In this vHopeful Conversation, filmmaker and birder Penny Lane joins me to talk about Wild Inside, her HBO documentary about Flaco the Eurasian eagle‑owl who escaped from the Central Park Zoo in New York City and became a worldwide symbol of freedom and urban wonder. Penny shares the origin story of that first surreal night outside Bergdorf Goodman, how she tried to imagine “what it is like to be an owl” by learning Flaco’s Umwelt and mirroring owl vision with camera movement and lenses, and why she deliberately walks a tightrope between anthropomorphism and genuine empathy. We dive into the crowdsourced nature of this New York City owl documentary, the chorus of besotted New Yorkers, the ethics of captivity versus the wild, and the philosophical questions Flaco’s odyssey raises about risk, freedom, safety, and what makes a life worth living. Along the way we celebrate Manhattan as Flaco’s beautiful wild kingdom and invite audiences to spend time with a true stranger in a strange land.
Transcript lightly edited. Podcast available on Dream of a Better World, & Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen
The Beatles’ Penny Lane stripped down — as if in my head — but please find the music video at bottom: “Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes.”
Vanessa Hope: Penny Lane is in our podcast! And I’m so excited to speak with you, Penny, about your absolutely outstanding film.
So first, let me intro you. I have to stay calm. You are a Guggenheim Fellow, an award‑winning documentary director who blends rigorous, playful, formally inventive storytelling in all of your films, from Our Nixon to Nuts!, Hail Satan?, Listening to Kenny G, Confessions of a Good Samaritan. And the film we’re here to talk about, Wild Inside, is your new HBO documentary film, made with Sandbox Films and Spinning Nancy, your company.
And you are turning your decades as a birder and your deep curiosity about consciousness towards Flaco, the Eurasian eagle‑owl who escaped the Central Park Zoo in 2023 and captured the imagination of millions.
I don’t really want to give away too much about this film, because you’ll share everything about it that we want to know. It’s very deep and it gets into everything from our relationship to urban wildlife and captivity to freedom, and what this one owl’s story might reveal about our own story‑making obsession as humans. Welcome, Penny.
Penny Lane: Thank you. Thanks for playing my song. Usually when I hear that song in a store or something, I look around like, “Am I being pranked?” It’s just actually a very popular song that plays all over the place.
Vanessa: It’s honestly the best name. And because I love the song, and I’m sure most people do, any time I think of your name or say your name, the song pops into my mind.
Penny: Yeah, there are worse things to make people do than, like, sing, you know?
Vanessa: And also your Substack, I believe, is called “Penny Lane Is My Real Name.” (I have 5 gift subscriptions to give away to anyone who comments here that they want one).
Penny: Yeah, because it is my real name, on my birth certificate.
Vanessa: Speaking of your Substack, on July 19th you wrote an outstanding post called “What Is It Like to Be an Owl?” And you talk about how every documentary begins with the impossible ambition of understanding what it’s like to be someone or something other than yourself.
So I’m curious about when you first felt that shift with Flaco and his story, and how you started to want to know what it’s like to be an owl.
Penny: Yeah. So the way that Flaco’s story came into my consciousness was the way it did for a lot of people, which was the night of February 2nd, 2023.
Actually, my good friend Jeremy Workman — who’s in the movie and some of your listeners might be familiar with because he’s also a doc filmmaker; he made a terrific film called Secret Mall Apartment that everyone already has seen, but if you haven’t, you should check it out — he was leaving a memorial service that evening.
Another small piece of film trivia: he was leaving a memorial service for the legendary Hollywood producer Ed Pressman. Yes, Jeremy had worked for Ed Pressman at some earlier point in his life. He was there to pay his respects at this memorial service at the Harmonie Club in Midtown Manhattan.
So he was leaving that memorial service, all emotional from this, you know, important night. And he turned a corner. And as he says in the film, “There he was.” There was this giant owl sitting on a sidewalk on Fifth Avenue, just outside Bergdorf Goodman and the Plaza Hotel. As someone in my film describes it, it’s the least owly place you can imagine an owl showing up.
