PRESS

A small sample of articles and interviews

THE DAILY BEAST / Amy Everson

Why I Chose to Wear a Penis: Exploring Gender and Masculinity in ‘FELT’

The writer and star of the feminist psychosocial thriller, FELT, Amy Everson, writes about how her past traumas influenced the making of the film, which takes aim at the patriarchy and opens in limited release June 26/VOD July 21.

My life was a fucking nightmare.

It seemed fitting, then, that while standing still on the edge of a tree stump in the middle of a freezing cold forest, that the stump should give way. No sooner did the director, Jason Banker, get the close-up he wanted when the redwood snapped and I fell, slamming my head against the stump on the way down. I should have known that it was all going to give way beneath me, though it probably wouldn’t have mattered if I did. It was the last shot of the film, and at that time, I would have been okay with dying if it made for a better show.

We had just wrapped shooting on Felt, a feature film based on my real-life experiences. In keeping with the style Banker had established on his previous film, Toad Road, the project began as a pseudo-documentary. He was intrigued by some costumes of mine, so he began filming me on-and-off over a period of months, waiting for the meaning of my attire to unveil itself to him. As for me, I was interested in making something thoughtful and true to my experience being a female. It wasn’t until my descent into a deep depression, exacerbated by some exploitative and disgusting developments in my personal life, that we realized we had been capturing the connection between the two from the beginning: my art was an expression of the accumulated sexual violence that had been perpetrated against me.

The costumes, it should be stated, are what my friends would call my “naked man-and-woman suits”—basically, underwear with genitalia sewn in. I began wearing the man-suit under my clothes as a party trick, eager to pull the penis out at a moment’s notice. Friends and strangers, the ones who weren’t disturbed, were happy to take part: they’d stage themselves in dirty photos with me, and, on occasion, men would round off the aesthetic by adorning themselves with my woman-suit and gesticulate their idea of female sexuality. A quick glance at my bedroom paints a similar picture: it’s adorned with pornified art, sex toys, and potty humor. For years, people would partake in my obscure sexualized jokes, laughing, all the while I remained unclear why I was telling them, and unsure as to whom they were intended.

Jason Banker’s footage helped to unravel the mysteries. The videos captured a female who had adapted to a culture which sexualized and violated her before she even knew what sex was. She had internalized her aggressors as a means of coping with the trauma inflicted by them. Her boundaries were nonexistent, her language crass, and she had rationalized that physical and emotional abuse, continuous through years of toxic relationships, wasn’t just normal, but something that she deserved. Her costumes weren’t worn merely for fun—they were a camouflage for whenever she wanted to escape a painful world of womanhood. In a culture that overvalues the idea of masculinity, trivializes women’s rights, encourages male entitlement, blames victims, denies the existence of widespread rape, and has a staggeringly unsophisticated understanding of the spectrum of sexual violence that occurs, it was next to impossible to recognize healthy alternatives. So the man-suit, imbued with a symbol of power, became her superhero costume.

Felt is a film that explores the insidious trauma caused by society’s open hostility against women. It tells the familiar story of womanhood: of having to endure life in a climate where attitudes about sex and the sexes contribute to the pervasiveness of rape and sexual violence. This particular tale is about a woman who is not only struggling to cope with the past, but must continually survive the present. Rather than go on tolerating the hostility and the harm, she loses herself in the fantasy of transcending it. But in embodying the very personification of masculinity that’s damaged her, the consequences can only be tragic.

Even as the crew rushed to my side, oozing love and concern as I lay fallen next to the rotten stump, I couldn’t see a happy ending for myself. In the time that’s passed, I’ve taken a route that’s been healing. In recognizing patterns of violence in my life, breaking free from toxic relationships, addressing my trauma with practice and patience, I’ve been able to raise my standards, improve my quality of life, make art and costumes with intention, and address the circumstances of the world I live in critically and assertively.

Healing is an ongoing process, and living in a culture with rampant misogyny will forever complicate it. As a baseline, however, I know that if anything gives way beneath me now, I’ll be ready for the fall. The tragedy of Felt was in my becoming the monster that I was fighting. The triumph is that I know that my life isn’t going to end that way.

Entertainment Weekly / Devan Coggan

Felt red-band trailer: Psychological thriller tackles rape culture

Felt takes a harsh and surreal look at rape culture and what it means to be a woman in a male-dominated society. Based on the real experiences of star and co-writer Amy Everson, Felt tells the story of a young woman struggling to process past sexual trauma by adopting costumed alter egos and re-appropriating the male body. Co-written and directed by Jason Banker, Felt follows Everson’s character as she begins a new relationship and falls further into the world of these grotesque alter egos, still searching for the power she feels she lacks. The new red-brand trailer is jarring and NSFW, but it certainly reflects a creatively compelling version of the psychological anguish that victimized women endure.

Felt will be released in theaters June 26 and digitally July 21.

The Village Voice / Diana Clarke

In Daring Indie ‘Felt,’ a Young Woman Seizes Rich Dudes’ Masculinity

Felt opens with sound: saliva clacking against mucus membranes, a closing throat. Amy (Amy Everson) is crying. The camera, invading her personal space, invites the viewer to do the same. Women, if visible, are expected to be beautiful even while weeping, which suggests — in this case, wrongly — that they need rescuing as well. This strange, quiet film takes social narratives about romance and gender and upends them, often seeming like one thing until it’s another.

At first, tinkly music and disorienting camera angles make Felt seem girlish and small — but the effect’s protective, and fuck you for associating girlishness with insignificance. Amy, depressed, spends all day in her childhood bedroom, incapable of moving enough to forget “that you’re constantly objectified and discredited just for being female.” Concerned friends want her to go out and look pretty, but on an arranged double date Amy gets aggressive, arguing with moneyed men who claim they’re useful to society. The dispute echoes in Amy’s solo art project, which drives her to the woods wearing costumes that are part murderous ski mask, part dildo. She appropriates artifacts of toxic masculinity, takes their power and disconnects it from normalcy, respectability — and male bodies.

Swathed in San Francisco fog and a hoodie, Amy looks like any whispering mumblecore starlet, but her actions are loud — especially once she starts dating Kenny (Kentucker Audley), who sports an ingrained sense of romance and a foppish haircut. He holds Amy while she laments that “most forms of rape are perpetuated by people that you know and trust,” but Kenny can’t possibly suspect Amy’s potential for violence.

AV Club / Jenni Miller

The viscerally weird Felt belongs equally to its director and star

“My life is a fucking nightmare.” Those are the first words spoken in Felt, a short, roughhewn movie about an artist named Amy (Amy Everson) who is recovering from an unnamed, unseen trauma. Her friends are initially supportive, but as Amy’s coping methods grow stranger and more provocative, they begin to distance themselves. The men that she and her friends encounter are all complete piles of ambulatory garbage, from an antagonistic boyfriend to Amy’s awful OKCupid date, who slurs jokes about roofies and how they don’t actually exist—they’re just excuses for women to act out sexually without bearing responsibility for their actions. What’s worse is that these guys aren’t anomalies; they’re just illustrating the daily indignities that many women experience. The only way Amy thinks she can regain her power is to become like them.

Amy’s bedroom is full of beautifully strange and disturbing art that combines childish artifacts with a sort of grotesque sexuality—felt penises, a tiny fetal Hitler—but her naked body costumes are where she draws her power. She wears the male one out in the woods, or occasionally under her clothes, as when she whips out her penis in a cemetery with her friend. Like her reckless behavior and scatological sense of humor, it’s a defense mechanism, and a way for Amy to co-opt the misogyny that surrounds her. Eventually, though, she meets a guy who is patient enough to wait for her to let down her hackles. Kenny (Kentucker Audley) seems like a nice guy, but unfortunately for everyone involved, seems is the operative word.

At first, Felt doesn’t feel substantial. There doesn’t seem to be much of a plot, or even a necessarily linear narrative. Amy’s nightmares leak into daytime, and the film follows that same dream logic. It can be as frustrating to watch Amy (and the movie) spin out as it is for her friends to experience. But what anchors the movie is co-writer and star Amy Everson’s performance. Everson is endlessly watchable as she cycles through despair, anger, wariness, and trust. Her sense of humor as an artist and performer shines through, especially in one scene where she answers an ad for semi-nude models by showing up in a nylon suit with a protruding vulva. She and the other model, played by Roxanne Knouse, have a great time teasing the hipster photographer (played by hipster photographer Merkley) by giggling, farting, and rubbing their butts on his hotel room pillows. The sight of Amy in her naked man suit, complete with a lifelike penis and cloth scrotum, is somehow more vulnerable and revealing than if she were completely nude.

Far too many movies rely on rape as a lazy character-development device or a way to shock the viewer. Felt assiduously avoids that; although there are indications everywhere that Amy’s trauma is sexual in nature, it’s never stated outright. Co-writer and director Jason Banker’s use of handheld cameras and abrupt edits makes the viewer feel physically uncomfortable, but it’s his collaboration with Everson that’s stunning. Although she’s billed as a co-writer, the project was developed with her after Banker took an interest in her art, specifically her costumes; the director’s previous feature, Toad Road, was similarly developed with its leads as a sort of hybrid feature/documentary. Of course, it’s not necessary to know all that to appreciate this film’s power. Although there are a few moments that feel a little too on the nose, Felt sneaks up on you and lingers for hours afterward.

FANGORIA / Michael Gingold

Q&A: Jason Banker And Amy Everson On Making FELT, Skin Suits And “Fetal Hitler”

There has never been a female genre-film protagonist quite like Amy, the young woman at the center of Jason Banker’s new psychodrama Felt. Banker and star Amy Everson based that character on the latter’s own life and experiences, and both delve into the process in this interview.

In Felt, Everson’s Amy deals with both past sexual trauma and present male-aggressive culture through bizarre art pieces she creates—most notably male and female “skin suits” sporting plastic genitalia. Donning these outfits empowers her, but also causes her to lose touch with reality—which threatens a burgeoning relationship she develops with an apparently nice guy named Kenny (The Sacrament’s Kentucker Audley). A rethinking of rape-revenge tropes in which the damage and horror are largely internal, Felt is Banker’s unsettling follow-up to Toad Road (the portrait of rural unease that marked his feature directorial debut after numerous credits as cinematographer) and introduces a unique new on-camera talent in Everson.

How did you adapt Amy’s real-life persona into her onscreen character, and develop her together over the course of making Felt?

JASON BANKER: Well, one of the reasons I enjoy making films this way is because I like to really dig into somebody’s psyche, and Amy is such an interesting person. I come from a documentary background, and as much as you try to get everything about a person into a film, it’s just not possible, so you have to decide what elements you’re going to use, and that process can be really fun.

AMY EVERSON: The story and character developed naturally from Banker approaching the project with an open mind and a camera and saying, “What is this about?” He followed me and captured me in my natural state, and we also improvised and explored some of my present and past and costumes and art. It was an ongoing process, even after production, of figuring out what it all meant, and what the story was. It was an organic blend of reality and fiction and documentary and narrative.

