Amongst these accounts were cases of ongoing sexual activity in elderly married couples where one of the partners was in significant decline. Because the inherent moral implications were complex and confusing, I found it difficult to take a definitive position on the many questions and contradictions that rushed to mind regarding agency and consent. Does someone who is experiencing the advances of dementia lose the ability to give informed sexual consent to a long-time partner? If so, who is responsible – a spouse, a child, an institution – for making this determination? Is it right to deprive someone of their agency in order to protect them? Can the best intentions of love cause unintentional harm?

What motivated me to write this story was a desire to explore the difficult moral choices being made in the privacy of family homes all around us, every day, almost entirely hidden from view. The more I learned from the real stories I encountered, the more difficult I found it to judge the choices made by the individuals in these complex family dilemmas. I do have opinions, and even judgments, about the actions of the characters in this story. Most importantly, if Martin can't know with certainty that Leslie wants to have sex, something that dementia may rob her of the ability to fully understand, then he should not have sex with her, even if it's she who initiates the act. If there is any possibility of misinterpreting her desires then there is risk of harming her, and any degree of risk is too high. But I've also witnessed how commonly a loving spouse can fail to recognize the moment in the process when their declining partner has lost the cognitive capacity to make such critical decisions because the decline is either too gradual to detect, too difficult to consciously accept, or both. I have also witnessed how difficult it is for a family to determine where the line is between protecting an ailing loved one and depriving them of their agency, and how easy it is to get it wrong. In fact, as in all true dilemmas, it is probably impossible to get it right. I realized there might be value in making a film focused on these uncertainties, one that neither condemns nor redeems the choices its characters make, so that a viewer might feel and sympathize with the agonizing moral dissonances a family experiences when forced to navigate such difficult waters.

Lance Hammer

With these thoughts on his mind, Hammer began to outline a script, one that would mark his second feature following the acclaimed Ballast (2008), the Mississippi-set drama that won two prizes at the Sundance Film Festival, including Best Director. The story, as it began to take shape, saw a family faced with a devastating moral quandary as a woman and her stepfather clash over his continued sexual contact with her mother, a dementia sufferer. As Hammer says, "The question at the centre of the story is not whether Leslie is saying yes to the sexual act – she is and often initiates it – but whether she still has the capacity to say yes. In her declining cognitive state can the yes that could once be trusted still be trusted?"

Inspired by the experience of Ballast, during which Hammer had worked with non-professionals, workshopping the story with them intensely, he wanted to repeat the process for Queen at Sea, but this time with professional actors. "I had to make a case to the actors I loved most that the goal was to develop a more natural language and scenario through a collaborative process that would rely heavily on workshopping. I prayed they'd find this an attractive idea because it meant they'd have to commit to an extensive rehearsal period."

For the role of Amanda, who has moved back to London with her 16-year-old daughter to be close to her ailing mother, Hammer was keen to cast Juliette Binoche, the celebrated French actress whose work he had long revered. “Juliette possesses an intense, spellbinding presence that emanates profound emotional truth. She's fearless, radically devoted to creative process, and she's guided by infallible instincts. She's given some of the most nuanced, emotionally devastating performances in all of cinema." Reading the script, it struck a personal chord with her. “I remember at times when my children were growing, jumping into life, love, emancipation and my parents were growing older…I was stuck in the middle of these generations, feeling panic.” Excited also by the prospect of contributing ideas to a story that would evolve in a collaborative process, Binoche accepted the offer without hesitation. “I wanted to be part of Lance's film immediately.”

To play Martin, Amanda’s stepfather, Hammer approached another actor that he reveres: Sir Tom Courtenay. “Tom's a masterful artist and a beautiful, complex soul, and those things are entwined.” he says. “He's extraordinary at conveying the most complex emotions of the heart. He does it with the simplest of means and it's always utterly true because he embodies a character but gives you his own soul."

Like Binoche, Courtenay didn’t take much persuading to join the project. “The irresistible thing about it was Juliette,” he says. “I was very taken by her in The English Patient. When I first saw it I thought she had something very special, a sort of radiance. I was intrigued by the thought of working with her.” Again, the notion of developing the characters and story through rehearsal was enticing to Courtenay. “We really bonded, Lance and I…I got very close to him. He listened to my ideas on what I might say, how I might want to put things. And he was very open to that which pleased me.”