So Jeremy was so struck with the incongruity and the weirdness of this enormous owl sitting on the sidewalk. And he knew that I was a birder, as you’ve already mentioned. And so he took some pictures and texted them to me, like, “Is this… what? Huh?” And I absolutely freaked out and started calling, you know, the police, but also wildlife rescues and stuff because I was like, something’s wrong. This owl should not be on this sidewalk in Midtown.
I also knew from my decades of birding that it was not a native species, that it wasn’t even that it was, like, a great horned owl that had hit a window. I was like, that’s not even a native bird. That’s an exotic species from another continent. So there were so many things that told me this owl was not meant to be there.
So to answer your question: the question of what it was like to be an owl, to be that owl in particular, was immediately the first question, actually. There was no shift, because you just look at him with his big eyes and he looked so, like… you know, I didn’t know if he was scared or he was just in wonder or he was stunned, but he was sort of looking around, and then suddenly there were police lights all around and police tape and people standing around with flash photography taking his picture.
And I was just like, who is this owl? And what is he thinking right now? That was my main question at that point. And so the mystery of what it was like to be him was actually the first mystery.
And then we found out, okay, this is an owl that actually escaped from the Central Park Zoo. So he had flown, you know, the two or three blocks it took to get from there to there that night. And he was probably sitting on the sidewalk because he was exhausted, because he had never flown that distance in his entire life — thirteen‑year life, as far as we know.
He lived in a very small enclosure. He might have had exercise or something — we don’t know; the zoo wouldn’t talk to us, and I’m hoping one day they will. But, you know, as far as we know, he just sat in this enclosure, kind of on a log, for 13 years, and his wings had never really even developed. He could barely fly.
So he flew these three blocks, which now I’m like, wow — what an incredible journey for this owl. Those three blocks must have been like going to the moon or something. Trying to imagine what that would have felt like for him was so immediately my concern, other than also, “Does he need help? Can I help him?” Because you also care about him right away when you see him in that circumstance, because you can just tell he’s not supposed to be there.
Vanessa: Right. Yeah. He was born here. He was born and raised to go into a zoo, to stay captive.
Penny: He was born in North Carolina, and he was born to a breeder who breeds birds for placement in places like zoos.
Yeah, he was part of a conservation breeding program, which is important — maybe not the clearest language in terms of what it is. Like, a “conservation breeding program” to the public might sound like, oh, we’re breeding these animals to send them back to the wild because their populations are declining.
But the Eurasian eagle‑owl population — it is declining; every bird species is declining — but it’s not an endangered species, and it wasn’t at that time either. The idea of the conservation breeding program was to have a healthy population of genetically diverse individuals in North American zoos so that if the worst were to happen in the wild and every Eurasian eagle‑owl in the wild were to be wiped out, there’d be some way to repopulate.
But none of the animals in this captive breeding program were going anywhere. They were going to be in zoos or in private collections in the United States. That’s where he came from. We know that his parents were born in captivity. We know that his grandparents were born in captivity. So as far back as I can trace, this was not a domesticated animal — we can talk more about these categories and how Flaco really confuses them — but he was bred to be a captive bird.
It wasn’t like he’d ever been in the wild. So we didn’t know what kind of instincts were going to kick in with him.
Vanessa: Yeah, which is a perfect segue to this other brilliant point you make in your Substack post where you invoke Thomas Nagel and this idea of an animal’s — is it Umwelt?
Penny: Umwelt. (pronounced oomvelt)
Vanessa: Umwelt. Okay. German — an animal’s distinct perceptual world. So that made me curious about what choices you and Naiti Gámez made in terms of camera placement, lenses, and visual motifs to get us closer to Flaco’s Umwelt rather than just a human viewpoint looking at an owl.
Penny: Yeah. So the first thing I wanted to know was like, yeah, what is it? What is he experiencing? What is he seeing? Even when he’s sitting on that sidewalk that first night, you kind of wonder: if I were to try to film a recreation from his point of view, what might that look like?
