Stories in Unlikely Places: A Conversation with Jeanie Finlay

By Simran Hans

Interviews—

Jun 14, 2023

Stories in Unlikely Places: A Conversation with Jeanie Finlay
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The British filmmaker Jeanie Finlay has mastered the art of listening. In a documentary marketplace saturated with trashy true crime, celebrity branding exercises, and issue docs cynically designed for “impact,” her nonfiction work stands out for the tenderness, humanity, and specificity of its approach. The intimacy she creates on-screen is the result of her keen and careful attention. She refuses to disappear herself: her presence behind the camera is quiet but felt. 

The director of nine documentary features, Finlay is drawn to unlikely subjects and settings: ordinary British teenagers in their bedrooms (Teenland, 2007); the last remaining indie record store in Teesside, three miles from where she grew up (Sound It Out,  2011); and a trans man determined to give birth (Seahorse: The Dad Who Gave Birth, 2019). In her eyes, no story is too small or unimportant. She is especially drawn to people who create new identities for themselves, and her interest is evident in The Great Hip Hop Hoax (2013), a weird and witty film about a Scottish rap duo who convince the world they are from California, and the heartbreaking Orion: The Man Who Would Be King (2015), about a masked singer many believed was Elvis Presley reincarnated.

Four of Finlay’s films are playing on the Criterion Channel this month, and her newest film, Your Fat Friend, a personal portrait of fat activist Aubrey Gordon, has played at Tribeca Film Festival. To mark the occasion, I had a wide-ranging conversation with the director about how she approaches documentary like an artist and why she thinks shy people often have the most to say.

You didn’t go to film school; instead, you went to art school, where you studied art and music. What drew you there?

My family was quite traditional. I had one uncle in the family who’d gone to art school, and he was held up as a rebel. But it was something I really wanted to do.

 

At the comprehensive [public] school I went to, I had a visionary art teacher who made us believe that we could be artists. I was also in the orchestra; I played cello. We got free lessons, but we had to commit, and so I played music every single day. They took us on tour to Germany, and we played on the stage at the Royal Festival Hall [in London], and it just made me think, this [a career in the arts] is possible.

At what point did film become your medium?

After university, I started making my own work. I was being an artist. I was doing this big commission called Home-Maker [an interactive gallery installation, website, and publication consisting of panoramic video portraits]. I wanted to do a residency in the homes of housebound people. It was in collaboration with a community arts organization. They wanted me to help older people learn how to use a camera. I went in with the caregivers to get access.

 

When I started to do the work bit—“Hey, here’s a camera, here’s a scanner”—they had no interest whatsoever. They wanted to tell me stories. That was the point where I was like, this should be a film. I borrowed a camera, I center-framed everything, and I was my own camera person.

 

It’s like unlocking a secret, or a surprise. The camera is really visible, and I am visible; I take up space. I’m not a tiny, waif-y, fly-on-the-wall person. What I’m looking for is something that just wouldn’t have been articulated if I wasn’t there, at that moment, with that camera. It’s intoxicating when people find the words in the moment. When they’re telling you a story, they’re just remembering the one they’ve told a thousand times. I’m always trying to get people to slow time down [and rediscover details they’ve forgotten].

What did the cinema offer you that was different?

When you make work for galleries, if you’re lucky, you might get a visitors’ book. I guess it’d be different now, if people are socially engaged with your work online. With a broadcast or a cinema, the audience connection is direct.

 

There’s also an amplification that comes with making films for the big screen that means that voices can be soft and small. As soon as you start filming people, you realize that you don’t have to have a loud voice to take up a lot of space on-screen.

Top of page and above: Sound It Out

Your third feature, Sound It Out, was your breakthrough film. But by your own admission you made it in a very urgent, scrappy way. You crowdfunded it, shot it yourself, and edited it in six weeks.

I had tried to make Orion, but Orion’s too big an ask if you’re an unknown filmmaker. I’d been doing this development program with the Scottish Documentary Institute. They take you to Canada, and you meet all the financiers. I pitched Orion over fifty times in hotel suites. It’s completely stupid. We didn’t even have trailers. Around the same time, I was trying to make The Great Hip Hop Hoax, and we were beset by massive legal problems. I’d been delayed. I just needed to make something.

 

I abandoned some of the ideas of “proper” filmmaking, and I made Sound It Out like I would an artwork. I’d bought a massive camera that I didn’t know how to use properly. Because I was trying out all of these things, I just learned so much. I learned to wait.

To wait for what?

For something to happen! Me being with people—that’s often “the work.” I don’t have questions written down or a shot list, because I want to be in the moment with people, and spend time with them, and listen.

We hear your voice in the film. You don’t edit it out or pretend that you’re not there. Why?

In my first two films, you don’t hear my voice at all. I was really embarrassed about the idea that you would hear it. Why would anyone want to hear from me? But the films are often a document of a relationship, and I’m part of the relationship. We talk now in the edit about when we’re going to bring me in.

