When Laia Costa first read the screenplay for Only You, she was indignant. Harry Wootliff’s drama about a relationship tested by infertility was, she felt, big on male gaze, light on female insight. “I thought: I’d never feel this way or say these words. He has no fucking idea.”
So they Skyped. “At first,” says Costa, “I was surprised, because Harry was not a man. And then I was like: ‘Oh, I’m the ignorant one here. There’s something I’m not getting.’”
Born Harriet, but sticking since school to her nickname, Wootliff sits alongside Costa and co-star Josh O’Connor in a Soho basement. “‘Harry’ seems a bit misguided now,” she grins. “A woman’s name would be more useful.”
Still, she knows of what she writes. Only You came from the years Wootliff and her partner spent struggling to conceive. Multiple treatments failed, leaving them scrabbling to reimagine a future without children. The film, her first, began to gestate. And then – naturally, almost miraculously – Wootliff got pregnant. Production was delayed. And this real-life final twist threatened to muddy the movie’s message. Should she grant the same luck to her characters? Or stick to something less simple?
“There’s many a film where the happy ending is that they have a baby,” she says. “Into the Wild: she meets someone and has a baby. Or title cards over the credits show a baby.” Her happy ending, she decided, would be different.
Only You is an astute, bruising love story whose mix of the lyrical and the explicit recalls the likes of Weekend and 45 Years (it was produced by the same outfit). What marks it out is a subtle sense of responsibility. Not just in terms of plot – at least 70% of IVF rounds fail – but premise. Infertility is not obvious date-movie material.
Wootliff admits to some tricky publicity discussions. “But I’d be doing a disservice to myself to not do something because I worry it’s not saleable,” she says, carefully. “I don’t want to put people off by saying this is a story about infertility. But then I feel I’m betraying the subject.
“Plus, I want to put it out there because it is a hard sell. [Children] are a fundamental desire. It’s really profound and misunderstood. So why shy away from it?”
O’Connor nods. “I see this film as being as important as something like I, Daniel Blake,” he says. “In the UK we’re living in a pretty torrid time politically. The social landscape isn’t massively uplifting. So I think there is a real place for honest cinema that also ends with some hope. We are starved of hope at the moment. This is riddled with it.”
O’Connor has been here before: bestowing low-budget hope while getting his kit off. His breakthrough, God’s Own Country, was also an intimate romance, praised for its final act (in that case: a reconciliation between O’Connor’s gruff farmer and the Romanian labourer he cheated on). “Not many queer films end happily,” he says. “They die from Aids or something horrible happens.”
In the flesh, O’Connor feels much closer to his character in this film: fresh-faced and bouncily deferential to the two “cool” women alongside him. Since they shot, his star has risen considerably, with God’s Own Country, of course, but also as Larry in ITV’s The Durrells; he’s shortly to be seen as Prince Charles in the new series of The Crown.
Wootliff cast him through auditions, struck by his mix of naivety and grit, while Costa was chased off the back of the one-take German thriller Victoria. The role was massaged to fit, and you can see how her frankness, facility with improvisation and occasional eccentricity might require a rewrite. Costa’s initial reaction to the script was mostly misunderstanding. But she is also someone who can say the unexpected. The actors met the day before the shoot, a week’s rehearsal scrapped after hurricanes kept Costa in Miami. Given that the film stands or falls on their chemistry, was Wootliff not worried? “Never! I’m a matchmaker. I love Josh, I love Laia. So I put them together. Though I did have some weird dreams beforehand where she was really small.”
Only You is brilliant on the electricity of inauspicious attraction. They meet competing for a cab in the small hours: one queasy, the other stone-cold sober. There is an age-gap: he is 26; she is 35, rather more ancient than she initially admits. Yet before long, they are living together. And it is he who suggests she get pregnant.
O’Connor calls the assumption that young men don’t want to start a family “totally incorrect. A lot of my laddy mates want to settle down.” Wootliff asks him if he wanted a baby before he met his girlfriend (neither he nor Costa have children). “Yeah, definitely. Everything happens quickly these days. Social media. The way we live our lives. It’s always about: what’s the next thing? For me, it’s what character? What film? I’ve done school and drama school. Now I should have a family.”
This inverted cliche is not Only You’s sole rug-pull. It is set in Glasgow, stars a Spaniard and an Englishman, yet remains oddly rootless, something that Wootliff hoped would combat the assumption that infertility is “a middle-class problem. I didn’t want audiences to go: ‘Well, she’s over-privileged. She left it too late.’”
Film financiers were, she found, especially allergic to the phrase. More unexpected was their aversion to the sight of a woman upset while undergoing IVF. “In the edit, they were always questioning her. Is she too emotional? Is she warm enough? Does she shout too much? When I was having screenings for executives, there was constant discussion.
“Women have always got to be more palatable. I’d say: ‘Well he is really irrational and annoying at times.’ They were like: ‘But that just made me love him even more.’”
Reviews have not pulled Wootliff up for an excess of female feeling. But some have queried the lack of mention of alternatives to building a family. Wootliff pauses. There was a line in there originally, she says: a gauche question from a friend that she cut in the edit. “Because the worst thing to ask someone going through IVF is: ‘Why don’t you just adopt?’ Just adopt!
“Plus, I feel like primarily they go on this journey and they’re grieving for this narrative of their life: coming together, having sex, having a baby.”
That is the key to Only You’s potency – and universality: it taps into the horror of having a fantasy about the future abruptly squashed. “That’s why we like reading stories and watching films,” says Wootliff. “It helps with the chaos of just being alive. You might wake up tomorrow and have a terminal illness or be left by your partner. Maybe we make narratives so that we feel safe: we have a plan.”
Only You is in UK cinemas and on digital from 12 July.
