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Nuts! (2016) is an animated documentary that follows the life of the eccentric Dr. John Romulus Brinkley, an infamous con-man who built an empire with his controversial goat-testicle impotence cure and a million-watt radio station. By using animation, Nuts! regales the fantastical and at times unbelievable life of Brinkley during the Depression era. We spoke with director Penny Lane and talked about what drew her to the story and how animation is used to reenact history.

ScreenPrism: How did you find the story? What attracted you?

Penny Lane: I didn’t know it was going to be a great movie, and that’s the thing. I’m certain that there are some filmmakers or artists who choose subjects based on slam dunk propositions, but I personally am very motivated by risk, so I am not going to do something unless there is a pretty big risk of failure —because that’s what keeps me interested. That means you are trying to do something interesting. If you’re trying to do something that’s not interesting, it might work, but who cares? It’s probably a good way to make a living, which I’m not as a filmmaker.+++oi I didn’t know if it would work.

The whole idea of the movie, that hero ?story about a very seductive con man who fooled a lot of people. I As I was exploring his story in the very early stages, I read a biography about him, just by chance, a book in the library, I was so into it, it was so colorful, I was reading it so fast, that I was like what is going to happen next, that I never really stopped to think until after the book was almost done that wait this ? thing didn’t work did it? Then I was like no of course it didn’t work, the name of the book was Charlatan. Hello? But I was sort of intrigued by the fact, not that I wanted to believe it, but it was sort of entertaining.

I thought that it would be interesting to explore the idea that when you are given a story that’s really colorful and exciting and entertaining and amazing and magical , you don’t really want to turn on your critical capacity. You just want to have fun and believe and go on the ride. That’s the secret of all fiction and also the secret of all cons and all bullshit. all cons. This is my jam? for lack of a better word I think a lot about metaphysics, which is the study of nature of reality. When you are watching a documentary film, you are looking at someone who is dealing with metaphysics, period, always. Also dealing with ? and other things. Metaphysics for me is where this film really sits. Is reality the reality of ?’s story? If that story is powerful enough, is that reality now? It was a great, funny animated movie that’s great and amusing. But if that’s all it was, I would not have spent eight years of my life on it.

I spent eight years of my life on it because it made me stay up late at night thinking about questions like that.

ScreenPrism: Structure of point of view and subjectivity?

PL: I like that you brought up the idea of the subjective+++I hadn’t actually put in in those terms. That’s helpful for me. You’re right, what I’m doing with that boring narrator I have. The first act of the film, to be frank, is a little boring in a weird way. It’s good, I like it but it’s also like I’m working so hard to convince you that what I’m doing is making an objective PBS documentary. But really of course that’s not what I’m doing, that becomes very clear by the end of the film that this not an objective PBS documentary, if that even exists in the world.

The risk was can I fool you to some extent? This is a new thing for me talking about in public, I’m still nervous saying fool, lie. I wasn’t like I’m going to be an asshole and fool people because I can. Obviously that’s not my mission. I’m not an asshole. I actually really wanted people to feel in their body and heart and mind what it feels like to be seduced and fooled by someone who knows how to do that. The movie took a long time to make because the movie had to be very, very convincing and had to be very, very seductive?It had to be really fast and entertaining. It couldn’t get boring because if it gets boring people would start to think, wait a minute, what’s going on here? This guy’s not a hero. Is this guy maybe even a bad guy? You can’t have time to do that. I had to be very specific and precise. It has a very tight run time. It’s moving very quickly. There are a lot of fun things happening. It’s almost misdirection. I’m trying to keep you from thinking too hard about what’s going on.

ScreenPrism: Adopting the con man art?

PL: You know what, it’s not that hard for filmmakers because that’s what we do every day. If you’re good at it, you know how to manipulate people and give them the story they want to hear and all of those things that con men do. There’s a very good argument to be made that every story is a con, every great story especially is a con. And of course it got the ? nomination? +++I’m a documentarian. I’m in that world. There is also an argument to be made that human beings deeply down inside need stories to even make sense of their day to day lives. +++It’s actually how we learn, it’s how we navigate choices, it’s how we develop ethics. There’s this tension inside of me, on the one hand I want to say all stories are bullshit. All stories are lies. Any great narrative that you see in a documentary, you should be like, yeah, life doesn’t actually look that way. But on the other hand, I need to make clear that stories are so deeply to what makes human beings human beings. Stories are how we are able to cooperate on a mass scale. Stories are how we have nations, religion, whatever you want to call it. That’s kind of what I thought a lot about, the relationship between truth, fiction, stories, lies, bullshits, those were all things I was having a lot of fun with.

ScreenPrism: Animation?

PL: I don’t even remember. I feel like I could answer it two ways. I could do the bullshitty answer to make me look really smart. Like I had this brilliant idea … I knew at a certain point the film was going to need reenactment? Of some kind. Probably in actuality animation was less terrifying to me because I am not a fiction filmmaker. The idea of going about scriptwriting, and sets and actors and directing actors. I just don’t want to. That’s not interesting to me. Animation I knew I’d be like oh that would be fun, just voice actors, I understand visual art really well, could probably talk to the artists really easily.

In retrospect, the bullshitty answer is knew I wanted to have these different animators draw the different scenes differently so that I could underscore there are different versions of the truth. That’s also true. But that actually came about later. Filmmakers always develop these great clear-sounding stories about how the choices they made got made. But it’s really much more chaotic in the moment. +++

ScreenPrism: Inspired by the book Ridiculously enjoyable Old ? America

PL: I think old ? weird? America is so specific and amazing, and it’s not like eight ? that I’ve ever uttered, so when I read that I was like, I love old ?America. There’s a specificity to those words here. I love old stories. I love stories that are kind of forgotten, like really cool stories that have somehow been lost. There are an infinite number of them. I don’t know why I’m so drawn to history, it might because I know the end before I start. Which makes me feel secure in some ways. Not the end of the movie necessarily, but the end of the story. How does ?’s life end? I’m not going to follow him around for twenty years and find out. I already know. That’s part of it. I love old ? America more specifically between the years of 1880 and 1940. I don’t know why. It’s a lot of stuff. The prolific? growth of the federal government, which essentially doesn’t exist until the New Deal and then you’ve got this amazing first wave of feminism, totally revolutionary, then you’ve got Prohibition, gangsters. There’s so much going on. It’s not like it’s any more interesting than any other period, but It’s for some reason interesting to me. I keep finding myself with more, and still the things I am working on now are still stories that come in that time period. Not really sure way. There’s also an amazing religious, spiritualist revival, all this cult stuff happening.