Fast Times at Camp Girl Horror: FFC Interviews Avalon Fast

by Walter Chaw A new wave of filmmakers has arrived, born and raised in the Internet age without parents capable of warning them there are wolves lurking in the digital forest. I think I only implanted in my children a general dread, a non-specific “be careful” with no strategy for survival. Didn’t it used to be easier? Don’t go into the candy house. Don’t accept rides from strangers. How do I protect my kids from the dangers of a place I don’t really know how to navigate, full of traps I myself can neither identify nor defeat? They were brought up in an environment of instant feedback, of virtual friends, of communities formed by shared niche interests. In my lifetime, I have seen the bullied become the captains of industry and entertainment. I’ve lived long enough to watch nerds not only gain their revenge but become the bullies themselves.

I don’t always understand what’s happening in the films that have come to define this wave (such as Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun, Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink, and Avalon Fast’s Camp), but I can feel the urgency of their demand to be seen on their own terms. They are unequivocal and uncompromised. They vibrate with ineffable, magnetic power, as offspring of the unfiltered heart will.

This is certainly true of the ferocious Camp, and I felt lucky to be able to talk with Fast before they broke big. As the film–like their debut feature, Honeycomb–doubles as something of a memory piece, I started by asking them about nostalgia:

AVALON FAST: It’s huge. Those super8 passages are reflecting Emily’s memories, but for me those felt personal. I felt very connected to the feeling of them, you know… Emily’s story isn’t necessarily mine, but I wanted her to remember how I remember. I did feel like those memories out of a car window, the kind of trees you’re looking at, the kind of environment that is, the way it makes you feel, are closest to my own experiences than maybe anything else in the film.

FILM FREAK CENTRAL: How is it useful? Nostalgia?
I don’t know if it is useful. I don’t know. It’s useful if you wanna make movies like this, I guess. I will say nostalgia definitely plagues me. I find it hard to–and I know I’m not unique in this–but I find it hard to live in the moment. It’s hard to be satisfied with where I am. I feel constantly plagued by memories of my youth or memories from even, you know, like last year. I seem to…at least get the most feeling out of things when I’m reflecting on them. Which works well when you’re trying to transcribe your feelings into film, but I think that’s it: nostalgia works in art, but in, like, regular life, I don’t, I don’t know how useful it is.

You say in the production notes that this film is now speaking for you–that you’ve always been telling this story.
I have a hard time. It’s funny, I had this feeling like I might get better at speaking about my work, [but] as I made more of it, it’s gotten harder. When I reflect, I feel like I was actually better at talking about Honeycomb than Camp. Maybe the thing I’ve gotten better at is putting my voice into the films that I’m making. All this energy I’m collecting, and all these feelings, I put it into the thing, and then I can’t remember what it’s about. Sometimes, I feel uneducated about my own work–like I’m not giving anybody good information when they ask about it.

The information is in the film. I think that’s what I meant by it speaking for me. This is the best answer I can give anybody about what this thing is, what Camp is speaking about.

It’s not your job.
I go back and forth on that. I feel like I’m toeing the line between wanting to connect with people who connect with the film but then also not totally expending myself trying to do something that is kind of impossible for me, which is just answering the basic questions about it.

Emily has that problem, too, at the party that opens Camp.
I think about that space that Emily’s in [at] the beginning of the film a lot. She’s asked the question, but you need to judge if they really wanna hear the answer to the question they’ve asked. It’s such a common experience, you know? It’s as simple as when people ask how you’re doing, and you give an answer that’s outside of this norm, and it’s completely uncomfortable for certain people. It’s so cool as I get older and as I connect with different people in my life how you start to find spaces where you are able to unmask. To challenge comfortable societal norms. That’s something I was looking at with Camp, because I’ve always been interested in going a step further and (pause) deeper in my relationships, and the people who allow that, who welcome it even, are the people that I not even enjoy spending time with, but feel alive spending time with. That’s definitely something I was exploring with this film. That moment when you find your group of freaks and weirdos is maybe the first moment you feel really human. For me it was…is… I feel like I’m still… I’m still looking. I want to narrow my life down into only spending time with people I can be wholly myself with.

Does creation feel like an exorcism for you?
You know… No. And I wish it did. I–I had a feeling it would, and it didn’t. Or it hasn’t yet. I had somebody say to me recently that they felt like I would eventually get a release from it, but I don’t know. I didn’t go into Camp thinking, “I need to get rid of this feeling.” I didn’t want to get rid of it. I wanted to really investigate what’s happening here. I made Camp because something happened in my life that didn’t make any sense to me, and it kind of uprooted the way that I saw the world. It flipped my world over, and I wanted to understand that. And I come out here at the end of it five years later, and I don’t understand this trauma or my life after it any better than I did in the beginning of the process. I don’t know if that will change. I’m open to my pain becoming something else, but I haven’t had that moment of catharsis where I’m like, “Oh, I’ve come out on the other side of this thing now.”

