Close-Up Culture’s Genevieve Dammery interviews Every Time I See A Yellow Car filmmaker Matt Chandler about trauma, masculinity, and the making of his psychological thriller.
Genevieve: The title Every Time I See a Yellow Car immediately grabs your attention. Where did it come from, and how did the project begin?
Matt: The title was originally longer: Every Time I See a Yellow Car, I Flinch. I thought that was too much and needed to be reeled in. The film and its title came from a conversation I had with a friend about three years ago. I was processing a sexual assault, while he was dealing with grief after a family member had died. We talked about the strange double-edged sword of discussing something that has happened to you: the more you talk about it, the more you seem to see it everywhere. We compared it to the yellow-car game you play as a child. Once you start playing, you begin to notice yellow cars everywhere.
In a strange way, the film’s premise began to manifest in our lives. Whenever I saw a yellow car, I thought about my friend’s grief; whenever he saw one, he thought about my assault. It became a kind of self-fulfilling metaphor. I liked the idea of being a couple of steps removed from an experience: something in the world takes on meaning because of what is happening in your life. After a breakup, for instance, songs on the radio can suddenly seem to be about that person, or adverts on the Tube can remind you of them. It can feel as though these things are following you. The title became a way of asking: what is everyone’s yellow car? What trigger takes on meaning in the world around us, becoming obsessive or increasingly difficult to ignore?
Genevieve: How do you turn something so personal into a fictional story? What could you explore through fiction that might have been harder to approach in a more directly autobiographical film?
Matt: It’s a tricky one because the jumping off point was a reactionary attempt at processing it or figuring out how to best articulate this this frequency bias thing that I was just talking about. But as the script developed, it became less personal. The characters grew, and the situation in the film is not completely autobiographical; its two steps removed from my own experience. The process was driven by emotion first, with story, structure and character developing afterwards.
Although the film feels personal because it began with something that happened to me, that distance is important. I would never want to make a film that feels like a trauma dump. When dealing with heavy themes such as sexual assault or grief, too direct a personal approach if handled with too much of a personal touch, might just come across as slightly inappropriate, overly traumatizing…just badly handled. I wanted to be guided by genre or character, so the film would not stray into trauma politics or trauma porn.
Genevieve: The film stands out for its genre elements: it feels like a psychological thriller, but it is also a character study. Was the non-linear structure, in which the audience is gradually given pieces of context, part of the plan from the beginning?
Matt: I always wanted the film to centre on a character with a strong interior life, and on a revelation that gradually unravels. I wanted it to feel like the experience of recollecting or remembering something. When you process an experience, you might connect with a surface-level idea first, only to discover later that it is linked to childhood, to events that happened before it, or to things that took place months afterwards. I liked the idea of telling a story that was non-linear in an attempt to have the audience experience what it’s like to figure out trauma and memory in real time.
Genevieve: One of the film’s most interesting tensions is between Liam and Ollie: the instinct to protect someone, and the point at which that protection becomes destructive. What did you want to explore about how men respond to trauma, particularly where protection, control and violence intersect?
Matt: The project began with a very masculine conversation between two men discussing what was happening in their lives. The assault itself involved men, most of the reactions that I had were that were people talking a vengeful thing or a justice-seeking thing were mostly from men. I wanted the film to focus on masculinity and men because I wanted to display the different forms of masculinity that take place when we’re talking about trauma rather than present it as a monolithic thing: that all men suppress their emotions, or that all men resort to violence.
You’ve got the therapist character who is deliberately coaxing out information. Ollie is more sensitive, introverted and introspective around the subject, while Liam turns to physical violence and deals with things in a more physical way. Then there is the dad, who appears only briefly but seems to embody a degree of repression or separation from his own experiences. This is not a problem exclusive to men, but I wanted to make a film specifically about masculinity and trauma because there is so much nuance beyond the way the subject is often discussed in the culture wars.
Genevieve: What responses have you had from men who have watched the film?
Matt: It has been interesting, and in a way, it has become another self-fulfilling prophecy. A lot of the reactions do split between people who can understand this conversation about masculinity and vulnerability, and the need for conversations and open dialogue, and then there’s the other end, which is people who end up always siding with Liam in this scenario. I think there’s some interesting things to be said there, which is like some people saying the rapist got what he deserved.
Genevieve: There is no single way to respond to trauma or grief, so the split in audience reactions is fascinating. Ultimately, it is good if the film gets people talking about things we need to be able to discuss as a society.
Matt: I would never want someone to leave the film feeling that I had handed them an answer. I would rather open up a question or a conversation. I’m glad it has prompted a range of reactions.
Genevieve: I watched the film a second time because I felt there was more to unpack. The cinematography and the depth of the story, alongside the voiceover, make it a film that benefits from a rewatch.
Matt: Even during editing, we were discovering new connections. The script was written in a very stripped-back way, with thin scene descriptions: there were around 56 scenes in 10 pages. It was choppy, and in the edit we moved things around like puzzle pieces. New links emerged that I had not thought of before. We also held a test screening. Andre, the editor, and I had watched the film 20, 30 or 40 times, but someone in the room pointed out something in a scene that neither of us had noticed. We were surprised by it. Different elements of the film seem to stand out to different people, which I think is quite interesting.
Genevieve: The physicality of the film really struck me: the hands reaching out of and around the car are among the most haunting images I have seen in a film this year. The characters’ physical flinches are so affecting that I found myself almost flinching, too.
Matt: Interestingly, the moment that gets the biggest reaction whenever we watch it in cinemas is the picking under the nails.
Genevieve: How do you balance emotional intimacy with the psychological-thriller elements? The many striking shots build suspense without over-explaining everything through dialogue. Is that something the visual approach makes possible?