So that began the process of learning about owl vision in particular. We can talk about vision because it’s the most important thing for the camera stuff. What we learned was that owls have — unlike most other birds — eyes in the front of their head, like humans do. And their eyes are actually fixed in their sockets, so they can’t do this; they can’t look left and right the way we do.
That’s why you see owls doing these moves. I’m going to do my best owl move — for anyone watching on video, you can see me doing these little moves. Basically, imagine that you have binoculars held up to your eyes — that is how they see.
There’s not a lot of peripheral vision. There’s extremely good long‑distance vision, so they can hone in on, like, a rat a hundred yards away or something. And they can’t look around left and right, so they have to move their head in these circles. Again, as you said, they can turn their head 270 degrees around, like a swivel.
So Naiti and I started practicing moving the camera. Movement was the first thing: how to move the camera the way that an owl’s head moves, and what rules you would put on that, you know. And then the second thing was the idea that we’d use a lot of very long lenses that would have a lot of things out of focus on the edges and in the foreground, because it’s very binocular — you understand what I mean.
Vanessa: Yes. It’s so beautifully shot, and also the way you have this kind of parallel going on between Flaco looking and the birders watching Flaco through their binoculars.
Penny: Yeah. It was just so delightful to discover — that because most of the people observing Flaco were doing so with binoculars, which is how birders operate, there might be some kind of visual parallel or comparability between those two things. So yeah, there was a lot of shot‑reverse‑shot in this movie.
Vanessa: I also really love how you shot all your interviews. They feel very natural — like human beings in their environment, a person‑on‑the‑street style, but beautifully shot. It’s sort of heightened in this way. You have a quality throughout the film that makes it all feel a little like a fable. It’s such an excellent film. Everyone needs to see it on a big screen. How did you come up with your style for shooting the interviews?
Penny: Thank you. We really just wanted to be outside as much as possible for the movie and to film as much of it on location as possible. We had the good fortune of having an incredible story that was unfolding in the greatest city in the world, you know, in Central Park. I mean, you couldn’t have asked for a better location anyway.
So yeah, we just wanted to be out in the world with Flaco as much as we could be, and we wanted to keep it feeling like we were on the run, present tense, kind of chasing him around and grabbing the humans as we went.
Vanessa: It does feel like that, from the first moment when Jeremy Workman sees him in front of Bergdorf Goodman. It’s so extraordinary what you’ve achieved. It truly is.
Penny: Thank you.
Vanessa: You push back on the idea that our only ethical options are either projecting human emotions onto animals or refusing to imagine anything at all. And in your post you argue that imagination is the cornerstone of empathy.
I mean, I think you’re right. I think it’s what makes great movies really incredible, like yours. Can you talk about a specific moment in Wild Inside where you were deliberately walking that tightrope, kind of allowing us to imagine Flaco’s inner life? Because you achieve it in this way without turning him into a Pixar character.
Although maybe he’ll be animated at some point; maybe someone should do this as a fiction character.
Penny: I wouldn’t be opposed to it. But yeah, I mean, anthropomorphism is certainly considered to be kind of a sin. It’s seen as like this childish thing to do, which I understand because owls are not people, and they do not think like humans, and they do not share our concerns.
There’s a lot of that in the world — a lot of people who look at Flaco and say, “Oh, he looks annoyed,” or “He looks happy,” or whatever. And I’m not sure that most people know what an owl would look like if they were annoyed or happy. That was something we spent a lot of time learning for the film.
I didn’t know that if his tufts were up and alert it meant that he was alert and anxious or on high alert, or that if his tufts were kind of relaxed that meant he was relaxed. I didn’t know that initially. That was just a guess. That was something I had to be told.
So it’s easy to anthropomorphize an owl because, as I said, they have those round heads and those very human‑shaped eyes. And it usually doesn’t harm them to make up a little story about an animal — it’s fine. Sometimes our anthropomorphizing could harm an animal if we misunderstand them, and we assign things that aren’t true.
So in the film, I would say we were walking the line of letting people project onto Flaco, as is natural to do — a lot of why Flaco was the phenomenon that he was is that we were projecting onto him our own human concerns — but also trying to really accept that there is such a thing as being relaxed, or being at peace, or being anxious. And we were trying to let people really feel those things.