BANKER: Also, because this is for FANGORIA, the idea was to explore the darker elements of her psyche. That was really interesting, figuring out how to make a movie with the dark tone I want to see in the films I make. There was a lot of discussion about how, while this was based on Amy’s life, we were also making something much grimmer than that life, so developing that was an interesting part of the process.

Amy, your character goes to some pretty unsettling and even perverse places. How much of that did you draw from your own feelings and experiences, and how much did you come up with specifically for the movie?

EVERSON: A lot of it was just an exploration of a part of myself. It is very much based on my real personality and experiences and sense of humor, and then running with that at an extreme level.

BANKER: In terms of building the horror narrative, Amy’s art was one of the things I really focused on. Her skin suits were kind of inspired by The Silence of the Lambs’ Buffalo Bill, right, Amy?

EVERSON: Oh, absolutely.

BANKER: That was an interesting thing to me; it was like, “Wow, these are skin suits! Let’s explore this a little bit more.”

EVERSON: The male suit with the penis was born out of a costume I made for a villain party that was inspired by Buffalo Bill. The idea was, what would be the reverse of that? Because Buffalo Bill kills women and literally inhabits their bodies, he is the ultimate villain, and I thought, well, a naked man can also be very threatening and villainous as well. I was exploring how that has affected me all my life, and how my life experiences have informed my costumes and my art.

The movie has a very strong overall theme of male victimization of women. Was that something you wanted to explore from the beginning?

BANKER: Well, when I met Amy and saw the suits, the very quick reaction was, it would be great to make a female-based horror film where a girl goes after men. I wasn’t stuck on that idea, because I knew it was a little bit cheesy and clichéd, but then I thought of the idea of exploring a horror film centered on the visual of a girl taking on a male identity, and doing it in a very artful way. That really opened up my mind to the possibilities, and from there, we developed something that also was sensitive to Amy’s real experiences, and that was manageable on a very low budget.

EVERSON: While I was happy to be a villain, I wanted to make it clear that I’m not just a crazy person; if I was going to be a bad person, we needed to contextualize what made me that way. I wanted to address my personal experiences, and what would lead me to act out aggressively.

As far as the male characters were concerned, how were they cast, and Amy, how was it relating on camera to people who were actors, yet inspired by people you’d known in real life?

BANKER: Well, Brendan Miller, who is in the roofie scene, is an actor I had worked with on another film I didn’t direct—I just shot 2nd camera—and I had known him for a while. This film was made for very little money, so Amy and I just called on people who were within our reach. The idea at the very beginning, which Amy and I both wanted, was to go out into the world and catch behaviors of people who didn’t even realize they were being, say, misogynistic. The scene at the beginning with all the guys in the hotel room is an example of that.

EVERSON: A lot of the cast were just random people we caught and pulled into the project, and a lot of them brought their own interpretations of what they thought would incite an interesting scene. Many of the scenes were not planned, but were just based on the characters they brought. They’re not necessarily re-enactments of specific moments from my life, but they are relatable interactions, like these guys talking shit or being jerks. Banker would shoot hours of footage of us just interacting, and then we would look at, OK, there’s a pattern of aggression here or there. They’re not necessarily reflections of these specific people; it’s a blend of improvisation and the real ways people talk. Kentucker is an actor Banker brought in to play a character who represents a person from my life, and there are scenes between us that are re-enacted, but a lot of it was just improvised with the energy I had with Kentucker.

BANKER: I think that sometimes, guys don’t understand how they’re behaving; they’re almost preprogrammed in their own way, being overly aggressive or saying things that are not sensitive, and I believe we caught a lot of that. At the same time, we needed certain things to be very clear, so we brought in actors to do certain things that were a little more over the line than they’d get in real life.

Amy, were all the skin suits and other art we see in the movie objects you had previously created?

EVERSON: A lot of it was already made, and that’s what initially provoked Banker to make the film, but other things were created during production. For example, I had the female suit and the male suit, but I also made another full-body skin suit during production, and I created some of the masks while we were exploring the story. And then, needle felting was something I picked up while we were working on the film; I had never done it before, but I thought it was a medium that could inform the story.

How about the specific objects addressed in the film, like the fetal Hitler?

EVERSON: [Laughs] Yeah, the fetal Hitler was made once we had already started shooting, but it was not necessarily made for the film. It was just like, I got into felting and was making a bunch of random things, and that was just another object in my room to show on screen.

BANKER: Amy, you made a fetal Hitler costume for Halloween; was that before or after the fetal Hitler felt?

EVERSON: It was after; it was actually fairly recently.

How long did the entire Felt process take, from the initial inspiration through the shoot and completion?

BANKER: We were debating that this morning; I was going back through my e-mails. From my first e-mail to Amy until I had the film together, I’d say it was a year and a half. The actual shoot was a year, or slightly less. She lives in San Francisco and I live in New York, so we didn’t film as much as we would have liked to. I could only shoot with her when I’d go to the West Coast for work, and I would make my way down to shoot with her for a couple of days, and then I’d leave, and then a couple of months would go by and I would go back again. It wasn’t a continuous thing; we were just doing it when we could.

How did you two first meet up?

BANKER: I was on a shoot in San Francisco and went out with a buddy to a club, and Amy was there. She was dancing, and I think she was doing a lot of Michael Jackson moves, and you just had to look at her because she was being so entertaining and kind of…provocative; that’s the way I would describe it. She came over and started talking to us, and we ended up shooting a short video with her wearing the naked woman costume she made. If you go to Vimeo and type in “White Ring Suffocation,” it’s an unofficial music video for this song we like.

That predates the film, and I just knew I had to make a feature with her at some point, but it wasn’t until a year after we shot that video that I asked her if she wanted to do it. She’s a natural performer; she has that thing where you put a camera on her, and magic happens. That’s a tough thing to find even in actors who spend a lot of time trying to get that; she just has it naturally. I hope somebody hires her to do other kinds of roles, because it would be very interesting to see what else she can do.

Do either of you think you might do a more traditional horror film in the future, either together or separately?

BANKER: I love horror films and I love sci-fi, but it’s weird, because on one hand I love realism, and the documentary style of shooting is very natural and instinctual for me. And then on the other hand, I love things that are completely out of left field and have no basis in reality, like over-the-top science fiction or things with heavy fantasy elements. I enjoy trying to marry the two together, but in the future, maybe even in the next film I do, it will be a little bit more… It’s not going to be traditional, but it may have a little bit more of the horror elements.

EVERSON: I’m definitely open to doing more movies, whether it’s acting or any other aspect. If it’s a project I believe in, horror is a genre I would be happy to jump into.

Horror Cult Films / David S. Smith

Exclusive interview with FELT creative team Jason Banker and Amy Everson

Following a brilliant reception on the festival circuits, the five star rape-culture revenge docu-drama Felt (reviewed here) is released online from friday. Focusing on real life artist Amy Everson, it is an innovative and powerful horror that represents a new direction for the genre’s sexual politics. Recently Horrorcultfilms spoke to the director, Jason Banker, and the star, Amy Everson, to discuss the themes, the art and the movie’s unique filming process.

HCF: Hello folks, thanks so much for joining us

JB: Our pleasure

HCF: Firstly, how did this collaboration come about?

JB: Completely by accident. I met Amy at a club in San Francisco and was drawn into her world immediately, by her running around acting kind of insane. And then I saw her room, which is filled with her art and featured in the film. You walk in and you’re kind of taken aback by how developed it is. I mean there’s costumes and a sky span on the wall – those are things I was immediately excited to put on film. It just went from there.

HCF: When you conceptualised the film was there a storyline in place or did it develop as you shot?

JB: It developed as we shot. I wanted to be sensitive to what we could tell. The way that I work, and working with a non actor, you really have to let them be who they are. That’s how you’re going to get the best performance and the best film. If you see films that have specific stories made with non-actors that aren’t those characters, trying to be an action hero or something, it’s terrible. You’ve got to let people be who they are. Amy’s an amazing person I think it was [laughs] my stroke of genius to allow her to be her and for people just to fall in love.

HCF: Does that mean the ending was an organic piece of storytelling and not necessarily an inevitability?

JB: Yeah. I mean I think we shot for six months without even knowing what the ending would be. I like that kind of chaos. There’s something about not knowing that keeps you invested and excited about something. Just being able to be free from a script or any expectation of what you’re making. I definitely wanted the film to be tragic. I didn’t want it to end well. That was very clear, but just exactly how we got there and what that ending was something we were going to discover together.

HCF: So when it came to shooting a scene, would you roll the camera just knowing the main beats? 

JB: At first I [was] just making a documentary, so going out with Amy just doing things she would normally do.  One of the first things we shot was the zombie pub crawl. I asked her and her friend what’s going on this weekend and they were like, oh well there’s the zombie pub crawl. They got dressed up and looked like zombies and we went to a random house party. That stuff is amazing and that’s not even in the film. So it’s kind of a process of just shooting a lot of material and then slowly figuring [it] out: now since we have this kind of scene, why don’t we do this sort of scene. So, as time goes on there is a level of doing specific things to expand on the story.

HCF: When you had a lot of raw material was there a point when you went alright, now let’s see what we’re going to say with it thematically?

AE: I think for me, from the beginning there was an intention to address some very specific experiences . Reflecting on my life I saw a thematic through line of the everyday aggression and sexual aggression. I think that informed the story telling. Especially because as we were shooting it unfolded in front of me, with my costumes and me drawing the connection between how my experiences formed my art, and the experiences that I was going through while we were filming. It all kind of interconnected. I think it enabled me to be true to my life experience and also to explore the darker themes of revenge and fantasy or this kind of deeper aggression within me that wanted to lash out.

HCF: Am I right in thinking the art in the film predated the project? 

AE: Yeah, most of the art was already made, like my room or the genital costumes, but during the production I also I evolved the man suit including the final skin hue and the mask… I’m getting uncomfortable thinking about it!

HCF: Amy, as your first acting experience how was it playing a different version of yourself?

AE: I think it definitely helped that it started with a documentary approach where I just spent time with the camera rolling and feeling comfortable, and opening up in front of it before slowly introducing other elements and expanding on this character. It evolved organically in that way. It was always a very blurred line. I mean I am playing myself, but I’m also playing a fictitious version throughout. When I’m just crying I’m not thinking about a character, that’s just me in my room. When I’m interacting with people I’m interacting as I would interact. It was mainly when we brought in Kenny that it wasn’t very natural. We weren’t actually falling in love, but I was still playing myself. The awkward interactions were just how it felt, to be awkward to be in relation to him. But it’s a very blurred line with fiction and reality.

HCF: Jason, when it comes to shooting like this, docudrama vs documentary- how different is it for you?

