‘My Animal’ Rewrites the Werewolf Tale for a Queer Generation

The stylistic use of red in the film as it pertains to Heather’s coming-of-age journey and her relationship with Jonny is striking. Why was that visual motif important to incorporate for you?

I come from a pretty visual background being a filmmaker, but also from being a music video director, and being a cinematographer on almost all of my projects. It was really important to me that there was this same kind of atmosphere and mood and feeling in the film.

Early on, red really came to the fore as an important use of color in this film, and using it as a way to examine when [Heather and Jonny] were getting closer, or when they were getting farther apart. Red [is] a color of lust and love, but also a color of violence. I love the idea that even the [skating] arena is red and white. It looked almost like a skeleton, or the back of your ribcage. I was always looking for every opportunity to add little things. That DNA is everywhere.

There are some great surrealist, stylistic touches in the film, like the erotic egg dream sequence, the environment around Heather and Jonny fading away in favor of darkness, and the warm neon lighting during their sex scene. How much were those elements in the script, and how much was drawn from your personal sensibilities as a filmmaker?

I have a lot of experimental tendencies in terms of my own filmmaking, so I wanted to have the opportunity to go into these more fantastical realms. It was really just a means in which to explore heightened emotional states.

When you’re falling in love for the first time, or you’re really upset, it’s like the world shifts and changes around you. You’re projecting things onto other people that don’t really exist, that aren’t really there. They’re like these phantoms within you that you’re putting out into the world. I really wanted to experiment with that in terms of the form of the film and take audiences into that same perspective that Heather has.

I think it’s really important to put audiences in the perspective of a character, even if they’re a little unreliable because that’s the way in which you can empathize with them, and really connect with them. What’s really interesting about cinema is that people can watch a movie and not necessarily have to have anything in common with that character, but come out of it, like, “I can understand where this person is coming from,” or, “I can understand why that character felt that way.”

Heather is obsessed with women wrestlers and bodybuilders. Those details felt like a natural addition to the story, given that werewolf stories are such potent allegories for coming to terms with your sexuality and your performance of gender presentation and your body.

I really love this idea that Heather, along with facing the challenges of being a werewolf, was trying to seek control of her own body, and the way in which she was gonna shape and mold and have autonomy over herself. One of the references on the movie for me was Pumping Iron II: The Women. I love that documentary so much [laughs]. The soundtrack to that is actually in Heather’s room.