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The creators behind feature film Departures tell Hadley Stewart about fighting for a place at the table and the importance of authenticity in queer films.
When Lloyd Eyre-Morgan came up with the idea for Departures, he tells me he was in a dark place. In fact, he says the on-screen emotions during the first ten minutes of the film are the truest and rawest. The award-winning actor-director-writer, who wrote, co-directed and stars in the northern comedy drama was going through the same emotional rollercoaster as his on-screen character Benji, who we meet at the start of the film getting dumped by Jake (played by former Hollyoaks actor David Tag). Distraught by heartbreak, Benji turns to the bottle and Grindr. His mother grills him at the kitchen table about why he can’t just move on, meanwhile he’s making a living by knocking on doors asking people to sponsor a bird, and fantasising about having sex with his (straight) work colleague. Cut to 18 months earlier, we find Benji in the departures lounge of Manchester airport, where he meets fellow solo traveller Jake who is also heading to Amsterdam for the weekend.
“I was in a bad place and felt a bit all over the place,” recalls Eyre-Morgan from his home over video call. “I started just vomiting out my feelings on paper, and then kind of constructed them into a narrative. I was in a really shit place when we shot the first sort of 10 minutes of the film, so the emotion that you see on screen is quite real. It was how I was feeling in real life.”
He took the idea of a feature film to his friend and long-term creative partner, award-winning writer and director for film and television, Neil Ely. “I didn’t take much convincing,” says Ely, who joins the call from his kitchen table, before rolling up a cigarette and lighting it. Despite their friendship and previous working relationship, Ely still made Eyre-Morgan audition for the lead role. “I had to prove myself to Neil,” laughs Eyre-Morgan.
Ely reasons, “I think we approached it in the same way we approach everything, that is to not just give someone a role. You have to, like with everything in life, earn your place at the table. So I didn’t see why it should be any different for this film.”
Equally, Ely was thinking ahead. The pair were going to be working on this project for several months. Whilst neither of them went into it blindly, Ely explains that he was also looking out for Eyre-Morgan. “If we’re gonna spend eight months having no day off and put our personal money into this, I needed to know that you could deliver this and that it could be authentic, and that you’re a good actor,” says Ely to Eyre-Morgan. “Otherwise it’s a vanity project.” Ely pauses and turns to me: “So yeah, Lloyd proved me wrong, which is rare.”
The pair erupt into laughter. It’s something that happens a couple of times during the interview; both Ely and Eyre-Morgan ribbing each other, a kind of familiarity that has grown between the two of them over the years of working on projects together. It’s also a glimpse into their humour and personalities, things which doubtless proved invaluable when shooting a film with such sensitive subject matter.
The film took months to make, with both Ely and Eyre-Morgan balancing shooting and editing with their day jobs. This juggling of jobs and pursuing creativity is something that working class creatives know all too well, yet as the pair point out, the realities of financing a film is not something that is talked about enough within their industry. “If you’ve got funding or finances in place, then you could block off maybe two or three weeks and shoot everything then,” explains Ely. Yet for those working on Departures, that simply wasn’t an option. “We had to work, save up money, then film it, then repeat.” Whilst filming in this way did have its advantages, namely that the pair were able to “sit and let the film breathe” between shoot days, it was labour-intensive. “I think I sat down at one point and was like, I haven’t even had, literally, a morning off, let alone a full day off, for nearly nine months,” recalls Ely, who was working as a painter and decorator in the week, whilst directing the film at the weekend.
Eyre-Morgan echoes this notion of hard work to get the project off the ground. “We kept adding weekends and at one point it felt like it was never going to end,” he says. “Or if we weren’t filming, we were rehearsing or going around and looking at locations or sorting out costumes.”
The film itself touches on several themes that would be emotive for any actor. Yet I wonder, how was it for Eyre-Morgan to film something that was so close to his own personal experiences? Did he, I venture, ever get the sense that making the film spilled into his own life? “I didn’t really take it away with me after we shot the scenes or anything like that,” he replies, crediting Ely’s abilities as a director. “And Neil, obviously, I’ve worked with him for years. He was directing a lot of my performance and made it feel like a very safe set to be on.”
Alongside his own lived experiences, namely being in a toxic relationship and grappling with body image insecurities, Eyre-Morgan’s character also goes through things that form part of Ely’s past. “Because me and Neil know each other so well, we had that trust when it came to playing both his and my experiences,” says Eyre-Morgan. “Sometimes I was playing Neil in a sense, and stuff that happened to him, things that I hadn’t directly experienced myself. So that was more challenging, because I wanted to get it right, because it was someone else’s story.”
The scene where Eyre-Morgan’s character is sexually assaulted and the aftermath that follows is based on Ely’s life experience. It was something that the actor tells me was “exhausting” to play, with Eyre-Morgan feeling like there was a sense of responsibility. “I wanted to get it right for people that have been through sexual assault, and make sure that it was accurate,” explains Eyre-Morgan. “Neil was on hand, and it was based on his experiences. I think that him directing me brought an authenticity to those scenes.”
Ely shares that he found those scenes challenging to watch at times. “I didn’t find it difficult when I was directing the scenes, I just kind of shut off from it being my lived experience,” he says. Yet when it came to having to rewatch the scene multiple times to edit the film, that’s when Ely felt himself needing to take a step back: “I was a bit like, I can’t keep watching this now. It’s something I just couldn’t keep looking at and watching, because then I did start to kind of relive it.”
Ely is keen to point out the importance of Survivors UK, where he currently works. The national charity’s mission is to ensure every boy, man, and non-binary person in the UK has access to the support they need to navigate the impact of sexual violence and begin their journey of recovery. Through the charity, Ely has gained a further understanding of sexual assault and violence, as well as opening the door to accessing counselling, something which he found particularly helpful during the filming of Departures.
