Peter Mackie Burns on vibrant comedy Daphne

Everyone reading this sentence knows a Daphne, the young woman at the heart of Glaswegian filmmaker Peter Mackie Burns' new comedy-drama of the same name. Vividly brought to life by Emily Beecham, Daphne is a 30-something redhead who acts like she’s in her early 20s. She lives a somewhat chaotic life in the south London neighbourhood of Elephant and Castle, where she half-heartedly works as a commis chef. She’s charming, cocky, fiercely independent, brainy, foul-mouthed and funny as hell – she’s also self-destructive, antagonistic and a bit infuriating. But these flaws are what make the character feel so real.

When we speak to Burns ahead of the film’s UK premiere at Edinburgh International Film Festival, he tells us that he worked closely with writer Nico Mensinga and Beecham to create a vivid, complex character. “We wanted her to be someone smart and relatable for whom life is pretty difficult and who can't abide bullshit – especially her own.”

If the character feels lived-in it’s because she is. Daphne is essentially an extension of a short film Burns made in 2014 called Happy Birthday to Me, also written by Mensinga and starring Beecham. “It was a kind of prototype ten minute film with the same character but a few years younger,” explains Burns. “When we made the short we realised this character had some juice, so when we took the Daphne script to producers it made it much easier to sell the character by showing them the short film.”

As well as the short, Burns and Mensinga created a 150-page backstory for Daphne, detailing everything from her school friends and the degree she studied at university to where she traveled after dropping out. The result is a rich character whose behaviour is always explainable. For example, Burns spells out Daphne's penchant for philosophising while inebriated. “The references she makes are the references someone who has read a Žižek primer would make: someone who’s done first year philosophy and then dropped out because she didn’t see any future in it.”

From that screening of the short to the money men, Burns and his team were on set within a year. The 50-year-old director has had a tough time getting previous projects to the screen, so this 12-month turnaround was refreshing. “It’s the fastest film project I’ve ever been involved in,” he says. “I spent ten years trying to make a feature film and I got very close with a couple of them, but they fell apart at the financing stage. Those were three years each, and came to nothing, so for me it was amazing to work on this film so quickly.”

This relative briskness of production seems to be reflected in Burns’ feature, which feels zesty and alive. “I suppose we tried to make a snapshot of what it’s like to live in [London] over a 12 day period, and we wanted it to feel fresh and energetic.” Much of this energy emanates from Beecham, whose dynamic performance dominates every scene. “I love Mike Leigh and I love Cassavetes,” says Burns, “so I suppose I make character films, and if you like the character of Daphne then the film might work for you, but if you don’t then it’s not your type of movie.”

It’s a high risk move, because Daphne is no manic pixie dream girl. She’s spiky, unapologetically hedonistic, and likes to rub people up the wrong way. Although as Burns notes, plenty of beloved male characters have behaved much worse. “Over the year’s there have been lots of stories about men who act in a similar way [to Daphne] and audiences don’t bat an eyelid,” he notes. “She’s provocative. Half the things she says she doesn’t believe, I don’t think, but she says them to get a reaction. She’s made this persona for herself to survive. We love her because we know what’s inside and we know that to survive she’s had to toughen up. She made this role for herself and now she’s been doing it for so long that she doesn’t know what to do next, and I thought that that would be an interesting place for the film to start.”

As well as Leigh and Cassavetes, Burns also mentions Woody Allen’s Manhattan and Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces as points of reference, but the film itself feels more contemporary. The auteurs that immediately come to mind while watching Daphne are more like Desiree Akhavan (Appropriate Behaviour), Gillian Robespierre (Obvious Child) and Lena Dunham (Girls, Tiny Furniture). “We did look at Obvious Child and Girls,” reveals Burns. There’s also an Appropriate Behaviour connection in the form of Daphne's production designer, Miren Marañón, who worked on Akhavan’s film. “When we realised the connection we said said to ourselves, ‘We’re making a Brooklyn film, but we’re making it for South London.’” As well as the Brooklyn location, what links those films are the incredible women at their centers. “They’re about young women who don’t want to be defined by traditional conventions. They’re these fourth wave feminists, and for some reason we don’t make those films [in the UK].”

The transfer of this sensibility to the UK's capital gives the film an interesting flavour, but it also makes Daphne a implicitly political film that quietly addresses the trials of living in that sprawling metropolis in 2017. “The question was, how do you live in that city and be a normal person with a normal job? How do you afford to live there?” asks Burns. This isn’t to say Daphne is some grim study of life as a millennial; quite the opposite. “You know, people in Elephant and Castle don’t feel like they’re living in a Ken Loach film. I love Ken Loach, but I didn't want to make that; that’s his territory.”

Burns’s solution to lift his film out of the traditional kitchen sink terrain of British cinema was an expressive use of colour. To put it simply, the film pops. “We wanted to use colour to lift this, but not in a way that it feels like you’re watching something overly stylised.” Production designer Marañón does this in some pleasingly simple ways, explains Burns. “With Emily’s hair, for example, the apartment had to be yellow. And the blue coat she wears, we knew the would stand out when you see her in a crowd. It’s a kind of low budget attempt to visually lift the film.”

The city itself also provided splashes of colour. “London isn’t the grey city it once was in the 70s and 80s. We found colour everywhere – the signs, the advertising. I know we hear this a lot, but we really wanted the city, or rather Elephant and Castle, to be a character in the film – South London is very much pushing in on her.”

While Daphne represents a rare and refreshingly frank look at modern life in London, Phoebe Waller-Bridge beat it to the punch last year with her brilliant sitcom Fleabag, which shares much DNA with Burns’ film. It turns out both were being made concurrently. “Phoebe Waller-Bridge is a very close friend of Emily’s and we’d bump into each other while filming,” says Burns. “Since then, I’ve watched Fleabag on the telly and loved it, and I thought to myself, her and Daphne could be sisters.” If they ever do a crossover between film and show, we’ll be first in the queue to see it.

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Daphne is released 29 Sep by Altitude