicked off their opening night with its first-ever outdoor gala with Cinespia at Hollywood Forever with a screening of Amazon Prime Video’s Everybody’s Talking About Jamie – a big-screen adaptation of the smash hit, award-winning West End musical. The outdoor premiere featured special appearances by Everybody’s Talking About Jamie film talent…

View On WordPress

#2021 outfest #Bianca Del Rio #culturally obsessed #Everybody’s Talking About Jamie #Everybody’s Talking About Jamie premiere #Hollywood Forever #jennifer ortega #Jonathan Butterell #Lauren Patel #Max Harwood #outfest 2021 #outfest la

[filmhabits]

Everybody's Talking About Jamie - Poster

Releases February 26, 2021 (USA)

#everybody's talking about jamie #film #movie posters #Jonathan Butterell #Max Harwood

[farminglesbian]

good morning i’m losing my entire mind

#THANKS KATE #crying about sarah lancashire hour #everybody's talking about jamie #sarah lancashire #max harwood #jonathan butterell #also s/o to #sharon horgan #for being in more movies about gaybies #anyway i'm relistening to that middle part until february #trailers #i'm sobbing

[jmunneytumbler]

English Village High School Goes Drag When 'Everybody's Talking About Jamie'

Everybody’s Talking About Jamie (CREDIT: Amazon) Starring: Max Harwood, Sarah Lancashire, Lauren Patel, Shobna Gulati, Ralph Ineson, Sharon Horgan, Richard E. Grant, Adeel Akhtar, Samuel Bottomley Director: Jonathan Butterell Running Time: 120 Minutes Rating: PG-13 for Some Cruel Words and a Few Dustups Release Date: September 10, 2021 (Select Theaters)/September 17, 2021 (Amazon Prime…

View On WordPress

#Adeel Akhtar #Everybody&039;s Talking About Jamie #Jamie New #Jonathan Butterell #Lauren Patel #Max Harwood #Ralph Ineson #Richard E. Grant #Samuel Bottomley #Sarah Lancashire #Sharon Horgan #Shobna Gulati

[elizabethstanley]

everybody’s talking about jamie (2021) | dir. jonathan butterell | starring max harwood

what do you think they were fighting for, jamie? for the future, and the future is you.

#everybody's talking about jamie #mt: everybody's talking about jamie #max harwood #p: max harwood #jamie new #musical #musicals #movie musicals #west end #musical gifs #userauds