I met filmmaker Wendy McColm volunteering at the Oak Cliff Film Festival in 2018 where they screened her debut, Birds Without Feathers. Wisely hanging around on her social media, I got the opportunity a few years later to consult on various edits of her next film, Fuzzy Head, which, after a stop-and-start production over the course of the pandemic, brought her back to Dallas to screen at the 2023 Oak Cliff Film Festival and is finally heading to streaming services this Tuesday, Oct. 24.

Fuzzy Head, a highly Lynchian voyage into the psyche, is one of the riskiest films I’ve ever seen. McColm, who writes, directs, edits, produces, color-corrects and designs sound, also stars as Marla, a young woman who flees into the desert after she may or may not have killed her abusive mother. The self-suspecting murder mystery plays out over a broken timeline and fantasy sequences as Marla is propelled through her guilt and the lingering self-blame from her childhood.

I’m enraptured every time I see it, and the day of its Oak Cliff premier, I find myself going over prior versions in the morning before I leave for the theater, but there are still new details to enjoy when I get to see the final cut on the big screen. McColm hovers by the stairs going in and out of the theater, seemingly wanting to both see and not see a film that is personal, often too personal, now playing for a packed house of more than 100 strangers. Late in the evening, after the headlining restoration of 1925’s The Lost World lets out, McColm and I steal away to the back of the empty Texas Theatre, where I talk with her about the emotion and memory driving the film.

Knopp: Wendy, happy birthday!

McColm: Thank you so much.

Knopp: Describe in single words only the good things that come to mind about your mother.

McColm: My mother, she was magic. She had a lot of magic, and I got to experience that until I was 5 years old. My mom had a lot of magic. She would make our Halloween costumes by hand. She set up a paint easel in the backyard for me to paint on. My mother was where I got my magic.

Knopp: This film comes from a very emotional place. You described shame as the primary emotion, I read anger and guilt coming from it mostly.

McColm: Shame is the deeper one. Shame is the one that people don’t know. We don’t hear that word a lot. We hear “anger,” we hear “guilt,” but we don’t really hear or talk about shame, and I think that’s why a lot of people have a lot of underlying issues that they can’t solve, because they can’t name it.

Knopp: How would you define “shame,” specifically?

McColm: I told a friend once, hey, my parents used to say bad things to me, and I still hear those voices, and I treat myself as such, and they’re like, “Yeah, me too, me too.” I told him some of the things my parents told me, and he goes, “Oh. Never like that.”

One example is just that you are inherently wrong. You are wrong. You are wrong. Not what you’ve done is wrong, but you, inherently, are wrong. That is shame. If anybody you are dating, anybody you know, anybody you are around makes you feel that way, that is shame.

It almost makes you feel, “I can change, I can change, I can change, I like criticism, I can change,” and that is not the healing for anybody. The healing is compassion. If someone gives you, “Here’s a little thing about yourself,” but says it compassionately to you, that’s not shame. That’s love and that’s helping you grow with love, and everyone deserves to grow with love, and that’s something I did not know.

Knopp: How did you delve into that and pull the emotions into something so coherent?

McColm: Thanks, I’m glad I was coherent. I experienced every single moment, to the time where my therapist told me what the word “shame” was, and I said whaaa, what do you mean, what is that word? I didn’t even know what it was! That was the beginning of my journey. I was like, 24, and I journaled every single experience I had. My walls in my apartment looked like Einstein or A Beautiful Mind with post-its of how to heal this shame and where it came from and the epiphanies I would have every day, and I obviously did that because I had no control over what was happening to me.

That’s what took me down the rabbit hole in my brain to make Fuzzy Head, to live Fuzzy Head, and that’s how I think it was so coherent, because I remembered every single key moment to that process of healing.

Knopp: You play your own therapist in the film. Is that a reflection of your experience, and how much of this film is you talking to yourself?

McColm: I think every screenwriter is talking with their own voice, talking to themselves or figuring out their lives or their emotions. In the movie, it ended up me playing the therapist as well. Most people ended up saying, “Yeah, I actually like that.”

I did do a lot of my own healing. I had that therapist in the beginning for a year, but the rest of my journey was self-healing through Kundalini meditation and a lot of meditating, and that is being your own therapist. I was writing on those walls talking to myself, healing myself because I didn’t feel like I had anywhere safe to go. Nobody was talking about PTSD. Nobody was talking about narcissistic abuse. You told anybody about that, they just thought you were crazy.

