“I wanted to make a film about fatness,” says Jeanie Finlay.
The English director first appeared in Indie Memphis with her 2015 film Orion: The Man Who Would Be King, a portrait of Jimmie Ellis, the masked singer who inspired rumors that Elvis had faked his death. She has a knack for finding great cinematic characters in real life, such as Freddie McConnell, the pregnant trans man in Seahorse. When she got the nod to document the creation of the final season of Game of Thrones for The Last Watch, she concentrated not on the series’ big stars, but on the special effects guy who made the fake snow, and the background performer who had been marching with the same pretend army for the better part of a decade.
This time around, the theme came first, then she found blogger Aubrey Gordon, and the film Your Fat Friend was born. “I read the first piece that Aubrey wrote that went viral,” Finlay recalls. “It had this emotional intensity, and she was anonymous. You know me, I like a masked person. The fact that she was anonymous meant that she could speak to politics and be free rather than be distracted in stupid conversations.”
You might say Finlay was lucky to find Gordon before she became the successful author of What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat and the co-star of the podcast Maintenance Phase. But really, the director was just one of millions of people who found truths in Gordon’s message of body positivity. “Speaking about the personal politics of what it means to live in a fat body just seemed really powerful,” she says.
Originally, the idea was for Gordon to write the voiceover for an essay documentary. The film simmered on the back burner as Aubrey’s career took off and Finlay made Seahorse and The Last Watch. But when they finally met in person, Finlay decided she had found a new character to focus on. “She seemed like this hugely charismatic person with a really complex interior voice. As soon as I met her, I was like, ‘Oh, I think she is my film … Then I met her mom, and I met her dad, who struggled to even say the word ‘fat.’ I knew that this film lay in the space between her and her parents — the act of becoming visible to the world, but also to her family. So I abandoned a year of work, because I wasn’t feeling it.”
Just when the film seemed to be coming together, the pandemic hit. “I was out in Portland in February, 2020, and I left cameras there because I was coming back.”
Instead, Finlay found herself directing shoots in the Pacific Northwest from the other side of the world, in her native Nottingham, England. “I taught Aubrey how to use one of the cameras, and then I hooked up with three different camera people in Portland: Michael Palmieri, Donald Mosher, and Lindsay Tranel …This isn’t my first time at the rodeo, but I want to learn on each film. One of the things I learned on Seahorse was that I couldn’t always be there. It’s not just, ‘I’m the director!’ This is a collaboration. And so I bought a microphone to stick on her camera and a cradle, so she was always ready. I was checking in all the time, ‘Have you filmed this?’ It was just to get the building blocks. I become possessed by the film once I start making it.”
These remote shoots yielded one of the most powerful moments in the film. Gordon filmed herself opening an email to find out that her first book had been accepted for publication. “It was pretty weird, wild, intense ride,” says Finlay. “Her writing just blew up. Everyone recognized the thing that I saw in her writing that was really special. She got a book deal, then her second book comes out, and it’s a New York Times bestseller. She launched Maintenance Phase, and it’s become wildly popular, because it’s so clever and smart and brilliant.”
When the coronavirus had subsided enough for Finlay to return to the states, she was able to capture Aubrey in her element as the podcaster got her first taste of fame. “It’s hard to shake off a whole lifetime of conditioning and value judgments,” says Finlay. “At the beginning, Aubrey said to me, you can put the camera wherever you want. I don’t care. So it was a real liberation, and I wanted to really celebrate her body, the volume of it, because she’s monumental. With her voice, her height — she’s 5-foot-10 — she’s big in every way. I wanted to make people sit with her fatness, because I think it’s uncomfortable for some people.”
The response to Your Fat Friend has been anything but uncomfortable. “I put all of my heart and soul into all the films I make, but this was really a film I made for myself. I made the film that I wished I’d been able to watch when I was 13 years old. Someone once told me that I would never be loved because I was fat, and it really shaped my self-identity. I wanted to make a film for that vulnerable teenager, sort of say, look, this is a construct, and people don’t know how to treat your body and soul with tenderness. So I was super nervous when we showed it at Tribeca [Film Festival]. We sold out all our screenings in less than half an hour. I know Aubrey’s got a big following, but then it just felt like more pressure. When the film ended, everyone stood up. I went, ‘Oh my God, Aubrey! Everyone’s leaving! Remind them there’s a Q and A!’ Then I realized, ‘Oh, this is a standing ovation.’”
Your Fat Friend screens on Wednesday, Oct. 25 at 6:00 p.m. and Friday, Oct. 27 at 2:45 p.m. at the Indie Memphis Film Festival. Tickets and passes are available at the Indie Memphis website.