JB: Well it’s always dealing with whoever is on the other end of the camera. It’s about personalities, because there’s not much that I would consider professional about what we’re doing. We’re just trying to make something magical and it’s a weird process. Each time that I try and do this there are different things you have to do to make that happen. It’s like navigating this weird hybrid world where Amy’s not acting so when she’s feeling crappy either we don’t shoot or we do shoot and I don’t know… I always know it’s going to be chaotic and it’s going to be difficult because these are real people and when you ask them sometimes to do something they can say ‘I’m not doing that, that’s a terrible idea.’ As a director you have to understand that your place in the project is not always to say what’s going to happen, it’s reacting to what’s really going on with the person. Amy could suggest something that takes the film in a totally different direction, and I liked that. The other thing that would happen might actually be better than what I wanted to do. And sometimes it’s worse, and sometimes it doesn’t get used, but I’m always up for the challenge of really living it and not just painting by numbers.

HCF: Towards the end it really starts to feel like an origin story for a feminist antihero. I was wondering if you see any further projects about the character?

JB: The way the narrative is structured, and kind of the direction, is a marriage of what Amy’s real life is and what I was excited to do. I’m into horror movies, I’m into sci-fi, I’m into comic books – or was when I was a kid. I love the fantasy element and I think seeing her costumes was an easy jump from just a person with issues to potentially an anti-hero kind of character. So I was always pushing the story towards that. Where the film ends there’s room for something else to happen but it would have to feel right.

HCF: Finally, is this a victory for the character?

AE: For me, I definitely don’t see it as an endorsement or a triumph of character. I think with the intention of being sort of a superhero vigilante it does become warped, where you see my character literally become the monster she is fighting. She embodies her aggressors and she becomes a man or rather, an embodiment of masculinity which has harmed her throughout her life. I definitely see the film as a tragedy and not as a triumph, and not a feminist revenge film. It’s kind of a warning. Tragedy begets tragedy and evil begets evil.

JB: I like it when the viewer has to make their own decision. With Toad Road, I ended it so that as a viewer you’re not sure of what you should think of the ending. I prefer endings like that. With Felt, I like that it’s very open. You don’t get to see five minutes later what her character does, you don’t know-

AE: We know what happened five minutes later- we had to rush to the airport! I was sticky, I was a mess, let me tell you, it was not great! From the character’s standpoint she could feel triumph in the moment. But you see how miserable she is throughout the story. How wearing these costumes is an escape but yet she’s not happy. She thought that she was happy, in finding a connection with someone who understood her and who was sensitive about her life. But then she was metaphorically re-birthed into the same world that has harmed her and exploited her. So she feels driven to the point where she needs to become the monster. But being a monster isn’t a happy ending either. Monsters are miserable and they perpetuate harm and maybe more monsters come and kill the monsters. But I don’t think anybody’s a hero in the film.

HCF: Thanks very much – great speaking to you.

JB: No problem.

AE: It was fun.

IndieWire / Ryan Lattanzio

‘Felt’ Is a Creepy Study of Female Victimhood and One of the Year’s Most Disturbing Films

Newcomer Amy Everson conveys a woman emotionally maimed and tortured in director Jason Banker‘s arty, claustrophobic, sort-of rape revenge thriller “Felt” (now on VOD from Amplify Releasing). We never know the source of her sexual trauma because “Felt” dwells only in the messy gulf of “after,” which is a provocative stance for an American indie film to take in a time when questions of abuse and sexual barriers are so embedded in our discourse.

Amy (played by Everson) putters through her days in a stew of despair, and suffers recurring nightmares that replay whatever it is that happened to her. A San Francisco artist, Amy wears a chicken suit and stands outside a fast food restaurant waving her arms around to pay the bills. She has a support system of friends that is foundering. In public, her speech melts into a puddle of sexual baby talk and scatological streams-of-consciousness. You can’t take this girl anywhere.

Finally deciding that suicide and drugs won’t salve her wounds, Amy does find a way to leave her mind. She escapes her trauma by creating and disappearing into grotesque, self-made alter-egos that pantomime and distort the male body. Her early, other selves look something like the anatomically correct, deconstructed Wild Things of Maurice Sendak: But her inventively costumed identities grow far less innocent as Amy wears hollowed-out burlap bags with spooky cartoon faces and drapes herself in flesh-colored tights and a mask shaped like the spongy head of a penis.

Effectively, she becomes a walking, human-sized phallus and eventually puts on a fake dick, testicles, pubes and all. Furthering the “what the fuck” factor is the arsenal of humanoid sex toys she keeps in her bedroom, which appear to be inspired by Japanese tentacle porn (her words, not mine). 

Amy bristles against the entire male sex — including in an early and uncomfortable OkCupid date that sours once he learns he won’t be getting any — until she meets affable deadbeat Kenny. He’s played by indie dreamboat Kentucker Audley, whose honest-boy good looks are intended to distract Amy, and us.

Kenny’s impressions of Amy, whose persistently coarse sexual reference-dropping is her only defense mechanism in conversations, range from tenderness to curiosity to disgust. As a character, Amy is patience-trying and extremely hard to like, and while that’s not to say she isn’t plenty full of truth, it’s not obvious why Kenny is attracted to her. We suspect he might be up to something. But there is a sweet girl beneath Amy’s damaged, broken-doll outsides, and Kenny somehow brings her out. He arranges a (vaginally themed) surprise birthday party. All is roses. Until it’s time to go to the bedroom.

Everson makes her brave screen debut in a performance that won Fantastic Fest’s Best Actress prize last Fall. Co-credited as a story writer with director Banker, she apparently put pieces of her own tattered life into the role. Most of the dialogue is improvised, which unfortunately underscores the film’s struggle to stretch its conceit to feature length during a gloomy and expository midsection. But Everson is a clear talent, disappearing into the ugliest parts of a character rattled by a psychosexual grief that the actress/writer clearly knows unnervingly well. I’d love to see her direct, or pair up with fellow budding indie Josephine Decker (“Thou Wast Mild and Lovely”), currently our generation’s best (and most unhinged) answer to a modern-day Catherine Breillat or Jane Campion.

Director Banker’s roots are in cinematography and documentary filmmaking. It shows. He also shoots and edits “Felt,” which has a delicately autumnal, fairytale quality to the look. His fly-on-the-wall chops amply ratchet up tension during Amy’s alone time, and on her outings with Kenny. Banker’s fiction feature debut “Toad Road” more twistingly married documentary and narrative filmmaking: A drug horror tale that follows a gaggle of transient twenty-somethings on an urban legend treasure hunt to Hell, that 2012 film’s lead actress, Sara Anne Jones, died of an overdose after the premiere.

“Felt,” Banker’s welcome directorial followup, takes blunt aim at the left-unsaids of rape culture, burrowing into the point-of-view of a victim whose aggressive meltdown goes mostly unnoticed — which makes this uncomfortably authentic thriller feel all too un-shockingly current. This is a sickening film, and necessary. But Banker and Everson’s aim becomes too blunt and even misguided once the film slips through the rabbit hole of trauma fantasy and into suddenly bloody genre territory. What was it Chekhov said about a pair of scissors?

With each scene, “Felt” oozes a low-key menace that hardly prepares us for the awful inevitability to come. The first hour of Jason Banker’s film offers a textured, specific and creepy study of female victimhood and unspeakable trauma. And then he loses his mind.

Bloody Disgusting / Patrick Cooper

‘Felt’ Is a Powerful Psychosexual Horror Film

Early in Toad Road director Jason Banker’s new film Felt, friends Amy (Amy Everson) and Allana (Allana Reynolds) joke about a killing spree against men. It seems like the only way to heal the psychological wounds inflicted upon them by the opposite sex. They laugh about strangling men with their thighs and stabbing a needle through their penises. It’s a humorous and compassionate scene between best pals that begins to hint at the challenging psychosexual drama to unfold.

There’s a vital and crucial conversation that’s been happening the past few years about rape culture and the seemingly inherit aggression towards women that bubbles in our society. Felt addresses the issue not through pretentious preaching but by charting one woman’s experience to her breaking point. And what a nasty breaking point it is.

That woman is Amy, an experimental artist who’s recovering from her past terrible relationships. Details are never fully disclosed but sexual trauma is suggested at through the body suits she makes crafts out of yarn and felt – complete with male genitals. At one point she makes a stocking mask with a coarsely painted face that I assumed was mean to be her rapist. She wears her outfits in the woods, where she idles and dances around. It seems to be her place of security. Just her and the trees united in despondency.

The emotional instability of Amy slowly escalates into a tension that makes an otherwise meandering film feel downright horrific at times. The approaches by men Amy endures on a daily basis may seem mundane at first, but Banker’s naturalistic docu-style gives them a hefty dose of dread. The narrative thread throughout the film is kept very loose, leaving it up to Everson’s performance to be our constant. She’s in nearly every frame of the film and brings with her a realism and fierce presence that’s equally charismatic and sinister.

Felt’s loose cinéma vérité style and improvisational approach may rub a lot of viewers the wrong way – dismissing it as another mumblecore flick where 20-somethings bitch aimlessly about their problems. This is not that film. It sucks us in through the character of Amy and forces its audience to confront the ugly truths about gender in our culture. The film does amble along at times and the stroke of violence that occurs during the climax comes fast and, despite its gore, left me underwhelmed. The tension leading up towards the third act is terribly effective, however, making Felt a must- and most-uncomfortable watch.

Bustle / Rachel Simon

‘Felt’ Star Amy Everson On Her Feminist Thriller

One of the most thought-provoking and unsettling films of the year is also one of the most feminist; a searing and no-holds-barred look at sexism and sexual violence, Felt , an indie thriller out Jun. 26, tackles everything from roofies to rape. Yet according to its star and co-writer, Amy Everson, the film’s overt themes and connection to society weren’t meant to be so, well, overt.

“It’s kind of accidental,” says Everson, speaking with Bustle. “I didn’t really set out to make a feminist film. But at the same time, I am a feminist, and so inevitably, my opinions inform the story.”

That’s to say the least; Felt is based substantially off its star’s real life, incorporating many of the traumas, relationships, and male aggression that Everson, a visual artist, has dealt with over the years. Yet while the actress says that while her original intent was to make a movie revolving around her personal experiences, she’s pleased that its final version is less specific.

“The fact that it’s resonating with other people and that it’s being touted as feminist is a statement to how big the problem of sexual objectification and aggression is,” she says. “I think that’s important that people see that this isn’t one person’s story — this is addressing a greater climate and culture.”

Directed by Jason Banker (Toad Road), Felt follows Amy (Everson), a woman recovering from a never-specified sexual assault. To cope, she wears self-made costumes, including genitalia-focused bodysuits, and takes on different personas, material drawn from Everson’s real art and space.

Says the star, “Everything from my room to my naked genital suits were a reflection of how I was dealing with the traumas around my life, and that’s what translated on-screen.”

