Meet Frances McIlvain | Filmmaker

We had the good fortune of connecting with Frances McIlvain and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Frances, can you share the most important lesson you’ve learned over the course of your career?
I’ve learned to go where the wind takes me. When you get an idea for a project, you start to plot out what the next three months of your life are going to look like, and what every increment of this process is gong to entail. When the project doesn’t come together, that whole network of ideas falls apart, and you start at zero again. I spent a year building up and tearing down ideas like this. I couldn’t get a movie made and it terrified me, until it didn’t. Accepting that I didn’t have all the power in the situation, that opened me up. It enabled me to pursue other things. I did the deep dive on editing and on film sound- I watched and read and researched- and gained an understanding of it I didn’t have before. I got to do those jobs for other people, and it kept me creating. My feeling now is that I’m a better filmmaker for having had that year away from the director’s chair. The place I’m at now, with having finished this movie Printer Head, and getting to revel in its accomplishments, is not something I would have been able to predict a year ago. I believe the right opportunities present themself. I owe a lot to things just falling into my lap.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
I have the distinction of being an artist who works in surrealism. That’s a language I happen to understand. When I found David Lynch, there was the sense that I had been wanting to make films like that my whole life and I was just waiting for someone to give me permission and show that it could be done. A lot of my first films are just completely incomprehensible, though they make sense to me, but over time I’ve been able to hone those impulses into something more refined. I’m autistic, and I have anxiety, so my experience is inherently different. It puts a lot of stress on my body. Something infringes on my routine, doesn’t go how I wanted to or you know, it pops up unexpectedly, and it can ruin my whole day. I’ll spend hours consumed by this feeling that I’ve destroyed everything forever, like my whole world is collapsing into itself, or that everybody’s out to get me, and it’s all fake. It’s a trick my brain plays on itself. I hate it. I suppose a lot of my cinema is about relaying that feeling, the imagined terror.
The conclusion I’ve come to over the last couple of years is that in most cases, something that requires 70% effort from most people will take 100% from me. I’m very obsessive-compulsive as an artist, and conversely I’m not very good at much else besides making movies. I wish it weren’t so, but when things come together, those successes are all the more satisfying. I try not to take things for granted. My sophomore movie was a huge challenge. It was a very personal story, played straight and close to the ground. There were no tricks. I came in with just a the idea, and no friends or crew to lead with. I basically had to beg people to do it with me, and nobody cared. I started out with a group of four that eventually whittled down to just me. I was running slate, manning the camera and holding the boom all in one go. The experience was pretty disheartening, but I needed to make that movie for myself. I’m proud of it, in spite of its many shortcomings, because it required a lot of resilience on my part. On Printer Head, I’d come onto set and there’d be 20 people there, and it could not have felt more different from how I did while making Julia.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
There are a lot of great DIY venues and I’ve come to know a lot of musicians in the area, so hopefully there’s somewhere one of my friends is playing at that we could hit up. I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t explored Five Points as much as I’d like to. Maybe a day in Five Points, and then a day at the art galleries on Santa Fe, The Bug Theatre is definitely a pillar of the Denver film community. We would go there, grab drinks, then get breakfast at Sam’s No. 3 in the morning.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
I’m very indebted to having a family that supports artists. My parents- their closest friends are all artists or they met in artist’s spaces. My mom I think was very invested in the idea of us being cultured and having a full perspective on culture. She wanted us to have a literacy about what good art is and what about it makes it good. The art museum became an anchor of our relationship- that’s just not something every mom is doing with their kids. My dad went to animation school with his brother. I think I was 6 or 7 when I first got to look at some of his storyboards, which was an instant imprint. That’s essentially how I “wrote” all of my movies until college. I’ll still find some in bins around the house. They’re as visually dynamic as anything we’re doing, maybe more so because they’re cartoons. My uncle took it even further, because he stayed in California, and ended up working at Sony as a visual effects artist. That was a big part, as a kid, of something that I was already becoming aware of, which is that behind every movie, within each frame, there’s a real person. Whenever I put on one of the Spider-Man movies, I always watch through to see his name in the credits.
I’ve had a lot of great professors in college, but two who I’d say were always thinking of me and offering encouragement were Andrew Bateman and Jess McGaugh. In my time at film school, there’s been a lot of peculiar domino effect-ing where, I had done some acting for the webseries class in years past, so Jess invited me to come to the set for a day- and this is when I had nothing going on. That shoot was where Andrew introduced me to another student named Eric and that’s how I ended up doing the sound effects for his movie Paperclips. A lot of the experience I got on Paperclips came in handy when I was doing Printer Head. So that’s a lot right there I owe just to those three people. There’s a lot of Andrews in my life. My theatre teacher in high school was also an Andrew.
I can’t mention everybody who I’ve went to school with because they’re all so incredible and singular artists and I’m sure they will all get their laurels soon enough. Rowan Taylor-Laska, who was my AD on this last movie, is very diligent, and a very well-rounded and skillful filmmaker. She just knows ball and she’s never not on her A-game. Of course, my sound designer Amy Burke and I are attached at the hip. That’s another thing, where she was not somebody who was on my radar coming into this school year. We kinda stumbled into each other, and it just snowballed into this incredible collaboration that has really given me new life. It’s this kind of sacred George Lucas-Walter Murch connection I’ve been waiting for for four years. Two people who I hold really close to me are Alex Lathrop-Melting and Casper Sargent. Being in film school is hard- sometimes it feels like nobody really likes movies, but Alex, he likes Fellini and Ozu and all the right people, and he’s not perturbed by the subversive or the atypical. His movies are grungy and visually pungent, and really funny while also being totally sincere. There are no actors either, it’s just broke dudes who make electronic music. It’s all very real and unpolished and I think quintessentially American. Getting to see his film The Bathtub Wine last year was this exhilarating experience. You watch the narrative slowly surrender to this deep audiovisual symphony, and it was so completely different from what everybody else was doing. Casper is an incredible writer and filmmaker who can now call himself a great actor as well. We connected, just through our conversations about art and media, and then over time our bond became more special, with us being some of the only trans people in the program.

Website: frannyquacks.myportfolio.com

Instagram: frannyquacks/lovetoasterprod

Image Credits
Clayton Breitensten