Still, Maddie’s Secret is a bit of a genre experiment. Early’s love of Showgirls is clearly there—there’s a direct homage in a scene where Maddie goes to dance class with Berlant’s character—and he looked to 1980s and 1990s TV movies to figure out how to make the kind of glossy drama he wanted without an exorbitant budget.

He was particularly “rocked” by Death of a Cheerleader, a 1994 flick which aired on NBC and starred Tori Spelling as a teen murdered by her nerdy classmate. “I was screaming-laughing,” Early says. “But I was also stunned by the craftsmanship because it’s old Hollywood designers adapting to a changing TV landscape.”

It’s an understanding of that movie that feels quintessentially Early: He can laugh at the absurdity without mocking it. In fact, there’s a deep respect for art that others might deem chintzy.

While there is a retro quality to Maddie’s Secret, with its soft-focus lensing and bright colors, Early was insistent it be set in modern times. That’s what led him to the world of addictively scrollable food content.

“If it’s set today, who is my ingénue? And then it was like: The food girls,” he says. “I didn’t have to think more than four seconds. I was like, ‘Who are my fairy princesses?’ The girls that I watch on my phone every night before bed, in their beautiful home kitchens, natural light pouring in, beautiful fly-away hair. I worship them.” He particularly loves the Bon Appétit crew as well as Corre Larkin, whose account he DMs me after we speak. (In the film, he also sends up the world of prestige food programming with a fictional TV show not so subtly called The Boar.)

Next, he thought, if his lead is a food girl, what’s her sublimated vice? Inspired by a 1986 NBC drama starring Meredith Baxter Birney called Kate’s Secret, he thought of bulimia.

Early cautions that he wasn’t trying to “represent” anything when it comes to the depiction of Maddie’s bulimia and how she appears red-eyed hovering over the toilet bowl after purging. Although he did speak to friends who had been in treatment for eating disorders, he was more interested in the disorder as a metaphor.

“If vomiting is a classic metaphor for the hysterical and involuntary expression of something that’s repressed, bulimia is interesting because it’s not involuntary,” he says. For him, Maddie is choosing to self-destruct in this way because it’s the only way she can be vulnerable.

He also anticipates that “tons” of people are going to think what he’s doing is in poor taste—although that’s been a hallmark of his other inspirations, queer artists like Charles Busch and John Waters.

“I think I now know that I chose a sensitive subject because I was putting myself at gunpoint to force myself to act with total sincerity,” he says. “Because to not do that would be ugly.”

The sincerity was also a test for Early as a performer and a director. To get it right—and he’s not sure he did—required “total emotional commitment.” Everyone on set also devoted themselves to Maddie’s story. He adds, “I always felt that the key to the tone would just be no matter how extreme the circumstances are that I’ve written for us, we just have to really act it.”

While Maddie’s Secret has yet to secure distribution, Early is already looking for ways to expand the character’s universe.

“I would love for her to feel like a YA book series where we can visit her at different times in her life,” he says. “That’s one dream.”