The example I would bring you to is: there’s a lot of action in the first act. Flaco’s on the sidewalk, and then the zoo’s trying to capture him; there’s this wonderful action sequence where people are trying to capture him and he keeps getting away at the last minute, and it’s so fun. But there’s a lot of action and heated debate about what should be done about this owl.
And then when the zoo decides that they’re just going to let him be free after two weeks — after he learns to hunt for himself and gets better at flying — we give him a two‑minute scene of stillness where Flaco can just be in the park. We created this space that’s not silent, but is full of sounds that he’s hearing. He’s hearing children sledding. He’s hearing a dog bark. He’s hearing a snowball fight. It’s this beautiful winter scene.
We just wanted to let people have a few minutes — we do this throughout the film, but this is the first time we did it, and it was very intentional — to be like: is he happy here? Does he look happy? Does he look curious? Curiosity was another word that people often ascribed to him; he looked very curious, you know, he’s looking around, he’s taking in the world with those big eyes.
So that would be an example where that’s a scene in which you are free to project whatever narrative you want onto Flaco, and to hopefully wonder what it really is like to be him. That’s our ultimate question.
Vanessa: I love it. I didn’t know all the details of his story, so I had a huge surprise when Flaco left Central Park.
Penny: It’s the midpoint of the film — Flaco leaves Central Park.
Vanessa: You have already spoken like a true New Yorker, so we know you love this city. It’s where I’m from, so I get it. But you really capture, both through these animated maps and also your choice in who you’re interviewing in each neighborhood that Flaco flies to, the city of New York in a really beautiful way.
It’s kind of like a magical odyssey through the island of Manhattan. If people have any interest in seeing The Odyssey, they absolutely should go see Wild Inside, because maybe this is the year of the odyssey of owls as much as of Odysseus.
You’ve crafted a story where Flaco is an underdog — resilient — and you have a sense of his self‑determination. So how did your time as a birder and your relationship to the city of New York shape the way you filmed around Flaco’s character, this backdrop that really captures the city?
Penny: Thank you. I think that being a birder shaped the film in a few ways. I’ll start with that. First of all, I knew in a way that maybe not every filmmaker would have known: I knew from day one that this film could be made because I knew there would be a couple dozen people with really good cameras and a lot of time on their hands and a lot of passion who were going to be out there filming him day in, day out.
I could create a diary of where Flaco was almost every single hour of all the time that he’s been in New York. So I knew that the birders would be on this. I knew that they would keep track of him. I knew that they would share that information amongst themselves and with the public. That was something I knew that allowed me to have confidence that the film could be made, because it actually is really hard to film an owl. It’s really hard to find an owl. It’s really hard to get good shots. This is a lot of work.
Vanessa: Absolutely. The first question as a viewer, even just coming to this movie knowing you’re a great documentary filmmaker, is: how in the world is she ever going to tell this story? And what you achieve so exceeds any expectation whatsoever, whether you’re a birder or not.
Penny: I mean, it’s like a nature documentary. It just happens to be an owl in Central Park and in New York City. A lot of the footage is tourists or random New Yorkers who happened to get a good shot. So it was really crowdsourced, in a way that maybe isn’t obvious when you watch the movie, because it’s all such good footage you might think was made by me and my professional cameras. It’s like, no, no, no — there are just a lot of professional‑level cameras roaming around New York.
So that’s the first thing. And then the second thing about the city of New York: I think we really wanted, in keeping with the idea of occupying Flaco’s Umwelt — to use the fancy term — to pay attention to things he would pay attention to.
So if you see a little wiener dog, you better believe he’s looking at that thing and wondering if he can eat it, because he’s a powerful hunter. He never ate any wiener dogs — don’t worry — but he could have. It would have been easy for him to.
So we were keeping an eye on things that he would look at, things we think would have gotten his attention. And you start to really realize how many wild animals there are in New York City when you pay attention to that. We wanted to bring the rats and the dogs and the cats and the pigeons and the sparrows up in the list of importance, so that they had an equal role to the random human passers‑by.
