Interview with Sapphire Lazuli about her latest short film
Sapphire Lazuli is a creative whirlwind! Not only is she a writer publishing indie horror (including the novella Our Witchless Flesh forthcoming from Off Limits Press in 2025), but she’s also a musician and filmmaker. And probably some other stuff I don’t know about yet! Her short film Those Were the Days arrived this month on YouTube, and she agreed to answer some questions about it. Read on for her fascinating thoughts on filmmaking, trauma, and queer art.
Q: Can you give a quick description of Those Were the Days for those who haven't watched it yet?
A: Poised as a video essay about Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink and B.R. Yeager’s Negative Space, Those Were The Days surprises viewers by quickly unfolding into a sharp and vulnerable horror film that explores how it feels to grow up transgender. Attached to it is the tagline dread the pain of having to carry on, as the horror of this film was largely rooted in the idea of dread.
Q: What's a small detail from the film that you're particularly proud of?
A: Well, on the topic of that aforementioned dread, if there's one thing that makes me go "oh! I love that!" Every time I pull up the film, it's the presence of the bedroom. Right from the very first shot of the film I tease where we are heading with my bedroom and the warm yellow light within in the top left corner of the shot. As the film goes on, my bedroom light is never once turned off, always leading your eyes back to where my character, Georgia, is trying desperately to avoid. Having that birthplace of trauma linger over everything was so important to me, Georgia claims to have forgotten, but the impact of everything she felt in that room all those years ago simply will not leave her. She is haunted by dread.
In that, this film, much like my previous, Haunted Houses and Houses That Haunt, explores the idea of a character who cannot yet understand that they are being haunted and, in turn explores the idea of haunting existing beyond the concept of ghosts and ghouls.
Gods, and the final line of the film itself. I won’t spoil it here, but originally that final line proceeded another paragraph that would send us off; I decided during editing to cut it where it does and every time I watch it it crushes my entire body from the inside out.
(Ivy’s note — yes, it’s a devastating ending!)
Q: How have people in your life responded to this film, especially those who've known you since you were young?
A: Well, the unfortunate truth is that there are not many people in my personal life now who have known me since during those times, what I don’t talk about in the film is that after the experience of trauma, I worked hard to create myself as someone who existed only elsewhere. I’ve always found it interesting how simply using the moniker of Sapphic Sapphire has been enough that those in my personal life cannot find me, but those in my artful life can’t stop hearing of me. I don’t think that disheartens me, though. The people from my artful life have had the most wonderful responses, and it feels quite cathartic to introduce a more vulnerable and real version of myself in alongside the often fantastical image of Sapphic Sapphire with my dramatic videos, and magpie mothering, a general ‘extra’ aesthetic.
Q: Did you write out the whole script before filming, or did you come up with new ideas as you started filming?
A: This varies from project to project. I believe Those Were The Days is pretty similar from script to final export, with the occasional omission or change to wording. But then in other projects I have found myself rewriting entire analysis segments before recording. I usually learn my lines as I go rather than dedicating time beforehand as I usually have it pretty down pact from having written it all, and in doing this I am given a final moment before the camera starts rolling to decide whether I enjoy what I have chosen to say.
In particular with Those Were The Days, however, as there is a lot of time spent in this film with silence, I did find myself making lots of cinematographic decisions that differed heavily from the script’s original stage directions. I think this film is perhaps my most expressive project to date, certainly this is true for what is currently on my YouTube channel. Haunted Houses and Houses That Haunt has a segment near the end that is nearly five and a half minutes (an absolutely intentional thing) of just video. No words. Just moving through the House. I thought for sure that this was the part of the film that would lose people and instead people came in droves to watch it. It showed me that I had people’s attention, that my visual flair as a filmmaker was interesting people as much as my analysis and with that, I gained the confidence to do what I did with this film.
On all of this, I had a thought earlier this morning of how my scripts come into creation. I think I do a lot of my pre-writing—that is the ideation and blocking of my videos and films—in the shower. The Stradivarius: Claustrophobia Incarnate benefited greatly from these writing sessions with its’ slowly closing aspect ratio being born here. So too did Haunted Houses and Houses That Haunt evolve from nothing more than a video essay into a full on live action recreation of The Five and A Half Minute Hallway during one of these shower writing sessions. Truly, the shower is a wonderful think tank if ever you’re stuck with a project!
Q: You reflect heavily on loss in this film, including the loss of social identity, along with suicidal ideation. In Skinamarink, various aspects of the house disappear, and you interpret this as a manifestation of loss. When people feel like they want to disappear, do you have any advice for them? Any advice for their friends who want to help them?
