Maddie’s Secret pivots on a simple, passively tantalizing, nearly made-for-TV movie premise: Maddie (John Early) is a young woman with an idyllic life in Los Angeles who dreams of sharing her love of cooking with the world. But when she gets her chance as an on-camera contributor at the mostly soulless digital food content site Gourmaybe, she finds her blissful life on shaky ground as insecurity returns Maddie to her previously long-dormant struggle with bulimia.
Maddie’s Secret is antithetical to much of what is being created in the independent film scene currently. It’s devastatingly earnest, unafraid of (maybe even excited by?) finding itself silly, and deeply intentional in its relationship to the art which inspired it. In short, it’s vastly more principled, thoughtfully political, and artistically enjoyable than most of its current counterparts, all without letting itself be anything but funny and sincere above all else.
Veronica spoke with writer, director, and star John Early about earnestness in the era of performing on your phone, the current dearth of intention in art, and what Maddie allows us experience more freely.
VERONICA: This movie is, to me, a meditation on giving yourself over to sensation and earnestness in a time of anhedonia. How did you decide to select the specific experiences of consumption that you touched on — both Maddie’s eating disorder but also food and streaming content — to tell this story?
JOHN: The way I arrived at things is all quite mysterious. I’ve tried to kind of assemble some sort of narrative that makes sense of it but I can’t really say. I think you’ve asked a more interesting question than that rote answer would give justice to. I feel like what you’re saying is so profound, like I chose food content — again, unconsciously — because embedded in food content are these two poles. One is the totally miserable media ecosystem and flattening quality of influencer culture, and then on the other side there’s this very beautiful, pure thing, which is food itself. Like food is beautiful and something that nourishes people and comforts people. Food feeds the hungry, it feeds the sick, it can be turned into an exquisite art form. So I think those poles being kind of linked is the point of the movie. Like Maddie is trying to wrest food and her relationship with food from the clutches of a sick culture, and from her early traumas with it. I was trying to bring some vividness, some color, some expressiveness to a very gray, phone-based subject matter, you know? I wanted some Technicolor, cinematic, old-school emotion injected into what I actually find to be, like — this thing that rules my life, the phone. And it’s awful and it makes me feel like shit.
VERONICA: It’s funny you say that because I feel like now the way we all move through the world, even Maddie — who is this raw, heart-on-sleeve woman who just wants to be out in the world and love people — being an entity on our phones is a feature of her life. I don’t think now, as grim as it is, we can detach from [the phone]. I think there’s an interesting question in Maddie’s Secret about if there’s a way to be an earnest influencer or short-form comedian or capsule review writer or what have you. I don’t know, but I wonder if you have thoughts on it.
JOHN: I don’t know, I mean, certainly all the promotion I have to do for this movie is done on my own phone. Like, it’s how I’ve sold tickets to the screening in an effort to make the money back for the movie, you know? I don’t know what I would do without social media in this context. But, you know, when this is over I’m going to go to the woods for two weeks. I don’t know if it’s possible to fully leave it. But I wanted to tell the story — I think the essential story is someone who is pure of heart being corrupted by today’s culture.
VERONICA: In a way, that story has such roots in a non-phone, non-social media, old-school form of storytelling. There’s almost a pulp novel, Lifetime movie texture at times. I’m thinking of the dialogue especially, and how striking it was to me on my second watch. What was your process to getting the sound and pattern of dialogue that you eventually achieved?
JOHN: The big thing was Showgirls. [… The beginning of the movie has a lot of these sort of Joe Eszterhas-y, almost three-word lines. Like the back-and-forth between Maddie and Jake when we first meet Jake where she’s like, “Have you eaten anything yet?” And he’s like, “I had some candy and some chips.” [Maddie says,] “That’s not food!” [Jake says,] “Then why did I eat it?” [Maddie says,] “You’ll eat anything.” […] That like [said rhythmically] da-da-da-da-da, blunt, crude, direct patter is very Showgirls to me, and I wanted it to sound like that. I mean, to be clear, when I say that it’s not like there was some alternative version of this movie that I’m capable of writing that’s, like, dense and literary. I’m not that. Even writing a three-word line, or “I had some candy and some chips”, that was impossible. That was like drawing blood for me. In other words this is the only way as of yet in my life as a filmmaker and as an artist that I know how to write. But I realized very quickly that that was the virtue of the movie. It wasn’t hiding behind pretension or vibe. I have a lot of rage toward the vibeyness of music and film and TV and visual art in the last ten years. Eveything is vibe and no one is trying to create potent, direct… This is such a brazen thing to say, “No one is trying to do that!” I’m sure lots of people are and they’re either not being seen or just not getting to me. But I really wanted to make something that wasn’t trying to be smart and was instead just hulking and crude and big-hearted and not afraid to be dumb and sincere. So that really shaped the dialogue itself. And then what also shaped the dialogue was these little earworms from food culture. You know, “grilled halloumi with a yuzu kosho crisp”, there’s this food world that I’m so immersed in as a millennial who loves chili crisp. In the grand scheme of things, I just discovered chili crisp. I don’t know chili crisp because I’ve, say, traveled to China or come from a Chinese family or spent time in a hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant. I know about chili crisp because of Instagram. These things are pushed at me all the time and I eat em’ up, figuratively and literally. That was fun to me, to populate this old style of movie with these very contemporary things.
