The writer, actor and now director Dolly Wells moved to New York in the summer of 2014, leaving London, where she was born. It was for family reasons – her husband, who is half-American, missed home – but it coincided with a new phase of her career. That same year, the first season of the much-missed comedy Doll & Em aired on HBO. She wrote and starred in it with her best friend, Emily Mortimer, and after years as a largely comedy actor, it established her as a writer worthy of serious attention.
Brooklyn gave her the material she needed to make her big-screen directorial debut, Good Posture. “I felt in quite a bit of pain, moving to America, leaving my brothers and sisters, my mum, whatever my identity was,” she says. “Trying to work out if I would be a different person in this country.”
It is a brisk autumnal morning, and in a hotel in London, Wells, 47, nurses a hot chocolate. She talks quickly and broadly, pegging out each corner of any point she is making, before settling on a conclusion somewhere in the middle, as if resolving an imaginary argument.
Good Posture is a beautiful, slender and pleasingly off-key story about Lilian, a young woman who moves in with a withdrawn and famous author, Julia, and decides to make a documentary about her without having read any of her books. Their unusual relationship, maternal and not, forms the backbone of the story. It was the first thing Wells – who also directed it – had written without Mortimer. Still, Mortimer appears in it, as Julia, who spends a lot of time hiding away unseen in her room. (This was partly for practical reasons: Mortimer, “the best person in the world”, wanted to do it but only had three days, so Wells wrote her reclusiveness into the story.)
Julia, the reluctant creator, is not the character Wells seems to identify with most, although you would be forgiven for thinking it might be, as getting the director to make Good Posture in the first place took some persuasion. She had worked with the director Jamie Adams on his 2014 film Black Mountain Poets. “Jamie said he thought I’d be a good storyteller. He said: ‘I think you should direct a film,’” she says. “And I kind of went: ‘Mmm, I’m all right, actually.’ I knew since I was younger that I wanted to direct, but it’s quite terrifying. I feel like: ‘What is it I’ve got to say that anyone wants to hear?’”
Undeterred, Adams asked her again a year later, having brought in Maggie Monteith, a producer who had found the money. “He said: ‘I don’t think she’ll ask again if you say no a second time.’ Quite clever. So I said: ‘OK. I’ll do it.’” Then Wells had to come up with a story. “Up until now, I’d only ever written with Emily. And I think we have different styles. Em was saying yesterday that she’s really good at the plot and I’m really good at the dialogue, but I’m probably a bit more chaotic. Also, I quite like not telling everything, leaving bits out. That’s the kind of films I enjoy.”
She knew she wanted to write a coming-of-age story about a young woman. A younger cousin had stayed with a writer in New York and she thought that was interesting. “Emily’s mother was asking me last night: ‘How did you get the idea for the mother and daughter?’ It sounds so weird, but I don’t remember, and that often happens when I have ideas. I can remember knowing I had 35 days before we were going to shoot it, and trying to write it ...”
The shoot was in a month and she hadn’t written anything? She nods, smiling. Does she normally leave things until the last minute? “No,” she says, still nodding. “A bit. Yes. With Doll & Em, as well. I’m not good without a deadline.”
Wells lights up most when talking about Lilian, the aimless woman at the centre of Good Posture, in her early 20s and desperately searching for purpose and love. It is a fond and tender portrait of a character who could have been insufferable. “Yeah, I love her. But people are horrified by her a bit, as well,” she says. In one scene, Lilian brazenly uses Julia’s toothbrush and towels. It is oddly uncomfortable to watch. “I know! This is too much information, but we were laughing yesterday about how, when you’re younger, you’d use the loo,” she leans in, “in a big way, at somebody’s house, and when you get older, you think: ‘I won’t.’” In her youth, Lilian is a little entitled and a little unfettered. “In a way, she’s trying to be Julia, and she doesn’t even know it. She’s trying to be a grownup woman.”
Wells’s father, the late satirist John Wells, was an actor, and she speaks vividly of the “pull of the excitement my dad was bringing into the house, the sparks, so I did obviously want that life”. She started acting in her early 20s, although she has said in the past that she was not ambitious when she was younger. “No, I really wasn’t. I just don’t quite know how you get it right, all of this. Then you have moments like Can You Ever Forgive Me?” Wells was Anna, the bookshop assistant fleeced, wined and dined by Melissa McCarthy’s author/forger Lee Israel. “It was a really beautiful little gem of a film,” she says. “It’s also really exciting that the story of [Israel], an angry, curmudgeonly, alcoholic, broke woman with no career, should be so interesting. There aren’t enough stories like that.”
As with Doll & Em, Good Posture is fluent on the peculiar intricacies of female friendships. Wells finds them fascinating and romantic. When she was younger, she says, there were areas of her life in which she would feel validated by men’s approval. “But I think the real approval you get is through women, if you’re heterosexual. Because if it’s not a sexual relationship, you can get to the important parts. You’re not holding something back.”