We also noticed a lot of owl statues in New York City that we’d never noticed before, so we tried to bring as many of those in as we could. We definitely thought of New York as Flaco’s wild kingdom. Trying to represent it that way — to show that, for him, those tall buildings on the Upper West Side were very comfortable because his species is a cliff‑dwelling species. They’re quite used to mountains and cliffs; that’s where they live in the wild, mostly.
So trying to see the city that way — that he’s seeing canyons and mountains and cliffs — his instinctual memory was telling him that when it came time to hoot for a mate, which is one of the chapters of Flaco’s story, he knew he was supposed to go to the highest point he could find and hoot as loudly as possible to announce his eligibility as a suitable mate in New York City, you know. So he had all these instincts that came into play in a really fun way.
Vanessa: Yeah. You find the best people to interview about his different moments in his odyssey, though. I feel it was on the Lower East Side that he flies to when he’s ready in spring to mate — or he’s looking for a mate and he’s hooting. You get this Lower East Side guy who’s just like, “Yeah, of course he would come to our neighborhood when he’s looking for a mate,” not a birder, not a tourist.
Penny: Yeah. We’re all looking for love on the Lower East Side.
Vanessa: Everyone claims their spot in the city, and are so thrilled to view this owl. I mean, it’s such a magical and special experience, and everyone has their connection to Flaco and they communicate it to you and your film in this way that is powerful.
Was it challenging for you and Hannah Buck to condense or edit all this incredible footage?
Penny: Yeah. Thank you. I mean, it’s always challenging — every movie’s challenging — but it was mainly just such a joy. I got to spend all my time looking at these beautiful images of this magnificent owl, who I was so completely besotted with. So that was really fun for me.
I would say the hard thing was certainly cutting it down. We wanted to show Flaco having good days, Flaco having bad days, Flaco being annoyed by various things, Flaco being relaxed, Flaco looking confident, Flaco looking scared. It was more emotional than anything else: trying to find these different emotional beats and, again, being careful not to ascribe too much human emotion to him.
It’s not hard to imagine that it might be kind of annoying to get rained on for six days in a row and just be sitting there sodden. Or when the fireworks start going off and he looks pretty scared — it makes you think about what fireworks must feel like to all the animals who live in our hot cities.
Vanessa: Right, because I think I learned from your film that owls have an incredibly strong sense of hearing. So there was a clock at the Central Park Zoo that was kind of over Flaco’s head that would have completely disturbed him.
Penny: Yeah. It must have been so bone‑rattlingly annoying for this very loud clock to go off every hour. A very lovely clock that many a tourist has taken a picture of — that I have also taken a picture of.
Vanessa: Yeah. But those fireworks could have sounded like bombs. I mean, we don’t know that Flaco knows about war — but certainly a threatening sound, not a celebratory one necessarily.
Penny: Yeah. No, probably not. I don’t think he heard those fireworks and thought about America’s birthday or anything.
Vanessa: No, no, probably not.
You raise kind of hard questions that, even in just telling people to see this movie, everyone will have an opinion about: should Flaco have stayed in the zoo? Should the zoo have continued to come after him? Is it okay that he was in the wild?
You raise these questions about zoo animals versus wild animals. And I wonder how you were navigating those ethical debates in the film and not letting that flatten Flaco’s story, because you feel it. And I felt it — you know, I’m recommending your film everywhere. Someone I told to see it immediately had this kind of opinion, and I said, “No, you need to see the film. It’s totally mapped out and you will understand the whole situation better.” I feel like you did an expert job, but I don’t know how you did it.
Penny: This has been challenging for me to navigate, even just leading up to the release — there’s a fair amount of actually incorrect information that has been circulating about the story for a long time.
And I’ve never had a movie like this before, Vanessa, where I’m looking at the comments on the trailer and I’m so happy people are talking and debating and engaging, but I’m also like, “That’s not true. That’s also not true. That’s also not true.” That’s been really challenging. So I’m curious how I’m going to continue to have to navigate that as I go on.