 

I know Tom [Butchart, owner of Sound It Out Records and the film’s subject] pretty well, and seeing him in the shop as an adult made me think so much about him as this shy teenager. He came to our school when he was fourteen, and he had a stutter. I just remember going into the shop after university and thinking, he’s King of Vinyl! He’s found his purpose. Tom would say stuff like, “It’s a hard area [that the shop is located in]; I sell Mákina [a subgenre of hardcore techno] and heavy metal.” I’d be like, okay, I want a heavy metal kid, and I want some Mákina heads, so I’m just gonna wait. And so I’d wait, and wait, and wait. Sometimes it might be that I’d waited for four or five hours for something to happen.

What did Sound It Out teach you about what was important to you as a filmmaker?

It affirmed my value system. This is a film I’d pitched to the BBC, and I’d been told it was too small, and that there wasn’t an audience, and no one would be interested in it. And so they wouldn’t commission it. And I made a distinct choice at that moment to make a film for the joy of making it. My mum was going through breast cancer, and I needed something joyful. And I wanted to explore what home meant to me.

You made that film three miles from where you spent your childhood, in Teesside, in the northeast of England. What was it like growing up there?

In the ’80s and the early ’90s, in Teesside, there was massive unemployment. It felt really far away from London. We had our own culture.

 

At art college [Cleveland College of Art and Design, now the Northern School of Art], we just used to go and look at the industrial landscape and crazy, massive buildings at night. We were told that Ridley Scott went to the same college, and that the opening of Blade Runner is based on Teesside. The Northeast is a brilliant secret. It’s staggeringly beautiful, and staggeringly devastated, economically. They used to say that the sunsets are the best in the country because of the pollution.

How has growing up in that landscape shaped your point of view?

There’s a lot of tall-poppy syndrome—don’t get too big for your boots. There’s a lot of wry humor. When I was a teenager, I used to go to Saltburn Beach and walk down the pier. The attraction in Saltburn is the wind. You have a lemon top [vanilla ice cream topped with a scoop of lemon sorbet], you sit in your car and eat fish and chips, or you walk down the pier, and the thing is the wind, the elements, being outside.

You’ve often said that you’re interested in shy people and small stories. I’m curious to know how you define that shyness. Is it an interest in people who choose to be quiet, or in people who have been somehow silenced by the world around them?

The people I’m interested in hearing from are the people who aren’t gobby. Our culture is dominated by loud voices shouting a lot of the time, whether or not they’ve got smart things to say. I noticed it when I was making my first short film, Love Takes. A quiet moment or a look can occupy as much real estate on-screen as someone who is used to amplifying [themselves].

 

I think I’ve found my voice now. I just did this Chicken & Egg residency, and no one thought I was quiet or shy at all. But in the past I was, very much so. I was a fat ginger kid who dressed in men’s suits, who was always looking to find out who I was.

Orion: The Man Who Would Be King

I think of The Great Hip Hop Hoax and Orion: The Man Who Would Be King as a double feature. You made them back-to-back, and both explore false identities.

I’m interested in those layers of identity that we craft. I like the fact that they’re all flawed. I don’t believe in good or evil people.

You get pitched ideas for documentaries all the time, I’m sure. When the journalist Freddy McConnell brought the story of Seahorse to you, about his journey as a trans man giving birth, you said yes, which I understand is the exception rather than the rule for you. What made you say yes to that one?

I really liked Freddy. I felt like we were really different. I’m a cis woman, and I’m also a femme. And it was an opportunity for me to reflect on my gender presentation. Also, on a selfish level, it allowed me to spend time thinking about what pregnancy had meant to me. I’ve got Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, which is an intermittent disability that affects my mobility in times of hormonal explosion. It meant that for the majority of my pregnancy, I couldn’t walk at all, because it just fucked my hips and my pelvis. It was a pretty overwhelming experience.

 

I’m careful about who and what I make films about. They have a big impact on your life, so I want to do stuff that’s enriching, or an adventure, or an important story to tell. Seahorse felt like it was going to be interesting. I didn’t know how it was going to end. I didn’t know whether Freddy could get pregnant. What would that experience be like for him as a trans guy? Could we film the birth? Could I do that?

Seahorse: The Dad Who Gave Birth

How did you and Freddy negotiate the ethics and boundaries of capturing that extraordinary scene? It’s so moving and intimate, but it never feels like it crosses a line.

My thinking around consent evolved partly in discussion with him, and partly because I’ve been thinking much more carefully about protecting my own mental health and that of the team that I’m working with. The traditional way of making a film is you get one of these [waves an A4 sheet of paper] shoved in your face—

You get a release form.

And it’s got three pages of stuff [that says] I can do anything with this, forever. But you’ve got to think about the impact on people’s lives. You can’t just take consent for granted. It’s important for the person you’re making a film about to be able to extend their own boundaries about what they’re comfortable with.

How did Freddy feel about filming the birth?

Freddy wanted the film to have an impact. He knew it was important for the birth to be in the film, to give it an ending, if he was able to do that.

 

The agreement I had with Freddy was: if at any point he felt like it was too much, I would leave, no questions asked. In a way, saying “I can leave” was the thing that allowed me to stay, because he trusted me.

 

All the stuff I’d done up to then allowed that to happen. Saying to Freddy, “I’ll guard your story,” and meaning it. I want my films to be tender. To deliver that, in reality, means sometimes you have to fight very hard. I didn’t just walk into the birthing suite. It took a lot of work to get there.

Simran Hans is a writer and film critic in London.

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