Harvey Zielinski on ‘Sweet Milk Lake’: A trans journey (Film interview)

Sweet Milk Lake, written and directed by and starring Harvey Zielinski, follows Jake, a young trans man who returns home to his estranged, dying father. The film screened at the 70th BFI London Film Festival, where SNACK sat down with Zielinski to talk about directing himself and reclaiming the father-son story.

How did you come up with the name?

Years and years ago I came across a fairy tale, whose title I unfortunately don’t remember any more, but it spoke about a prodigal son returning and finally getting to drink from the sweet milk lake. I just thought that sounded very nostalgic, and it sounded like a bit of an allegory for privilege: who gets to drink from it, and who doesn’t. 

The film speaks to queer people’s experience, and you’re playing the lead. How does it feel to direct yourself?

It’s tricky. It’s a real balancing act, so you’re constantly reassessing your own priorities. The needs aren’t necessarily always complementary. The director needs to be quite pragmatic, but the actor needs to be very, very vulnerable. So it doesn’t always go together perfectly, but it’s really exciting, and I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the creative challenge of it, and I was very, very well supported too. There was a little system built around me to support this very specific way of making the film.

How does it speak to your own experience as a queer artist? 

A lot of the microaggressions and the subtle dynamics, the conversations in the film where Jake is just not being received properly in all of his humanity and is being reduced as a person; many of them come from my own little experiences, but the arc of the film is not in any way autobiographical. It’s more of an allegory for things I was feeling and being frustrated by: feeling pigeonholed, feeling limited, feeling defined by transness, in a way that felt very claustrophobic to me. That’s where it came from.

I was fascinated by the idea of the father-son relationship, which is defined by gender norms. It’s completely different from a father-daughter relationship.

I think Jake steps into a relationship he was never allowed to have, and it feels really hard to pass up. That’s why he doesn’t correct the mistake: he finally gets the keys to the kingdom, in a kind of way. He gets that traditional father-son relationship, but then he realises it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. It’s sometimes lacking vulnerability, lacking honesty. A lot of what Jake has to grapple with is what aspects of masculinity he wants to take on, and what he should leave behind and reject. Surely, as trans men, we don’t want to just replicate traditional masculinity. Surely we want to interrogate it a bit deeper than that, and only take the bits that feel positive.

How did your queerness affect your filmmaking?

I suppose, in a way, Sweet Milk Lake was intentionally classic in some regards, in terms of a classic three-act structure. I wanted the subversion to be inside the classic structure. I didn’t want to rebuild the house all at once. But you are inside Jake’s positionality: the film is shot from Jake’s POV and his emotionality. 

We dressed 360, lit 360, gave the actors a lot of freedom, and my beautiful DOP, Michael Lincoln, was emotionally connected to Jake. When he pulled back or pushed in it was entirely based on Jake’s psychology, because I wanted the audience to be firmly inside his experience – his queer trans experience – to really feel what that was like.

How did it feel working with your actors while also directing them?

They were the nicest people as well. I just lucked out: such a talented, lovely group of human beings. I was quite concerned that, by virtue of me directing and acting, it might feel jarring to them that one minute I was in the scene with them, and the next minute I was saying, ‘Could you change that?’ 

But they were really on board and really embraced the peculiarities of this particular job. I was lucky that my chemistry with Hunter Page-Lochard came very easily and very instantaneously. We worked with a great intimacy coordinator, Amy Cater, but we also had this very easeful chemistry right from the very beginning. It was lovely.

Do you have any other projects in development?

Yes, I have a second script, a second feature called Bugs. It’s a first draft, but I’m excited to talk to people about it, and I’d love to make it.