theartsdesk Q&A: Alice Lowe on 'Timestalker' and what women rue through the ages

Before Alice Lowe wrote her first short film scripts, she was, despite success in television and theater, “terrified” of making a full-length feature. “I thought it was some untouchable Holy Grail. That you have to be somehow inducted before you’re allowed to breathe the word ‘film'." She's not terrified these days. Timestalker, Lowe’s second feature as director, writer, and star, is a fully realised passion project in every sense.

In the history-hopping romantic comedy-thriller, Lowe portrays an obsessed heroine in pursuit of her dream lover – whether he cares or not. From the Stone Age and the Enlightenment to New Wave-era Manhattan, Agnes and her mismatched love object (Aneurin Barnard as a highwayman, heretic, and New Romantic pop star) are reincarnated again and again, with hilarious results.

Lowe’s indelible quick-hit acting performances in cult TV series (Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, The Mighty Boosh) and in popular British indie films (Hot Fuzz, Kill List) reflect her origins in alternative theater and sketch comedy. She cast herself as a tourist-turned-serial killer in Sightseers, which she co-wrote with Steve Oram and Amy Jump, and as a grieving-yet-ferocious mother-to-be in Prevenge, her directorial debut. Yet she always manages to find a beguiling lightness in the bloodiest situations. In Timestalker, the heroine, Agnes, yearns not for vengeance, however, but for dazzling romance.

JUSTINE ELIAS: What’s driving Agnes’s obsession: love or madness?

ALICE LOWE: A sort of 1980s lilac sadness. The whole film has that vibe. The word nostalgia literally means a pain, a yearning to go home. You can have a nostalgia about an era you've never lived in, and sometimes you get that feeling – a yearning for something that you cannot name. For Agnes, it’s the sense that she’s been reincarnated, that she has a destiny.

Do you have a bit of New Romantic pop fandom in your past?

I love the early '80s – it's so my era. All the eras I chose [for Agnes to be reincarnated in], I secretly love. The early ‘80s was such a bizarre period of culture and music because the hippies were over, punk was over, and there was sort of a gap between the [different] subcultures and mainstream pop. Electronic music became mainstream quite quickly. There was some really weird, unique stuff crawling out of the woodwork: Kate Bush, who I'm a massive fan of, Toyah, Leo Sayer, and I don't know... just all this very interesting amphibious or ambiguous stuff.

When Agnes is an aerobicized New Yorker clothed in big-shouldered power suits, she declares that she’s “a new woman – a liberated woman.” Is she, really?

That’s the biggest thing – that she's not ever truly happy. She might have the illusion. And that's what I enjoyed about searching the past. I wondered, in what era is a woman really happy? There are always drawbacks. There’s always some bind. You could be a 17th century spinster, but then people wouldn't have much respect for you because you weren't married. Or you could be a wife, but maybe you wouldn't get to marry anyone you wanted to marry. The fun thing was finding how these different eras trapped you in very different ways.

What era or decade most formed who you are?

I would say the Noughties, which is now getting increasingly more attention, perhaps because it takes twenty years to really work out what a period is. In the 2000s, there was a revival of a certain kind of romanticism: libertinism is the first idea that comes to mind. It's the idea that men are the crazy geniuses and women can be muses, or hang around as groupies. It was a revival of that slightly damaging concept: Yeah! Liberty for all, except probably not for women. And there was a revival of interest in women like Mary Shelley. She got a bit screwed over, didn't she? She's obviously a literary genius, but, you know, when you look at her actual life, she was treated like a groupie, hanging around with all these Byronic poets.

How do you make an expensive-looking period film like Timestalker on an independent film budget?

I hope it looks expensive! It's not. We planned carefully and we reused locations and props and costumes. With every scene there were so many influences. I was inspired by the romanticism of Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. There’s very famous fencing scene in Blimp, and we certainly drew on that. The first time I saw it, I thought, my god, this is the most incredibly cinematic scene, and I am the only person that's realized that. Then I googled it and, of course, there’s Martin Scorsese talking for a half an hour about how that scene influenced Raging Bull. (Pictured below: Alice Lowe)

Yet it’s always subjective what you think is talent in cinema. Then you have to ask who’s been allowed to talk about film, and who’s allowed to be influenced. Someone just said to me that one bit [in Timestalker] was clearly from a Fellini film, and I went, "No, I haven’t seen it." In truth, my film knowledge isn’t encyclopedic. But I know what I like and, quite unashamedly, I just put it in. There’s an illusion that to be knowledgeable about cinema, you have to have seen absolutely everything and, as a filmmaker, you're not allowed to admit that you haven't, which is ridiculous. I use my intuition as a filmmaker. If you watch everything, you can get stuck. Anaïs Nin said something like, "If you know too much, it can blind you to your intuition."

In big-screen roles, you do the most deranged things – stalking, murder, and so on – in an innocent, almost beatific manner. How do you get away with that?

I’m interested in those characters who just don’t see the wrong in things. Nobody thinks they are the villain in their own life. Agnes has got main character syndrome. She thinks what she is doing is right and predestined. Everything she does, in her own view, seems like the only solution. I thought, what if we make the stalker the hero, and it’s her journey, and we understand it? You’re giving me a bit of therapy right now, talking about this. Agnes barely notices the harm she causes, or the harm to herself. Imagine an abuse that’s powerful enough, and she can dissociate.

I think that's why a lot of people do dissociate from bad situations, or good. They’ve had childhood traumas or experiences which have made them able to withdraw from reality. They’ve switched off from it. They’ve gone to another place in their heads. Agnes and her husband are frozen in a childhood state, so their wants are pure. In a way, the character in Prevenge seems to have grown up: she’s an almost jaded figure, taking responsibility for killing people. But again, she thinks that it’s the right thing to do. But it’s not coming from purity – it's from darkness.

You cast Nick Frost as George, a nasty villain who was a Scottish Terrier in a past life. Where did you find sympathy for a man who burns his wife’s books and berates her?

I wondered, how do I make this timeless? A lot of the concerns that we have in a particular era are not the concerns of the previous era. When you stand back, or zoom back in time, you look for the common thread. It’s usually humanity. Of course, George is a despicable figure, and he does terrible things over many years and lifetimes. Can there ever be redemption for him? But everyone is flawed, everyone is trapped, everyone wants something that they can't get. I want audiences to feel that you could watch a film about any one of these characters. And then Nick came along and played it with such empathy that you kind of can’t help feeling for him. That’s why I made him a dog. We forgive dogs when they do bad things, but not people. But his behaviour is coming from somewhere real, from damage.

What’s your next project as a writer-director?

One is an adaptation of a classic, and one is horror. The aim now is to take less time actually getting them made. It was seven years between Prevenge and Timestalker. Yet there was something meaningful about the time I was working on this one, writing during lockdown. I’d had another baby, so there was a lot going on in my life at that time. That’s a sort of happy take on it. I went into this film with the attitude that if I never get to make another film, this is the film I’m going to make. This is my chance to really forge a voice. So I will fight for it.

• More film on theartsdesk