You Can’t Fly is an aesthete’s take on the portrait documentary, beginning with the chaotic aftermath of a hang gliding accident over the cliffs of Brighton and following Silverback Tarzan (aka Matt Lewis) through his year-long recovery, and its impact on his family: Tara, his wife and Tia, his daughter. Gliding between candid glimpses into Lewis’ family life and characteristically indie, dreamlike snapshots of the natural world, You Can’t Fly takes on masculinity, trauma, neurodivergence, spirituality and growth through unapologetically authenticity. It is a courageously honest and beautiful window into the life of a wildly unique public figure who takes on the manosphere and disassembles it with “cosmic abundance” and good faith. It casts a light on the softness in the humanity of a half-caricature who meets his audience where they are and urges them to use their buzzing energy for the good of humanity.
Underneath a birch tree on a village green just outside of Brighton, I talked to director Josh Dylan and producer Kit Patrick about their journey into making their first feature together. Their energy is wild and chaotic. Seemingly a bit of an odd pairing, Kit; a bit brash and overtly well-spoken, perfectly complimented by a smiley and boyishly giddy Josh. I was enamoured by them, reminding me of two horses who had just been let out of the box and into the wild, bouncing around and soaking up sunlight like the world was about to go dark. They ended every sentence with the word “cosmic”. Their passion was palpable and gravitational.
The Cold Magazine (CM): Let’s start at the beginning, what was the moment that drew you to decide that Silverback was the one? Was there a particular moment, video, anything that you saw?
Josh Dylan (JD): Yes. There was a particular video… There’s a particular video of him in his garden and they’ve got beautiful rose bushes and he’s smelling the rose and he’s talking about, I suppose, anxiety, broadly speaking. And he says, “don’t get tiny in your mind, don’t get tiny.” He’s talking about a flower and how it opens up, the petals open up and it has a kind of cosmic abundance. And he was relating it to how we are as humans and saying, ‘don’t shut down your mind, don’t get tiny and shut yourself off you’ll close yourself off to possibility, you’ve got to keep opening up, keep being available, like a flower is. I found it extraordinarily beautiful.
Kit Patrick (KP): The easy thing to do is laugh, I think we always start by saying ‘well we encountered Silverback and sort of thought he was funny’ because maybe that qualifies us as sane. It was really not necessarily a particular video, it was the atmosphere that existed in all of them, [for us] it kind of developed. But there was an original spark where you’re just drawn and that’s inspiration I suppose.
CM: What did the process of actually getting in touch with him look like? How do you ask someone if you can make a film about them?
JD: We didn’t have a massive agenda. There was an idea, we were drawn to him, deeply. So we wrote him a letter, and we said ‘we’re really interested in you.’ At this point we don’t know anything about this guy, you come across his videos and… we don’t know he has a family, it was quite thrilling, we were piecing together this jigsaw puzzle and we knew nothing about him. [We] never thought it would make a documentary.
KP: It didn’t necessarily come with the weight and trappings of a traditional filmmaking exercise. It was curious. It was documentarian, journalistic almost. It was full of the verve and fizz of debutants, first timers, silly boys. I felt as we rounded that corner [to Silverback’s house] and went into the Cali garden and suddenly; ‘oh, I want this. I fucking hope that this goes the way we want it to.’ And round the corner comes Silverback and typically dressed in stuff that you would go out and answer the door to deep on a hungover Sunday, but this is his sort of mixed with a tinge of outdoor wear. So it’s like a RAAB zip up that’s 20 years old, but he’s not wearing anything underneath and he’s got it a little bit zipped and he’s got no socks on and. It’s typical. Tara came out with him. At which stage we weren’t at all aware of Tara. Like, in the slightest, at that point on his socials, Tara wasn’t really present. So we didn’t reckon on that being part of the story at that stage either.
CM: It seems like she was a really important part of the story. Which of course she is, being the matriarch of that family unit, but was that expected? How did that journey go? Away from Silverback, to her and telling Tara’s story?
JD: Their relationship is kind of sacred. It’s central to his philosophy. They’re a partnership, and they’re so human, and they’re flawed, and they’re going through it like everybody else. It was very clear that whatever we wanted to focus on, vis a vis, Silverback Tarzan, Tara was entirely part of that. She’s got an incredible story. We could have made a documentary about Tara on her own. She’s a very special person.