The idea of using their own personal experiences for a creative project is something that Ely and Eyre-Morgan are no strangers to. In fact, the pair argue that personal experiences often form the foundation to their creative ideas. “A lot of our work comes from lived experiences, either our own or someone else’s,” explains Ely. They worked on a short film S.A.M. in 2020, a love story that explores acceptance and how people living with a learning disability can feel about love and sexuality. Ely worked with the charity Mencap in a community centre for six months, such was his motivation to tell this story authentically. “It was really important to make sure that the film was as authentic as possible,” says Ely. “We worked with a brilliant actor called George Webster, who has Down syndrome. We said to him, this has to be your story, your voice on the page. It couldn’t come from us.”
Getting to a point that feels as close to the truth of the human experience is something that both film-makers are unquestionably driven by. For Eyre-Morgan, he believes that Departures is a film that tells the honest story of what many gay men might have been through. “Neil and I have experienced everything in the film at some point,” he says. “This is our truth, and we’re just putting out what we’ve experienced as gay men. It’s not necessarily saying that this is everyone’s truth, but just what is authentic and raw and real to us.”
It’s impossible, I reply, to be able to represent the lives of all queer people through just one film. “You know, this was Lloyd’s story initially, but I could relate to it so much,” says Ely, adding that he believes the relatability of the themes brought up in this film go beyond the queer community. After the film screened at the BFI Flare film festival earlier this year, the pair received messages from both within and outside the LGBTQ+ community, praising them for the film. “It’s the story of a toxic relationship and unrequited love,” he continues. “I feel like that can be relatable to so many different people.”
Eyre-Morgan echoes this, picking up on the idea of the importance of creating varied queer stories. “I think that’s really important,” he says of the diversity of stories being shown on the big screen. “I suppose there is still a bit of an expectation to make queer cinema in a certain way.” It is his view that there is a so-called “unpublished rule book” when it comes to the expectations of queer films. For instance, he points to previous conversations he has been a part of that have suggested the lead must be “a ten out of ten” in order for the film to be a success. Does he think there is an over sexualisation in queer films? “I think a lot of queer stories are very overly sexualised,” he replies. “I think there’s a lot of tendency to cast people who look like absolute supermodels in them, which is another reason why I wanted to be in the film as well.”
In Departures, Eyre-Morgan’s character brings up insecurities about his appearance several times throughout the film. It’s something that the actor has firsthand experience of. “I do have body conscious issues myself and I feel like that’s not really represented in queer cinema,” he shares. “I think the rule book is that if you’re going to make a gay film, you need to have a hot lead, otherwise it’s not going to sell and nobody is going to see it.”
Whilst Eyre-Morgan says what drives him to tell queer stories comes from the lack of queer representation in cinema and TV when he was growing up, he believes that some stories are still not being told due to the expectations of certain restrictive hallmarks of queer cinema, that come from the wider film industry. “If we’re restricting stories, then can we tell real, true stories?” he ponders. “I don’t know.”
In addition to restrictions on queer storytelling, the pair agree that one of the main barriers to making films today is the financial aspect of any project. “Working class people aren’t able to make films and tell their stories, because of funding. That’s one of the biggest barriers we’ve come across in our film-making careers.” Ely gives the example of needing to complete several forms as a means of securing funding, yet funding applications are often rejected because “it takes knowing what to say in the forms and that only happens when people know the industry well.”
Both Ely and Eyre-Morgan come from a working class background and say that prejudice towards people from similar backgrounds to their own is omnipresent across the industry. Ely grew up on a council estate in Greater Manchester. His mother was a cleaner, and his father a painter and decorator. Everyone assumed Ely would too grow up to be a painter and decorator, which he did. “It would have been very easy just to be like, actually, okay I’m never gonna be able to make a film,” he says. “I didn’t know how to fill out any of the funding forms, so I thought to myself that I’ll just carry on being a painter decorator, because that’s what was expected of me.”
Despite having trained at UCLA Film School, like Ely, Eyre-Morgan had to fight for a place at the film-making table too. He applied for the BBC New Directors Scheme every year for 10 years. “I just couldn’t get on it,” he recalls, having now directed several episodes of Hollyoaks, Eastenders and Waterloo Road. “I just kept applying and applying and applying.” Eyre-Morgan says that perseverance is something that is required to work in this industry. “You’ve just got to keep banging on doors,” he advises anyone considering becoming a film-maker. “And in the meantime, keep making films you love in the interim.”
Whilst many might marvel at Eyre-Morgan’s directing career to date, he shares that the snobbery towards actors, writers and directors who have worked on soaps means that some doors are currently closed to him: “Sometimes I can’t get seen for a television project, because I’ve directed episodes of soaps. People who have never worked on soaps get seen straight away.” The rationale behind this? “It comes down to class,” argues Eyre-Morgan. “Soaps are predominantly working class actors, working class crew members. I think it is classism. It does come down to a prejudice against working class people.”
Ely and Eyre-Morgan say they are now part of a “lovely film-making family” who believe in the stories that reflect who they are: northern, working class, queer and neurodiverse. Having been selected as a festival favourite at the BFI Flare 2025 and nominated at the National Film Awards 2025 for Best Comedy, the creators behind Departures are now looking to get the film out to a wider audience. In the meantime, it comes as no surprise that the pair are already working together on their next project.
Neil Ely and Lloyd Eyre-Morgan are the creators behind feature film Departures, and are featured on Vada’s latest digital cover, photographed by Adam Spencer Young.
