D.W. Waterson’s feature directorial debut, Backspot, is a lesbian competitive cheer drama.
Instead of the cliche-ridden ideas that likely spring to mind at this descriptor, Waterson instead offers their audience something thoughtful, concise, and joyous. In Backspot, Waterson probes and critiques the optics of gender, race, and bodily stereotypes within the cheer world, a sport the film continuously centers upon and celebrates. Backspot is charming in its simplicity; allowing its queer teen characters to exist with ease while never ignoring the ways in which society perceives them—as cheerleaders, as women, as queer people. I had the pleasure of speaking to D.W. Waterson about their film and their thoughts on queerness, performance, and the hardcore nature of society’s “girliest” sport.
VERONICA PHILLIPS: One of my favorite aspects of Backspot was its representation of physical touch. I really liked that there was this range of utilizing touch; sometimes affectionately, sometimes harmfully, or sometimes somewhere in between—especially in regards to the girls’ caretaking for each other’s wounds. Did you bring any kind of specific intention into directing physical moments?
D.W. WATERSON.: I locked myself in a room for three weeks and really wanted to be intimate with the script and my shot list. I was really just trying to figure out how I wanted the audience to feel in each scene. I knew that with these more intimate moments, especially with Riley (Devery Jacobs) in her bedroom with her eyebrow [Riley suffers from trichotillomania] or her tending to wounds, I wanted to be close. I wanted to work with macro lenses and sound design, with the intention of making the audience feel what Riley was feeling instead of watching a performance. I really wanted the audience to be an active participant, and I think that’s why I love getting so close to those things. Even just in our life, when we are tending to a wound or looking at ourselves in the mirror, we’re physically so close – I wanted to reflect that in the film.
VP: That transitions perfectly into another question I had about Riley’s relationship to perfectionism and anxiety. Was the way her anxiety was expressed through trichotillomania determined by you from the get go? Or was that developed alongside Devery Jacobs?
D.W.: Trichotillomania is something I have a relationship with. I know a couple other people who have had experiences with it, and I read a stat somewhere that said it affects like 56% of young women, whether it’s hair or fingernails or chewing. All the little things where, when our bodies are overwhelmed, we turn to these self-soothing mechanisms. I really wanted to explore the question of how we self-soothe. And for Riley, it is through that kind of release [from hair pulling] that brings her anxiety back down, so she can keep running towards that perfectionism, or being the best cheerleader she can be.
VP: I thought it was so interesting that this physical shift appears on Riley’s face and body that represents her inner state. Throughout the film, Riley grapples with the way that cheer has a certain stereotyped body standard and look that is not necessarily aligned with how these girls present in their day-to-day lives. How did you handle that complex intersection of competitive cheerleading where certain aesthetic ideals of the sport aren’t necessarily representative of the people performing within it?
D.W.: When you think of cheerleading, you think of bows and glitter and sparkles. But I’m like, who made that package? And for me, it feels like the male gaze saying, “How do you sell this female sport? Well, we will make it pretty and polished and add makeup and all of those things.” And for me, I really wanted to get behind that.
Working with Cheer Fusion, a Brampton cheer club, so closely for the past five years opened the doors for myself and Devery Jacobs and [screenwriter] Joanne Sarazen. We got to hang out at practice and follow them along. And there’s nothing glitzy or glammy about it. There’s a concussion every practice. There’s injuries, there’s blisters, there’s bruises. I really wanted to dive into that, because we’re so used to that polished version of cheer. We’re making this the way a male director would approach a gritty football film. That’s the way I’m approaching cheer, because they are badass and they are athletes, and cheer has one of the highest concussion rates of all sports. It was really just showing them for the badasses that they are.
VP: I want to talk specifically about Riley and her girlfriend, Amanda (Kudakwashe Rutendo). I was so impressed with the way their relationship encapsulated a sense of queer joy while still being naturally flawed or insecure at moments. Did you feel like you were actively trying to create nuanced queer characters, or were you just trying to write from a place of truth? Or were Amanda and Riley’s essence found somewhere in between?
DW: I mean, mostly I’m reflecting my reality. Everyone in my queer community are three dimensional, nuanced people, and we’re not always dissecting our queer trauma or speaking in those tropes that we’re so used to seeing. So for me, it was about keeping things very natural and realistic. The one thing I definitely fought with in the script was, how do we have a positive representation of a queer relationship when story and film demands conflict? And so I really tried to move the conflict off the queerness and put it into the sport, because I wish I saw this relationship when I was a teenager.
I feel like watching queer cinema, it’s always about how hard it is to come out, or about how you fall in love with somebody but they’re not out, or all those kind of chaotic tropes like bury your gays. I really wanted to highlight the innocence and joy and the friendship that’s the baseline for their relationship. That opening montage of them being silly downstairs was kind of my homage to queer fan edits made from when you watch something and there’s one queer character and they only get thirty seconds of airtime per episode or whatever. I really wanted to kind of lean in and really just sit with that youthfulness and that love that Riley and Amanda share.
VP: Beyond Riley and Amanda, the film as a whole felt not just mostly queer-oriented, but almost entirely women-oriented. Almost all characters on screen are women, save for one queer male character. Was this intentional? Or did you feel like it was the way the story just naturally unfolded?
D.W.: Yeah, it felt very, very natural. I mean, it’s a group of cheerleaders. I felt like, why would we be focusing on anybody else? Truly? And I knew I was only interested in having one queer male character. Most of my queer characters are played by queer actors, so that brought so much lived experience. I think that’s such a key to making grounded, great queer cinema—hiring queer people who live the experience and can bring that three dimensionality to the story.
