Writer Nat Luurtsema on her Bafta-nominated comedy film

A dark comedy about a sperm-bank hiccup — made for just £1,000 — has been nominated in next month’s Bafta film awards. Writer Nat Luurtsema is in a tizz, she tells Veronica Lee
Veronica Lee21 January 2014

The focus at the Baftas next month will be on Steve McQueen’s monumental and harrowing drama 12 Years a Slave, which cost $20 million to make and is nominated in 10 categories — but among the other nods is Island Queen, a wonderfully dark, low-budget comedy made by two young Londoners, Nat Luurtsema and Ben Mallaby, which couldn’t be more different.

It’s in the short film category — at “the bottom end of the card,” as its writer Luurtsema self-deprecatingly jokes — but she and director Mallaby are chuffed to be in the company of more established film-makers such as McQueen and Martin Scorsese (for The Wolf of Wall Street). When Luurtsema (pronounced LURTS-sem-mer) and I meet over tea at the Radisson Blu Edwardian Hampshire hotel in Leicester Square, she talks excitedly about the ceremony at the Royal Opera House on February 16 — although, she says: “I have absolutely nothing to wear. When I heard we had been nominated I sent a message on Twitter asking if anyone could lend me a dress.”

Island Queen was made for £1,000 with the help of students from Falmouth University and Eugene Hughes, a private investor who had liked Mallaby’s previous short films. Luurtsema stars as Miriam, 30, busy going nowhere, still living with her parents on a small island and working seasonally on a ferry boat with her friend Danny (Sam Pamphilon). She tells him she has decided to have a baby and has visited the island’s sperm bank. The only trouble is, so has her younger brother (Sam Perry) ... It’s a very funny and touching comedy about love and friendship, told in 16 minutes.

Mallaby and Luurtsema filmed it in four days in Cornwall, with everyone doubling up as cast and crew. Luurtsema, who clearly has charm to spare, persuaded daytrippers to appear as unpaid extras, which leads to a priceless moment when Miriam and Danny discuss whether she would have sex with a dog, and the elderly woman behind her looks genuinely aghast.

Luurtsema, 31, was born in Watford to an English mother, a teaching assistant and waitress, and a half-Dutch, half-Indonesian father, who is an accountant and barman. She was a bookish and shy child (although now, by her own admission, a chatterbox), and ferociously bright, winning scholarships to the Royal Masonic School for Girls in Rickmansworth and then to Oxford to read English. “I plateaued at university,” she says, “where I was very middling. It was refreshing, because I realised I had peaked early and was not academic.”

While she was at boarding school she developed an eating disorder and was hospitalised at 13, and says it is something she is always mindful of. “I have an obsessive personality, I guess — but it means I work really hard.”

Although she has appeared in television and radio comedies and written for shows including Mock the Week and 8 Out of 10 Cats, it was as a stand-up that Luurtsema came to many people’s attention. At the Edinburgh Fringe last year she performed She Be Here, which charted the break-up of her three-and-half-year relationship with fellow comic Tom Craine, her colleague (with Dan Antopolski) in the sketch group Jigsaw (who have a second Radio 4 series later this year).

He performed his own show about the split, Crying on a Waltzer, and Luurtsema describes the comically complicated scenario last August. “I was doing my show about him, rushing across to the Pleasance Courtyard to appear on a sketch show with him and then he would dash off to do a show about me. I saw his but I wouldn’t let him see mine because I was scared he would object to some of the things in it and I would have to take them out,” she jokes.

“He was way more complimentary about me. But he’s still my best friend and we talk about 10 times a day.”

They had moved in together on the second date. “The lease was up on my flat and we were so heady about being in love that we did it. I’m very romantic and I can get really giddy at the beginning of a relationship. I have oxytocin overload.”

Island Queen is not autobiographical — the idea was inspired by a news item about the concern that sperm banks in Iceland, which has a population of only 320,000, have about donors and recipients being unrelated. Luurtsema, currently single, has no plans to visit a sperm bank any day soon — but much of her work is about her life.

Her break-up with Craine came after a period when she had moved back to her parents’ house, an experience she turned into a sharply observed memoir. Cuckoo in the Nest, her first Edinburgh show, was about her eating disorder and now she is writing her second book, a novel for young adults, about a teenager who is an Olympic swimming hopeful — as was Luurtsema. I ask if there’s anything about her life she wouldn’t plunder for material.

“I have a couple of things that are private to me but the rest is up for grabs,” she replies. “I don’t think I’m unique or special so I figure that anything I reveal about myself has happened to other people — so why would I be guarded about it? My stage persona is me two glasses of wine in — it’s a bigger version of me.”

Her second project with Mallaby, a university friend of Craine’s — “I got a share of him in the split. I see everything in words, he sees things in pictures, it’s the perfect pairing” — does not, however, spring from her life.

Annie Has Body Issues, which starts shooting in May, is a feature-length film — again written by Luurtsema and directed by Mallaby — which she describes as “a female-led black comedy marrying the tone of Bridesmaids with a bit of Shallow Grave”.

“It’s about Annie [played by Luurtsema], who wakes up after a house party and finds a dead woman on her sofa, and has no idea how she got there. It’s the woman who stole her job and her boyfriend so she’s in the frame and has to get rid of the body, and she recruits her best friend, Gwyn, to help her. It’s a film about loyalty and accountability and looking after your friends — and getting rid of dead bodies, of course...”

As we part, the issue of a dress for the Bafta ceremony crops up again. “I live in jeans and clothes from Tom and Dan that have shrunk in the wash. I can’t turn up in an old Fred Perry shirt.”

The Baftas will be screened on BBC1 on Sunday February 16.

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