‘It’s about being seen’: Devin Shears and Benjamin Turnbull on ‘Cherub’

Purple Hour: Devin, this was your graduation project as part of York University’s Film MFA Programme. What was the genesis of Cherub as your choice of project?

Devin Shears: I applied with this project. There’s no real expectation that you stick with the thing that you apply with, but I get pretty excited about something. Other than the length, it didn’t change a whole lot – the concept was mostly there from the start.

How did Ben end up being your Cherub?

DS: I went through conventional routes and didn’t find a good fit. I knew Ben a little bit – we were friends of friends, and we’d been Twitter mutuals for a few years. We first met at Sewerfest, my friend Alex’s microfilm festival [in Toronto], where I’d seen a film that Ben had made. I did a test film that shared DNA with Cherub, in that it was three characters connected through a piece of media that they had this silent, personal reaction to. None of the actors knew it was a secret audition. It felt good working with Ben – natural and easy. He has a deep knowledge of film, more than me, so he quickly understood what I was going for. I was nervous asking him, because the content is a little weird to ask someone to do if you don’t know them that well. But he was very open and gracious – and excited, which is another great quality to have in an actor.

This is the kind of logline that you might expect for a short. What gave you the conviction that you could sustain this as a feature?

DS: Because it was made on this Master’s programme, there were fewer expectations to make something audience-friendly. The film was originally going to be thirty to thirty-five minutes, which I knew was a terrible length for a film to get played anywhere. We shot the first block – the skeleton of the film – in five days. John Greyson, my supervisor – an amazing filmmaker – said: You could cut this down and make it a palatable short film, or – based on what he saw as the strength of Ben’s performance – you could keep shooting and push it into something closer to a feature. That conversation kept happening. We would shoot more, and then John would say, “I think you should go shoot more”. It was a rare thing to get from anybody, to make it longer. That was all the encouragement I needed.

When you went back to shoot more, was it with specific intent, or was it more “Let’s shoot this and see what we can do with it later”?

DS: There was a script for that first round. The film was broken up into seasons, so there was some general intent, but for those extra shooting blocks, it became, ‘What would be an interesting space or interaction for the character to have that isn’t already covered? I had notes on my phone, and I told Ben what we would be doing when we showed up, but I didn’t have a script. Because it became process-oriented and we were a small crew, there was a lot of freedom to play around.

Benjamin Turnbull: There was an improvisational element to it. I mentioned to Devin that I was going on a weekend trip to Niagara Falls – because the solar eclipse was happening –, and we were like ‘that could be interesting’. I was a first-time actor being directed for the first time. It was incredible to see Devin on the fly coming up not just with scenes and ideas, but specific compositions and moments. When I saw the finished film, those were some of my favourite parts. Other collaborators had input. Our cinematographer Nick [Tiringer], for example, said that he’d love to see the character skating.

DS: It was freeing to figure out more about this character as we went along.

You bring that observant relationship between director and actor into the diegesis of the film in its latter stages.

DS: I played Harvey in the test, but I really didn’t want to. I was grateful when Ben came in – I don’t think the film would be nearly as strong without him. When it came to shooting Niagara, I returned to this earlier idea of a photographer. So much of the film is Harvey alone, not interacting with anybody. At that point, it was late in production, and I had already asked everyone I knew to be in the film. I was like ‘well, I’ll do it’. A lot of the film was born out of that – of what we had access to and what kept things small and easy to do. It was a choice made partially out of practicality, but, depending on the day, I do think of the character as just me.

Is there a real publication like Cherub in that newspaper format?

DS: The film was inspired by a real Belgian magazine that I came across from the late ‘90s, early-to-mid ‘00s – ‘The Fat Angel Times’. It was an early magazine focused on the bear community, and the title was very evocative to me. Most of those magazines have a very masculine vibe to them, but this evoked this celestial, angelic vibe. As much as I’m a romantic about those pre-Internet times, I grew up with relationships with other fat queer people that were formed through the Internet – through images and image-making. I see the film as a reflection of forming relationships through images, and of taking photos of myself and sharing them with people. The magazine seemed an interesting space through which to explore those ideas.

