JULIE WYMAN

First of all Julie, I’d like to thank you for showing fat bodies in a manner that gives them agency and respect, especially in a medium that usually treats us like jokes and punchlines. I was wondering what was the first moment in your life that you felt that you didn’t have a body that society deems as worthy on camera?

I think that for me that experience probably was always with me since early childhood. But at that point I didn't have the awareness to even know it was something I was experiencing, and that it was something not everyone experiences. I spent a lot of my childhood dieting from age 9 until I went to college. Basically, I was always on a diet, and so there was always some sort of a project that I had, and my family had, to correct my body. And that definitely shaped my self-concept. At a certain point, I got into the 12-step world via Overeaters Anonymous and started feeling like “I have an addiction,” so I used the addiction model to understand why my body was "different."

I think there were some good things for me out of being in that group. But it was also very negative, because that program, at least for me, was very individualizing. It was very much about “you have this terrible part of you that you have to control.” And it's a little bit strange to apply a model for alcoholism and substance abuse to food, because food is something you need. You can't simply not eat. You can't abstain from food, so at that point–and that maybe early in my college year, I was also taking classes in feminist theory, and I just had this big breakthrough that this thing I have been living with all my life was political and was a construct that was imposed on me, and that I literally lived and breathed it and experienced it in every cell and every waking, walking, moving minute of my life.

What was the most complicated part about shooting Buoyant?

Oh, there were lots of complicated parts. One thing that happened is I had started off [the project] when The Padded Lilies went on The Tonight Show. I was friends with a couple of them, and I had been wanting to film them, and I was living in San Diego at the time not far from LA. So they said, “come up to Burbank and hang out and shoot with us,” and that's when I first met them.

At first I thought, “okay I'm gonna make a documentary. I'm gonna follow you working up to this upcoming show [planned for a few months after the Tonight Show appearance.]” But essentially, what initially seemed to be an event in the near future, kept getting delayed and delayed and [it] wasn't clear when or if this larger live, public synchronized swimming show was ever going to happen.

So instead of a longer-term documentary about them, which I was pursuing as my MFA thesis film, I realized that if I wanted to graduate in a reasonable amount of time I had to come up with another concept. And actually that "pivot" to a shorter, experimental film was a really great opportunity, because it let me be a lot more experimental in the film–which is something I had wanted to do anyway - a film in which I could perform... which is what my roots are in.

Anyway, the complicated thing about the film was that the process was meandering. I felt even though they're really funny, and I think that comes across, I felt like I didn't want the audience to laugh at them the way that the audience at Jay Leno did. And I felt like it was kind of a fine line to walk. They walk it really well. They're kind of reclaiming the joke. They're making fat jokes, but they're owning them. And they're making them in a way that they're laughing with the joke instead of it being on them.

But I wanted my film to have a playful element, and it was easier to make their story about going to the Tonight show more straightforward, and then to interweave the story in which I perform as this fictional inventor character, trying to invent a machine that allows her to swim outside of water...

Have you ever felt the disillusionment that often comes with being a woman in filmmaking?

I definitely feel exhaustion [on] different days, at different times, because I've been doing this for a long time. I think some of it actually may be not specific to being a woman. It's just, you know, it takes a lot of energy and persistence and a certain kind of resourcefulness that sometimes runs out. I look at my work and other people look at my work and say “it's so successful,” but I can also look at it and say “look at all things I didn't do.”

The topics that I focus on have to do a lot with people's experiences in their non-normative bodies. I feel like those topics get pegged as niche topics that not that many people want to see [even though] I often have people of all sizes and all races [coming to screenings] and telling me how much of an impact my films have on them in a personal, visceral sense. I guess where it feels hard is that the topics that feel so relevant and so necessary to me are often pegged as niche or marginal or just for a small audience.

What is the film that helped to solidify that you wanted to make films?

One day someone gave me a tape of Tongues Untied to watch. It's by a really amazing filmmaker, Marlon Riggs, and it's an amazing film. I totally recommend it. It's about black gay male identity, and I'm not black or a gay male, but somehow seeing this film totally changed the path of my life. It's very poetic. Now, we're in this moment that's so much about a wide understanding of intersectionality. The film is about how as a black gay man within the civil rights movement, Riggs and other black gay men encountered a lot of homophobia; and within the gay rights movement they encountered racism. So Riggs began to ask himself “where do I belong? Where am I? Who am I? What do I do?” And that's what the film is asking in a really poetic and really political way.

