“Love is the most important thing,” Memphis DiAngelis assures his friend Seneca at the end of a long night in “Your Friend, Memphis,” though it doesn’t seem like there’s ever enough to go around. There’s no doubt that Seneca was drawn to Memphis in part because of his unrelenting optimism, meeting on the set of a low-budget movie that the two of them worked on together in East Texas before going their separate ways – with Seneca headed back to Odessa, where she was just waiting to leave high school to pursue a career in singing, and Memphis driving back to Austin, where he hopes to start directing films of his own, but is mostly confined to his car when driving for Uber is what pays the bills. If enthusiasm alone was a determining factor, Memphis would be calling the shots on a production in no time, except opportunities seem even fewer for Memphis when he has cerebral palsy, a condition that is rarely mentioned by name in David Zucker’s touching profile of the would-be filmmaker yet is shown limiting what he can do, far less so because of what he’s capable of physically than what others think he is.
Filmed over the course of five years, “Your Friend, Memphis” shows Memphis making a way for himself in the world where there is no obvious path, with his now-divorced parents Christine and Edoardo having just as difficult a time navigating how much independence to let their son have while knowing how unkind the world can be. Zucker’s commitment to return to Austin annually yields an insightful portrait of nearly everyone in Memphis’ orbit who isn’t where they’d imagine they’d be in life but making the best of the moment at hand, none more so than Memphis, whose unflagging optimism can be both a liability when it sets him up for disappointment from his lofty expectations and a saving grace that keeps him carrying on through the many setbacks he faces.
Getting to know him is a real privilege as many attending SXSW will already know before walking into the film when he was once one of the festival’s most infectiously cheerful volunteers, but the chance for a larger audience to get to know him in the months and years ahead was well worth Zucker’s investment of time in the project and as “Your Friend, Memphis” charms the local crowd first, he spoke about what made Memphis such a compelling person to follow and making a film around the subject disability that wouldn’t condescend.
How did this come about?
In 2015, I was hired to work on the set of this Christmas film called “A Dogwalker’s Christmas Tale,” and Memphis was hired to work on the same set. We were shooting outside Austin in dog parks overnight and it was miserable and under-budgeted. A couple days into the shoot, Memphis got fired and this was kind of in front of people and just super uncomfortable. I just didn’t really know what to do, and it raised all these questions for me about what his experience basically must be like, moving through the world with this added dimension of having a disability, so I ended up reaching out to him because I was interested in doing a short film about his experience trying to work in the film industry. And he says, “Yeah, come. Let’s work on something.” He’s super enthusiastic, and once he and I are talking, he’s not just telling me about film, but he’s also telling me about this girl that he met who he is just sure is going to be in his future. And I meet his parents and the story just starts snowballing. Seven years later, here we are.
Was there a moment you realized this was going to be more than a short?
I was trying to limit myself to a short for a long time, and then in the second year I went back and followed Memphis on this six-hour road trip to Odessa. He had just gotten a car that he was leasing for Uber and we enter into this weird theater in Odessa, Texas, in the middle of an oil town, and Seneca is on stage and she’s singing “Creep.” I was just like, “Whoa.” I think it was probably there that it feels like this story’s going to keep tumbling and I want to see it to its end.
Every year that we filmed, we thought was going to be the last year that we would be filming and it just kept expanding, Memphis is episodic in his interests. He’ll become really obsessed about one thing and then put that aside, and [become] really obsessed about the next thing, so it took a few years to realize that that was going to be the structure of the film. That Memphis himself was the spine, and that Seneca and their friendship was going to be a significant part, but ultimately we were going to follow Memphis through each of these episodes because there was something linking all of them. It was his search for independence and slow pulling away from his parents and carving out his own identity, but the edit was a beast.
Were you actually starting to follow Seneca and Memphis’ parents individually from the start or did that evolve over time as life took them in different directions?
As we went, it just became clear how interconnected all of their stories were because we were always trying to understand who Memphis was and where did that come from? So we were thinking about what social interactions were like for him in comparison to someone who doesn’t have cerebral palsy. And his parents are so different and so unique in their perspective and identity, but they’re not together, so when Memphis was with his dad, he was a certain way. It was like they were off adventuring and laughing and it was wild. And then he was with his mom and there just a different energy to it, so it became necessary to explore each of these characters more deeply. Memphis was always code switching as he went between them, so it was just all in service upon trying to understand this person.
His sense of optimism certainly comes through, but there are allusions to difficulties he’s having with state services and other darker aspects of his experience. Was it a challenge to find the right tone that could be honest?
It was always something that we were fine tuning through the end. We would do test screenings because on a base level, when I was in development on the film I would watch a lot of films that were about a character with a disability, and I often felt like they were just falling into certain traps that I wanted to avoid. Sometimes it would be that everyone in this person’s life was speaking in the interviews except for the person who supposedly the film was about, so I wanted to make sure Memphis’ voice was coming forward. I also didn’t want it to be sort of saccharine and inspirational or pity-focused and saccharine in its own other way. I just wanted to make something complicated, and that reflected the ugliness and beauty of the experience of being a person, so we were trying to lean into the humor and the weirdness of Memphis’ life. He’s always interacting with different oddballs and none of that has anything to do with disability. That has to do with this underground world of suburban Austin, so by trying to lean into the weirder details of the story, it allowed us to transcend a more cliched disability portrayal.
Did anything happen that really changes your ideas of what this could be?
The vision from the beginning was to do something subversive. It was to try to say, “Just because this person has a disability, that does not need to be the focus of the film and we’re going to really stay true to the strangeness and ugliness, if that’s where it goes, or the victory. We were just going to try to stay the course. But every year we showed up, it was like, “Okay, now he’s a Trump supporter. Okay, he’s obsessed with Seneca. He’s driving for Uber.” He always had a new hustle. And so in that way it almost wasn’t a surprise because it was like, “Okay, what exactly are we entering into this time?” I don’t think there was one specific turning point. It just kept evolving into this weird beast of a film.
It just blew my mind when those of us who have been attending SXSW for years will realize Memphis scanned badges here. What’s it like bringing the film here now?
That’s awesome to hear, because I had an inkling, I was like, “I think if we play at South By, someone is going to see this film who knows Memphis, and that would be cool.” Especially because the origin of the story was that he was fired from this film set. And I wanted people who worked on that film set to know his life continued on, and here’s what it looked like. But it’s a dream come true for me to be here. I was just at the filmmaker luncheon and Richard Linklater was speaking to us. And literally “Boyhood” was a primary inspiration for the kind of longitudinal approach of this film. So, it’s Memphis hometown. It’s where we filmed the entire thing, so extremely excited to be here.
“Your Friend, Memphis” will screen again at SXSW on March 16th at 1 pm at the Rollins Theatre at the Long Center. It will also screen virtually for SXSW Online badgeholders from March 12th-14th.