But putting that aside: certainly the debate of what should be done with Flaco in the beginning, and then continuing throughout the whole story, was probably why I made the movie — even more than his beauty and my desire to know what life was like for him.
I was very interested in the way that even people who are into zoos, or like zoos, when an animal escapes from the zoo, they tend to root for them, like they’re some kind of cool outlaw hero. There’s something psychologically interesting about zoo escapes, because if an animal leaves the zoo and chooses not to return to the zoo, it feels like pretty clear evidence the animal doesn’t want to be in the zoo.
But at the same time, the humans who put that animal in the zoo are absolutely responsible for the safety and well‑being of that animal. So these are difficult things. When Flaco first escaped and it didn’t seem like he was going to be able to hunt for himself, everybody thought he should go back to the zoo. Even if we were sad when we saw pictures of his enclosure and how small it was, we were like— He’s going to starve. He’s a zoo animal; he doesn’t belong out there.
And then there are questions around his non‑native status. You might be concerned about a fragile native ecosystem and an apex predator from another continent. Another planet would be funny — like Predator. I’m going to make a Predator meme about him.
But yeah, from another continent — he’s not meant to be here. Is he going to cause harm to the local ecosystem? There are so many things to worry about here. All of these things are humans’ fault. All of these things are our fault. And then Flaco is just doing his thing, living his life.
So the movie had to balance the main goal, which was to faithfully tell the truth in the story about Flaco living his own life. He was the protagonist. The minute he was busted out of that zoo, he was making his own choices. In a classic narrative sense, he was the protagonist: the story changed based on what decisions he made about what to do, where to go, how to spend his time. And he kept surprising us, and that’s why the movie’s so good — because he really did a lot of things none of us imagined he was ever going to do.
But at the same time, there’s all of us over here watching and talking and debating and commenting on it. I just tried to make space for all of those arguments and leave it as open to the viewer as possible. My goal is never to do a gotcha or tell people how to think. I tried to find people to represent the best version of every argument that felt germane to the film.
Vanessa: You do. Okay, first: New Yorkers should be very thankful that Flaco went and ate so many rats for them. It’s unfortunate that there’s so much rat poison everywhere in New York and that that’s a danger to Flaco.
You mentioned at the beginning of the interview that Flaco has these relatives — his parents and grandparents were born here. You visit and you meet a lot of Flaco’s relatives, and that added another layer of understanding to Flaco.
Penny: For sure. And it also reminds you that Flaco is just one owl and there are many other owls. He’s part of a large number — hundreds of Eurasian eagle‑owls — that are here in the United States. They’re in zoos, or might be in educational facilities, or could be in private care with a falconer.
We think of him as being so special and so unique because he has this particular story associated with him. Of course, I think he’s the most beautiful Eurasian eagle‑owl of all time, but he might have just had the best photographers, you know — let’s be real. He did have his own dedicated paparazzi getting those shots.
But yeah, if you’re someone who might see the film and feel outraged at the fact that he was kept in a small enclosure, there are hundreds of other Flacos all around you that you might extend that care to if you are so moved, you know. Or if you think he never should have been set loose in the first place — which I also think; he shouldn’t have been set loose in the first place, to be clear — but then once he was, there were a lot of questions about what should be done then.
There are other animals that share all of his attributes that are in similar circumstances.
Vanessa: Side question: it’s still a mystery how he was set loose, right? We don’t know who cut the bars of his cage?
Penny: It wasn’t me. Yeah, no.
So just for your listeners who may not know this detail: he didn’t exactly “escape.” Someone broke into the zoo and cut open the mesh on the roof of his enclosure. Presumably they guided him out or pushed him out or something, or maybe he just flew away once he saw the opening — we don’t know. But no one’s ever come forward to claim it.
I have no idea who did it. Over the years I’ve thought the most likely theory is the random drunk‑teenager kind of thing. But then someone pointed out to me recently that you would have had to bring the right tool to cut that serious mesh — that’s probably a pretty serious tool. So now I’m like, someone definitely came with the intention of doing it. But who, I don’t know.
They could have been trying to steal him and sell him on the black market — I really have no idea. But I did recently think the statute of limitations is probably going to be up on this in about a year and a half, so maybe someone will come forward at that point and tell us it was them.
