With his feature debut, writer-director Benjamin Cleary is going big. In Swan Song, not only has he assembled an astonishing cast – with Mahershala Ali, Naomie Harris, Glenn Close and Awkwafina as his core foursome – but he’s also wrestling with big, meaty topics. It’s a tale of grief, love, and humanity, as Ali’s terminally-ill Cameron grapples with his imminent mortality, and contemplates replacing himself with a clone in order to spare his loved ones from the devastation of losing him.
For Cleary, it’s a deeply personal exploration. “When I was around 19, 20, 21, I lost three friends three summers in a row,” he tells Empire. “I witnessed what that was like, and the ripples of grief that spread out from that, and just what it does to everyone around the person who's gone. When someone dies suddenly, there's no goodbye. I think I started to look at the world through a different lens around that time, and started to really think – probably far too much – about my own death and what it would do to those around me if I passed.”
Those weighty notions boiled down into Swan Song – and Cleary talked Empire through its influences, its approach to science-fiction, and its raft of talented performers.
Carbon copy
In most science-fiction stories, clones tend to represent some kind of threat. But in Swan Song, it offers hope for Cameron to relieve people’s pain. While there are complex ideas at play in the film, it’s more about creating an emotional experience. “The film is incredibly human and about the people involved in it – not so much about the sci-fi,” says Cleary. “It’s a vessel to actually tell a kind of ‘what would you do?’ type narrative.”
If that humanised approach to the genre brings to mind films like Never Let Me Go, and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, the biggest influences for Cleary – and his cinematographer, Masanobu Takayanagi – weren’t films, but things of a more abstract nature. “We’d sometimes discuss a photograph, or a mood, and he was very much into that,” says the filmmaker. “We had a lot of discussions about the emotion, where the story came from, and the feeling we wanted the audience to have.”
Seeing double
At the centre of the film is a dual-performance from Mahershala Ali – bringing his double-Oscar-winning talents to a pair of characters who need to be totally alike, and yet subtly different. “Getting to work with a master like Mahershala for my first film still feels surreal in some ways,” says Cleary. “A big challenge in the performance was to imbue the two characters with some internal differences, because they’re both facing a very different set of circumstances. Cameron is terminally ill and has very little time left, and the film becomes this incredible journey where he’s stuck in the moral conundrum of whether indeed this [cloned] person is truly him. It’s this beautiful meditation on memory and identity and trust, all these things.”
In trying to get to the core of both characters, Ali went deep. “He started talking about, what does one character's lungs feel like. I just thought that was amazing,” Cleary recalls, describing his leading man as “someone who was 100% committed to getting into the finer details. He was finding the differences between the characters in the most subtle, nuanced and credible ways. You roll the dice when you say they're not going to look different at all, but with an actor like Mahershala the results are just breathtaking.”
Family life
In a Moonlight reunion, Mahershala Ali is joined by Oscar nominee Naomie Harris – here playing Poppy, Cameron’s wife, who doesn’t know about her husband’s illness. It’s a role, Cleary explains, that required the phenomenal performer to lean into every corner of her repertoire. “The way she was able to go from some of the most joyous, beautiful moments to some of the most hard-hitting moments that a person can ever experience was incredible,” he says. “She's just an amazing actor. Her range is unbelievably good.” If he’s reluctant to give too much away, Cleary hints at knotty characterisation for Poppy. “It was a really challenging role to write, because her character is complex, and the journey she's been on up to this point, that we are let in on during the film is a really complex one.”
The doctor is in
In another major coup, Cleary bagged the legendary Glenn Close (“another ‘pinch yourself’ moment,” he tells Empire) to play Dr. Scott, who works at the cloning facility. While ‘scientist playing God’ is a well-worn sci-fi trope that tends to lean towards the dark side, the writer-director wanted something different. “For Glenn's character, it's really important that she came across as believable, and didn't fall into that sort of villainous character that we often see, and that it's actually much harder to read what her intentions are,” he says. “I won't give away any spoilers, but we needed an actor who was able to do something very difficult, which was to play the role in a way that was, in some ways, neutral, and hard to read.” So, don’t expect another live-action Cruella, basically.
Light in the darkness
Awkwafina’s cinematic year has largely been a dance of dragons – voicing Sisu in Disney’s Raya And The Last Dragon, and playing dragon-slayer Katy in Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings. But Cleary was inspired to cast her after seeing one of her most celebrated, lower-key roles. “I saw The Farewell and I was completely blown away. I thought it was stunning,” he says. The role she plays here is “along a spectrum where she's got to be funny and comedic one moment, and then she goes all the way through to some very heavy moments,” he says. “And with her role, those moments often turn quite quickly. So it was really important that we had someone who was able to go into that humour space and have all the comedic timing.”
Those brief bursts of humour are all about keeping the film believably human. “From personal experience, even when you've experienced a great loss, there are just slivers of light where you have a chuckle about something fond about the person or whatever it is, and it just breaks through for a moment.”
Cosy clinic
While Cameron is facing a cold, stark choice in the film, the cloning facility he enters is anything but. There’s a surprising warmth to the look of Swan Song that all came from Cleary’s humanistic approach. “I wanted the environment within to be calm and as inviting as possible, not to be somewhere that a patient will go in and instantly feel like it had the clinical nature of a hospital, or somewhere that was technologically foreign to them,” he elaborates. “So all of the design and aesthetic choices in the film are driven by that narrative and that story point.” And, as gadgetry becomes more seamlessly integrated into our lives, the director wanted to extend that to the lightly-futurised world of the film. “I feel like technology is going to get less flashy as time goes on, and recede more into the background,” he says. “It was important to me that the place wasn't crammed full of computers and screens and things.” Does anyone else have a sudden overwhelming urge to splurge in Muji?
Life, the universe and everything
As Cameron reflects on his fate and the future of his family hangs in the balance, Swan Song looks to be a deeply emotional ride. “I hope people will watch and find something meaningful in it for themselves,” says Cleary. “Hopefully, our movie poses some really interesting questions about our own life and existence here, and the fragility of life, and the beauty of life and love and memory.” For all the futuristic elements, the filmmaker wants to leave the audience thinking about their own lives, families, and loved ones. “I really hope that people have a personal response to it, because I think that when you do dig deep into your own personal well of experiences, it's really painful. But I feel that people do see the truth in that.” Bring tissues, everyone.
Swan Song comes to UK cinemas from 17 December, and will stream on Apple TV+