KP: We didn’t go and try and make a film about Silverback’s family and his world in that way. Definitely, personally, it was like, ‘Ok. There’s this extremely male/seemingly male setup.’ [But then] there is a very articulate, intelligent woman who is occupying space, not necessarily yielding to Silverback. Who is clearly at the least part – if not leading – some of these ideas and messaging. That was challenging to take on. It felt like the image that we first encountered of the ‘stacked lone wolf in the garden, just getting ripped’ had been kind of adapted. To absorb that, I think, frankly speaking, as a man, was something that needed to happen and didn’t happen on day one.
CM: I was wondering the whole film…what does their house smell like? Are there any smells that you associate with the film? Because I feel like it’s a visceral piece of media that you can almost smell and touch.
KP: The waterfall in Wales was just so full on. We were so tired, because we had an extraordinary episode the night before, both on camera and off. We couldn’t get into the Airbnb. So we slept about two hours and we went to the waterfall, where sleep hung over like, you’re very available, defences are down. We got to the waterfall, and it was just cascading. The smell of the moss, and the spray, and just, like, ‘look at the size of this thing, look how extraordinary it is.’ And the sun broke through, I felt very, very lucky to be there, and that moment stuck with me. Tia, drew a little thing on my hand and all of that stuff’s just all happening at once, you’re trying to say something real about, frankly, a very 360 real environment. So yeah, I remember that 2nd day in Wales.
JD: I think the smell of their house, I can remember that it’s sort of impossible to put into words, there’s no synthetic smell. They don’t have, like, perfume or room spray.
They smell real. They smell like fucking real people. They’re cooking in the kitchen, it’s just like you’re smelling them. They’re beautiful.
CM: I think the film changes everyone who’s seen it, everyone who experiences it. I’m wondering how it changed you.
JD: The changes are ongoing. The honest answer is I think just spending time with Silverback and Tara – who I would say are extraordinary people – and some of these ancient ideas that Silverback speaks about. I think there’s something about this idea of being cosmic and not being caught up. I’m getting increasingly anti-capitalist as well. He, in a very kind of gentle way, a very natural way, is pushing against a lot of those boundaries and has always been, and I find that quite inspirational.
KP: I think we probably find a lot of parallels between mine and Josh’s experiences here, we obviously largely had very similar experiences during the shoot, so I would agree with that. I went private school, and I’d go around to people’s houses, and you just wouldn’t fucking believe some of the fucking shit. The clobber, the stuff, the abundance, the space, the gardens, the kitchens, the fridges, the cars, the possessions, the holidays, the boats. You just, it doesn’t stop. It becomes identity and it’s extremely poisonous. Silverback will say – as he does in the film – “You don’t need a car, you don’t need a house. You don’t need nothing. Mm. ‘Cause you’ve got faith and trust in the universe. Faith and trust in sharing. And the more it comes, the more it flows, the more it flows, the more it comes. You don’t need to hold on to nothing.”
CM: Reading the Letterboxd reviews, many of them call You Cant Fly a “tonic to the manosphere,” what do you think about that? Was that the idea?
JD: I think there’s a lot of condemnation. I actually watched [the Louis Theroux Manosphere documentary] twice. It left me feeling pretty empty, I didn’t feel like there was a glimmer of hope anywhere and it felt pretty mountainous; this culture that seems to be what everyone is associating with masculinity at the moment. Then here comes Silverback, who has access to that space by being striking and strong. Yet he’s embodying and talking about something totally different. So, I would absolutely say he’s offering something in that space, and it’s not polished, and it’s also not trying to ram it down people’s throats. He’s not rallying young men. For him, it’s not really about young men. There’s not a targeted agenda. He’s just being authentic. He’s just being himself. And I do think that it’s refreshing, and it’s meaningful. “You’re half the man you can be if you don’t know sensitivity.” It’s the antithesis of ‘bunker down, don’t express anything, be hard.’ It’s the opposite to that. It’s something we believe in so much.
KP: I think we can say that the political left has failed young men. There’s been a great many strides made by the political left, but within that, there is a chasm for young men. That chasm is being swept up by the political extreme right.It is extremely dangerous, and extremely scary. [In] Silverback, there is a great message for young men. Even the way he talks about sex and the importance of sensitivity and the importance of understanding your partner. As a young man, you have a lot of libido and have a great deal of sexual energy. That is ripe for corruption and misunderstanding. The root of many young men’s socialisation is misogyny, but Silverback is expressing an important message to the contrary and introducing the idea that, actually, young men could be socialising in an entirely different way. Masculinity is core to what we’re trying to express about this film. Anthony Bourdain said in one of his legendary intros to one of his shows: We all get “crushed by the same terrible wheel.” And it’s true, we do. You have to keep trying, talking about it and doing something.