That’s hard. But it’s good for us if it means you’ll keep making these.
(laughs) Exactly.

Tell me about Coppola’s Rumble Fish as an emotional template for your work. I know you love it.
Perfect example. Perfect example. I watched Rumble Fish with my dad the summer that I finished making Camp. He came to visit me in Vancouver, and we hadn’t seen each other for a long time. I’d been so busy making this movie. My dad and I are really close. He was like, “I think that you’d like this movie. I saw it in France when I was in the Army.” And I said, “Okay.” I’d seen The Outsiders, and it didn’t really mean much to me, so I was just kind of expecting to watch this Dad Movie. And I was down. So we rented it, and I said, “Oh, wow, this is pure art.” I don’t know what Francis Ford Coppola had on his mind, what the story was there, and I almost don’t wanna look it up because to me, I just have this idea that he got the rights to The Outsiders, did it in a really marketable way, and then did Rumble Fish and was like, “Okay, now I’m gonna make an insane art movie.” That movie is everything to me. It’s talking about some of the same things I’ve been talking about through my work. Like, how do they describe it in the film? How some are cursed with having an acute sensibility that makes you a little bit off in relation to the world around you? I love that. I feel so connected to that character, Motorcycle Boy, and I love people like that.

Oh, man. You know, when Mickey Rourke first appears on screen, he’s so heartbreakingly beautiful, like he’s the most beautiful thing in the world in the way that Coppola shoots him. He’s almost supernaturally beautiful. But he’s an alien for it–an outcast.
I think a lot of the reason that I make films was because I grew up as an only child. I’m not anymore, but for the majority of my youth I was. I grew up very isolated. Socially, but just literally geographically. I grew up in a situation where it would take thirty minutes to walk to somebody else’s house. Through the woods, on the side of a mountain. I had my parents, right, but oftentimes I just felt really alone and really bored. I’m very social, though. I really liked making friends, but when I was young and before I had that kind of agency to go and hang out with people on my own, I spent so much of this time alone, and it made me a very introspective person. I don’t ever remember thinking of myself as a misfit, though, I think because I wanted so badly not to be. I remember very clearly the experience of leaving the place I grew up, going to middle school, recognizing then that I was strange, and then, like, actively putting on a costume to play normal. I played a role throughout middle school and high school. Looking back, that masking is such a stunting experience for me, because without it, I would’ve been a real weirdo and a real misfit. I missed that experience, ’cause I was so scared of it.

Are you still afraid of being known?
Yeah, it’s interesting and a little bit nerve-wracking to speak about things in interviews that I haven’t said out loud before, but I’ll go for it ’cause it’s just coming to me now. But I do feel like, um, sometimes as a person, it’s so exhausting to just exist, much less to speak. And so I think what I mean when I say something like the movie speaks for me… It’s less about losing my voice [than] it is this film is giving me a moment to breathe, because I’ve created an external entity, a piece of media, that speaks for me. What a relief. And what a nice way to allow people to know who I am. I think that’s the reason I’m drawn to do it. I had a close friend who hadn’t seen any of my films, and after the Q&A at our IFC preview the other night, they looked at me and said, “I didn’t know who you were.” And I was thinking, How cool, ’cause I would’ve never known how to tell you. And I didn’t know how to tell a lot of people who I was. I actually feel like I have more of a voice now because I have something that’s able to explain me. Because I never could.

Being heard, being seen–tie those themes together for me under the banner of “girl horror.”
I labelled it “girl horror” because it was like a reclaiming of the thing. It’s a phrase I’ve been exploring. I want to understand what that means to me now. And I do feel like there’s a way horror connects to Camp that’s more complex than just, like, the horror of, you know, femininity. There’s fear there, right? But, no, traditional horror as a genre, generally it doesn’t mean the same thing to me that it seems to mean to other people. So I feel like I’m definitely moving outside of those expectations, because people come and see Camp, and they’re like, “A horror movie? Is that what this is?” Not really. But, I mean, if people need to categorize things, I guess that’s where it makes the most sense.

What kind of responsibility do you feel for your audience?
I mean this in a kind way, but I don’t make movies for someone. It’s not that I don’t care about people, but I don’t make what I make for a specific audience. I’m never, ever thinking about where my work will fit in culturally or, like, within the history of film, you know, where my film fits in there. It’s not something that I ever thought about. It’s not something that I think about now. I think how an audience finds you happens naturally and instinctually, and I have to try to make my films the same way. It doesn’t really have anything to do with… Too much intentionality can only hurt.

