Filmmaker Andy Fidoten on making art (and a living) outside of the mainstream

Maybe we can start by talking about your movie, Something You Should Know About Me. How did it come to be?

I was in my last year of my MFA program, which was at Stony Brook University. They started a new film MFA about a decade ago that was geared towards NYC filmmakers who were interested in working in independent film. And it was very affordable. I went there because I really wanted to make a feature, and I knew how cost-prohibitive it was. In my last year, I started a writing class, and I was like, “What can I make that I could actually shoot?”

I was writing all this stuff about trans people, and it always felt like people weren’t really engaging with my scripts, which bummed me out. I was writing comedy. I wanted people to laugh and push back and stuff.

And I had this idea to write a romantic comedy about a trans guy who’s a struggling artist and who’s in love with his best friend and they go to a funny cartooning camp together. I was thinking a lot about these horny, messy rom-coms from the early 2000s. And those movies reminded me of being post-transition and acting sort of teenage boy-like in a way that is sort of humiliating. And so when I wrote from that place, right away, I noticed that all of these people were engaging really deeply with the script. So then I thought, “Okay. Maybe, this is the right form for talking about all these ideas.”

Something You Should Know About Me is a very independent film in terms of how it was made, and it also feels like it’s about independent filmmaking. It has this beating DIY heart.

What Christine Vachon from Killer Films says about independent filmmaking is that you don’t need to reach all audiences when you make something. You just need to make something at the budget that is appropriate for the audience you’re trying to reach.

And the same is true for comics, in a way. There is a robust viable path for being an independent cartoonist. No one’s raking money in hand over fist. But if you’re a comics artist, you can publish with a small press. People find their audience really early, and they target their audiences, and there’s a lot of infrastructure to support that with expos and small presses and stuff.

I was so inspired by that. When I went to comics camp, I realized that there were all these super independent artists who were making a living and finding the people who wanted to see their work and really making things for them. And I think that is part of the ethos that went into the movie that filmmakers should do the same thing.

In the movie there’s a celebration of art-making that happens outside of the mainstream. And then I was hoping when I made the movie, I would scale it similarly to the artists depicted in the movie.

You studied visual art in college. How did you find filmmaking?

All the photography I did was very, very obsessed with narrative. The camera was a vessel for trying to capture as much story as I could. There was only so much story I could shove into those photos, and I was not using the form as it’s meant to be used.

Film is certainly a kind of art but for me, it was extremely liberating to realize that I could actually simply write a narrative that began and ended somewhere and that there was a place to go do that.

Comics came from the same place. I started making comics during COVID when I was lonely, and because unfortunately filmmaking is expensive and takes a really long time, and comics are free.

In my movie, part of what Al is trying to figure out is how to be an artist. There’s times he’s really aping other storytelling forms. And as you push to the end of the story, there’s an attempt to find something that feels more authentic, even if it’s more unwieldy.

And I think that the movie is the same. It mirrored my path as an emerging filmmaker, having very few resources and trying to figure out what the tools are, what are the things that I have to say, and what is the way I want to say it.

The music is a huge part of the story, too, which makes sense with your background in T-Rextasy. T-Rextasy’s songs were also narrative.

The T-Rextasy songs I wrote are another place where I look back, and I’m like, “Oh my God.” I am always really trying to shove a story in there.

I think that I was trying to write stories in a lot of different parts of my life before I realized that I wanted to be a filmmaker. And the DIY scene was helpful. I don’t think I could make movies the way I do if I hadn’t had all that time being in a punk band because there is such an intense and real ethos of self-reliance.

When I decided I wanted to make this movie, I remember being told by a lot of people who I respect, “You don’t have the resources to do this thing that you want to do.” And I was just like, “Yes, I do. Yes, I do. Yes, I do.”

Not being reliant on these larger corporate apparatuses is a point of pride in DIY world, which seemed like it helped with the film.

Music, my first venture into being any kind of artist, was so deeply collaborative. I was so reliant on my bandmates. I didn’t know what I was doing. I barely knew how to play the bass. Everything I learned was with them.

What I love about film truly is that you cannot make a film on your own. Actually, I heard Lilly [Wachowski] say this when I was at Frameline in a panel, and she was like, “Me and my sister never took a ‘film by’ credit because there’s so many things that are in the film that we couldn’t have done.” In all films, even if you have a vision, there’s infinite people who have specialized in things that you need to make something happen. And then those people come, and you give them your vision, and then you just trust that person to run with it and execute.

And that’s true of music. You just have to trust people. If you respect someone and you think that they are capable of executing things on the highest level of what you want, then you all make something together you can’t make on your own.

In filmmaking, sometimes, there is the misconception that the director is able to create something only because they execute a kind of dictatorial control over the product as opposed to collaborative trust. I admire how you’re so invested in the latter.

Obviously there are some filmmakers who keep really tight reins on what they do. It’s not how I want to make movies, but I understand why people do it like that, and I think it can be an interesting way to make an independent film.

But on the larger scale, when we valorize these auteurs, I’m like, “So who set the fire? Who made the explosion? Who hemmed the dress?” There are so many things in a movie that come from somebody’s honed craft. And I think that if you really respect those crafts, as a filmmaker, you would understand that it’s never only you, even if it really feels like it is.

I think a good director is a person who recognizes the talent in other people. It’s like being a good boss, seeing people’s skills, drawing them out and trusting them to do good work. It is a job that is as managerial as it is creative, in many ways. And that’s why directors don’t really like thinking about it because if we talked about how managerial directing was, people wouldn’t dream of being directors.

At the same time, I know that it took so much for you personally to make this. You saw it through every step of the way, wrote it, crowdfunded it, everything. How do you balance your creative practice with work and a day job?

Ultimately the only way to do your art and make your living is to practice extreme discipline, which I feel like is sort of the opposite of the vision of the artist’s life.

I have a fulltime day job because I need health insurance. And I need time to write. I also need at least an hour every day to take care of the administrative work of finishing a film. And so that means that I have to get up at 6:00 AM and make my breakfast. And if I’m going to, my God, take care of my body, I have to do that, and then have enough time to sit and have time to write and do creative work, which I try to do in the morning.

It also looks like not doing everything that I want to do so that I can make time to keep the business thing work. I eke out a lot of time on the margins of my life, and it’s made it harder to do the things that are fun.

Do I have incredible discipline? No, not yet. But I think the closer that I’ve gotten to finishing this movie, I’ve realized that it’s just me and the people who made it with me getting it over the finish line. And so that helped me prioritize self-discipline again. I hope that one day it gets easier.

But also, I do work in film in my day job. So I feel like I’m learning a lot at my job, which is good, even though I can’t work on my own stuff on the clock.

The creative time commitment can be a really hard thing to convey to other people.

I explain to people that it’s just me. I have two full-time jobs. One is the one that pays me, and the other one is the one that sustains me.

Everybody supports and loves their friends who make art, but I think it’s really hard for people to understand the sheer amount of time and work that you are doing off the clock.

Do you have anything that you do when you’re stuck and overwhelmed?

If I can’t figure out how to write something, I will stop working on it for a couple of weeks. I do find that true when I am out in the world, just trying to feel inspired and happy and excited that is when ideas come back to me.

What else? I think that when I’m having a hard time with film stuff, I stop trying to write movies, and just go to the movies instead.

Andy Fidoten recommends:

New York City public swimming pools

The writing of Barbara Browning

The new 4K restoration of By Hook or By Crook directed by Silas Howard and Harry Dodge

The New Museum’s current robot exhibit

Only ever wearing the newest baseball hat you just got somewhere for free, even though you have a drawer full of them at home

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Claudia Ross.

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