Lance Hammer’s First Film in 18 Years Is One He Never Wanted to Make: I ‘Was Kicking and Screaming Against It the Whole Time’

It’s not often that a director waits 18 years to make their second feature — especially after Lance Hammer‘s first, “Ballast,” was one of the most lauded independent films of 2008. Set in the Mississippi Delta, the film took a humanist approach to how a Black man’s tragic death ricochets off the lives around him. “Ballast” won Best Director at Sundance, was nominated for six Independent Spirit Awards including Best Feature, and received a four-star rating from none other than Roger Ebert.
 
But that was 2008. Then, Hammer’s output “simply stopped,” as he explained to IndieWire over Zoom, and he hasn’t been heard from as a filmmaker since. Until now. 

While it seemed he was courting some “bankable” industry interest after “Ballast,” and did some writing over the years, he decided he needed “to stop trying to create a piece of work or write a script that I think is commercially viable. That can’t be an active part of the creative process,” said Hammer a week before his second feature “Queen at Sea,” a now-acclaimed drama about dementia, caregiving, and consent starring Juliette Binoche and Tom Courtenay (“45 Years”), brought him back to the Berlinale this year.
 
“As an American trying to find financing for films like ‘Ballast,’ or this one, is very difficult. It was pretty clear there’s no way to make a living. I just have to write a story that I care about, something small and easy to produce. If that happens, I’ll try to make it. I didn’t want to make material I didn’t care about. So I didn’t.” It’s striking that he used nearly the same words in an interview in 2008, during an entirely different socioeconomic era of downturn in America, adding that he would never want to compromise artistically on a film. 

Lance Hammer’s ‘Ballast’ from 2008©Strand Releasing/Courtesy Everett Collection

So what’s he been up to? “Just living my life, you know?” said Hammer, laughing, who lives in Silver Lake in Los Angeles. A lot of his friends are filmmakers, so he was aware of what they were doing, but he just wasn’t part of their world. Until a few years ago, Hammer said, when “for reasons I don’t understand, I was suddenly hearing, reading, and witnessing stories of dementia all around me. I couldn’t get away from them. Several of them had to do with the issue of sexual consent and agency. And I found my own moral position in some of these cases very difficult to understand.”  
 
That impetus brought Lance Hammer back out of the woodwork, a gauntlet thrown to himself to think through problematic contradictions involving the quite different — and often sparring — human verticals of capability, autonomy, and decline. Does he have a personal connection to the material? Surprisingly, no. “I wasn’t particularly interested in dementia. My parents don’t have it. This isn’t from my own life. It’s just a moral dilemma that riveted me. And one day I just sat down in my dining room table and vomited out an outline.” 
 
In “Queen At Sea,” Juliette Binoche plays Amanda, who is visiting her mother Leslie (Anna Calder-Marshall, “Uncle Vanya”) in London from Newcastle as she works on her book during her year-long academic sabbatical. Leslie has advanced dementia, and her primary caregiver is Amanda’s stepfather, Martin, played by veteran British actor Tom Courtenay (“45 Years,” “Dr. Zhivago”).

One morning, Amanda walks in on Martin having sex with Leslie and is immediately perturbed by the ethical crosshairs of the situation. She calls the police, arguing that Leslie can’t give consent to having sex, yet Martin keeps doing it anyway. The police knock, followed by a difficult medical check-up, a visit by a social worker, and eventually talk of admitting Leslie into an assisted living facility despite Martin’s contrary wishes. Meanwhile, he argues that, as her husband of 18 years, he knows that physical intimacy even now gives Leslie pleasure and comfort, and often she is the one who instigates sex. 
 
Quite a departure from “Ballast” as subject matter, characters, and location go. In a way, it seems understandable that any writer would have trouble parsing this issue, especially a male writer in a post-#MeToo world. Beyond trying to suss out his own moral position, Hammer tussled with the script process and didn’t pretend otherwise, still incredulous on the eve of the film’s release that he’d pursued this story at all.  

‘Queen at Sea‘Seafaring

“I resisted writing this story for the whole time I was writing it, but I kept doing it anyway,” he said. “I resisted it because I didn’t want to make a film about the elderly. Part of me was thinking I couldn’t choose a more difficult film to get made than about dementia and the elderly and sex. Youthful society doesn’t want to see that. But I kept writing it, I don’t know why. And pretty soon it was done. I guess I just listened to the cosmos whispering in my ear. And I finally made the film. I never wanted to make this film. I was kicking and screaming against it the whole time.”

Hammer shouldn’t have doubted himself so much, as the project got immediate industry traction. “I won’t mention names, but a pretty big production company came on board and immediately greenlit it,” he shared. “But at that point, I wasn’t happy with the script, so I took a long time rewriting it. It kind of killed the momentum of the project. Then, COVID and a series of things happened that made this development process go on for a very long time. A lot of it had to do with the people involved who really demanded that it had to be a certain group of American actresses that were A-list. And I wasn’t seeing it. I really wanted Juliette to play the role.”

