When Finding Nathan Fielder (with Jen Zhao) had its international premiere at the Calgary FascinAsian Film Festival earlier this year in May, it left the festival having charmed viewers such that it won the Audience Choice Award.
The film then had its U.S. premiere in June in Los Angeles—appropriate for a film that has so much to do with both cities and the experience of artists leaving for L.A. to find work in the film and television industry.
The auto-fictional film draws from the real-life experiences of filmmaker and actor Jen Zhao, who left Calgary thinking that Los Angeles was the place she had to go to pursue the arts.
“I thought I had to go to L.A. to do film and television, but my visa expired, and I had to move back. I thought that I wanted to move back to L.A. right away, but I was working on this piece and I really wanted it to be something that I was proud of and something that represented me,” she said.
“And because I was also learning and teaching myself these things while I was making it.”
What Zhao created was a film loosely based on her life and a traumatic period where she had three close deaths happen within the space of a year and a half.
The premise of Finding Nathan Fielder (with Jen Zhao) is a Canadian film school grad is living in L.A. with a visa that is about to expire when she’s urged to come back to Calgary by her family following the suicide of her brother.
Instead, the fictional Zhao does everything she can to avoid returning, including trying to reach the Canadian comedy icon (and creator of hit TV show Nathan For You) to help her retain her visa and enter the lofty heights of Hollywood.
“I think part of the reason why I made this is because I had to process a lot of death, and I really didn’t know how to do that at the time, and I think this project really helped me with it. At the beginning, I wrote a story where this person experienced three deaths, but it was not narratively clean enough and so I created this other character instead,” Zhao said.
Finding a foil in Nathan Fielder
Fielder played the perfect parasocial foil to that relationship story she wanted to tell, said Zhao.
“At the time, his public persona was this kind of awkward everyday kind of guy, but he was having a huge moment, and something that he plays with a lot is the idea of reality and that’s something that I’m really interested in,” she said.
“It was interesting to watch him in interviews, because he would have to play himself, and you’d always see him resist that in a way with a bit or something. So I thought, because of all that, he was the perfect subject because he seemed accessible.”
The film ended up being something although not based in Calgary, took cues from the Calgary experience, she said.
“A lot of things, a lot of workshops I’ve taken here in Calgary—like clowning—have made their way into the piece. So I’m really influenced by all the workshops that I’ve been taking in Calgary,” Zhao said.
“I think it’s very much a Calgary story, even though it starts in L.A. because, and it might be different now, but when my me and my friends were growing up in high school we had this notion that we wanted to move to a big city. Since that’s happened some of them have moved back because they realize that Calgary actually has a lot to offer.”
One of the things she said that she did while she was editing the film, was to discover that the city does in fact have a vibrant arts scene.
“I was forced to leave the house and meet people, and I just found an arts community that, I don’t know if it was here before, I just didn’t know it existed. I’ve been really blown away by all the people that I’ve met and the things that I’ve learned here.”
Finding Nathan Fielder (with Jen Zhao) is set to be released on YouTube on August 15, at 8 p.m. through Cosmic Soup Productions.
As for what she hopes audiences take away from the film, she said that it was weird to expect anyone to take away a message from something so personal, but she hoped that it would inspire other independent filmmakers in Calgary.
“I hope people feel energized to make their own stuff from it. I think that would be cool, especially because it’s shot in a way that looks very, you know, accessible.”