With Binoche and Courtenay in place, the production needed to nail down the other two critical roles: Leslie, Amanda's dementia-afflicted mother, and Sarah, Amanda's 16-year-old daughter. Tasked with the search was casting director Kahleen Crawford, a frequent collaborator with producer, Tristan Goligher. “She was really driving that process and that search along with Lance,” says Goligher.

As Hammer was studying a list of proposed actors Crawford had prepared for the Leslie role, he was daunted by the number of names with whom he had little familiarity. He turned to Courtenay for guidance. As Courtenay considered the names, one leaped out to him: Anna Calder-Marshall. "I was reading him the list over the phone," says Hammer. "I couldn't see him but when he heard Annie's name, he was so excited I think he might have jumped up from his chair. He said, 'Annie! It has to be Annie! She's perfect. Cast her immediately!'" Courtenay and Calder-Marshall had worked together in the late 1960s, in a stage production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and had remained friends ever since.

While Hammer's intuition was to trust his partner's idea, he wasn't ready to cast someone sight unseen. So he agreed to drive out to Kent with Courtenay and meet Calder-Marshall with the idea they'd try an improvisation together which would also serve as a kind of audition. Upon arriving they went out to her painting studio near the house. Hammer suggested they jump straight into the improvisation and follow it wherever it might lead. Calder-Marshall started drawing in one of her sketch pads and Hammer hit record on his iPhone camera. "Tom and I watched her drawing quietly for a while, then she started saying a few words in character – a version of herself but affected with dementia, something she instinctively knew to approach with restraint." Courtenay joined in, playing Martin, and Hammer as a social worker. Hammer says, "Something extraordinary happened in that session between Tom and Annie, in the material they invented together on the fly, something tender and true and heartbreaking, which I know now was due to their many years of friendship and love for each other." As they were leaving, Courtenay was frustrated that Hammer didn't cast her on the spot. Hammer explains, "It wasn't until I got home that night and watched the video that I understood what had actually occurred. I thought, 'She's exceptional. Totally natural. And the magic of the two of them together! My God.' I called Tom right away and said, ‘You’re right, let's do it.' And so Calder-Marshall was cast. But as Hammer adds, "In the end it's good we made the drive out to Kent because that improvisation became the basis of the social worker scene in the film. Their performance in the film is identical to the improvisation, just a bit shorter."

The other key casting task was finding a young actress to play Sarah, Amanda’s teenage daughter. “It was a very, very big search because we knew they were going to have to hold their own with Juliette on screen,” adds Goligher. “They had to be at that level.”

The search ended when the team met Florence Hunt, the Bridgerton star immediately impressing Hammer. "Flo vibrates with this incredible magnetic energy, but she's cool as hell, as if she has no idea what she possesses. Her skills are so advanced and innate, and she’s totally naturalistic in everything she does, whether it's working with the words taken directly from the script or improvisation. She does both, often within the same scene, and you never sense that she's acting."

In need of a partner to help orchestrate a U.K.-based production, Hammer was introduced to producer Goligher. Spearheading U.K. production at renowned outfit The Bureau since 2010, Goligher had worked with Courtenay before, on Andrew Haigh’s critically acclaimed 2015 drama 45 Years, making a collaboration on Queen at Sea feel like a perfect fit. Goligher and Hammer immediately clicked.

The producer was stunned by the craft and skill Hammer had taken with the story. “Lance did an extraordinary job of not taking any side, carefully laying out multiple points of view and multiple ways you might look at this. He treads a fine line. It was a compelling subject that nobody has dealt with before, and the sensitivity with which he dealt with it, I found really attractive.”

For Hammer, Goligher was the key that finally unlocked the project. "Tristan is the partner you dream of finding. He's a truly creative mind and that's what I value in him the most. There was so much that needed to be solved creatively and we did that together. His priority is making the best piece of art. Everything else is in service to that. But his other great talent is doing the muscular work of actually manifesting the art. He's a manifester. He expertly structures and manages the logistics, financing, and human relationships of a production with calm, compassion, and incredible ingenuity. He's a very stabilizing presence."

When it came to choosing a cinematographer, Hammer approached Adolpho Veloso, the Brazilian-born director of photography recently nominated for an Academy Award for his work on Clint Bentley’s 2025 period drama Train Dreams.

