52 Tuesdays

52 Tuesdays is an absorbing Australian drama about Billie (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) who learns that her mother Jane (Del Herbert-Jane), whom she has always been very close to, is transitioning into James. Moving in with her dad Tom (Beau Travis Williams), Billie makes a promise to visit James every Tuesday. Their weekly meetings are contrasted with Billie meeting up with two classmates, Jasmine (Imogen Archer) and Josh (Sam Althuizen), whom she films and experiments with sexually in an effort to forge her own identity. Viewers will care about Billie and James as well, in part because Cobham-Hervey and Herbert- Jane give such emotionally honest performances. 52 Tuesdays is very much about the need to live an authentic life and director Sophie Hyde captures this with acuity. We spoke via Skype about her fine film.

You make some very savvy points about gender and sexuality and identity. What can you say about your goal in making this film? 


The paralleling of the stories and ideas of gender are big questions for me. Gender is a perfect word for it. People ask if I made a transgender film. The character is transgender, but it’s about gender. We have constructed a very binary idea of gender and the way we enforce it everyday is problematic and unsatisfying — not just by people who reject or don’t conform to gender or are transgender, but for all of us.

Why did you choose to employ this dual narrative approach of a teenager coming of age, contrasted with a transitioning adult coming of age?

When we started making the film, we were exploring them equally. As we started to make it, we created these rules — we could only shoot on Tuesdays and in chronological order — and that connected to the story. We started to realize that without the access of the rest of James’ life, we couldn’t go into his point of view.

Not to sound Freudian, but what was your relationship with your mother like?


*laughs* You should maybe ask me about my relationship with my father. I have personal connections with the film. I don’t have a transgender parent, but my dad was openly gay when I was little. It was important that he was out and open with us. It was a great privilege to know my dad as a whole person — being gay was part of who he was, and it was acknowledged all the time; it wasn’t hidden away or separate from him being my dad. We all meet our parents as people in some point in our lives. Billie does it when she’s 16, but some don’t do it until they’re older.

The character of Billie is in many ways a proxy for the audience. Was that deliberate?

I think it’s very much her experience of this year. You do learn about what James is going through through Billie. But it’s also about what Billie is going through. I don’t think of her as a proxy. Some viewers have a hard time that she doesn’t [reject] him. She had more a problem not being able to see James or live with him. We wanted to veer away from a medical explanation of being trans — e.g., this is the exact physical change. James sets up this promise of how much he will change and we went into how it feels and looks. He starts recording himself, but that falls by the wayside. You see incremental changes. Are the characters different from before? Yes, and no.

The characters talk about leading an authentic life. How authentic was the portrayal by Del who played Jane/James?


Del identifies as gender non-conforming. Del is different from James, but they share something similar about not always being seen or feeling as you are seen. Del is not going through the same thing [as James]; we’re not revealing his transition. We started working with Del by talking about different experiences of gender, and it was a natural progression from Del being a consultant to playing the role. He’s not a transman, and we didn’t want to fake things, but his experiences had an impact on the film.

What research did you do in the trans community?

The great thing is that there is so much stuff online — blogs, videos, etc. and that they are so personal and different. We worked with a psychologist in Melbourne who does identity stuff. We read Original Plumbing, a US-based trans magazine that was a great resource. We did a broad look at different kinds of gender even though we were honing it down to show one character’s journey of [becoming] a transman. We wanted to understand the whole context, so we read a lot.