Yet while that trauma itself certainly informs the film, much of Felt deals with the more subtle microaggressions experienced by Amy each day, and by Everson and many other women in their real lives. One scene in particular stands out; a date, seemingly believing he’s simply being honest, tells Amy his theory that roofies are just women’s excuses to get drunk and sleep with strangers, and very little truly counts as rape and assault. It’s an infuriating conversation, both for its subject matter (“misogyny is a very rampant thing,” Everson says bluntly) and for its speaker’s total ignorance.

Says the actress, “There’s a reason why there is this anger and aggression within me.”

Everson says that one of the film’s biggest challenges was getting its male actors to understand the impact of unintentionally harmful behavior. She says that many of the men on set, while well-meaning, weren’t aware that “they were a part of the story that I was trying to tell.” Even the director had trouble at times; Everson says that Banker “didn’t really understand why my experiences were so damaging and affected me so deeply.”

Still, she says, “It was ultimately that kind of conflict that informed the story, because a lot of my expression on the film is kind of me trying to tell Banker: this is my life. This is my story.”

It’s a story that’s resonated strongly with viewers (“ Felt sneaks up on you and lingers for hours afterward,” said The AV Club in its review), and Everson says the response she’s heard from fans has been nothing but positive.

“People, both men and women, approach me after screenings saying, ‘thank you for making this film,’ and opening up about their personal experiences,” she says. “It’s been really moving, because I can understand the frustration people feel going through lives either being a trauma survivor, or just being a woman.”

One of Everson’s biggest goals with the film, as well as her sexualized art, is to encourage a change in behavior and limit that frustration, not through subtle comments or hushed asides but through open, honest communication. She points out to the roofies scene as an especially notable moment, saying that discriminatory instances like that unfortunately aren’t “very rare.”

“He [the character] represents a kind of mentality that is very common and offensive,” Everson says. “It speaks to this attitude that a lot of men do have.”

Yet with Felt, she hopes that those who might not recognize the damage of their actions or the need to change will begin to do so.

Says Everson firmly, “It’s important to have that conversation.”

BuzzFeed / Alison Willmore

This Is What A Feminist Horror Movie Looks Like

Felt also has the help of some creepy homemade costumes.

Something very bad happened to Amy (absorbing first-time actor Amy Everson), the protagonist of Felt.

We’re never told exactly what it was, but we can guess. “Every time I close my eyes, I just relive the trauma,” she murmurs in a voiceover that opens the movie. Her friends have to coax her out of her house, which is filled with her artwork — sculptures of penises and vaginas, broken dolls, and toothbrushes shaped like nude torsos. When she does go out, she swaps water for alcohol — in shot glasses, or mixed with cranberry juice — like a spell of protection.

Felt, which is directed by Jason Banker (Toad Road) and is inspired by star and co-writer Everson’s work and experiences, has played genre festivals and is being billed as a “feminist psychological thriller.” But for the majority of its runtime, it’s more of a movie about living with trauma than one that seems to be escalating toward horror. It’s a choice that is ultimately more provocatively feminist than the dialogue, which can tend toward the clunkily didactic — when Amy tells someone that “just the struggle of being female is that you’re constantly objectified and discredited,” it’s more treatise than conversation.

Slasher films love their Final Girls, but rarely bother with what happens to them in the aftermath of their terrible experiences. The fact that Amy has survived her assault isn’t in question — what’s at stake is what her life is going to be like in the afterwards, when, as she puts it at the start of the film, she’s never safe. Amy channels her distress into her distinctive artwork, making herself masks out of fabric, and muscles, and a nude suit with a penis, like some sweded version of shapeshifting.

Amy’s work and her affect are so quirky that few people — not the largely awful guys she goes on dates with, not the friends who get frustrated with her — see the distress and anger underneath. She’s obsessed with genitals and bodily functions, as if to confront any sexualization and defuse it by redirecting the conversation toward a more childlike approach to her body. She shows up at a racy photo shoot in panties with a felt vagina and pubic hair attached, announcing that “sexiness is overrated.” Her follow-up, that “being human is overrated,” goes uncommented on in the ensuing chaos. In dream-like interludes, she wanders by herself in spooky homemade masks and costumes, as if trying to force some physical change in herself.

Felt wears its feminism like branding, particularly toward the end, when Amy starts to open up to and trust a seemingly nice guy named Kenny (Kentucker Audley), and the movie finally starts to move toward an inevitably dark conclusion. But it feels fresh in its point of view, despite the heavier handed moments. It focuses on what it’s like to have taken abuse and to continue, in smaller ways, to take it — to have people discount your pain or tell you to smile or, as one of Amy’s suitors does, claim that roofies are a myth that women cite when they’re embarrassed about the sex they had. It’s a reminder that while genre movies usually look toward violence, there’s just as rich territory to be explored in what happens after it, in the marks it leaves that go beyond the physical.

Complex / Kristen Yoonsoo Kim

Trash Men Beware: ‘Felt’ Is Unforgivably Brutal (And Mostly Real)

This is one of the most unsettling movies we’ve seen.

Felt is one of the weirdest films you’ll see this year. It’s a post-traumatic film, but its trauma is mostly unknown. Though never specified, there are implications of rape—contextualized in the way the main character, Amy, talks about female objectification and the reaction she has to her date’s insensitive roofie jokes. But Felt—director Jason Banker’s second ‘narrative feature’—isn’t concerned with the shock value of the unspeakable event. He wants to document the strange characterization of Amy, post-incident.

‘Narrative feature’ here is in scare quotes, because there’s a documentary-like quality to Felt. Its lead, Amy, essentially plays herself (Amy Everson). She co-wrote the story with Banker, who met Amy and was enamored by these erotic skin suits she created out of felt, many of which come attached with fake penises. Amy is seen wearing many of these suits in the film, a big part of why the movie is so unsettling. On its reality-based nature, Everson told Fangoria, “He followed me and captured me in my natural state.” Yet it’s not quite like the recent based-on-true-story film Heaven Knows What (Josh and Benny Safdie), in which its actor Arielle Holmes essentially plays herself. 

Felt is more than just a strange movie chronicling a strange woman doing strange things. Its genre falls outside conventional lines. There’s a “movie about nothingness” vibe to its first hour, but to call it a drama would be unfair to its horrifying final act. To call it a horror wouldn’t be quite right either. What I can confirm, though, is that it’s disturbing and uncomfortable from start to finish. From Amy’s first uttered words, “My life is a fucking nightmare,” it’s clear that this isn’t going to be a feel-good film.

There’s a revenge thriller element to Felt as well. Perhaps last year’s feminist vampire horror A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night will come to mind—especially in the way that Amy encounters one trash man after another and gives them a piece of her mind. She’s no vampire, but if you’re a shitty male, you’re definitely in danger. For a fleeting moment, Felt delves into romantic drama territory when Amy falls for a nice man named Kenny (Kentucker Audley), who accepts her for who she is (if throwing her a vagina birthday party isn’t a sign of acceptance, then I don’t know what is). But, as you probably guessed, Kenny isn’t all he’s built up to be. The consequence? A terrifying ending—details of which will be left out here.

Despite some of its upsetting scenes, Felt is a fascinating movie—one that belongs on this year’s list of “you’ve never seen anything like it!” (also see: The Tribe). What makes Felt so great, though, is that it’s got elements of the recent crop of female-driven horror/thriller, a la the aforementioned A Girl Walks Home or even Gone Girl. Gender roles are bending in these narratives, and Felt, especially, drives that point home. If hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, then Felt’s final chapter will be especially hellish for the asshole men who have wronged her.

Cut Print Film / Amy Anna

Interview: FELT’s Amy Everson and Jason Banker

Jason Banker and Amy Everson, the director/writer and writer of Felt, spoke about improvising a collaborative story based on intensely personal traumatic events, calling out society on pervasive misogyny and sexual violence, the power of putting on a costume, and the dark opposite of the superhero mythos.

CUT PRINT FILM: The film arouses so many questions for me as a viewer and probably for the audience as a whole, which it is meant to do, and the most important one and the one I want to start with is how do you confront and defeat evil without becoming evil?

AMY EVERSON: Yeah, it’s a good question because clearly in the film it doesn’t explore that, the film is about becoming the monster that me, the character, is fighting, and it doesn’t offer any solution, but I know from my personal experience that I was able to distance myself from the evil and the things that were harming me and I’ve been able to grow and evolve and find a healthier way of channeling my experiences, and I think for me, even the process of having the film made and being my character from a distance and recognizing my experiences and my processes and behavior and my language because that kind of helped me move past a lot of it and with therapy and with learning how to process trauma and set boundaries for myself and recognizing patterns of violence and toxicity in my life and cutting those out of my life has been how I’ve moved beyond that and chosen the path of healing. And yeah, even talking with people about the self and that the bigger picture about this is that it’s an experience a lot of people go through and this is a systemic problem, this isn’t just an individual problem that I was dealing with and it’s not just a unique experience, it is an experience of the culture which leads into and enables and perpetuates sexual violence. And addressing the bigger picture has helped me move past it.

CUT PRINT FILM: It’s interesting that you say that because art is very healing and making art always – and both of you have experienced this, Jason, with your other film and Amy with making this film, that making art comes from the dark places inside of you; the shadow within is destructive but it’s also creative and it is healing. And I really must commend your bravery because this movie is so intimate and so personal because it is relating to things that have happened to you in your life, and this is something that happens to an awful lot of people. It is not an exaggeration to say that we live in a culture where rape is easier than it has ever been before, because you don’t need a weapon, all you need is a little drug. Anybody can do it.

AMY EVERSON: Yes, yes. Yeah, and I think really recognizing and addressing the culture has helped me in processing my personal experience as well and has helped me heal. And it’s still an ongoing process because we do live in a culture that is really ignorant and undermines people’s experiences, but recognizing it for what it is and calling it out for what it is, trauma, misogyny, definitely helps process it.

CUT PRINT FILM: It’s true; it’s a wonderful film for that reason, even though it’s extremely dark and disturbing, because it is shining a light on something which it is almost impossible to find a way to discuss otherwise. So it’s like you’ve made a work of art that reminds me a lot – and I don’t know if this influenced you guys in any way – of the art of Goya, which was all about bringing to light the injustices of his society.  And you guys are going specifically for the injustices of men against women, and ultimately even vice versa. Was that in your minds when you were doing this, or did this topic just want to be made in this way?

AMY EVERSON: I don’t know; I think for myself I wasn’t completely aware of what story we were telling while we were sitting down; I knew that Banker had approached me with, well, what story do you want to tell, and he wanted to explore some of my costumes, and I was like, well, some of my costumes relate to my life experiences. I had a whole lifestyle that informed my art. We thought about recreating some of my past, but ultimately we just addressed how I was navigating the present. I did want to address the injustices of being a woman in a male-dominated society, but it was still a very collaborative process and an ongoing conversation that I was having with Banker, and that’s what kind of translated onto the film. I expressed to Banker that this was the reality that I’ve had to navigate through. What do you think, Banker?

