Luke White’s Handsome, a world premiere at the Glasgow Film Festival this week, is a road movie with a difference. Instead of Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda, its two travellers are Nicholas Bourne and his younger brother Alex, who has Down’s Syndrome. They travel from Cornwall to New York, India and Hanoi to meet other siblings in the same situation.
This is a film not only starring brothers, but made by brothers as well. Luke directed but the doc was shot and co-produced by his sibling Ed with whom he runs video production company Boxclever Media.
As Ed and Luke explain, Nicholas and Alex were long time family friends. Nicholas had appeared as an actor in Luke’s thriller Blood Money (2017). Long before that, they all used to meet on holidays in France.
Nicholas came to them with the idea for Handsome. “He had been thinking about making it into a book but his mum said ‘why not talk to us about whether we would be interested in making it into a documentary,’” Ed recalls.
“Nick wanted it [the documentary] to be made to help other siblings who had the same experiences as himself,” Luke adds.
This isn’t a subject filmmakers or authors have covered in any depth before. “There’s lots of information about having babies with Down’s but there’s very little on what it means to be a sibling,” Nick recently commented.
Handsome was shot with a tiny crew. When they went to Cornwall, Luke would drive behind Nicholas and Alex’s camper van. They would set up tents next to each other. In India, they stayed in the same tiny hotel. When they weren’t on the road, they were living in a house together in Farnham, in the south of England. The brothers were determined to spend as much time as they could with their subjects so they could get a grasp on what their everyday lives were like.
“We were always really aware, as soon as we started living with Nick and Alex, how little Alex is able to speak. When he does, you do have to give him a lot of time,” Ed notes.
There were some ethical challenges to negotiate. Alex is now in his early 20s. He didn’t “fully understand” that he was the subject of a film. “We had a responsibility to inform Alex as best as we can what was happening and to see that he was comfortable with what we had recorded,” Luke observes. “Whenever we’d show him a version of the edit, he would indicate that he didn’t mind. He would enjoy watching it.”
The brothers shot around 11 hours in each country, adding up to 45 hours of material in total. It was then, as Luke puts it, “a process of filtering and filtering for good conversations, the quality of the footage and sound and then it starts about how we are going to structure it into something that was informative and entertaining.”
The film is very frank, sometimes painfully so, about Nicholas and Alex. There is frustration and exasperation as well as comedy, affection and joy in their relationship. Early in the documentary, Nicholas admits that he was ashamed of Alex when he was younger.
At the same time, Luke and Ed were determined that the film should be entertaining rather than didactic. That way, they would stand a far greater chance of reaching a big audience and, as Luke puts it, “make a much bigger impact when it comes to overcoming the social stigma of Down’s Syndrome.”
“It was so important that we made sure they had fun, and we all had fun, making it,” Ed emphasises.
“We wanted it to be a fun trip,” his brother chips in. The mood, he adds, was intended to be similar to that of Little Miss Sunshine or of The Peanut Butter Falcon. The brothers tried to make sure that Nicholas and Alex weren’t aware of any of the budgeting or scheduling tensions behind the scenes.
Vietnam was especially stressful. It was hot. The equipment was heavy. It took a small eternity for the story there to come into focus.
It helped that Luke and Ed have worked together for so long that they now have a near telepathic rapport. “We get on so well and we’ve both been interested in film since we were seven years old. There are so many things we don’t even have to discuss… we are totally on the same wavelength.”
The brothers were in contact with the Down Syndrome Association right from the start of the project. “They’ve seen the film and it was really great to get their positive response to it,” says Ed.
Luke and Ed set up Boxclever in 2015. The company has two divisions. One is devoted to “passion projects” like Handsome and their feature fiction films. The other deals with the brand work and corporate videos which they make for a huge range of clients, from the NHS to legal firms like Clifford Chance.
Yes, it can be a struggle to combine both. Handsome took huge amounts of preparation and research. The documentary has been picked up for distribution by Zak Brilliant’s Republic Film Distribution and will be released in the UK later in the year.
The brothers are currently developing another documentary, on sitar-playing Indian musician and guru Ravi Shankar. This was originally called ‘Secret Code Of The Universe’ but its new working title is Ravi Shankar: Godfather Of World Music.
“Maybe when lockdown is lifted, we are going to seriously look at that again and see if we can get it off the ground,” Luke states.
