Interview: Mikko Mäkelä on ‘Sebastian’
After premiering at Sundance in early 2024, Mikko Mäkelä’s second feature Sebastian is finally making its way to UK audiences, more than a year after its debut in Park City back in January 2024. It’s one of the film’s final release dates, having been released in most of the world throughout the course of the past year. Which is slightly ironic to think about, considering just how essentially British the film is.
“It’s great,” says Mäkelä of the film’s UK release. “It’s kind of strange in the sense that it’s coming to the UK after such a long time, it also being such a British film that’s totally inspired by London. So it’s really great to be bringing it home and to finally get to share it with an audience who I think will hopefully have the closest connection to it as well.”
This is also the city where Mäkelä first became curious about the changing face of sex work. Not as a crisis or a last resort, but as a more complex, sometimes voluntary decision young queer people were making. That nuance became the foundation of Sebastian, a quiet, complicated portrait of Max, an aspiring writer who begins doing sex work under a pseudonym to find inspiration for his debut novel.
“The first element was crafting a portrait of a sex worker in the context of London, which I kind of observed already in the 2010’s after I moved to London after university,” he explains. “Through time, I became aware of how many young gay men were involved in sex work and how with online platforms and apps, the threshold for going into sex work has become so much lower, so a lot of people can then maybe experiment with it more and dip their toes into it rather than it be this last resort or this more traditional, old-fashioned idea of sex work in like a brothel or on the street, in that sense. So the first element was really to craft a portrait of someone who is choosing to do sex work in this kind of context and really think about their journey into sex work as well. And regardless of everything, it has been and still is such a stigmatized profession. So I really found myself thinking about that creative process and wanting to combine it with this exploration into the nature of storytelling. Autofiction as a genre has been so in vogue over the last 10 years, but we’ve also been having so many important conversations around authenticity or voice for stories and any type storytelling. So that’s why I really wanted to explore that link between a writer’s experience and what goes on the page.”
It’s this intersection, the one between identity, performance, and authorship, that gives the film its central theme; Mäkelä draws a line between Max’s work on the page and his performances with clients, between who he is and who others need him to be.
“Both Max as a writer and Sebastian as a sex worker have to think about their audience, in a way,” he says. “Sebastian is very much what Max thinks that each client will want and he’s quite adaptable in that sense. And I suppose that’s not so different from what his editor is asking or that the publisher is asking when thinking about what their audience will like in terms of that book. So it really is very much a film that’s asking questions around the different kinds of adaptations and compromises we need to make in our lives or in our works within different contexts and for different audiences, and how that affects our self-image and our formation about identity. But I really wanted to also explore in the film through his reflection on living in London’s gig economy, as well, is really the splintering of identity for someone who maybe has had a couple of jobs and all these different domains in their life and how they present slightly different aspect of themselves. We all have experiences with that. We all wonder, ‘Who am I, really, ultimately, at the end, at my core?’
Films like François Ozon‘s Jeune & Jolie and Swimming Pool, as well as Olivier Assayas‘ Clouds of Sils Maria were key influences. Not just for their visual approach, but for their ideas around authorship, performance, and fictionalizing the self. In Sebastian, those ideas manifest in Max’s dual roles: the writer commodified by a publishing industry hungry for “authentic” queer voices, and the escort commodifying himself in private encounters.
“I loved that film when it came out,” says Mäkelä of Jeune & Jolie. “And I think what was really interesting about that film was just that the character who goes into sex work is someone from from quite a middle-class, Bourgeois background, someone who you wouldn’t expect to do sex work or have any need to do it. And so it’s almost about her private rebellion or experimentation with it. And socially, I think there is some of that in Max as well. That’s also what I wanted to bring into the film as well, a little bit about his background and his relationship with his mother as well to signal that he comes from a fairly comfortable background, in that sense. But a lot of my inspirations were also from the side of looking at art and creativity in film, so films like Olivier Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria or Non-Fiction, also other ones from Ozon, like Swimming Pool. These films are about writing and they playfully reflect on the process of fictionalization and the boundaries between reality and fiction. And with the Assayas films, just how unapologetically he delves into reflecting on the world of creatives and what it means to be making art within a commercial system. In Sebastian, I was subtly trying to draw this ironic parallel between commodification in these different industries as well: The way in which Max is commodifying himself as Sebastian as a sex worker, which isn’t necessarily unlike the way that the literary establishment is then packaging this hot new writer, with the photoshoots he has to do and everything that goes with it.”
There’s a world of coded gestures in Sebastian made up of glances, silences, posture shifts so it was crucial to find an actor who could carry all of that and portray it as authentically as possible. That search led Mäkelä to Ruaridh Mollica, whose performance as Max is as haunted as it is controlled. Sebastian marks not only Mollica’s first leading performance but also his first performance in a feature film, period, which is surprising to think about, considering the nuance and complexity in which he tackles the role.
“I knew that I wanted to find someone who would be fresh and new to the audience because it is such a story of self-discovery,” says Mäkelä of casting Mollica in the role. “I wanted the audience to also discover Max and really begin with this tabula rasa of not bringing any expectations to the role. So we did a fairly wide search with our casting director Martin Ware, just getting submissions in from all over the country of newcomers. We did a few rounds of auditions. But there was something from the very first tape [of Ruaridh] that really leapt out at me from my laptop screen when I was watching it. There was this audaciousness that really showed me that he could jump into the role of Sebastian. But then he’s also such a precise actor; I could imagine him in a silent film, as well, in the sense of him being able to say so much just with his face completely wordlessly, which was so important in the film since there are so many quiet, contemplative moments of Max by himself as well.”
Though Mäkelä’s 2018 debut A Moment in the Reeds was a lo-fi, BIFA-nominated surprise, Sebastian arrives with more resources — and more pressure. But scale hasn’t blunted his instincts. Quite the contrary, as he made sure to stay as grounded and intimate as possible despite the increase in scale and resources.
“I won’t say that it wasn’t bit daunting, for sure,” he says of making the jump from A Moment in the Reeds to Sebastian. “I think we made A Moment in the Reeds for 30,000 and this was made for 2.5 million, which is quite the leap in that sense. In terms of the shoot, it was a co-production between four countries so we shot across 3 cities and I think the big difference was just the scale of the logistics and the logistical challenges we faced. But what I really tried to hold on to as much as possible was keeping a very intimate atmosphere on set. Obviously, for the intimate scenes, but also for the no dialogue scenes and other things as well. We strived to have a closed set, as well, to try to maintain that similar intimacy for the actors to really thrive.”
The film had its UK premiere at the BFI London Film Festival, a full circle moment for Mäkelä, who not only resides in London but also premiered A Moment in the Reeds there a few years ago. “It was wonderful because that’s the festival where my first feature, A Moment in the Reeds, had its world premiere,” he explains. “And so not just being my home festival but also for that reason, it holds a very special place for me. LFF is the festival and BFI is the institution [BFI co-funded the film] that really helped start my career in that sense as a filmmaker as well.”
Now, with Sebastian finally making its way back home to the UK, Mäkelä says he is slowly but surely starting to write again. “I’m trying to find time for writing at the moment,” he says. “I’m working at the moment on a TV adaptation of a novel by a Finnish Kosovar author [Crossing by Pajtim Statovci] about a hidden queer romance between a Kosovar Albanian and a Serbian set against the backdrop of the Kosovo war in the ’90s. But I’m also developing other things as well at the same time. I’m looking forward to diving into writing again as well.”
SEBASTIAN will be released in cinemas in the UK tomorrow, April 4.