JASON BANKER: (laughs) Well, yeah, for me I think it was just meeting Amy, I was just fascinated by her personality. I mean she was almost this walking performance art puzzle. There were just so many interesting things, I was like, wait, you’re wearing this kind of suit and you make this kind of art. The way that she interacted with men was really interesting because there was a little bit of prodding there, there was a little bit of like something was going on and I didn’t know quite what it was, I was just really intrigued. I thought there’s a film here, and I felt strongly about her and her perspective on the world. I just kind of wanted to work with her and to kind of get that out. I felt it was really strong and it was something that I didn’t – I personally like making films with women, women’s stories, I think there’s a lot there that people haven’t seen. And I think that this film proves that, I think it’s a woman’s story that twenty years ago this film wouldn’t have been made. Obviously now, women’s issues are in the news and they’re at the forefront and there’s this movement. To me, I kind of like making films where I don’t know what the film is, because that for me is fun. I come from a documentary background, and when you’re working like that you basically take a subject that you’re interested in and you follow that subject. That’s at the core of what I like to do, and that’s a lot different from most people. Most people start with the points they’re trying to make and then they build something around that. I kind of start with a person and explore their world, and for me this film happened in a way organically. I mean I didn’t set out to make this particular story; I wanted to make a film with Amy about her, and this is what came out of it. That’s why it’s important that Amy is on these calls and talking too, because the voice in the film is a blend of ours. Definitely her voice is the base.

CUT PRINT FILM: It’s interesting to hear you talk about how organic the process was for making this film, working from the ground up, with the genesis from Amy’s art, Amy’s personality, your way of living through trauma. To create such a powerful piece of cinema around that is a wonderful thing to see. I’m particularly interested in the way that so many objects in the film function as symbols: the toys, the costumes, the trees, and the play on words with the title, Felt, in the sense of both feeling and the material that she makes things from, the needle-felting process, and I was wondering if you can comment further on that?

JASON BANKER: I think that all that happened organically as we were making the film. Amy mentioned this in an interview yesterday that she started felting while we were making the film; it was something she hadn’t done before. For me, the trees, the woods, those in my last film were an element. I like working in nature because there’s a rawness, there’s this kind of emotional quality to it. And also I worked on a documentary with kids that had been traumatized, called My Name is Faith. And in that documentary, I shot a scene where one of the counselors has the kids draw a tree, and how they draw the tree tells you a lot about whether they’ve been sexually abused. And all of those visual things to me were such an important thing. When I saw Amy and the costumes, I saw her room, it was so rich in visual metaphors and I knew that there would be a great film. There was a film there that it was just so obvious that it needed to be made, and all those things as we were making it kind of came to life.  All those things have this subtext, and this is what the film means. I’m really excited about this film, I’m glad that it’s getting distribution and people are getting it. I kind of just work from a place of me personally being interested in her world, and having that play out this way has been great.

CUT PRINT FILM: That’s awesome. Another thing was that you’re dealing with violence against women, particularly young women, the cultural milieu that they’re trapped in. And you’re bringing in little touches of it here and there in the relationships that Amy’s friends have with men in their lives, or not in their lives, and hints of sexual jealousy with the character of Roxanne. Do you have any more thoughts about that?

AMY EVERSON: It’s a tough question. I think, yeah, when we set out to shoot the film the story wasn’t very clear and I think it was really informed by my life experiences, and I really wanted to add in some of the everyday micro-aggressions that women face in life, and it was hard to capture that organically and some things were kind of set up. But other times, it was actors just bringing their own experience as well, their interpretations of the world around them. All of these things were improvised, nothing was scripted, so every actor and everybody in the film brought themselves and their experiences and their interpretations of how they would interact with people themselves. It surprised me how people reacted.  But as far as the relationship with Roxanne, that was very organic as well. I had only met her once briefly before filming and the time that we shot with her was over the course of one week, and that friendship developed over the course of filming. I wasn’t seeing the film from her perspective either and it was a very collaborative effort from Banker, me, and all of the various characters. I think in that way it does capture a lot of reality, and real interactions between women and between men.

CUT PRINT FILM: The film does an excellent job of capturing and remarking upon that climate. Superheroes have a whole movie genre of their own and here you are dealing with the underbelly of what a superhero can be about.  Was it planned, or did that arise during filming too, or was it just something that you wanted to touch on if you could?

JASON BANKER: It was a piece I wanted to get in there in a certain way, because I grew up reading comic books and the idea of wearing a costume and a mask immediately falls into that world. I think also trying to take control, the whole thing with Amy wearing the suit to me was an obvious superhero thing. The scene where Amy actually says that: I wanted to at least get the idea of that in there because I did feel that for me, as an outsider looking at what she was doing, there was an element of that. I really like it. I think Amy and I agree.

AMY EVERSON: Yeah, I think it’s important. I do say that this is a superhero costume and we’re going to rid the world of evil, but I think it is really important to recognize that the film is not heroic and the character isn’t heroic. I think a superhero is someone who transcends the villain and is someone better, but ultimately me, and my character, embody the villain and become the monster that she is supposedly fighting. So it’s a twisted sense of power in which she’s wearing the suit with the ultimate symbol of power, which is the penis. It’s a superhero costume for her because it lets her feel powerful and be somebody else. I think there is a sense that some superheroes gain from changing into their superhero costumes, but here it’s coming from a very dark and twisted place.

CUT PRINT FILM: It’s a wonderful piece of film work and the cinematography is lovely for such a dark and disturbing movie, it is a visual masterpiece of all kinds of things happening and things to look at. About the superhero comment, I think she does exchange personas; she goes from victim, to wanting to be a superhero, to becoming someone who does terrible things. Watching that transformation is the crux of the movie, and it is quite a journey. Thank you both.

Salon / Andrew O’Hehir

Revenge against rape culture: Micro-indie film “Felt” is a Rorschach test for gender relations

A young artist haunted by trauma retreats into gender-blur and violent fantasy

In its own strange way, the tiny, mysterious and occasionally terrifying indie film “Felt” captures the confusion of this moment in gender relations, and especially the confusion around the term “rape culture.” It took courage to make this disturbing little movie, which is both a zero-budget contemporary update on the rape-revenge thriller and something entirely different and more ambiguous. (“Felt” would make a deeply bewildering but oddly perfect double-bill companion to Seth MacFarlane’s “Ted 2,” which also involves sexual confusion and nightmarish costumes.) I don’t just mean that it was brave of co-writer and lead actress Amy Everson to draw on her own life experience (as she has said) to create this portrait of a traumatized young woman who retreats into an invented world that lies somewhere between art therapy and mental breakdown. No doubt that’s true, but as viewers we can’t possibly know what parts of a film are autobiographical and what parts are invented, and it doesn’t much matter.

Where the deeper bravery of “Felt” lies is that Everson and director Jason Banker never flinch from the inherent ambiguity and subjectivity of their story – which, by the way, are the same things that make sexual assault, rape and “rape culture” so difficult to talk about. This movie may well function as a sort of Rorschach blot, and while I’m sure it’s not universally true that women will understand it one way and men another, some gender division is almost inevitable.

At the most direct level, we literally don’t know why Amy, the wry, attractive but profoundly depressed 20-something California artist played by Everson, is so messed up. (All the actors in this movie play characters who share their real-world first names.) Sure, Amy’s predicament suggests or implies that she is a survivor of rape or some other form of sexual assault. And the movie drops a few hints about what may have happened to her, as in an edgy conversation about “roofies,” the date-rape drug, partway through a botched blind date with a blond surfer type. (Tips for guys: Perhaps date rape is not the ideal first-date conversation topic!)

But Amy never tells her story in the movie, and we simply don’t know. We can choose to believe that she endured some truly horrific form of assault, or that something inappropriate but less dramatic occurred that has affected her deeply. Or that she has a fragile ego and got dumped by some guy and has badly lost the plot, or even that she’s just kind of a nutjob who is channeling general cultural anxiety. Stuff happens, and how we read Amy’s history is entirely on us. What we can see is that Amy creates disturbing little doll-dioramas with a running theme of sexual violence, that she sometimes retreats into the woods to costume herself as a stubbly guy with an enormous schlong, and that her view of her own body and female sexuality in general is extremely damaged.

Banker shot “Felt” himself on locations in both San Francisco and Los Angeles – it’s as if Amy is so disoriented she’s not quite sure what city she lives in – and remains tightly focused on Amy’s withdrawn state and her relationships with the two female friends who try to drag her out of her funk. That’s also an intriguing and underplayed plot element, in that both of these supposedly functional women, Amy’s roommate Elizabeth (Elizabeth Twaits) and a model-artist-hipster type named Roxanne (Roxanne Lauren Knouse) whom Amy meets on a quasi-pornographic photo shoot, are more messed up than they appear. Elizabeth is dating a flaming corporate jerkwad who treats her terribly, as Amy correctly observes, while Roxanne is contemptuous of any and all men and immediately dedicates herself to splitting up Amy and Kenny (indie director Kentucker Audley), the seemingly kind and decent guy who shows up in the final act of “Felt.”

Roxanne may or may not be correct to mistrust Kenny, but the point Banker and Everson are making is that whatever has destabilized the lives of these three women – and whatever is driving Amy toward a violent rupture with so-called reality – has already happened and is all around us, like an atmospheric phenomenon. Some viewers will no doubt find “Felt” maddening because it never answers seemingly crucial plot questions that a normal movie or TV show would feel compelled to clear up. That ambiguity is precisely the source of its power, and its cinematic quality. Whether or not Amy is crazy, and whether her behavior is justified, are the wrong questions in any case. Whether the contemporary state of North American heterosexual relations is crazy, and how to begin to unpack or untangle that, is much more difficult to confront.

The She View / Kristal Cooper

Q&A with Amy Everson on Felt, rape culture and giving women a voice

Amy Everson is a San Francisco-based artist and actress who’s intent on forcing people to confront the issue of rape culture with her new film Felt. Created with director Jason Banker (Toad Road) and based loosely on her own life, the film has been both making waves and taking home awards during its film festival run. It’s also been fuelling discussion about its subtext concerning the implications of traditional gender roles and sexuality as seen through the experiences of an artist named Amy who creates grotesquely beautiful human costumes out of felt as a way to work through a recent trauma which, although not specified, is clearly sexual in nature.

The She View was able to talk to Everson about what it’s like to blur the lines between real life and art, and how making Felt gave her back the voice that she never believed she deserved to have in the first place.

How did you meet (Director and co-writer) Jason Banker and how did the film come about?

I met Jason Banker at a music venue in San Francisco while he was in town doing a commercial shoot. It was at a club that I frequented every week, so I would get to know the various patrons there. Being from New York, he wasn’t very familiar with the area, so I offered to show him and his friend around. I showed him my costumes and art as well, which left an impression on him. About a year later, Jason contacted me and asked if I would be interested in collaborating on a feature length film.