Vanessa: Yeah, and they haven’t committed similar—
Penny: We haven’t seen a rash of zoo break‑ins in the area or anything. No.
Vanessa: I loved your movie from the opening titles. I feel like your stylistic choices are so in tune with your story and your protagonist, Flaco. And the whole movie has a fable‑like quality. I’m curious about your choices — your music is so good, I love the score — and your graphic style. How did you work with Carolina Eyck and the animation teams and figure out your tone — how whimsical, how cosmic, how grounded — for this story that is so both real and mythic?
Penny: It’s a great question, and I think you already answered it.
It was those words. Those were all the key words we were trying to work with, so I’m happy to hear that you felt that. A lot of people are a little mean about this; they’re like, “People act like it’s a Disney story,” or, “It’s not a Disney movie, it’s not a Pixar movie,” and I’m just like, okay, I know that, that’s true.
But I also want to honor the way that this animal allowed people to tap into this kind of childlike wonder that is hard to access when you’re an adult going about your life in the winter in New York City, man. So the way he makes people smile and go, “He’s so cute,” and you just root for him… there is a kind of fable‑like, children’s‑book quality to it that we wanted to honor and appreciate, even while we made an adult movie.
I mean, it’s not like an “adult” movie. There’s not that much in it that a kid couldn’t see.
Vanessa: It’s a movie for grownups and children — it’s the best of both those worlds.
And you feel, through Flaco’s odyssey — I’m going to go back to “Odyssey” because I want your film in the Oscar race, I want it there; we know The Odyssey is going to be there — this is like the perfect companion.
Penny: We really should have called our movie The Odyssey too.
Vanessa: Wild Inside is great, and we love your hat, and I’m sure there’s more merch to purchase. But I feel like you give us so much in New Yorkers’ responses to Flaco and the way the city feels like it’s come together around this bird: the smiles, but also their interpretations. And we end up looking at human beings like wild animals —
Penny: Yeah, because we are wild animals.
Vanessa: Yeah. And you feel like Flaco is getting more attention, probably more discussion, more interest in the wild than maybe he ever had in the zoo.
Penny: There’s no doubt about that. He became a worldwide ambassador for owls the minute he was set free — which is ironic, because of course in the zoo he would have been referred to as an “ambassador animal.” That’s standard language in that world for why we would keep an owl with a six‑foot wingspan sitting on a branch in a tiny bus‑stop enclosure for thirteen years.
The purpose of that is meant to be that he’s an ambassador from his wild counterparts, to make mostly children care about animals. I would ask: do children already care about animals? I’m just curious, because anyone who’s ever met a kid might have an answer about whether they need to be taught to care about animals, or whether they already do. Just a thought.
Vanessa: Or why they even gravitate to certain animals — like my niece is very into snails.
Penny: She must have seen one at the zoo. There’s no other way.
Vanessa: It must have been that.
So you end this brilliant Substack piece reflecting on how you hope, in some “owly” way, that Flaco might understand that you love him and that the film comes from a place of love. What is it that you hope audiences leave your film feeling and thinking about?
Penny: I mean, the main thing is really that I wanted to bring people — this is a once‑in‑a‑lifetime opportunity to spend a lot of time getting to know an owl.
Like, have you ever gotten to know an owl? We had the opportunity, because of the unique circumstances of this film, to be close to this owl, to feel that we could be close to this owl. And so for 96 minutes we get to try to inhabit New York City as an owl who’s never experienced freedom before.
That is really the opportunity and the invitation of the film. And then along the way we ask a lot of important philosophical questions. How you feel about what should or shouldn’t be done with Flaco probably will reveal to you a lot about what you value in your life. There are questions we all navigate every day around things like risk, and freedom versus safety and comfort.
I know I think about those things all the time. I know everyone in the audience does too, and we have different answers, especially at different points in our lives. What really matters at the end of the day? What makes life worth living? Is it just about how many years you live, or is it about the quality of what you got to experience during those years?