VERONICA: It just dawned on me when you said that — I’m the same, I spend so much time before bed looking at my phone and being like, “Why don’t I cook like this?” — and I feel like because you have to eat the influencing of it can break through more than being like, “I’m not going to buy this garbage pair of horrible fast fashion underwear.”
JOHN: Veronica? No one has said this yet, and I’ve never even thought about it, but you have to eat. You have to eat. There are obviously industries built on these lies. Like, no one needs make-up, and it’s a billions and billions of dollar industry and they have to build this gigantic psyop that’s been going on for hundreds and hundreds of years to make people think they need to buy makeup. But food you actually need to survive. It’s kind of shocking. And that’s why there’s something so insidious when your food taste feels influenced by advertising or an algorithm instead of just very simply trying to get through your day.
VERONICA: This is like a really big spiritual question so it’s okay if there’s not a clear answer, but how long has Maddie been around? Did she come to be with this specific story or was she here for you before?
JOHN: She’s always been there. There’s always been that voice, like I’ve always loved to do [switches into Maddie’s voice] this voice. I have, I would say, four voices that I reach into my back pocket for, not even as an artist but just to make my friends laugh or myself laugh or to express some part of me. I think the Maddie voice — this is not conscious — has always been there to kind of roast myself? My own kind of Christian charity, my own kind of virtuousness that has become totally perverted in the age of social media when everything is political. I don’t know, that voice and that girl is always there as an outlet for my own naivete, my own open-heartedness, my own optimism, my own sense of hope. And I guess sometimes I use it comedically to kind of soften the bluntness and the intensity of wanting and yearning. What was so amazing about this movie was that by becoming the girl — instead of irony-poisoned, Internet-addled John Early who can snap into a voice as a way to dilute the intensity of my true feelings — there was no hiding. Even though there’s a wig, there’s breasts, I was tucking, I was corseted. It’s so artificial in some ways and yet it’s like the most vulnerable thing I’ve ever done. I feel totally exposed by this movie. I feel like I read myself to filth, I feel like I’ve completely bared my soul in this movie in this strange way. I can’t explain it, but I’ve woken up in the middle of the night going, “I need to call Magnolia and ask them to pull the release.” […] That’s when you know you’re making something not necessarily good but has maybe some sort of potential artistically. You have to feel at constant risk of embarrassing yourself.
HIGH FEMME RAPID FIRE WITH MADDIE RALPH, FICTIONAL PROTAGONIST OF MADDIE’S SECRET:
HF: What’s your biggest time suck online?
MR: Old videos of Julia Child.
HF: Favorite curse word?
MR: I’m not comfortable answering that question, I’m going to have to pass.
HF: Favorite perverted thing?
MR: I’m not comfortable answering.
HF: A sex discourse you wish you could ban?
MR: I’m going to plead the fifth.
HF: Favorite book from childhood?
MR: Blueberries for Sal.
HF: Song of the summer?
MR: “Girl, Put Your Records On”.
HF: Do you call it a journal or a diary?
MR: Diary.
HF: Person dead or alive that you would ask to dinner with the sole purpose of getting to throw a drink in their face?
MR: Putin.
[John, as an aside: “She’s not totally radicalized yet. In a later movie I’d love for her to learn about society, but right now I think she has mainstream liberal politics.”]
HF: Ideal nap length?
MR: Thirty minutes.
HF: Best time to write?
MR: Every morning.
HF: Worst place to edit writing?
MR: At a coffee shop.
HF: Any opinion on any movie ever?
MR: I love the movie Sabrina, both the original and the remake.
You can find our original review from TIFF here.
Maddie’s Secret opens on June 19 in New York and June 26 in Los Angeles.