What made you want to be a part of the film and share part of your life/experiences?

At the time, I probably would’ve jumped at any opportunity to do a creative project, but what Jason wanted was to collaborate on a narrative together. He asked me what story I would want to tell if I had the opportunity. Even though I didn’t feel as though I had a voice that mattered, I knew that it might be worth exploring why I felt so insignificant – something that was true to my experience being a woman.

What was the most challenging part of making a film like Felt?

Making Felt was challenging in that the process of documenting and re-enacting everyday micro-aggressions I already endeavored was inevitably triggering; while filming, abusive life changes made me excavate my past in search of answers. All of these factors were, to some degree, re-traumatizing.

What’s been the best part of the process?

The reception to the film has been the most rewarding aspect of Felt. Knowing that the film has spoken to so many people has been eye-opening and immensely moving; there are others out there who not only understand what I have been through, but stand alongside me as reminders that they, too, have been harmed but that they, too, have voices that matter.

What do you hope people will take away from seeing Felt?

For every female who has ever been silenced, or abused, or objectified, I hope that Felt instills in them the courage to share their own stories. For every person ignorant of the scope of sexual violence that can occur, I hope that Felt provokes a desire to raise their consciousness and listen. For every male who has ever silenced, abused, or objectified any human being, I hope that Felt encourages a deep, humbling introspection, one in which they internalize a compassionate understanding of the harm they have done and how they can prevent this, which is essential if we’re going to raise the empathy of our culture.

What are your thoughts on where we are in terms of rape culture and the way women and their sexuality are portrayed in the media?

I think the majority of discussions about “rape culture” start and end without any real discussion or legitimate progress; many people dismiss the term, falsely presuming it means that every man walking down the street is a sex offender. Until conversations begin with a basic acknowledgement that females are groomed to believe that our worth is dependent on our sexual desirability, we literally can’t even begin a discussion about “rape culture.” The very fact that the term is trivialized and dismissed, is reflective of how rape itself is treated; it is evidence enough that we haven’t made enough progress on the matter.

The vast majority of film and television projects reinforce toxic messages that contribute to this cultural attitude, where rape is used most often as a cheap plot device without any consequence or as catalyst for a strong man to seek vengeance. The ramifications of sexual assault and rape are rarely explored with sensitivity or intelligence. And why should I expect any better from filmmakers? After all, many of them continue to stick to lazy tropes of females as either sex objects, damsels in distress, love interests, or bitches.

What do you think needs to happen for the negative culture surrounding sexualized violence and women and their sexuality to change for the better?

In order to shape this culture away from one that reinforces beliefs and attitudes that contribute to sexual violence and into one that values and respects the life and integrity of all females, we need to let all females speak and be heard.

Ain’t It Cool News / Horrorella

Horrorella Reviews the Incredible Feminist Thriller FELT!

Hey guys! Horrorella here…

Opening in limited release this weekend is FELT, one of the most challenging, beautiful and complex films you are likely to see this summer. It was directed by Jason Banker (TOAD ROAD) and co-written and starring Amy Everson, based in part on some of her own life experiences.

FELT is something of a thoughtful, emotional and cerebral twist on rape/revenge films, also serving as an exploration of healing and expression. Rather than focusing on the initial assault itself, it focuses on the aftermath. On the damage that it did to its lead character, Amy (Everson), and how she struggles to cope with the shadow that it has cast over her life, along with the ingrained misogyny that permeates modern rape culture. We don’t know much about the trauma that Amy suffered, but she gives us enough information to know that it wasn’t random. It wasn’t a midnight attack by a stranger in a dark alley or an empty parking garage. It was someone she knew. Someone she trusted. A scenario that happens all too often. And the psychological damage has left her lost, struggling to even remember what life was like before her heart was broken and her soul was fractured.

We see her friends trying to engage her, but to minimal degrees of success. Between bad dates and failed interactions – mostly with human garbage who decry roofies as a myth and excuse adopted by promiscuous women. Amy struggles to resume the role that she once played in social settings, and spends a lot of time by herself, working on her art, which is her only real coping mechanism. The film meanders along with her in a perpetual dreamlike state.

Amy’s art is a reflection of how she feels and her struggle to understand what this event has made her. It is a shield, a reflection, an expression, and a grasp at trying to reclaim what she has lost. She makes masks, suits, costumes – most notably a nude suit with a lifelike prosthetic penis attached. Through her creations Amy is trying to recapture any fraction of the power that she has lost as the result of her trauma. They are her means of coping and trying to understand and ultimately trying to come back to herself.

When she meets Kenny (Kentucker Audley), it looks like she might have finally made a promising connection. He represents someone supportive, respectful and kind, free from the all too pervasive misogyny and dismissive bullshit that we have seen from her interactions with other men throughout the film. She is finally able to begin to articulate what she has been struggling to get out through the entire movie, and we hope that she is on the path to healing herself and becoming whole again. But nothing is perfect, and some wounds run terribly deep. And as the film slowly builds toward its final, inevitable climax, it does so with a sense of inescapable dread. 

Everson’s performance as Amy is fantastic. Banker employs a very intimate verite shooting style, following Amy through social interactions, but also through many quiet moments alone, creating art, sitting at home or walking through the woods. It is in these moments that she really brings the character to life, allowing us to see both her strength and her fragility in equal measure. It’s a fantastically complex portrayal, giving us a glimpse into the inner workings of Amy’s struggle and not just relying on shooting her as a broken, lifeless victim. Even though
Amy is consumed by the after effects of this trauma, she is not solely defined by it. She is funny and creative and weird and wonderful, but also scarred. Everson fully embraces each aspect and welcomes them into the character.

FELT offers a beautiful and powerfully affecting statement on trauma, rape culture and healing. Amy’s struggles highlight scenarios that women face all too often and that have become commonplace. The film really provides a beautiful and heartbreaking look at these issues from the perspective of someone trying to cope with the aftermath of a horrific event, inviting the audience to empathize with her and to understand her experiences.

Austin Chronicle / Richard Whittaker

Under the Skin: Psychological thriller Felt slices into rape culture

All films are personal, some just more than others. In the case of Felt, the new drama based on the creations and experiences of artist Amy Everson, it’s not just personal, but profoundly intimate. Yet such films often catch a moment or a period in someone’s life. In the nine months since Felt debuted at Fantastic Fest, Everson has found some distance between herself and her onscreen incarnation. While the narrative centers on her darkest times, she is happier and healthier now. She recalled talking to her partner about the change. “I was telling him, ‘Doesn’t this seem like this is a scene in a movie right before one of us dies? The montage of all the happy moments right before the tragedy?'”

In the improvised semiautobiographical drama, Everson plays the character of Amy, a lightly fictionalized version of herself. Both Amys are artists, working in the gray area between textiles, conceptual pieces, and guerrilla performance. Both are dealing with a deep and abiding personal trauma, using their art to explore and confront the ever-present specter of misogyny. But onscreen Amy is set on an accelerating path of self-destruction – one that real-world Amy has now avoided. She said, “The Amy in the film is very much me, and that’s been the space I’ve inhabited for most of my life. When I see myself on the screen, that seems more like me than where I am now, which is in a very healthy relationship and a happier place, which feels more foreign to me. I can’t distance myself from my past or the character, because they are parts of me, and they have informed who I am now.”

Director Jason Banker understands the weird longevity of cinema: Just the other day, his 2012 debut feature Toad Road made a new list of the best drug horror movies of all time. He said, “The one cool thing about filmmaking is that you make this thing that has this incredibly long life span.” That makes the release of Felt just another phase in its existence, which actually started when he met Everson while making Toad Road. He was shooting another project in San Francisco, and hanging out with a friend at underground club Popscene, when he fell into her orbit. “I have a tendency of just randomly kidnapping people from clubs,” Everson explained. “A friend of mine and me, we would just pick up strangers and then terrorize them, and Banker just happened to be one of those people.”

When he heard about her art and her costumes, and saw the bedroom that became a key location in the film, he knew he had to work with her – “with” being the significant word. Both describe Felt as a collaborative experience, heavily workshopped and evolving over years. A distinctive component is that Amy’s trauma is never spelled out explicitly. Everson said, “I did think, well, if you want to know how fucked-up my life is, we can shoot all that, because it’s really terrible. Instead, it was ‘No, let’s capture how it’s affected you, and explore how hard it is to navigate in a world that re-enforces the messages of your abusers.'”

With the film’s release, that abuse is something Everson contends with again, on a larger, more public scale. Banker said, “I know this part of the journey will be a little bit tougher for her, because she did put herself on the line, and she is the centerpiece of this film, and it is things that she cares about. This is a real person here.”

The release means Everson will be even more exposed to what she calls “abusive monsters … people who haven’t even seen the film that are outraged that a film like this exists. The trailer has been down-voted disproportionately because it’s been circulated on different hate sites. It’s a backlash that’s expected, but also very odd to inhabit.” Yet, in a way, those dismissive critics prove her point, and that of the film. She said, “You are the people who this movie is based off of. People who turn the situation into something very toxic. The thing about these kinds of abuses is that the nature of sexual abuse is to silence and undermine voices and survivors. It’s a manifestation of that in a very public arena, and it’s very toxic, but it re-enforces that it’s an important thing to talk about.” Yet, for all the brutality, at the same time she called much of the reception “therapeutic. In general I see the people who do receive it sensitively, and do understand it on a level of it being a reflection of reality.”

One part of the reception has been the perception of Felt as a subversive superhero origin story. Many writers and critics have painted Amy’s costumes as a strange kin to Iron Man’s armor or Superman’s cape, the garb she must wear to push back against her oppressors. Banker admits that he pushed for that subtext more than Everson did. He said, “People understand the superheroes thing, and I thought that her wearing the suit had that fundamentally built into it, whether she realized it or not.”

This is one of those moments when it’s vital to distinguish between Amy the person and Amy the character. Onscreen Amy sees her costumes as a vigilante’s cowl. However, Everson said, “My framing was like Batman Begins. He is clearly a very delusional person acting out from revenge based in deep trauma.” For Everson, when Amy responds to violence with violence, she moves closer to the evolution of a supervillain. She said, “I don’t think she’s heroic. I think the hero is something who transcends the villain, who becomes better. But Amy embodies the villain. She becomes the monster that she is fighting, and in that sense the film becomes a tragedy.”

While new audiences discover and interpret the film, the star and the director are moving on creatively. Banker is “working on something bigger with a script and professional actors for a change.” He admits he was under some pressure to make the leap to mainstream filmmaking after the success of Toad Road. “It’s tricky, because I’ve held it off, but I am eager to try my hand at something that has a much bigger budget, just to see what I can do.” However, that doesn’t mean he’s abandoning his experimental indie roots now, as he’s currently workshopping “what could be a feature” with Felt co-star Roxanne Knouse. He said, “I will always make the small, slow-developed projects like Toad Road and Felt. … In my very being, I’m a DIY filmmaker. I can take two years and not be under any specific crunch.”

