I had little reason – on the face of it – to make this particular film. While it’s almost expected that independent filmmakers will draw on biography for their first feature, I had no personal experience with divorce, parenthood or personality disorders, and the family depicted herein bears (fortunately) little resemblance to my own. The starting point for the script was more abstract, though no less personal for that: namely, what is the fundamental difference between love freely given, and love given for something in return?
I had done some research into personality disorders, and become interested in how those emotionally detached from their loved ones managed to function within the family unit, out of which emerged the characters of Jayne and Robin – one navigating the world completely detached from herself and others, the other overwhelmed by her own sensitivities, and each of them alienated in their divergent ways. Centering the film around a divorce seemed at first a matter of bringing these tensions to the fore – such separations tending to reveal emotional ties as also being legal and financial ones – but the parallels to Brexit (still being put in motion in 2017, as I wrote the script) began to open new political dimensions, and came to form the story’s backdrop.
With an eight-year gestation between conception and completion, the film continued to be shaped by our recent history in some unexpected ways. We were gearing up to go into production in the summer of 2020 when Covid reared its head and the project – along with the rest of the world’s plans – was suddenly thrown into doubt. Over the following months we were able to regroup, and began shooting the film in installments in October 2020. Although this piecemeal approach was in many ways beneficial to a small production like ours, working under pandemic conditions came with some great stresses – the location for Robin’s flat was about to be sold off, and if we were interrupted by anyone falling ill before its completion, we’d have needed to throw it all out and start over again (possibly a fatal stroke for a self-funded film like ours). We were lucky enough to avoid any such mishaps and completed principal photography in late 2021, before reuniting a year and a half later to film the epilogue in the summer of 2023.
One reason for this gap was to have an opportunity to rethink our ending once the bulk of the editing was complete. The title Cost of Living was settled on when I wrote the script, and only during the course of production did it become topical amidst the unfolding cost-of-living crisis. Rather than take on a new title, we elected to work this into the epilogue which takes place in 2023, as the charity Jayne ends up working for is no longer administering to crises abroad, but the one unfolding (and unfolds still) at home in the UK.