Matt: It’s a film where inferred meaning through the edit is a big thing. When we were shooting, we had a point of view in mind for almost every shot. With the exception of those surreal shots of the zoom out of the street of cars, the hands coming out of the car, everything is largely rooted in a character’s point of view. That helps ground the chaos in an emotional connection, because you are watching through someone’s eyes or from their perspective. The perspective may move between Liam and Ollie, but the intention was that the audience would always understand whose experience they were meant to be feeling with in a given scene.
Genevieve: That is interesting, because I had not consciously picked up on the point-of-view approach, apart from those more surreal shots. It makes me want to watch the film a third time with that in mind.
Matt: Even in prep, our cinematographer, Ola, talked about connecting a particular lens to each character. Ollie was generally shot on a slightly wider lens, which gives a sense of having everything in view. Even his close-ups are a little wider and more distorted. Liam, who is more single-minded, was shot with longer lenses, making the frame feel tighter and more claustrophobic. These are subconscious choices, and Ola is a genius for thinking them through. I think they are part of why some of the quick-cut sequences work: you instinctively know how to feel.
Genevieve: Did you feel a particular responsibility when telling queer stories on screen? So many queer stories in cinema are rooted in trauma. Was that something you considered while writing the film and thinking about how audiences might respond?
Matt: I think there are two sides to it. There is a responsibility to portray trauma without inflicting further suffering or harm, or creating controversy within the queer community. But you also do not want to sanitise it so much that you end up protecting real issues from view out of fear of showing them.
I recently watched Tiptoe, Russell T Davies’s new show. Its opening shot is of a man, Alan, hanging from a lamppost, so from the beginning you know where the story is going. Across its six episodes, though, it contains unadulterated queer joy as well as queer anguish, anger and trauma. It does not sugar-coat those emotions to make the story cleaner or more protective. The show prompted very different reactions: some people thought it went too far, while others felt its anger was exactly what was needed to get the message across.
That is close to how I want to write: starting with emotion. I felt many of the emotions in this film at the time, and I did not want to censor them. At the same time, the film was never about the assault itself; it was about the emotions that followed and the reactions of the people around me. It is important not to confuse making trauma porn with making an emotionally driven film that refuses to censor those feelings.
Genevieve: I think audiences can find something of themselves in the film, whether or not they have had a directly comparable experience. The way grief and trauma keep being brought to mind, how we tell the people we love, and how they respond, including the feeling that perhaps we should not have said anything, are all recognisable. That makes a specific story accessible to a wider audience.
Matt: That is good to hear. While we were making it, we wondered whether the story was too specific, particularly because some people do not know the yellow-car game. But screenings have shown that people can understand the metaphor quite quickly even if they have never played it. You are right that people come up to me afterwards and talk about experiences that are not directly connected to sexual abuse. They might be about all sorts of things, which is nice.
Genevieve: How did Ty Tennant and Sam Buchanan shape your understanding of Olly and Liam? Were there moments when their performances revealed something about the characters or their relationship that you hadn’t anticipated when writing the screenplay?
Matt: I think the lovely thing about working with Ty and Sam was how much they understood about these characters without necessarily needing to say it out loud. So much of the film is about what goes unsaid between the two of them, and they both brought this brilliant emotional intelligence to their relationship as brothers. Sam brought a real vulnerability to Liam that I hadn’t quite anticipated. He managed to find something more fragile within the script. Really added complexity to the film in that way. And Ty really resisted the urge to define Olly by the trauma, which I really respect. His performance has defiance, humour, frustration, and the whole works underneath it all. And so much of the film lives in the really believable, really tiny moments between them as brothers. They manage to get that sibling-shorthand down to a T.
Genevieve: What were the biggest challenges of bringing this story to the screen, and what did the experience teach you about the kinds of stories independent cinema can make space for?
Matt: The biggest challenges of bringing the story to the screen was just the sheer scale and ambition of it all. It’s a multi-format 16mm/digital non-linear queer thriller, with 56 scenes in 12 pages, across many many locations, some of which featuring huge set pieces. Then throw in some moving vehicles, some stunts and some child actor performances for good measure. All for a 14-minute short. Very sensible, I’d say. But, Poppy O’Hagan my producer, who created Giant Films with her father Nick O’Hagan, is on the front line of independent filmmaking. Their company’s entire ethos is about championing independents – true independents – and allowing filmmaking to be ambitious, and exciting, and creative-led. I never once felt like these challenges were something to be scared of, but just something in the puzzle to figure out. And we did.
Genevieve: The brothers seem to struggle not because they necessarily lack love for one another, but because they cannot communicate that love in ways the other can recognise. What did you want to say about the limits of familial understanding, even within close relationships?
Matt: I think that’s exactly it. There’s absolutely no question that Liam and Olly love each other. In fact, I think they love each other so much that it becomes part of the problem. But there is something to be said about love through action vs love through listening/seeing someone. Liam genuinely believes he’s doing the right thing – his love isn’t insincere. It’s just expressed in a way that ultimately causes more harm. I suppose the question at the heart of the film is whether loving someone is enough if you can’t actually understand them. And I don’t think it always is.
Genevieve: It is good to see the film finding its audience. What comes next for you? What should we be looking out for?
Matt: The film has around eight festivals left for now. We will see whether we want to do any more. Poppy, my producer, and I have just secured funding for our next short, Top Dog. It has a similar structural identity to Every Time I See a Yellow Car, but the subject matter could not be further from it. It follows a gay man training a dog for a dog show. The dog stops behaving after realising that its owner is submissive in the bedroom. We have been calling it the ‘homophobic dog movie’. We are shooting it in March. Poppy and I are also working on a feature together called Glass Houses, which we will probably shoot in the next year or two.
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