Felt has undoubtedly raised Everson’s profile as an artist: Since its debut, indie band Modest Mouse brought her unique visual style to two of their music videos, “The Ground Walks, With Time in a Box” and “Lampshades on Fire.” Yet the most meaningful impact may not be on her career. She said, “I think I’ve grown and evolved a lot since the making of the film,” cutting out what she describes as toxic relationships, and setting healthier personal boundaries. She even credits the film, and living through both its making and release, for separating onscreen Amy from real-life Amy. “The film has actually illuminated some of these patterns of how I was very aggressive in my language and my behavior, and how in subtle ways I was embodying the language of my aggressors and their behaviors, and how ultimately I need to do things that take care of myself, and create art that is meaningful.”

Los Angeles Times / Robert Abele

‘Felt’ an atmospheric character study of an artist going mad

The indie horror film “Felt,” about a young woman’s unraveling, wades into textures of unhinged personal expression with a bracing intimacy, at its most effective coming across like a millennial feminist spin on Roman Polanski’s “Repulsion.”

Artist Amy Everson, who co-wrote the story with director Jason Banker, plays an artist named Amy (yes, there’s personal experience being drawn from here) who appears to be losing touch with friends and reality. Amy is driven to wearing self-made bodysuits with phallic appendages and either blank or garishly rendered masks, and she’s prone to weird asides about death and violence. She seems unready for companionship until sweet-faced Kenny (Kentucker Audley) enters the picture.

Things go well until they don’t, at which point remembering Amy’s penchant for woodsy role-playing with a sword and red hood leaves little doubt about where this film is headed. Until its regrettably foregone conclusion, though, “Felt” is a moodily disturbing character study of a besieged woman for whom art is engagement and coping mechanism, but also conversely a source of alienation and even a weapon.

With so much conversation these days about the effects of rape culture, “Felt,” with its atmospheric DIY aesthetics, enters the discussion as a corrective chiller that can best be described as compassionately perverse about one type of pushback.

Paste / Andy Crump

Felt

If there’s one objective statement to make about Felt, the third film by Jason Banker, it’s that it’ll make you deeply uncomfortable. Felt is easier to admire than to straight-up love, a symptom of the ways it uses unease as a tool for setting atmosphere and tone. But whether we like or dislike movies like it is ultimately irrelevant compared to the responses they induce in their audiences. So consider this a guarantee: You won’t walk away from Felt unmoved.

Take that as a warning, too. Banker and his collaborator, writer-star Amy Everson, regard their joint, jarring artistic effort in the way the hunter regards their rifle. They patiently hold their sights steady with their fingers off the trigger until the last possible moment. Belaboring the metaphor further might constitute a spoiler, but you don’t need to rub more than a couple brain cells together to figure out where Felt is heading from its first few minutes. Banker and Everson have creativity, resourcefulness, and human insight to spare, but they write their film into a corner and leave themselves only one logical conclusion.

Maybe that’s the goal. Maybe, with Felt, Banker and Everson are suggesting that rape culture can only produce a certain range of reactions and over time culminate in specific outcomes. Neither inevitability is pretty, of course, but Felt doesn’t aspire to be a pretty film. It’s the kind of D.I.Y. production whose scrappiness and rough edges engender immediate fondness as much as the subject matter invites our sensitivity. The film’s lead is Amy (Everson), a young woman recovering from an unspoken trauma through her art. Felt’s title refers as much to her cloth-born recreations of human genitalia as it does to the emotions she wrestles with every day as she tries to move forward—from what, we’re unsure, but we can pretty confidently make an educated guess.

Amy tries to temper her anguish by hanging out with her roommate, Elizabeth (Elisabeth Ferrara), and, eventually, Roxanne (Roxanne Knouse), a model with her own animus to deal with. Amy, Elizabeth, and Roxanne each represent a pillar of violated womanhood: Amy’s issues drive much of Felt’s plot, while Elizabeth’s attachment to a man who treats both her and Amy with naked contempt, and Roxanne’s disdain toward all things male, paint a portrait of the female spirit caught in the vice of patriarchy. Elizabeth makes moves to help Amy through her suffering. Roxanne, meanwhile, offers a validating outlet for Amy’s transgressive feelings toward the male element. Amy doesn’t just make fabric vaginas: She has an entire man-suit, complete with an accompanying, dangling member, that she dons alone in the woods where no one can see her.

The suit is her way of reclaiming lost power, and the images of Everson, dressed head-to-toe in her horrific mimicry of the masculine form, are Felt’s most affecting. How does a woman who has had so much of herself taken away by male transgression reclaim her personhood? The film doesn’t get explicit about Amy’s past, though it comes close: “Everything is qualified by the fact that you don’t have a dick, or that just because you’re a girl gives men the right to grope you, or fondle you, or do what they want, because they’re fucking selfish and exploitative,” she says around 50 minutes in as she stabs a needle into a textile penis. It’s unclear how much of the dialogue Everson writes from experience, but it leaves a cold feeling in the gut to hear her torment put into words this blunt, unpoetic, and true.

Amy makes her speech to Kenny (Kentucker Audley), the rare positive manly presence in Felt and, for a time, the person best capable of walking her toward the light at the end of the tunnel. Unsurprisingly, it turns out he may or may not be hiding something from her. Even less surprising, we learn about Kenny’s secrets thanks to Roxanne, hell-bent on keeping him and Amy apart. There’s wonderful ambiguity to be mined out of the love triangle here, but Felt can only head toward the foreordained climax it predicts for itself early on. That’s the film’s biggest shame: There’s no sense of mystery here, or even a sense of drama. We know where the through line is taking us. What would Felt look like with a fleshed-out script and enough time to do it justice? We’ll never know, but even as a rough draft, the film’s unmasked empathy and dazzling grotesqueries linger long after the credits roll—and maybe that’s enough.

The Mary Sue / Carolyn Cox

The Mary Sue Interview: Star and Writer Amy Everson Talks the Controversial New Film Felt

Available on VOD starting today, Amplify Releasing’s Felt is the result of a unique creative process. Artist Amy Everson stars as herself, and co-wrote the script, which incorporates both documentary and fantasy elements, with director Jason Banker.

Speaking to The Mary Sue via email, Everson talked about the difficulties of working with a male collaborator on Felt, what it was like to write her real life onto the screen, and what she hopes audiences will take away from the film. [Trigger warning for discussion of rape and sexual violence.]

The Mary Sue: Could you talk a little about how your collaboration with director Jason Banker originated, and what your partnership on the film entailed?

Amy Everson: A few years ago, Jason Banker was in San Francisco for a commercial shoot, and we had a chance meeting at a music venue I frequented every week. He and his friend weren’t familiar with the area, so I showed the two of them around, introducing them to my costumes and art along the way. They wound up shooting some footage of me improvising in my costumes in front of the camera, which they then set to music.

Around a year later, Jason called me and expressed interest in collaborating on a film. As with the music video, he wanted to capture my costumes and artwork, only this time, he wanted to explore the meaning of my creations. Rather than create a narrative outright, Banker was more interested in approaching the story as he did his previous film, Toad Road, which was a hybrid of reality and fantasy. Our movie was to begin life documentary-style, and then gradually weave in fictitious elements once we found the story we wanted to tell.

Before long, Jason began making regular stops in San Francisco. Whenever he was in California for a commercial shoot, or when he was able to, he’d drop in for short periods of time and we’d get to work. Sure enough, in a little under the course of a year, we went from capturing moments of my real life to staging scenarios, with real friends and strangers, for me to interact with.

TMS: What was it like to collaborate with a male director and co-writer on a project about rape culture? Was there an experiential gap between the two of you that you had to work around?

Everson: The experiential gap between Jason and myself is huge, and it’s that distance between us that, I believe, ultimately informed the story we were telling. I wanted to make something true to my experience being a woman, and while he was definitely receptive to telling my story, he didn’t always see the pervasive misogyny in the world around him and, therefore, couldn’t quite understand my experiences. He wanted to make something edgy. For every Thelma & Louise I gave him, he threw two Lars von Triers at me. Needless to say, Jason and I didn’t always see eye-to-eye.

Felt wasn’t knowingly planned as a critique or examination of rape culture. The film started as a documentation of the hostile and misogynistic attitudes I regularly encountered and evolved into a dark fantasy of my lashing out against it, and, to some degree, Jason himself. I was trying to persuade Jason that there was a fundamental difference in the way females are treated, and it was infuriating. It was my way of presenting to him a climate that continuously devalued my voice and made light of the sexual violence I had weathered, and what I wanted to do about it.

TMS: What were some of your reservations while working on Felt, and what has the response been like so far?

Everson: As a survivor of sexual and physical violence, I had been groomed to believe that my experiences and my voice didn’t matter, so any excitement I could have had in sharing my story was offset from the beginning of production. On one hand, I had a filmmaker encouraging me to bare my soul and speak my piece for his camera, but on the other, based on my own personal experiences of being exploited and abused and by Jason’s love of problematic films, I had no justifiable reason to believe that this guy would put something together that was sensitive and thoughtful.

Early cuts of Felt concerned me, but my partner, Michael, who had seen the film, was convinced my story would resonate with people, as it did him. He believed in me, and helped me to process the film beyond the scope of my own involvement. His support of the film was very encouraging, and led me to believe that it wasn’t the disaster I feared it was going to be.

It wasn’t until the world premiere of the film at Fantastic Fest, though, that I could see how Banker had shaped Felt into something that was honest, heartbreaking, and spoke to the consequences of living in a male-dominated society. Knowing my story has articulated something that so many people have recognized on screen was, and continues to be, a reminder that I have every right to my voice.

TMS: I’ve seen Felt referred to by several reviewers as a horror movie. How do you feel about that description?

Everson: I can appreciate Felt being perceived as a horror film. In a sense, it is, albeit an untraditional one. It is terrifying navigating a world that is openly hostile towards females, and I think that Jason captured the disorienting and fearful unease that comes attached to living as a woman. The editing and imagery is jarring at times, which mirrors the nightmare of living with trauma and the dissociation that comes with it.

In regards to the horror community’s position on Felt, I want to say that since the very first screening of the film, they have been among the most sensitive and thoughtful in supporting it. This surprised me, but I’ve since come to appreciate and embrace this reception. The horror genre is bombarded with sexualized violence and sensationalized torture. Felt foregoes depicting these things, and if it’s being ushered into the pantheon of horror, then I think it must be as a welcome respite. That community knows tropes better than the average movie goer, so I feel like they must recognize that Felt has many elements of a standard horror movie but without many of the more problematic, lazy go-tos that filmmakers cling to.

TMS: In Felt, the character Amy wears several suits. Were these suits something you had designed prior to the film or were they made in concurrence with the movie?