Tell me about THAT summer.
That is such a cool way to frame it, because if you look for a throughline that ties together all of the work that I’ve done, like from my short film Night Trouble to Honeycomb to Camp to my new movie Drinking and Driving, “that summer” is a great way to encircle them all into a succinct… I’ve never thought about that. So, thank you. (pause) It’s so clear. I’ll definitely be saying that about my stuff. Let me try to answer this by… I had this experience with the person I wrote the story for. She came and saw the movie, and she seemed–well, she saw it twice. The first time, I brought it over to her house. We watched it with her family. And then she came to Vancouver, and she saw it at the Rio with an audience, which is like a whole other thing. After the film, I saw her quickly. I saw she was fucked up. She went back to my place while we all went out to a bar with some people. I knew she wasn’t there. We didn’t talk for a while after, and I thought, “She’s absolutely fucked up.” You know, I’d bring it up to my friends, and I’d go, you know, “I don’t know, I don’t know how she’s… I don’t know what’s going on.” And they’d be like, “Oh, I’m sure she’s fine. You should check in with her.” But, I’m sure she’s not fine, and I don’t wanna check in with her because I don’t want her to feel obligated to tell me she’s okay when I know that she’s not. I think she’s going to feel that way if I reach out, because I made the thing, and there’s this like, you know, need to make me feel like everything’s fine and what I did didn’t hurt her when I know that it did. This story has a happy ending. I mean, she came around to tell me most recently that it ended up being a gift, but it was a very… It was traumatic to revisit those experiences, and it kind of cracked her open in a new way, but she has been able to find peace by going through those things.

I’m reminded of stories about having to break bones that have healed improperly so that they can heal properly.
But, like, damn, that’s a hard experience to go through, not once but now twice and it… Yeah, it just, it made me think about that obligation to make people understand that you’re okay when you’re not. Sometimes “that summer” sticks, and, no, you’re not okay. But for me, it wasn’t necessarily about revisiting “that summer,” because I was so in it, and I’ve been in it since I started writing this thing, that in a lot of ways I never left it. I do think how it would’ve been easier for me to not make this movie. It’s all there in Emily’s journey, you know? Like, you’re going into a place where you’re hitting what you’re trying to suppress head-on. You’re sharing your story. You’re putting it all out on the table. That’s the way that I need to operate. I have like a Substack where I write essentially romantic journal entries. They’ve gotten me in trouble before in my social life, and I wonder, Why am I doing this? Why am I putting my heart on my sleeve in this way that’s public? I think this way about my films as well, you know. Why? Why do I feel this need to share? But it’s how I process. I feel incredibly drawn to being seen and understood.

This is me.
(laughs) I’m actually not trying to be mysterious. I really want people to understand and talk to me about it if I’ve touched on something that’s universal and not just personal. Which you seem to, and that’s awesome. I love having these conversations. It’s why I do the thing.

Tell me about the payphone. I have kids your age. And Emily’s. This scene destroyed me.
The way that you connect with your parents once you’re outside of the house, for me, it’s always been like that phone call, and it’s a call that generally comes in a time of crisis because, you know, when life’s good, I’m not gonna call my parents. I’m busy. But when you’re feeling low and you have to ground yourself or reconnect, I’ll often have these kinds of calls with my dad. And I pick up this energy where my dad is happy to hear from me when things are hard, but it’s also… It’s painful. It’s both.

Her dad says, “This makes me happy and sad,” and, yes, I’m also happy and sad when I talk to my daughter, who is grown now and doesn’t live at home anymore.
When my dad saw the film, he was emotional, too. Kind of similar to what you’re saying, he said, “I understand now that you have moved on and you have other people in your world to support you, and I’m letting you–you are free.” And I was like, “Okay, it is just a movie, and it’s okay, Dad.” I think he wondered if I was subliminally trying to reach him and tell him something that I couldn’t (pause) say out loud.

Weren’t you?
Could be. The payphone, visually, I don’t know. I don’t even remember where that idea came from. I do remember it being such a cool experience. I hadn’t seen that set being executed, and then when we walked into the woods with Zola to shoot the scene… I mean, just seeing the payphone there in the clearing of trees, and the art directors are kind of standing back through the forest, like, so proud because it’s so cool. It’s exactly the uncanniness I’d envisioned. And Zola’s performance in that is so incredible. It’s, like, so timely, so heartbreaking for me. When I first saw the audition tape come in from Zola, she’d shot it with a window behind her looking out on this deep evergreen forest, and I thought, “Well, that looks really familiar.” It’s like she already understood this character. She grew up in China, and then she spends half of her time in Courtenay–which is a small town very close to the one I grew up in in British Columbia–and half in New York. It felt like fate. She’d spent so much time in the place I had. Once cast, we collaborated on the background of her character. We created it together. She was able to write about who Emily was as a young person. She just instantly got all of it. She’s incredible. It was her first feature. I don’t even know if she’d done short films before she got on set, maybe like one or two. She did go to school for acting, but, you know, it was so new for her. How grateful I am to have somebody who fully embodied this character in a way that I didn’t know was possible. Zola showed me who that character was, and she gave so much of herself to it. I’ll always be grateful to her for that. She is just phenomenal. And there was something spiritually moving about being there with her in that space–the clearing with the phone booth. It was our last shot of the day, and it, it really felt like there was kind of an outside presence guiding that particular scene and performance.

