In Camera writer-director Naqqash Khalid: ‘The film industry is a circus’

His new film lampoons performative representation in showbusiness – and if it rubs people up the wrong way and ends up being his first, and last, movie? Well, he says, he’s OK with that

“I want to do Scooby-Doo. I will interview for that job. I would love to make a Scooby-Doo movie.” Sitting opposite me eating a watermelon salad and pitching for the (at the time of writing) theoretical gig of directing a new Scooby-Doo movie is Naqqash Khalid, film director and sometime academic. His new feature, In Camera, is one of the most original debuts in years, a sharp piece of work that satirises the film industry at the same time as being formally inventive and playful. But it’s not exactly an audition for a big studio gig, and though the Scooby-Doo pitch is probably 98% ironic, it’s hard not to wonder what Khalid’s arthouse version would look like, with the actors from In Camera in the lead roles and “every other role played, in multiple role casting, by Kristen Stewart or Franz Rogowski”.

But back to In Camera. How would Khalid describe his film? “It’s a labyrinthine fairytale about a young actor who’s navigating a nightmarish version of the industry. But it’s also not about that … ” The film is about Aden (Nabhaan Rizwan) and his tortured efforts to book an acting gig in London, but it’s also more ambitious than this logline suggests, taking jabs at all sorts of ripe targets, from post-empire complacencies – “it’s almost like a kind of postcolonial horror” – to the bedevilled concept of “representation”.

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