A journalist
Clara Cowan isn’t stuck in the past.
That will be the first line of the piece the journalist is going to write, because it’s clear that all the early buzz for her new film has misunderstood something fundamental.
This isn’t some confessional about what happened on the set of The Sons.
It’s not a retread of An Enormous Mind, either, nor is it a self-conscious pivot from Malcontent.
It’s something else entirely. Something great.
‘She’s ready for you.’
The journalist has been sitting in the lounge section of a suite at the Soho Hotel, waiting nervously for the publicist to call her in.
She was a huge fan of Cowan even before she was allowed to see a top-secret, hush-hush screener of the new film in the production company’s private screening room this morning.
Tonight, the movie will screen to its first proper audience.
The journalist stands and smooths out the raw silk trousers she has painstakingly selected for the occasion of interviewing her idol.
She is led into a room where the lights seem brighter than they are, is seated on a sofa that feels deeper than it really is.
What does Cowan look like? The journalist’s eyes adjust. Smaller than you’d expect.
Older than a lot of the familiar photos.
Immaculate style, expensive-looking jewellery, that loosely buttoned linen shirt that has become a trademark look for a whole generation of female film students.
Something in her eyes that suggests she’s never going to tell you the whole story.
The journalist is already writing the piece in her head. Clara Cowan isn’t stuck in the past. Even when she’s fixing me with those famously piercing eyes in the interview room of a Soho hotel, I get the sense that she’s looking forwards, not back.
There’ll be time to edit. The sensibility is what matters.
‘It’s a pleasure,’ the journalist says. ‘I loved the film.’
‘Thank you,’ says Cowan. ‘It was a joy to make.’
‘That comes across.’ Right into it, then. ‘What did you draw on, for all that joy?’
Cowan is surprisingly unguarded today. The journalist had been told she was a difficult interview, but right now, she talks about her daughter, about the happiness she has brought into her life.
About love, and about how every different kind of it informs every other.
The Dictaphone sitting on the coffee table between them does all the note-taking, so the journalist takes a moment to wipe her brow, to scan down the list of questions she’s prepared.
The ones her editor made her put in, about Jacob Steele.
‘What inspired the story?’
Steele has been back in the headlines recently.
It must have been vindicating, for Cowan, that her name was rarely mentioned.
No one cares about the drama behind The Sons any more.
The film took on a life of its own, and such stories became footnotes.
It’s a dramatic industry, and a fickle one.
Of late, the journalist’s colleagues are far more interested in the catastrophic failure of Steele’s directorial debut, a film shot pompously in black and white, a script so clunky that it practically shot sparks as it scraped towards the end of its two-hour-and-forty-minute runtime.
Cowan doesn’t seem the type to gloat. She’s never said anything in public about her relationship with Steele, nor did she address the rumours about her daughter’s parentage.
She quietly reclaimed the name of the first short film she’d made with Steele, used it to christen her fledgling production company.
Sonder. Directing pays well, but directing scripts you’ve written, with an exec producer credit, pays better.
Clara Cowan has a net worth you can google, and has probably earned the right to step back for a bit.
She wants to incubate other writers and directors. To bring their ideas to the screen.
‘It’s a love story,’ Cowan says. ‘And when you write a love story, you draw on this vast wealth of love stories already out there. And some of your own experiences, of course.’
They talk about her favourite love stories.
They talk about the convention of the rom-com, about the condescension around art made for women, by women.
They talk about more than this. As the analogue clock on the wall ticks away, the journalist circles certain questions, crosses others out.
She taps her pen against a certain one, near the bottom of the page. Whatever happened to Seb Bonami?
‘Does it annoy you?’ the journalist says. ‘Everyone assuming it’s your life, up there on the screen?’
Cowan smiles. ‘It used to,’ she says. ‘But I haven’t exactly helped to dispel those assumptions.
’ A knowing look. ‘It is my life. In an abstract sense, at least. When I write a script, when I turn it into a film, I’m saying, this is how I see things.
’ She gestures with her hands, rings on every finger.
‘If someone else feels seen by that, then I guess I’ve done my job. ’
The journalist doesn’t say, I felt seen, because she fears it would be ingratiating, unprofessional. ‘So it’s not a true story?’ she ventures, instead.
‘If it’s true to anything, then it’s true to a portion of my life that has been and gone.’ Cowan’s voice is suddenly sharp-edged. ‘I made it before—’ she begins, but the sentence peters out. ‘It belongs to the time in which I made it. Which is fine. That’s the reality of art.’
‘Would you change it?’ the journalist asks.
‘No,’ Cowan says. ‘I wouldn’t change a thing.’
The publicist is looming by the door, but there’s still time for one more question. She knows the one she wants to ask.
‘You’ve been a lot of things,’ the journalist says. ‘An artist, especially in your early days. An animator, an illustrator. A puppeteer.’ This elicits a smile. ‘You’ve been a screenwriter, you’ve been a director, now you’re a producer. Of course, you’re a mother.’
‘When you put it like that, it sounds exhausting.’
‘Well, I think people would like to know,’ the journalist says. ‘Who is the real Clara Cowan?’
Cowan thinks about this for a moment. With one hand, she tucks a few strands of hair behind her ear. She smiles a weary smile.
‘It changes,’ she says. ‘My forties have been a learning curve so far. I never expected to be a working mother. In my thirties, I think I lost myself a bit. More than I realised.’ She’s deep in her own thoughts.
‘My twenties. That was me. I had such a hunger. I was having so much fun. Back when it was just me and a camera and—’ She trails off again.
She averts her eyes, plucks at the cuff of her shirt.
‘When I was a student, I didn’t think I’d amount to much.
I told everyone I would, because I thought I might manifest it.
But I didn’t really believe in myself yet. ’
‘What changed?’ the journalist asks.
‘I realised who I am,’ Cowan says. ‘Who I always was. Not a job title, or a role in a family, or a reaction against something or a desire to be someone else.’ She looks up. ‘A person. A flawed, fearful, fucking insecure person. But a person who could make herself proud, too.’
The room is quiet.
‘How did you find that person?’ the journalist asks.
Clara’s eyes are bright. ‘I guess someone else had to see her first.’