"I was deeply moved by the beauty of Adolpho's photography when I first encountered it. I hadn't known too much about him before, but I knew I needed to call him immediately," Hammer says. When they spoke in that first Zoom call, they discovered that their aesthetic and philosophical ideas about the way the film should be shot were remarkably aligned, an alignment that continued throughout pre-production and production. "There were so many times that Adolpho was quietly setting up a shot in his head, and I was off on my own doing the same, and we'd look at each other and realize we were thinking exactly the same thing. It happened so often it was uncanny. But it also made me realize that I could step back a bit from the camera and let him work with real autonomy, and this allowed me to work more intensively with the actors. There's some real genius in the way Adolpho's seeing actors in space – static in space, moving through space. It's very poetic what he captures."

Veloso, as it turns out, was a huge fan of Hammer’s debut. “Ballast was such a reference for my generation...something that I loved for so many years,” he says. “Then when he sent me the script, I just loved it. It's such a powerful story, very sad and with tricky subjects, but it was really great to see that the script was already amazing...then especially learning that Juliette Binoche and Tom Courtenay would be part of it, it just felt like a dream.”

When Hammer began to outline the film, he quickly understood he'd need to seek the knowledge of the professionals who would actually respond to the situations explored in the story. To achieve the procedural and tonal accuracy that only these individuals could provide, scenario would need to be shaped with their guidance. Although this collaboration would necessarily coincide with the structuring of the script, Hammer always understood that a second stage of collaboration would be important during the workshopping phase and would in fact be integrated into it. He also understood the script could change significantly at this stage and, indeed, that was the point.

The first task for The Bureau’s Gabrielle de Cevins, who would work closely with Hammer as the film's "workshop and rehearsal producer," was to identify the several key personnel who would serve as consultants during this second stage. Her first discovery was Michelle Jeram, a former SOIT (Sexual Offences Investigation Trained) officer, capable of supporting victims of sexual assault, and an experienced actor.

Hammer was taken by the naturalism in Jeram's audition for the SOIT role and he cast her immediately. But as they began to discuss the role in more detail, he discovered she possessed extensive knowledge about such cases. She took on the additional role of advisor and became a critical collaborator throughout the preproduction and workshopping process. "At first I was just hoping Michelle could check for accuracy of the police response in the first scenes, but when it became clear we needed to make some significant changes to the narrative to reflect reality, she became a major contributor of ideas to me and to the cast. She also provided much of the language used by the police officers in the film. Most of all, she played her role brilliantly."

Jeram also put Hammer and de Cevins in touch with Marie-Elle Vooijs, a SARC (Sexual Assault Referral Centre) doctor, again highly trained in her field. Jeram and Vooijs had worked on cases together previously, and like Jeram, Vooijs took command of the SARC sequences in the film, giving critical guidance for procedural accuracy.

The third expert included in the process was Jean Pemberton, a social worker, who was referred by Jeram. All three – who take consultant credits in the film – helped Hammer shape the script into its final form, making the institutional responses to the situations in the story highly accurate.

But the director had other ideas too. “I knew I was going to cast Michelle, who is an experienced actor, but I also knew I would very likely try to cast Marie-Elle and Jean, who hadn't acted before. They didn’t know it, but I was auditioning them as I was speaking to them on Zoom.” Thank God they both agreed because they're outstanding. Frankly, the film wouldn't have worked without them."

Hammer and De Cevins gathered the key cast a month before production to begin the workshopping. The first sessions occurred during the off-hours at a pub inside the London Welsh Centre. Hammer was delighted by what emerged from this period of intense creativity. “A deep, intimate bond developed between Juliette, Tom, and Annie during those intense sessions we spent together figuring it all out. The film is imbued with that feeling. It's not acted. It's real.” We became like a family,” says Courtenay, “I thought Lance grew it out of the three of us.”

When the sessions moved to a white-walled house in Tufnell Park North London, set to be the location of Martin and Leslie’s home, cinematographer Veloso joined the process. “We filmed the whole movie with my iPhone before we actually shot it, just to know exactly the shots,” he explains. “We obviously would adapt when it came time to shoot it. But most of it came from those rehearsals.” It was a way to keep the scenes as naturalistic as possible. “Where to place the camera…we wanted it to be in a way that it didn't feel that we were anticipating that much,” he continues. Binoche adds: “We’d spend our lunches staying in the house, being together, the three of us, every single day.” The house became a sanctuary for all three.  “Juliette had one of the smaller bedrooms to escape to and Annie and I went in the big bedroom, on the big bed, for a lie down and gossip,” says Courtenay. “It turned out to be quite a magical place. I'll never forget it.”