Everson: A lot of the costumes predate the production of the film. The “naked man-and-woman suits”—undergarments with genitalia and nipples sewn in—were what initially provoked Jason to make a film with me. As we were developing the story, we recognized a need to make more art that could inform the themes of the film. Jason wanted the costumes to evolve into more elaborate pieces as the story progressed, and so throughout filming, I built the full skin-suit and the skin masks in accordance with the story that was developing.

TMS: Could you talk some about what the suits mean to you personally, particularly in regards to gender?

Everson: When I built and began wearing the man-and-woman suits, I hadn’t yet begun to address my trauma. So when I adorned them—particularly the male one—it was almost exclusively as a party trick. I wore these costumes eager to make dirty jokes with strangers, take
lewd photos with my friends, and did so entirely without the insight that trauma-specific therapy and feminist analysis have brought me.

It’s apparent to me now, reflecting on the costumes and as depicted in the film, that the costumes were an expression of the sexual violence I had survived, simply on account of my being a female. Since even before I knew what sex was, and even throughout filming, I was subject to repeated violations by abusive, violent men. Rather than go on tolerating the abuse, I had begun internalizing precepts of masculinity to protect myself. This camouflage encompassed everything from sexualizing my language to imbuing myself with the ultimate symbol of power that had abused me: a penis.

My costumes allowed me to embody the very personification of the men that had harmed me. They allowed me to become the monster that had hurt me and, in turn, reinforced those same characteristics in myself. But becoming a monster, in the interest of keeping the monsters away, is not and was not a sustainable way of living for myself. In healing, I’ve had to challenge these qualities in myself and move forward from the Amy I was.

TMS: At the end of Felt [mild spoilers to follow]

Everson:

TMS: In making the movie, did you and/or Banker have anything specific in mind that you wanted audiences to take away from the film, and if so, what kind of edits/revisions did you make to help clarify or serve that message?

Everson: I always wanted to make a film that was honest and sympathetic in its portrayal of the female experience, but the through line of accomplishing this was an ongoing discussion and learning process for both Banker and I.

Towards the beginning of production, for instance, we believed that in order to accomplish our goal, it would be necessary to actually depict what had been done to me in my real life. The first actor that Jason reached out to, though, refused, citing that recreating the worst of my abuse could seriously harm me. I had very little self-worth at the time, and hadn’t yet begun to address my own trauma; I would have been willing to put myself through torture or, to be honest, cut myself if Jason had asked me to do so.

So the actor’s choice was, simply, a blessing. I’m grateful we never veered back into that direction, as it is very clear to me now that it’s not necessary to show or spell out specific acts of harm against women for an audience to empathize with them. I had seen other films depicting sexual violence, and many of them seemed to have a habit of sensationalizing it without exploring the consequences on the victims. Many, many male filmmakers have, and continue to use rape either for shock value or as a plot device in order to allow some male to get vengeance. I find these filmmakers, who most certainly do not have a sophisticated understanding of either trauma or their own ignorance, offensive. So it’s very good that Banker didn’t make a film in that same vein.

The rest of production was wrought with comparable conflict and heated conversations between Jason and me. He’d make suggestions that supported our goals, and I’d dive into them, or he’d make suggestions which were problematic or offensive, and we’d argue. Sometimes
we’d find middle ground. Though my low self-worth was consistent throughout filming, I always knew that I didn’t want Felt to be irresponsible in its depiction of women, even if those ideals were continually evolving.

It was in the process of post-production, though, when I feel I was able to offer some of my critical feedback to Jason. Sometime after filming, I began making life choices that were conducive to healing my trauma, working with an insightful therapist, engaging in a respectful, loving relationship, cutting out toxicity and setting personal boundaries for myself. Compounded, these life choices helped me to understand the film with a more critical eye. Jason was receptive and sensitive towards my growth, and was very good about sending me updated cuts of the film, as well as making edits and revisions in accordance with my evolving values.

TMS: What are your thoughts on how violence is traditionally perceived as a masculine trait or state of being?

Everson: Masculinity is not an innate state of being; males do not develop a thirst for violence in the womb any more than females have some flamboyant natural desire to wear pink. Masculinity, and femininity, are social constructs that are hard-wired into the sexes culturally and reinforced throughout their lives in popular entertainment, tradition, and a male-dominated scientific community that insists there is such a thing as a male versus female brain but has actually never conclusively proven this true.

As masculinity is based on dominance, it brings with it a cluster of characteristics—strength, aggressiveness, machismo—that inherently breed violence. But, again, masculinity is not biologically-rooted, and these traits are not mutually exclusive to males, per se. As masculinity is a socialized performance (designed to keep femininity—its submissive, docile, obedient and compliant counterpart—the subservient sex), like all performances, the part can be learned by anyone who studies it.

What’s tragic is that while in the film Amy recognizes, to some degree, that masculinity and femininity are performances, she doesn’t opt out altogether. She indulges in the fantasy of taking the lead role of the masculine, aggressive male. She learns all the lines, prepares the costume, and spends her time on edge, just waiting for that big break to make her debut.

PopHorror / Tiffany Blem

Interview With Filmmaker Amy Everson, Creator of ‘Felt’

I recently watched Amy Everson’s debut film, Felt, for the second time (you can read my review here), and it was just as powerful the second time around. Perhaps it’s the relevancy of the story with the current #MeToo movement, but I believe it’s because Felt is just a damn good movie. I was lucky that Amy agreed to an interview with us to discuss her emotional film, what’s next for her, and women in the industry.

PopHorror: If you can tell from my review of Felt, I loved the film, When did you know you needed to tell this story?

Amy Everson: Filming Felt was an unusual process in that the entire film was improvised. Sometimes [Jason] Banker would follow me with a camera as I went about my day, and other times we’d set up a basic scenario, and he’d document what happened in front of the camera, whether it was me alone in the woods or with some friends. There was no shape to the story, no structure to rely on – it was just a process of collecting fragments of my life and seeing what stuck. Eventually, a theme began to form, and once we recognized the potential of that narrative, we leaned in towards it and began to more heavily mold a story around trauma, identity, and the ramifications of sexual abuse.

At the beginning of production, I was still sorting through a lot of my own history, my trauma, and the choices I made; the process of making Felt did, in a way, help to clarify the significance of what I was going through, and I was emboldened to pursue the meaning of my experiences through reimagining it on camera.

PopHorror: How did you come about collaborating with Jason Banker?

Amy Everson: Banker and I met while I was out clubbing one night in San Francisco. When I’d go out, sometimes I’d would wear costumes, to the extent that I would adorn a handmade penis under my skirt. It was a way of desexualizing an unwanted situation, but in another way, it was my way of adorning what I perceived to be a symbol of power when I was out and potentially vulnerable. Banker seemed fascinated with all of this, and sought out a friendship with me. I ended up showing him all of my costumes, many of which ended up being featured in the film. After staying in touch for a year or so, he asked if I would be willing to make a film with him. I agreed.

PopHorror: Was it always the idea to play yourself?

Amy Everson: Banker and I workshopped a variety of ideas for which direction to take the film. He wanted to incorporate my art into it, and I was willing to try anything. Because neither of us had much experience with screenwriting, we just decided to start shooting. That process eventually became an exploration of the meaning behind my art and costumes, and thus, an examination of me and my character. A narrative and connective theme started to come together, and once we realized this, we leaned into those ideas, weaving in approximations of my own experiences and playing out some fantasy as well.

PopHorror: How have the roles for women changed in the industry, and where do you see these roles going in the future?

Amy Everson: The positive reception of Felt by critics and audiences was quite a surprise to me. Of course, there was a huge backlash, even before the film had been seen – just for the mere fact that I was sharing my story. I received hate mail. There were angry podcasts. Ugly articles. Most of these, mind you, were from people who hadn’t even seen the film. But, the positive reception overwhelmed that toxicity and gave me hope that people were truly open to different narratives and roles for women.

It can be hard to see progress when we still see a lot of hypersexualization, objectification, and sexist tropes. But I also think that we are seeing a lot more criticism of these things as well. Additionally, the #MeToo movement has shined a light on the countless abuses within the industry that were considered standard practice, and for that matter, are still rampant today. But the consciousness around the treatment of women does appear to be raising, and that is a good thing.

I do hope we see more female directors, writers, and producers, as well as have the opportunity to see and hear more variety in stories about women and by women. It’s going to take a lot of work to dismantle the issues that got us here in the first place, though. It takes more than a hashtag and basic acknowledgement of the harm to undo centuries of sexist tropes and misogynistic storytelling. I think we are going to need to be a lot more proactive in challenging the industry as a whole if we want to make actual progress.

PopHorror: How did it feel to have your film premiere at the 2014 Fantastic Fest?

Amy Everson: I love my share of genre films, but I find that they’re more problematic in their depiction of women. Knowing Fantastic Fest was the premiere genre film festival, I have to admit that I went with some reservations. But ultimately, Fantastic Fest was a wonderful experience. The people there were wonderful – especially Kristen Bell, who runs the entire thing. I didn’t go to there with aspirations of winning awards or anything – I just thought it was going to be a unique experience. It wasn’t until after Felt premiered that I recognized, for maybe the first time in my life, that my experiences were not isolated. A lot of people came up to me afterwards, telling me how moved they were, how much they felt they had in common with me, and how healing the connection for them was. This changed me. For that alone, I will always be grateful to the leadership and the community of that festival. There are some really good people there.

PopHorror: Did you always wanted to be a filmmaker?

Amy Everson: I’ve always had a love for the arts and wanted to be involved in film and theater, but I never imagined that I had any talent or a story worth sharing. I’m grateful that Felt – and Banker – provided me that opportunity. It really opened my eyes to what kind of creative, expressive career I could have, and gave me a sense that I may have something of value to contribute.

PopHorror: You’re currently working on the film Murder Bury Win with your husband, Michael Lovan. Can you tell us a little about that project?

Amy Everson: Murder Bury Win is about the indie board game scene, but it’s also a thriller, a horror, and a comedy. It’s a unique blend of ideas and has a great tone, which I’m really excited to see play with an audience. I designed the board game on which the film’s story is centered, as well as serving as the overall art director and production designer. It’s really good. We’re finalizing a crowd fundraiser to secure post-production costs now – and people can actually become a part of the movie by contributing. The details are up at MurderBuryWin.com

PopHorror: What’s your favorite scary movie?

Amy Everson: I’m not sure what might qualify as a scary movie, because it’s so subjective, but I can guarantee that in Felt, you can see the influence of Silence of the Lambs, El Orfanato (The Orphanage), and Hard Candy. I also really love 28 Days Later and Shaun of the Dead.

We want to send a great big thank you to Amy Everson for taking the time to speak with us. Be sure to check out her film, Felt, if you haven’t already. And stay tuned to PopHorror for all of your Women in Horror Month needs!