Why Binoche? As with the other questions, Hammer’s answer here is curiously simple. “She’s my favorite actress. When I saw ‘Blue’ in the cinema, that was it. She’s an artist’s artist.”  
 
In the beginning of the writing stage, however, the plan wasn’t Binoche or even London as a setting. He just needed a major urban center so he’d have the flexibility to shoot anywhere in the world, and though he always had a penchant for shooting in Europe, Hammer initially set the story in New York City to “anchor” the script in one place.

‘Queen at Sea’Seafaring LLC

Yet his rebelliousness and independent streak remained as alive when it came to casting Martin’s role as well. As in 2008 when Hammer told Film Comment that he would never compromise artistically on a film, “on the outline of the script, on the casting, and all that other shit,” now too he says, “I’m tired of the restrictions on casting. They need an American to play Martin, and he has to be A-list, but I really love Tom Courtenay.” Binoche, who came on board first and wanted to shoot it in the U.S., agreed to London. “So we went to Tom, and he said yes, so that was it. The location just determined itself with the casting,” said Hammer, and this is how he secured his first two choices for leads.  
 
Since some scenes involved close physical intimacy between Courtenay and Anna Calder Marshall, who is astounding as Leslie, Hammer’s producer, Tristan Goligher, brought on Jenefer Odell (“Baby Reindeer”) as the intimacy coordinator. Hammer had never worked with one before. On the general prospect, Hammer said that initially, “I was reluctant because of the potential for interference in the creative process. But I have to say [Odell] did the opposite. She became a neutral broker … between what could be, in bad situations, two sides. It’s almost like escrow [laughs]. She would facilitate conversations in her very gentle and truly fair way. Jenefer’s main concern was that the creative content of the scenes be maximized, but at the same time, [that] everyone felt comfortable with each other.” 
 
Even beyond that, “Annie and Tom didn’t require any of that,” said Hammer. It was Courtenay, in fact, who was instrumental in bringing Calder Marshall on board. “The important thing was that there was an existing friendship between Tom and Annie. They’d worked together in the ’60s on a production of ‘Hamlet.’ They’ve been kind of distant but dear friends.” 

When listening to a list of actors on the phone for Leslie, Courtenay heard Calder Marshall’s name, and he immediately jumped with excitement. Hammer goes on to describe a beautiful improvisatory audition at her home in Kent, along with Courtenay and casting director Kahleen Crawford.

‘Queen at Sea’Seafaring LLC

Courtenay was reluctant to improvise because, as Hammer explained, he and Calder Marshall belong to a generation of actors who prefer memorizing lines. But the director said they ultimately took to it like “fish to water. On the fly, they created a scene entirely in character. It wasn’t in the script. I was playing a social worker, kind of nudging things around. That became [almost] verbatim the social worker scene in the film. I brought my iPhone video footage to the workshops, we’d look at it, we rehearsed it. [Later] I transcribed it and pretty soon it was a very concise scene, and I shot it.” 
 
Given their “loving bond,” prior work history and trust for each other, Hammer said that when it came to the intimate scenes, “they’re both such fearsome artists that they’ll do whatever the scene requires. But we did have these discussions with Tom, Annie, Jenefer and myself. It was helpful to [have Jenefer] really assure that we are all trying to do this thing. There’s no exploitation happening here at all. And if you ever feel like there is, then we won’t do it.” 

Besides, the month-long workshopping process with Binoche helped, too, where they set the script aside and just talked through scenes. “Everybody was encouraged to bring their own language, their actual vernacular, add and remove things, change scenarios. We gave ourselves a lot of time to explore a bunch of wild goose chases. Some turned out to be extraordinary. And those [like the social worker scene] are in the film.” 

‘Queen at Sea’Seafaring LLC

What of the opinions of a cast as capable and discreet as this one (Florence Hunt rounds out the quartet as Amanda’s teenage daughter) on the thorny nature of the material? Hammer said, “It kind of organically resolved itself, because I was preparing myself to have these long discussions with the actors when they were considering whether or not to take the role. Juliette came on very early, and she talked a lot about her position, but not the moral position. And I thought, that’s interesting. As a director, I don’t want to have to talk about that with the actors. If they like the character and want to play the role in the film, that means there’s something they’re connected to. That’s enough for me. I don’t want them to know my positions, and I don’t want them to have to communicate their positions to me because I want them to interpret the role the way they want.”

Hammer said that while he and the cast did “occasionally discuss the real moral implications,” it never went very deep. “And with Tom, it was that way, too. Tom would say things to me, but I’d just quietly not respond with my opinions. I didn’t want to color it in any way. So that’s the way it happened, all through [the workshopping]. We did not get into the core moral issues. I guess it’s because I steered away from that a little bit. But in the end, that worked pretty well for me, and I still don’t know with specificity what Juliette, Tom, and Annie feel about the morality issues underpinning this. You’d have to talk to them, I guess.”

“Queen at Sea” premiered at the 2026 Berlin Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.