Today, my guest is writer-director and actor Avalon Fast.
Fast is a member of a really exciting group of queer auteurs – including Alice Maio Mackay, Jane Schoenbrun, Vera Drew and Louise Weard – who are making truly original, boundary-pushing work, and often enlisting each other as collaborators on their projects.
Fast played one of the leads in Mackay’s The Serpent's Skin, acted in Weard’s Castration Movie (as did Drew, Mackay and Schoenbrun), and not only has a cameo in Schoenbrun’s new movie Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma but also shot behind-the-scenes footage on that production for a documentary that will hopefully see the light of day soon.
Fast made their directorial debut in 2022 with Honeycomb, a DIY psychological drama that’s like a feminist take on Lord of the Flies, and this past June saw the theatrical release of their second feature as director Camp, a fairytale-like story about a young woman burdened by recurrent tragedy who finds community and kinship as a camp counsellor in the northern reaches of Canada.
Dreamy, poignant and evocative, it’s the most evolved example of the “girl horror” movies that Fast loves to make. While there are some genre elements to Fast’s movies, “girl horror” is a term that is being consciously reclaimed and reimagined. Fast’s films are not rooted in violence, gore or scares, but rather focus on the group dynamics of young women, often with an almost anesthetized sense of unease.
When Camp came out, Fast wrote a beautifully crafted and sometimes elliptical personal essay for Talkhouse that shows their skill and poeticism as an artist … and focused not only on Camp, but also their upcoming film Drinking and Driving, which is now playing festivals.
That film sees Fast return to the low-budget aesthetic of Honeycomb, but brings the cinematic sophistication they acquired making Camp and applies it to a smaller canvas. The film, which Fast and their best friend Jillian Frank co-wrote, co-directed and co-star in, captures the small-town lives of two young women who, as the title suggests, kill time drinking, driving, hanging out with boys, taking illegal substances … and trying to work out their place in the world. It’s immediate and compelling, and features an ending that is surprising, audacious and resonantly impactful.
This episode was recorded a couple days after Fast and I had hung out for the first time, when we’d wandered around MoMA and then Central Park, talking about life and movies. This conversation was a continuation of that, except this time we were in our respective apartments … and got stuck into even weightier subjects, including ... musical imposter syndrome, exploring and mapping the dream world version of Fast’s childhood home of Vancouver Island, growing up in the shadow of an impending fatal mega-earthquake tsunami, what a perfect week looks like, drinking to die, coolness, ego death, and much, much more.
Camp and Honeycomb are available to stream, and Drinking and Driving is now playing festivals, so check out the film’s website for upcoming screenings.
This episode was produced by Myron Kaplan and the theme music is by The Range.
Nobody’s Ever Asked Me That is going on break for the summer, but we’ll be back in the fall for more surprising, thoughtful conversations that go far beyond what you’ll hear in a normal interview.
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Have a great summer, and we’ll see you back in a month or two for more Nobody’s Ever Asked Me That.