A: I think what's important to focus on is that Skinamarink specifically presents a loss of the core structures. The toilet, the parents and therefore the home, windows, doors, and then with the loss of the parents comes a loss of routine, grasp, and resources for learning what comes next. That is what we feel when we become lost of ourselves, a breaking down of our core structures and, from my experience, the depression can manifest largely as a refusal of taking part. We see this in how Georgia rarely moves, in her clothing (nothing more than a robe), and certainly in how particularly dread filled shots keep returning. In being unable to take part, Georgia is also unable to move on.
Even the smallest task can feel insurmountable and, in struggling with our standard routine, we become more and more tired with each passing day. My biggest advice is to take those structures that you feel you may have lost, and break them down further to their smallest part. Making food was a huge one for me, the thought of having to put all of the ingredients together was so insurmountable that I wouldn't eat. But you don't need to make food, eat the ingredients separately, get the nutrition you need and build back up to being able to cook. The same can apply for bathing, for dressing, a shower might be an insurmountable task, but washing your face, or putting on deodorant, or brushing your teeth is a brilliant step forward. As for friends who may feel powerless watching their friend suffer, pay close attention to what basic needs your friend is missing. You can do quite a lot by helping them meet their basic needs. But more than that, showing up, especially when that friend is struggling to do this very thing, will be incredible important.
We ought to revel in the small wins when we are unable to work towards large ones, I think.
If I might go on a tangent also, the idea of disappearance in Skinamarink was something I wanted to play with. I imagined it would be expected of me to have various aspects of the House disappear much like in the film, and so I deliberately went against this. You see it in the first bathtub scene where a window makes up a large portion of the shot—that is one of the first indications that this film is going to do something different. Georgia disappears, but the House refuses to move. In fact, the House is presented as it is in my day to day life as opposed to how I hollowed it out for Haunted Houses and Houses That Haunt. Again we come back to that idea of haunting and the House's knowledge.
Q: How long did it take you to make this film, and what technology did you use?
A: This film took around two and a half months to create, and throughout it I used quite a lot of different things. My trusty camera (a Nikon Z6 with a Tamron 18-400mm lens for anyone interested), as well as various lights that I’ve accumulated across my videos. Perhaps my favourite piece of technology that I used was the CRT TV that features heavily throughout. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to capture actual footage on the TV, so for all of the scenes where the TV is presenting an image, I’m actually using two different clips: one of the TV and a compressed version of the clip edited to appear the CRT. The whole film is edited in Premiere Pro.
The final thing to note is my hard drive which, shortly before the release of the film, died along with all of the data on it. As such, the film is lost but for its final release. Whilst this is heart breaking, the positive we can take is that the previous film, Haunted Houses and Houses That Haunt is now genuine found footage as all of the original files have been deleted! Isn’t that wonderful!?
Q: What is a question you'd like to be asked?
A: This is my favourite question I’ve seen in anything, I’ve been thinking about it all week. The one thing that I want to be asked now and again and again and again until I can no longer speak is why are queer stories so important to tell?
It’s something that came up recently in researching an upcoming project. Anne Caron’s If Not Winter, a translation of Sappho’s poetry, opens with an introduction that says, "It seems that she knew and loved women as deeply as she did music. Can we leave the matter there?" This outrages me. Because absolutely we cannot. We are talking about a people, queer people, who have been repetitively muted, erased, ignored, murdered, and here we have one of the earliest surviving female poets writing so clearly about loving other women. To silence the queerness of Sappho’s work is to ignore entirely what her art is largely about.
Queer people have endured so much, and continue to do so. We have seen numerous anthologies recently that all centre around queerness outside of the desired perspective. Les Petites Morts by Evelyn Freeling, The Book Of Queer Saints Vol1 and Vol2 by Mae Murray, Scissor Sisters by Rae Knowles and April Yates, Bury Your Gays by Sofia Ajram, Moonflowers and Nightshade by Samantha Kolesnik, Bound in Flesh by Lor Gislason–need I keep going on? YES! Because what we see here are collections not of authors but of queer folk screaming out that they are, have been, and continue to be in pain. Queer art is, unfortunately, inherently activism, because it speaks to a truth that is not wanted to be told. That there is healing to be done and in many cases it is not afforded the resources it needs. For many of us queer folk, we have endured much that has caused us pain, and though some of that has begun to ‘get better’, the trauma we have experienced left scars that still hurt today. In telling our stories, in presenting our art, we give a voice not to that pain, but the desire to heal it.
There are generations worth of healing to be done for queer folk around the world, generations I fear we are going to lose to an education system that is failing them. So the power falls upon us as artists to create beacons for the young queer people experiencing the same pain we did all those years ago. Many of us were alone when we grew up and suffered because of it, but we can afford the coming generations a chance to hope.
Thank you, Sapphire!!