Interview With Director Sasha Nathwani (Last Swim)

Congratulations on the success Last Swim’s seen so far and on the upcoming release too.

I rewatched the film last night and it truly does spin the coming-of-age genre on its head. Mostly an American genre, not one that tends to spotlight any ethnic minorities let alone a British-Iranian girl. It’s clear to the viewer that you’ve prioritised Ziba’s heritage, why was that so important in a film like this?

Some really lovely observations there, thank you. I suppose the initial inspiration for wanting to tell this story was what was mainly born out of frustration. When I was the same age as the characters, there weren’t any British coming-of-age films that represented my experience of growing up in London and my friendship circle. I always wanted that to be at the centre of my first film. I’m really interested in the duality of identity that’s very true of Londoners: we tend to be chameleons.

When Ziba is at home, she speaks Farsi, listens to Iranian music and she eats Persian food. But when she’s out on the streets of London, there’s a slightly different more exuberant side of her personality. When she’s in the interview at the very beginning, she’s articulate but when she’s on the High Street with her friends, she’s dropping lots of London slang and I think that’s really true of Londoners.

Obviously we knew that Ziba had to be Iranian. But in terms of the diversity of the rest of the cast, we didn’t want to take a paint by numbers approach. We wanted actors from London and actors that were the same age as the characters because again, with a lot of coming-of-age stories or particularly like American High School films, they cast 30 year olds with really big muscles that play teenagers. By taking that approach to casting, we naturally had a really diverse offering.

I mean, I’m half Iranian, half Indian and as I’ve grown a little bit older and more confident in my storytelling and filmmaking I realised that when I draw on my own experiences, the work seems to live and breathe more authentically.

I’d love to hear a little about your process casting the lovely ensemble of Last Swim. You and Shakyra Dowling crafted a group of friends that aren’t hyperbolic and pretty authentic. Did that take time, was it a challenge for you and the team?

With a film such as this, we had to find the protagonist first. I happened to work with Deba a few years prior on a music video and had been following her on Instagram – she’s not a trained actor. She’s an activist and an influencer and was street-cast as a model, but she showed up on a list of recess Iranians, but she’s actually Kurdish: they have their own culture that’s separate from Iranian culture.

She came in and we did the diagnosis scene. We just kept the camera on her face, had someone off camera read the read the diagnosis, and asked her over the course of the diagnosis to show us or reveal to the camera a loss of hope only with her eyes. There was no dialogue and she just did the most incredible audition. We knew immediately in the room she had the role and then we just had to support her through the process. We got an acting coach, built the team around her. The ensemble are all traditional actors with lots of experience. They all went to drama school. And it was really lovely to see them interact with one another.

We were actually fully cast, and we were supposed to shoot in the summer of 2022. But we missed our window because we only got our financing in place in September, so we had missed out on the summer. We kicked the shoot forward to the following spring. That meant I had six months to rehearse with the actors. So when it came to actually shooting, they were their own mob of friends. Jay, for instance, was doing cartwheels, stuff like that, goofing around a lot. It developed into this lovely chemistry and you feel that camaraderie in the car scenes in the film.

Of course, even from the title, there’s the air of finality that comes with results day, with the beginning of university life and as a teenager, it’s easy to catastrophise and to spiral, which is then compounded by the beating heat. Was Last Swim always a project set in summer?

Summer was important, results day was important because it’s such a seminal time for 18 year olds. It’s very British as well: it doesn’t exist in North America. I remember from my own results day experience that the emotions of the day are a huge contrast between happiness and unhappiness.

I get so frustrated with this reputation that we have in this country, as a culture, the assumption that British people are very cold. The energy of Britain and London in particular, has never really been documented when the sun shines. I love that we do a 180. Often when you tell stories about characters who are experiencing something challenging, that’s reflected in the world that they inhabit. Whenever you see a couple break up on camera, it’s always raining. I thought it was more interesting to have an inverse pathetic fallacy. Ziba is having a tumultuous time and the sun just totally juxtaposes that.

Visually, this is a stunning film. Vibrant, warm, and colourful, mostly due to their fantastic outfits creating that real London feel. London itself provides such a timeless feel to this story, I’m curious about your location choices. Portobello, Hampstead Heath, Primrose Hill: why these places?

The film was actually shot in the lead up to and right after the king’s coronation, which is probably a weird thing to tell you. But it’s relevant: it made the scheduling of the shoot really challenging because none of the film offices were giving up film permits. I had this very naive plan of wanting to shoot the film in story order but it wasn’t possible. I remember on my favourite days when I was a teenager and I’d just crept back into my house after breaking curfew and getting in trouble with my Iranian mum, I would play this game where I would try to piece the day together, and the best days were the ones where I couldn’t actually remember what the order of events were, which locations we went to first, which friends showed up first, that kind of thing. So I wanted the structure of the film to have a similar kind of Planes, Trains and Automobiles approach. When you’re in London, you never know how you’ll get from point A to point B, and it was important to showcase that in the film.