…hops into our Zoom room, bright and early. She is planted on her friend’s stoop in Chicago, making time, taking our call, and planning for world domination. It’s a beautiful day.

MAX: Lily, how are you feeling about the state of the world right now? Jumping in with the big ones, okay! Yeah, just everything going on—How we feeling? I mean, not great about it—there’s a lot of things that give me hope on the small scale. Community-level things in different places. Writ large, I feel very…scared. I think that’s the right word. It’s more complicated than that, but it’s somewhere between fear, disgust, and rage; I think that’s the primary feeling of being alive in the modern times that we’re in. There’s still things that keep me getting out of bed in the morning. 

Lily McCauley is what one might call a master-of-all-trades. For the past few years, she has dominated Chicago youth’s independent filmmaking with pieces such as Patron Saint Buffalo Bill—an experimental short that reclaims and reexamines The Silence of the Lambs’ central antagonist—and her upcoming feature film, The Woodcutter and the Weaver. 

MAX: Do you feel like your creative work is one of those big pillars in your life right now, keeping you sane? I think so. Something that helps me is feeling like I’m doing something that has a purpose. I drive a lot of meaning out of my own creative work, and the fact that it can have some kind of impact on people, or be of service to them in ways…that keeps me motivated. It’s also a good way to exercise a lot of the things you’re feeling or the thoughts you’re having. Try to communicate those things to people in the hopes that things can change through the work and its interpretation. But it is a more indirect pathway to change, I think. It alone is not enough.

I’ve been supplementing it more with things that are actually more immediately tangible. I think creative work can have a bit of a delay problem.

GRADY: Like delayed gratification? Yeah. To be clear: I’m not against delayed gratification. We have way too much instant gratification in the way we’ve structured the world, and that’s a big problem. But I also think the crises of the modern moment seem to kind of call for a little bit more immediacy than making a feature film can provide. I can spend three or four years working on a project for it to maybe get into a festival and maybe be seen by some hundred people.

That alone can’t be everything I do to try and change the world, because if it was just that, it wouldn’t have a tangible enough impact in the time or scale that matters.

Maybe that’s focusing on the short term. I do think in the long term, [creative endeavors] still have the potential to ripple out. I do believe that it’s not just about the time you’re living in, but the impact you’re leaving on what comes next. So it has a place and a meaning, but I think it also has to know its place, and know that it is only a part of life and living and putting up a fight.

GRADY: That being said, I’m super interested in the creative stuff that you’re doing, because I feel like you’re maybe one of the busiest people that I know. I’m very interested in The Woodcutter & The Weaver. You’re directing this movie, and you wrote it too? Yes, I co-wrote that movie with Cleo Shine, who was the lead actor in it as well. She acted in a short film that I’d done previously, one that I’d kind of written for her, and in talking about the concept for [The Woodcutter & The Weaver], I just found that we were on the same page. Then we were like: “Alright, let’s tackle it together.”

GRADY: Can you tell us how you came to this idea, or what inspired it? I felt for a little bit that I was going crazy because I kept being drawn to these random things and having these random images and whatnot pop into my head. I can’t really explain it. I’m gonna fully steal an idea [from a mutual friend and fellow artist, Anna Hutchins]. 

She described her own process of getting inspiration with the idea that there’s an antenna sticking out of her head that catches stay frequencies. When you catch one, you have to spend a bunch of time tuning it and trying to get the full thought out. It’s just a matter of catching things as they flow through the air.

I really, really like that way of framing it, because it fits so well with the way I experienced Woodcutter especially. I had finished this short film, The Sliver of Light Under Your Door. And when you finish a project, you kind of enter into this weird, nebulous, empty space. I was feeling a lot of things at the time about the environment, intimacy, and blah-blah-blah—the things the film tends to center itself around. I never really had a definition for anything I was feeling.

It eventually came in tiny cuts. I was taking a sculpture class at the time and I became obsessed with Magdalena Abakanowicz’s Abakans, these very large woven pieces. And then I got to see Mitski in concert and fell into such a rabbit hole for The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We. I was fixated on this image of a farmhouse in the dead of March with an ominous light pouring out; this idea that it could be some kind of transformation. It was a slow realization process until I’d read something that kind of equated certain aspects of masculinity to the human desire to control nature. There was a larger conversation about our relationship to nature as one of control and dominance, and how that might mirror patriarchal dominance. It crystallized something in my head. Plot notwithstanding, the film is about being faced with the unknown of vast radical change, and trying to hold onto something that is steady and understood as to exert power over it. 

It’s a sentiment tied to the main subject: a relationship. I think that [The Woodcutter & The Weaver] is about marriage as much as it’s about anything else. It’s a story of two people trying to understand how they change together rather than separately.

Finding a way forward requires a leap of faith into each other’s arms, but at the same time, it is a leap of faith in the face of vast change and the unmooring of your world. These things are very applicable as we are staring down the barrel of climate collapse and all these things that really do threaten what we are and how we define ourselves in relation to the world.

Lily takes a breather and smiles. I don’t know if that really describes the plot of it. It’s about this couple who get engaged, and then the world ends because of this mysterious disease that causes people to mutate into these kinds of floral and fungal forms. One of these people is infected with this touch-borne disease, and the other is trying to find a way to solve it, all while the person who is infected comes to terms with it as more of a transformation than a dying. There’s a rift in their relationship, and they have to find a way to communicate with each other in spite of this disease that prohibits them from having contact with one another. 

GRADY: In our last interview we spoke to Arie Champney, and we spoke briefly about people using art to talk about themselves rather than the world. I love that you and Cleo are trying to tackle an idea larger than yourself. Yeah, no, I think there’s definitely a lot of that. You can definitely feel my influence on it. I mean, to put it in very self-disparaging terms: it reads as being written by a dyke afraid of intimacy! But I think that everything you make is going to have your fingerprints on it. And that’s good—it’s real and honest, and that honesty is something that people will pick up on. If you’re hiding from something, your audience will find it in your work and realize. People know how to sniff that out, we’re social creatures. If you can be honest and vulnerable in your work but make it about the audience—that’s when it’s at its best. 

Art is a service in a semi-religious sense. You’re attempting to reach into both yourself and your perspective to help them explain or navigate something that they previously couldn’t. You’re doing the work in bringing something from somewhere nebulous in the collective unconscious, pulling it into concrete terms to give somebody the tools they need to define it.

MAX: This all makes me think of the areas of art you’ve been attached to. You’ve mentioned sculpture, writing, and we’ll throw out ‘generally’ filmmaking. I’m curious about how you might introduce yourself in a creative space. Do you have a go-to? Or is it just like, “I’m an artist.”I think the work you do in other mediums reinforces the work you do in the primary medium or whatever. So I used to just go with “I’m an artist,” but I was told secondhand about something John Waters said in a Q&A when someone introduced themselves as an artist.

LILY MCCAULEY ON WHAT SHE’S UP TO:

I’m always keeping busy trying to support other projects—producing or trying to do some art department work for a film that [writer-director Eli Buie] is working on.