“I want to do Scooby-Doo. I will interview for that job. I would love to make a Scooby-Doo movie.” Sitting opposite me eating a watermelon salad and pitching for the (at the time of writing) theoretical gig of directing a new Scooby-Doo movie is Naqqash Khalid, film director and sometime academic. His new feature, In Camera, is one of the most original debuts in years, a sharp piece of work that satirises the film industry at the same time as being formally inventive and playful. But it’s not exactly an audition for a big studio gig, and though the Scooby-Doo pitch is probably 98% ironic, it’s hard not to wonder what Khalid’s arthouse version would look like, with the actors from In Camera in the lead roles and “every other role played, in multiple role casting, by Kristen Stewart or Franz Rogowski”.
But back to In Camera. How would Khalid describe his film? “It’s a labyrinthine fairytale about a young actor who’s navigating a nightmarish version of the industry. But it’s also not about that … ” The film is about Aden (Nabhaan Rizwan) and his tortured efforts to book an acting gig in London, but it’s also more ambitious than this logline suggests, taking jabs at all sorts of ripe targets, from post-empire complacencies – “it’s almost like a kind of postcolonial horror” – to the bedevilled concept of “representation”.
In one scene, Aden auditions for a toothpaste commercial and is required to deliver the same line over and over again until the words lose all meaning, while the casting director implores him nonsensically to smile: “whiter, whiter!” At another audition for the role of a bearded terrorist, the casting director asks him to “try it with an accent”. We know, and he knows, what kind of nonspecific accent she’s requesting, but he refuses to play the game. Later, auditioning for a gritty northern film about father-son strife, he presents himself as exactly what the white director wants him to be: an untutored novice actor. He gets much further with this persona – “so I just say the words on the page, yeah?” – than he ever did asking intelligent questions about motivation. The director wants credit for discovering a diamond in the rough, not working in partnership with a performer, but can’t spot Aden’s performance of ignorance for what it is.
“This is my horrified response to the empty discourse on representation, which I think is actually quite dangerous,” Khalid explains. He cites real-world examples such as the selection of the UK’s first British Asian prime minister as instances where a so-called “win” for representation is not remotely a win for the oppressed. “The entire discourse around representation is just broken, like it’s not going to liberate anyone or fix systemic issues. And I think how people talk about representation is quite laughable and makes me feel uncomfortable.”
It’s perhaps not surprising, given his perspective and lexicon, that Khalid started out in academia. After getting an English literature degree, he skipped doing a master’s and went straight into working on his PhD, aged 22, a period that included teaching classes of students, some of whom were presumably older than he was. He finished the In Camera script by the time he turned 26, and shot it two years later. “I dropped out of my PhD because I was like: ‘OK, the film will probably bring me the same amount of money as six months of teaching. So let me just risk it.’”
The risk paid off. Or, at least, the resulting film was what Khalid hoped it would be. Whether he’ll be allowed to make another remains to be seen: “I went in saying to myself: ‘This is the only film you’re ever gonna make.’ And if, in five years, I’m working somewhere else, I will know I made the film I wanted to make. It’s so seductive to think about being a careerist and being like: ‘I’m gonna make this film to go to this festival, and then I can make a £5m film with this actor, and then I could do this, this, this.’ I went in very much thinking: ‘I am gonna make a film, and I’m gonna hold on to it, and it’s take it or leave it.’”
This is, of course, what’s so electrifying about the film: it’s not cookie cutter, it’s not a compromise, and its virtues and flaws are authentic and original. There are hints of film-makers such as Nicolas Roeg (Performance, Don’t Look Now) in the mix, but it’s also strongly reminiscent of Lindsay Anderson’s 1968 masterpiece If …., which combined lyrical surrealism with an icepick-sharp critique of the system that Malcolm McDowell’s public schoolboy Mick Travis finds himself desperate to obliterate. Crucially, there’s anger there, but also playfulness, which is a key hallmark of Khalid’s approach.
It would have been easy to make a film that played out a series of skits taking the piss out of the industry, but there’s something more sweeping at work, too – an acknowledgment of the rise and fall of different hierarchies, and the cynical ways that identity politics can be weaponised. Amir El-Masry, excellent as Aden’s flatmate, is highly attuned to such swings of the pendulum, insisting to Aden that it’s “our time” – he sees the commodification of his identity as an opportunity, rather than an insult. As a menswear consultant, he’s perhaps particularly well placed to recognise much of modern life as a case of dressing up as the thing you want to be seen as.
Khalid himself isn’t averse to a bit of cosplaying as the thing we’re meant to see him as: “When I’ve been doing In Camera press, I’ve just started to dress like a man with a job, so I find a tie and a shirt. This is my grandad’s tie. I came into all of his ties recently, from, like, the 70s. So it feels as if I’m dressing like a man with a job, like an eight-year-old might.”
Khalid repeatedly – and endearingly – characterises himself as a clown. “The industry is a circus. It’s like putting on your clown makeup and going to work. I thought I escaped one circus, which was academia, but I joined the biggest circus of all.”
This playful disregard for the industry side of an art form he simultaneously regards with deep respect is the attitude that makes In Camera so winning: it’s not satire in the cosy Have I Got News for You sense, whereby a man such as Boris Johnson can leapfrog from amiable self-parody to dangerously self-serving prime minister; it’s satire that might not be enjoyed or even comprehended by those that it targets.
After our lunch, I check Instagram. I have a couple of direct messages from Khalid that encapsulate in miniature the scope of our conversation. One is a picture of Muhammad Ali photographed by Gordon Parks for Life magazine, which served as a visual reference point for In Camera. The other is a return to the charms of screen culture’s greatest great dane. “I can’t stop thinking about my Scooby-Doo cast. It has to have André 3000. André as Fred.”
In Camera is in cinemas from Friday 13 September.
