In Drive Back Home, Michael Clowater’s new period drama film, Alan Cumming and Charlie Creed-Miles retell the director’s family history.
Growing up, the Canadian filmmaker learned that in the 1950s, his uncle Hedley had been arrested and that his grandfather Ernie, a scarcely educated plumber and townie from New Brunswick, had somehow managed to get him out of prison. At first, Clowater couldn’t piece together how, until a bit of research revealed Canada’s ghoulish history of publicly humiliating gay men.
“At that time, it was illegal to be gay. You could go to jail for years, but at police stations… if they saw [the incident] as very victimless, they would try to get it out of their system,” Clowater explains, speaking at BFI Flare: London LGBTIQ+ Film Festival where the film screened in March.
If two men were caught sleeping together, police would often phone their family members, or wives, or employers, to come and collect them, effectively outing them. “Essentially what that was was them deciding that they could still ruin your life, and that would be good enough.
“You’re not going to jail, but you’re still punished appropriately,” he continues. “I think I’m pretty good at trying to put myself in other people’s shoes, and what I saw in that was cruelty.”
Drive Back Home has its roots in Hedley and Ernie’s story, but much of the plot is fictional. It follows three-time Emmy Award winner Alan Cumming as Perley, a fierce if slightly haughty man who is bailed out of a Toronto jail by his estranged brother, plumber Weldon (Wild Bill’s Charlie Creed-Miles), after being caught by police having gay sex in a public park.
Weldon drives them and Perley’s taxidermy pet dog back to his home in New Brunswick, a near 1,000 mile journey. En route, they mull over childhood trauma – both brothers were subjected to vicious treatment at the hands of their father, with Perley forced to run away from home after being caught sleeping with a farm worker – and confront their differences.
“I wanted to trap these two brothers that didn’t understand each other in a truck for three days, which did really happen, and so they begin to start to see each other,” explains Clowater. Like Perley and Weldon, Hedley and Ernie had a contentious relationship that required fixing.
Both brothers spend the bulk of the film on the defensive, resisting the notion that they have anything to apologise to the other for. Perilous violence along the way, inspired by true events that occurred at Clowater’s high school, brings them closer. Cummings plays Perley with both stoicism and flamboyancy, a man with a fearless exterior and stark vulnerability just below the surface. “Alan’s character, I think much like my great uncle, had to be stronger. You have to have a strength to survive at that time,” Clowater says. “His whole being was about armour.”
In Cumming’s 2014 autobiography Not My Father’s Son, he describes a childhood of emotional and physical abuse at the hands of his father. Clowater knew the The Traitors host would be right for the role as he saw similarities between Cumming’s and Perley’s stories. Cumming himself “basically said the same thing,” Clowater shares. “He’s from a very rural part of Scotland and his father was abusive and not accepting of him. I think he really saw a lot of himself in the story.”
Creed-Miles could see how personal the role felt for Cumming, and in his eyes there was no one else for the job. “It just feels like [he] was made to play that role, and I know how much he put into that emotionally and professionally. I felt very privileged to be working alongside him in this,” he says. “He’s fantastic in it. He was always going to be.”
Clowater is reluctant to refer to Drive Back Home as a queer film. “It’s a love story between two brothers that are trying to figure out how to love each other when they don’t really like each other,” he muses. The reality is that its story is embedded in the historic oppression of LGBTQ+ folk, and the director knows that. It’s a reminder of what queer people have endured, are enduring, and may have to endure in the future.
“It’s the same thing as World War Two. Once you have generations that start to forget that, that’s when hate comes. I think it really is important to remember men like my great uncle that lived through this because that’s how you prevent it from happening again and unfortunately, I think it is starting to happen again,” he says.
He doesn’t expand, but it’s clear what he’s referring to: across both sides of the pond, the community is being targeted in politics, in law, by the billionaire tech bros of the world. “That’s crazy to me. In a weird way, it makes me think stories like this are even more important.”
Drive Back Home played at the 2025 BFI Flare: London LGBTIQ+ Film Festival.
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