For many years, says Moin Hussain, he had a dream of making a film set in a motorway service station. It would be science fiction, “because I’ve always felt that they were like spaceships; these strange lit-up spaces that are all isolated and synthetic, surrounded by darkness. I was just fascinated by that image.” But it was only with the arrival of Adam – a lonely mixed-race night worker in a fast-food outlet – that he found a character and a story capable of bringing the image to life, in what would become his debut feature film, Sky Peals.
At first, Adam seems like a textbook example of how not to create a movie protagonist. The plot kicks off with a phone message from his estranged Pakistani father, which he leaves unanswered despite its apparent urgency. He is equally impassive as his childhood home is packed up and moved into storage, so that his white mother can move across the country to live with her new husband.
In a workplace of constant, noisy comings and goings, Adam is almost entirely withdrawn, unable to smile, make eye contact or even to speak more than a few words at a time. When he does, he has a way of killing the conversation – as when, in one of the film’s few hard-earned laughs, he declares to a gobsmacked therapy group that he thinks his dad might have been an alien.
But, in a performance from Faraz Ayub of unstinting, hunched-shouldered lugubriousness, Adam is also touching and compelling. So effectively does he inhabit his spooky no man’s land that, when his mere presence sets off a cacophony of flashing car alarms in the service station car park, you are simultaneously aware that this is a familiar sci-fi-thriller trope and quite sure that, in Adam’s troubled mind, it would, wouldn’t it? “It’s the existential full house,” wrote Xan Brooks at the film’s Venice film festival premiere.
So eerily otherworldly is the atmosphere that Hussain and Ayub between them have created that it comes almost as a surprise to find them bantering in a back room of the British Film Institute on London’s South Bank about similarities in their family histories that they have only this minute discovered. Both had grandfathers who came from the borderlands in and around Kashmir and who served in the British army before emigrating to the UK. “My dad came over here when he was 10 or something,” says Hussain. Though this is a coincidence, it’s not particularly surprising, points out Ayub, who lives in Nottingham, near the town where his grandfather settled. “Pakistan or old north India was very militarised, wasn’t it? So you know, everyone has links to the military.”
In the film, glimpses of a Pakistani background emerge from some old photographs that Adam is given by his uncle after his father’s death, but he is so profoundly alienated that he has no key to understanding them. “Yeah, well, like myself, Adam is mixed-race,” says Hussain, now 32, who grew up in London and then Norfolk, as the child of a Pakistani father and an English mother, both of whom are successful sculptors. His grandfather had recently died, cutting him off from a country that was part of his identity but which he had never personally visited. “Trying to kind of place yourself in one particular culture is always difficult, especially when there are certain aspects of different cultures that you don’t really have access to, or you don’t feel close to,” he says. “I was trying to interrogate that: what would it look like if you turn it up to top volume, with this character who is convinced that his father is from another world. Science fiction, horror, those kinds of genres enable you to be quite operatic.”
Beyond the specific questions that confront Adam, Sky Peals also paints a broader, expressionistic picture of the precariat: hard-working people with jobs that give them little income and no security. People like his co-worker Tara (Natalie Gavin), whose efforts to juggle work with motherhood leave her always one step away from destitution or disaster in a transient environment that could not be more hazardous. When you hear the phrase “people on the edges”, says Hussain, “your brain goes to homeless people, but for a lot of Britain – including people I know – transience is just a way of life”.
Sky Peals was shot on 35mm film over 26 days, so there was little scope for retakes, and Ayub is in almost every scene. He was one of many actors who sent self-tapes in response to a callout for a south Asian actor in his early 30s. “I think Moin quite liked me from the beginning, but the others needed a bit of convincing,” he says. “Well, you know, you’re very, very different to Adam,” picks up Hussain. “But,” he adds, turning to me, “he kept coming back because, though it sounds simplistic, I just believed that he was Adam. It was very hard, with such a specific character who doesn’t say much and communicates through physicality, to find someone I believed as that person. Obviously every performer channels something in themselves, but in the end I thought: ‘He’s just a really good actor.’”
The role is a big break for Ayub, who landed his first role in a TV miniseries at the age of 14. Though he didn’t go down the drama school route, he got involved with The Television Workshop in Nottingham, which introduced him to improvisation and the world of TV. He has appeared in Silent Witness, Line of Duty and Spooks, but didn’t land his first regular role until 2022, as prison officer Ali in Channel 4 prison comedy Screw. For Sky Peals, he channelled the isolation of the Covid era and its effect on people he knew, he says. “As an actor, you observe people. You just utilise that and hopefully deliver it, in that moment, with a level of honesty.”
Hussain’s route to directing was complicated by his determination not to become an artist like his parents, he says. For years, all he wanted to do was play in bands. But having failed to get into a music production course, “which I’m very grateful for because I would have been crappy at it”, he fell into a cinema and photography at University of Leeds, on “a bit of a whim. I was kind of like, oh, I don’t want to be a director. I don’t like the limelight or standing at the front. I’ve always played bass. The first time I ever directed was my graduation film, and I realised that I’d stumbled across something that I was really excited about, so I carried on stumbling around.”
He moved to London and started to work as a production assistant. “It gives you a grounding in how things work, but I very quickly realised that if I was going to do my own thing, or at least try to, I needed to step away.” He started making short films, and had just signed an eight-month contract assisting on a TV series when one of them was accepted for the Cannes film festival. “I was like, OK, I’m going to have to just do it – but after that, how do I earn a living? It’s a question that kept coming back for years and years.”
Sky Peals, they both agree, is a film that has found its moment. “I think it is perfect timing,” says Ayub. “It’s asking questions about identity that are very relevant. There’s a search for who we are as a nation. And within that, different people are questioning themselves about who they are and searching for answers. I feel it’s very much a hot topic at the moment.” But, at the time, Hussain cautions, “there’s recently been a concerted push in the other direction. I feel like a lot of boundaries have been broken down and it feels like there’s a pushback from certain people who are trying to create distance between communities and people.”
“But yeah,” he concludes. “I think there’s a lot of conversation at the moment about identities and who we are, and there’s a real drive of people wanting to identify themselves in one particular way. But I really think that can limit us. We’re really all a mixture of things, and the culture itself is becoming more and more mixed. But we’re all getting very boxed-in. That’s something that I wanted to explore, because I haven’t seen it on screen that much.”