A good time to ask you about religion.
As a kid, I found it to be a cool space to live in a little bit. Neither of my parents were religious, but I grew up in a small town, and a lot of the after-school clubs and summer camps were religious. I always liked that. I thought religion was beautiful. Obviously, as I got older, there started to be some guidelines around it that made it uncomfortable for me to participate in, but I always considered myself connected to God from a young age. It was something that was very personal to me and not something that I think I could explain to other people. I went through a period of time where I was more interested in understanding other people’s religions before coming back full circle back to this place where I wonder if religion might not be the best way for me to understand my life. Can I get a better grasp on my world if I keep a personal connection to my own type of God? Not the Biblical God–or, at least, [my] concept of God is very personal to me and not something that I can learn about through reading the Bible.

You name one key character in Camp “Eden” and you put them in Hell.
To me, the moment with Eden getting their first period is, like–that to me is the most girl-horror moment of the entire story. It’s just such an alarming thing. For people who experience this process of menstruation, it’s like a reminder of your body in the freakiest way. For me, it’s just never quite made complete sense. It’s not like I dislike it, but I still find it very confusing. Obviously, as a kid, I found it very confusing, but even now. Maybe in a different way. I love Izza [Jarvis], who plays Eden. Izza’s trans, and that added such a layer to that character. Through Eden, menstruation became so much bigger for me, and what that could look like to somebody who might feel disconnected from their body.

Tell me about your relationship with “Eden” in the sense of a mythological “Natural.”
I had this feeling growing up–and I’m gonna make a movie about this feeling as well–but when I was a little kid growing up where I did, it’s incredibly isolating. From my house, you couldn’t see other houses. You could hear the highway in the distance sometimes. Like one car every hour. So there was some notion of civilization out there in the day, but at night there was nothing. As a kid, you don’t really understand the concept of scale, of space and distance. Not in the same way as you do as an adult. I just didn’t understand where we were in relationship to other things. When I was five or six, I would have these ideas that if I got out of bed and I walked out the front door, I could just walk forever and no one would ever find me. And it’s kind of true. Where I grew up, I really could just disappear if I walked straight into the woods, and no one would see me again. There would no evidence of my existence, no clue as to what happened to little Avalon. I found that really scary, but also it makes mystery possible and the world feel more interesting. The older I get, looking back on that feeling, the more I feel nostalgia for that fear, even, because that kind of mystery doesn’t exist in the world that I live in anymore. I’m so online. I live in the city. I’m very, uh, witnessed. I feel no deep connection to being Canadian. I feel no connection to the labels that have been put on the land that I grew up on. But I feel a deep connection to the land and to those natural spaces. They’re sacred, and you can feel it. It feels like an entity. Like it really is like a living, sentient organism. I’ve felt lonelier here as an adult in the city than I ever did as a kid in the forest. You’re surrounded and, and held in this way, and that’s what I look to show in my movies. How Nature holds you.

The score communicates that–and the final needle-drop by I Hate Sex is extraordinary.
Music is everything when it comes to film for me. The first things that I’ll think of when I think of a story is often a piece of music. I’m always making playlists to just remind me of the feeling or a scene or just a new idea. Working with my composer Max Robin is such a blessing in my life. He fits into my artistry, and I, I think that I fit into his as well. Without him, the thing wouldn’t exist in the same way. And, like, it’s such a scary thought that it’s so random, but it’s also so cool that it happened that we’ve known each other so long. We grew up in the same place and went to the same schools. It’s just so exceptional to me. How did we happen to be partnered like this? What his music does… It feels like me. How can another person do that? The finale song Max did to run before the credits, before the I Hate Sex song, he’d written that for an art piece I did about the place where we grew up. Really, it was just a single shot of a meadow that I used to go to when I was a kid. It’s just the sun rising, and then it starts raining, and he made this looped piece of music that is around 40 minutes long to augment the images. This piece of music feels like I made it, in a way. I mean, he made it, obviously, but it understands me. I hope that I can work with him forever.

And the end-credits song?
“San Francisco.” That song, the final line of it is, “You deserve so much more than this,” and it’s… The film ends with that line. To me, literally, the film ends with, “You deserve so much more than this.” And you do. We all do.