Bill Friedman, the main subject of Brian Friedman's documentary The Bodybuilder & I. (Mongrel Media)
Bill Friedman is a wealthy 60-year-old Toronto lawyer. For fun, he paints himself orange, squeezes his hard body into a miniscule Superman costume and struts and clasps his hands Hans-and-Franz style at “mature” bodybuilding competitions. His son, Bryan, 26, cringes from the audience.
In Bryan Friedman’s documentary The Bodybuilder and I, the inherently funny, yet oddly sincere subculture of “geriatric bodybuilding” — not the PC term, but it’s what the Friedmans jokingly call it — is the stage for a poignant tale of father-son estrangement. The elder Friedman was a lousy divorced dad and the younger never got over it.
In the process of filming his father’s preparations for an important competition, the two slowly break through their lifelong wariness of one another. The Bodybuilder and I won the Best Canadian Feature award at the Toronto Hot Docs Festival last year. Last summer, Bryan Friedman, a law student and former script reader in the Toronto film industry, sat down to talk with CBCNews.ca about self-indulgent filmmaking, bad dads and being nicer to waiters.
Q: You and your father had little contact over the years, and what you did have was fraught with your anger at being neglected while your dad lived a rich man’s life with a new family. Considering that background, what did your father first say when you approached him about the film?
A: First, I told him, “I want to make a movie about your bodybuilding competition,” to which he said, “Fabulous, this is going to be about me!” You know, he’s OK with being the centre of attention. [Laughs.] But then I immediately said, “It’s not just about bodybuilding; it’s going to be about you and me, our relationship, and you as a man.” To his credit, right away he said, “OK, let’s do it.” He knew this was a chance to get things fixed, to make things better. He had reached the point where he wasn’t going to do it himself, so I think he said, “If you’re going to take the lead, I’ll follow.”
Q: What had happened in your life to bring you to that point of seeking some peace with him?
A: I had broken up this long-term, six-year relationship and I knew what the roots of my problem were, that it had to do with my relationship with my dad. People said, “Why make a film? Why not just deal with it?” I don’t have a good answer, other than that I’ve always been able to express myself better in this medium than any other form. I’m not comfortable talking to other people about me, but I am comfortable creating a story. Even if it does reveal personal things, if it finds a narrative form, I find it’s easier to deal with. I can distance myself from it in a way.
Bill Friedman and his son Bryan share a quiet moment backstage at the World Bodybuilding Championships. (Mongrel Media)
Q: I feel like your dad is one of the most unknowable characters I’ve seen in the movies. Why do you think he’s so closed off?
A: I don’t know. I would be lying if I said I got him. As his girlfriend points out in the movie, he’s the child of Holocaust survivors. He was always struggling for his own father’s approval and he never got it. He had a huge mansion and he spent a lot of time building up a facade to project to the world. He never understood that as far as his kids were concerned, none of us cared about that. I saw the film as my path to get behind the facade and see who this guy really is. I think once you chisel that stuff away, he becomes a really sympathetic and really interesting, lovable guy. Our relationship is good now. It sounds unbelievable, but it’s amazing. I mean, nothing’s perfect. He’s not “daddy,” and I don’t think he ever will be, because that stuff is ground in as a child. I don’t have that foundation, but I have something much more interesting, and that’s an awareness of him as a man. Most people don’t have that understanding of their parents.
Q: There have been a lot of first-person documentaries in the post-Michael Moore era, where the filmmaker comes off as self-mythologizing and the experience of watching is kind of prurient. Were you conscious of the traps of this genre?
A: I know, mine is this terrible, totally modern type of doc: It’s one of those competition-in-a-subculture films, like Spellbound or that one about the New York Times crossword puzzle fans [Wordplay], and it’s also a look-at-me, woe-is-me personal doc. It’s really bad. [Laughs.]
Q: It’s so unusual to see male intimacy on screen. Were you self-conscious shooting the really emotional confrontation scenes with your parents and your brother?
A: In the big interviews, I completely forgot that I was filming a movie. I really was talking to people for the first time in my life about things I always wanted to know but never had the balls to ask. I didn’t feel too naked because the camera wasn’t on me. The only scene where we shot with two cameras was with my father.
Q: Do you recognize yourself in your father?
A: Yes, his work ethic. He just doesn’t stop, and when I’m into something, I’m similar. And also, we have a bad habit of being irreverent to people sometimes. When a waiter brings you something and you make a joke and he doesn’t get it — we both do that. That definitely has to stop.
The Bodybuilder and I opens in Vancouver, Ottawa and Toronto on Nov. 2.
Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBCnews.ca.
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