You mentioned photography. What inspired your tableau-based approach?

DS: I gave Ben three films to watch.

BT: One that he gave me that I hadn’t seen was Vive L’Amour, which is such a wonderful movie. There’s a longing and a yearning in alienation and isolation in that film that I could keep in the back of my mind. He sent a Jacques Tati film. The other one was Barbara Loden‘s Wanda– obviously a very different character, but there’s a certain improvisational nature to that film. I think, out of all of those, Tsai Ming-Liang would be the filmmaker that I associate with Devin.

DS: All of my films are in some way or another occupied with alienation, loneliness, and longing. I always felt that the long take and the static camera conveyed those ideas the best.

You’re asking your spectator to sit in a contemplative empathy of sorts.

DS: I’ve always responded to films like that. It’s a space I really love being in, both in films and in life. I’ll sit on a bench on a beautiful day and people-watch. I was interested in thinking of isolation as a space with this film. At times, it can be sad or alienating, but frequently, when you’re alone, you enter creative spaces, too, which are pleasurable to be in. My earlier films were about the pains of loneliness, and I wanted this film to represent some of its joys. Ben, this is a vulnerable performance. You’re putting yourself on screen and offering yourself up to the spectator just as your character does to the readers of Cherub.

How did you feel about taking on that role?

BT: I trusted Devin. I could see his vision, and we had an easy rapport. I knew he’d be receptive if I ever felt uncomfortable. But seeing the film in full for the first time, I was like ‘okay, well – this is vulnerable – my body’s on display’. I’ve been chubby most of my life, but particularly in the last four years – I gained weight during the pandemic. I have self-image issues, of course, I think everybody does. During the shoot, they were in the back of my mind, because I didn’t know what the shot would look like – I hoped that there was purpose and love behind it. The most vulnerable moment for me was as an audience member watching myself. The film is just so tender and thoughtful. Not just in presenting the type of body that isn’t on film in general, but in the way that it’s filmed. I felt, in a way, quite beautiful. In the Niagara sequence, when I’m lying in bed – I remember when Devin showed me that shot. I thought, ‘this is sexy’. I feel sexy, I feel seen. The experience that Devin and I both have watching the film with audiences is that we start to feel like the Harvey character. Up there on screen as the lead, I go through those emotions that the character goes through. But because I love the film – and I do feel like the film loves that character – I don’t feel afraid. It’s all about seeing and being seen, and now we are being seen. I’m a lot more in touch with my physical self because of the film, which I wasn’t expecting.

This film is queer, but in unexpected ways. What’s your experience been so far with

Cherub at LGBTQ-specific festivals?

DS: Sexuality is a tool of expression, not necessarily just as a space for carnal desire. The world of gay men is so body-focused that you get an understanding at a certain point of how your body could be desired. What was interesting to me was to think about how someone who never had that context might come to it, especially a little later in life, and how it might transform their viewpoint. I always thought of Harvey as a straight character who uses this magazine as a way to forge a new kind of connection and understand something about himself. A lot of the things that are gayer about the character – cruising and such – came later in the exploratory process. It was a story that I wanted to tell, I didn’t consider too much if a straight or queer audience would respond to it more. It was the fat part of me that was the more foundational part of my identity when I was younger, so it was that part that I was more interested in.

What do you hope audiences take away from the film?

BT: It’s the cliche that cinema creates empathy, but it’s true. There’s a lot of fear of sincerity, sentimentality, and empathy – it’s easy to embrace negativity, irony and detachment. It’s something that I personally struggle with a lot – it’s become especially difficult over the past five years. I think this movie takes sincerity and empathy very seriously, and not blindly. That’s why, to my mind, it succeeds and why people have responded to it. It’s easy to say that empathy is important, but a lot of people are afraid to feel empathy on a day-to-day basis. These people are very guarded, and I hope that this film catches them off-guard. I want people to love Harvey.