Knopp: I detect a very slight David Lynch influence, and especially in the screening upstairs I saw a lot of Stanley Kubrick. What are your background filmmakers on this?

McColm: I get Lynch a lot, and I’m happy to hear it, obviously a great filmmaker, but it’s kind of funny – I really didn’t see his work until after everyone said it was Lynch-like for my first film, Birds Without Feathers. I actually had never seen a David Lynch film. I did watch a few of his films after, and I see the similarity. It’s from the subconscious, so I think anybody making art from their subconscious is going to have parallels. David Lynch is one of the most put-forward directors who does that, but I think if we all really lived from our subconscious and dug deep, we would see we’re all of the same makeup. Our brains are all very similar. There aren’t too many different things people have to choose. Love and hate are drawing our choices in life. It’s very simple, underneath it all.

Kubrick is obviously a great influence for me, I’m really happy you said that. I was saying it as a joke in the Q&A, but I’m dead serious, Scorsese is a huge influence on me, and Robert Altman.

Knopp: I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Robert Altman film.

McColm: I love Three Women, because when I saw it, my mind was blown. I’ve asked everybody how they feel about that film, they’ve all given a different explanation, and then I finally saw an interview with him on some Tonight Show back in the ‘70s. He was like, well, I wanted a film that didn’t really have one singular meaning, and I was like, you did it man. You really did it.

The Long Goodbye has one of the best intros of all time from him, that’s like a 10-15 minute intro. Elliott Gould, great acting, great character development and just flawless, flowing filmmaking.

There’s just these fundamental things, like, Scorsese teaches those. Every shot has a meaning. Use the color. Have five rules when you’re making a film to keep your guide. I think those are just so important, so important.

Knopp: What were your five rules when making Fuzzy Head?

McColm: I know I had a lot when I was making Birds Without Feathers. For this one, I don’t know if I had five rules for this one. This one was, get the film fucking done. That’s absolutely what this one was.

The rules maybe lie more in the color palette and the choices of lenses. I try to keep consistent, because I think that’s what uplifts a film, paying attention to every single aspect, talking over with your cinematographer what each color means. Especially when you’re making a film that is not typical, you have to help the audience in every single way, so I think color. Our color palette was definitely a big map to follow and rule to stick to. If we were ever in doubt, what color is this character, what is the meaning for Marla, let it live there. And the camera lenses.

Knopp: What lenses did you use?

McColm: We used many different cameras on this film, just because it was shot through the pandemic and it was three-to-five shooters on this film, not at the same time, but anybody who was available, basically, who could stay on the film without having COVID. We used different cameras, different lenses, whatever worked.

But to have Marla’s shame in everything, and those be wide lenses, and to have the memories and everything get closer. It’s just paying attention to what lenses we used, when it was a memory, when it was trauma, when it was real life. Those were our rules, I think.

Knopp: Why do you direct yourself? How does it affect you, watching yourself going through these things that you have gone through?

McColm: It’s hard to watch the film now, because I don’t feel like I’m in that space anymore. You have to develop this confidence that you’re allowed to show that. I could walk up everywhere ashamed, but then it would be showing everyone that they couldn’t be themselves.

All of it’s art, right? The fact that I can walk up and hold my shoulders upright and be like, this happened, I’m OK to share this. That’s a big part of it all.

I really thought this would be my last time I’d ever act, and it might be. Luckily, I’m auditioning again, I’m flourishing again. I’ve grown so much, and I feel so much momentum after making this film, and I’ve been blessed to book a few roles after this film.

I love watching people act. You’re working with now Alicia Witt, Fred Melamed, Richard Riehle, who can get it in one take, and then from there, you just get to watch, you know, “let’s do some more takes, see how far we can take this,” and then you just watch them live. You can’t even cut, really, because they’re living as these characters. I’ve experienced this before, but not at this extent, and once you experience something like that you’re like, I need to be behind the camera. I need to create this safe space for the actors, but in order to do that, Marla, the character I play, would get one take, you know, maybe two. We’re shooting Fred for as many hours as we have him, and we’ll get one take of me, you know?

Knopp: Why did you decide to end the movie where you did? Because it’s very abstract.

McColm: You think?

Knopp: Oh, yeah.

McColm: Because I don’t see it as abstract.

I just thought that was the end of the story. She found out what she needed to find out to move on.

Fuzzy Head will be available for on-demand rental and purchase on AppleTV+ Oct. 24.