While front page news at the time, Elizabeth Carmichael and her radical cars are lesser-known these days. How did you first learn of Liz’s story? And how did you get involved in the project?

Nick Cammilleri, my co-director, was obsessed with this story for years and started doggedly track people who knew Liz, her family members, people who worked in her company, and created this network and laid the groundwork for the documentary. Very few people I know had ever heard of Liz—I could count on one hand—and they were all trans women who were trans history enthusiasts. I think that it was very much a local story for folks in Los Angeles and Dallas at the time. She was really lost to time and had never been a part of any roundup of trans historical figures, so there was a lot to discover.

I came to learn that Liz was done wrong by the press and that her story was never vindicated; her being treated as a complex human being didn’t happen in her lifetime. I don’t think her soul was really at rest—I really felt as though I was wrestling with this spirit of Liz Carmichael for the last year and a half, that she was really banging on earth’s door for her story to be told.

Photo-collage and animation dominate the visual storytelling of the series and create such a distinct look—how did that come to be and what was important about the aesthetics for you?

Like many trans stories, there was not a huge amount of source material, and the style that we settled on [in collaboration] with [animation studio house] Awesome and Modest really leaned into this notion that Liz would tell her story in a very kind-of DIY, scrappy way, where she’s cutting things out and everything is kind of rough-edged. You’ll notice that the animation is entirely paper-based—so there’s no dissolves, it’s entirely tactile, it’s entirely analogue. We were able to procure a roll of film taken by [journalist] Colin Dangaard; we ended up using that in the animation quite a lot just for different expressions on Liz’s face. Had COVID not happened, we may have tried some other things out, but animation became, serendipitously, the best option for us to tell her story, because Liz’s imagination is like this limitless space of possibility and obviously that’s what animation can do—it can transcend the limits and constraints of physical reality.

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