Is there a feminist director that you admire deeply?

For some reason Jane Campion comes to mind because she's one of the first female directors I started watching. Chantal Akerman is really important to me. I would say half the people on your list for the interview project that you're doing. A good number of them are people that really inspire me. There’s too many too name.

That’s not something the male professors at my school agree with. They constantly say “there just aren’t many woman filmmakers to put on the syllabus” in response to when I call them out when 100% of the directors are men.

That's too bad that you still have professors like that, and I'm sure there are professors at Davis too that might not think hard about that or make it a point. I think some people [think of] "I'm showing Maya Deren, so we're covered." I mean, I love Maya Deren. She's actually one of my sources of major inspiration. But, it's like, there's other people out there - a range of women filmmakers, women of color, queer filmmakers, etc.

Yeah! Women are always pushed as a chapter to only be focused on for one week.

I remember classes that were offered or syllabi that I've seen where it’s the one week about gender. Why is gender something that can just be a special little topic that we feel is "just for the ladies?"

Is it difficult putting yourself into your projects so directly?

I'm kind of an exhibitionist! So, no it's not hard. I like [it] and actually, all those things that I've done including [in] Buoyant– it's not really me. I'm playing a character for sure. I'm saying I'm an exhibitionist, and I like being in front of the camera, but when I think about whether I want to be a subject of a documentary and have someone following me in a hard phase of my life, I'd always say, “no, definitely not.” I just haven't yet reached this level of vulnerability.

This piece I'm working on now is about my body among other things, and I've done some filming with my dad that my dad and I and my aunt are in, because we all have a similar body. That's verging on being a feeling a little vulnerable.... I feel like I should go more into that direction maybe.

So here in Santa Cruz, there is a term many femme film majors use, and that’s “gear bros”– which is men that think if they know everything about tech, then that’s all they need to be successful in filmmaking. In your film classes do you sometimes find that [the people] we call gear bros are always the first ones to try to use a camera or other equipment?

Oh gear bros, oh yeah, definitely. It's really weird, the whole gendering of technology. There's this obvious–I don't even know what to call it–affiliation. Like there's this way that it's much easier for them to feel entitled to use and be confident with gear, even if they don't know it at all. I say that a lot, and I sometimes feel like my role as a teacher is really to address that. I think my entry point to film was to get techy and nerd out with the technology.

Me too! I work at the checkout lab in the department and spend many hours with the equipment and enjoy letting myself wonder.

I just sort of felt like, “well, that's what you got to do.” If you're painting, you need to have your paints and your brush and know how to use them, right? So same with technology and filmmaking. At first it was a little intimidating, but that's exactly why I felt I should do it. I think the subversion of it was exciting to me. To the extent that I felt like it was like man space or bro space or whatever you want to call it, I wanted to get in there. I was, at the time, really into doing free weights and being in the weight room at the gym because that was also this space where there were no women, so I would just say, “I'm gonna go in there and I'm gonna do those things that women aren't supposed to do.”

One thing I found early on in my career, before I even started teaching, was when I worked at this editing facility where I was just dying to get my hands on the gear and I was learning signal flow and all this techie engineering stuff. Of course it's these guys there that know [how things work] and who I had to get to explain it to me. But then I started realizing that even though they didn't always know everything, they acted like they did. So it was some kind of a revelation to just know, “Oh, I see, that kind of confidence is sometimes kind of fake.”

There was one time when I was on set and this guy asked me if there were any polarizing filters in the lab. And I knew for a fact that there weren't, but he kept persisting. He said “are you sure?” or “aren’t they on the front counter?” I mean, I’ve worked there for almost two years but sure, you know more than I do.

You should just pull out a banana and say “okay here, yeah. Oh, I checked... I guess we have one.” I think that's the thing people need to learn in general, a lot of guys need to learn to not take up space and to give credit and space to the women and the other people they're talking to. And that's a learned behavior of theirs, too. It's unfortunate, and it benefits them. But it doesn't have to be that way.