These are questions that are very universal. And it’s very interesting to ask those questions through the avatar of this magnificent creature who’s changed New York City for me forever. I’ll never see the city the same way.
Vanessa: Yeah. And I think for those who love Flaco or who knew about Flaco or who don’t know anything about Flaco — I don’t want to give away the end of the film, but I will say it is such a joy and a pleasure to experience this film exactly as you’ve just described it, however you feel about what happens in the end.
You absolutely will want to see this film, especially if you cared about Flaco in any way, or if you just love owls, or if you’re curious about human consciousness and animal consciousness and want to watch a beautiful film.
Penny: That’s everybody, I mean, I hope, right?
Vanessa: It’s everybody.
Penny: So yeah, everyone should see this film, it sounds like. You wouldn’t know it from this conversation, but it’s actually a very fun movie and very funny. I get very philosophical when I’m talking about it because I think it is about really important things, but it’s mostly just really entertaining and fun and funny.
And there is this kind of stranger‑in‑a‑strange‑land story, and the way people go about interpreting this stranger’s behavior is very funny to me. It’s really fun, it’s really funny — it’s a really funny story, I think.
Vanessa: Absolutely. Yeah, and I’m not sure New York has ever been captured better, honestly. You really nail it. And it’s such a beautifully made film. So don’t wait to watch it on HBO in February next year. Try to get to a theatrical screening now.
Penny: Thank you, that’s so kind.
Yeah, who wants to wait till February of next year to see Wild Inside? You can see it in a theater near you this summer.
Vanessa: Excellent. So we’re going to put all that info in the notes. You’ve got a Central Park screening coming up too, right? That’s free, but people should RSVP.
Penny: Yes. The world premiere is right in Flaco’s stomping grounds in Central Park. So a lot of people who made the film and who are in the film will be there, and it’s going to be very beautiful and cathartic for us to all sit together and watch his story unfold on a giant screen under the stars, back where we used to run around chasing him at night in Central Park. It’s going to be beautiful.
But yeah, it’s a free screening. We’re hoping that launching the theatrical with this kind of event screening will help get the word out and help build word‑of‑mouth and buzz, because we are an independent film and we don’t have a $125‑million budget for marketing like The Odyssey does. We have some much smaller proportion of money than that.
So it really does help to just tell people, if you like the film, to go see it. That’s the main thing we have going for us: we have a great film and a cute protagonist and a nice poster. So hopefully that’ll help get the word out about the movie — and people like you, Vanessa, who are taking your time. I really appreciate your reaching out to me about doing this.
Vanessa: We are so happy to support you. Ted and I love your film, and I hope everyone subscribes to your Substack too, which I think I’ve referenced more than in any other podcast I’ve ever done. It’s so well written, it’s so full of great ideas, even though your film is also very fun, as you said — very playful, very entertaining, and beautiful. So subscribe to “Penny Lane Is My Real Name.” Don’t forget this song…
The Beatles’ Penny Lane: “There beneath the blue suburban skies
I sit, and meanwhile back…In”
Vanessa: Okay.
Penny: Thank you.
Penny Lane has been making award-winning, innovative documentaries for over a decade. This includes 8 feature films, most recently CONFESSIONS OF A GOOD SAMARITAN(Netflix, 2023), LISTENING TO KENNY G(HBO, 2021) and HAIL SATAN? (Magnolia Pictures, 2019). A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, Lane has received grants and awards from the Sundance Film Festival, Cinereach, Creative Capital, Chicken & Egg Pictures, Tribeca Film Institute, Wexner Center for the Arts and many others. She has been honored with mid-career retrospectives at the Museum of the Moving Image, San Francisco DocFest, Open City Documentary Festival and Cinema Moderne. She co-owns the Brooklyn-based production company Spinning Nancy and is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Penny Lane is her real name.
Is Wild Inside playing near you?
Check FlacoDocumentary.com for info and ticket links.
This is the ONLY WAY to see this movie for the foreseeable future. It’s not on HBO until February 2027. More cities are being added all the time and you can request a screening
New Yorkers are so lucky to have the free world premiere in a special outdoor screening in Central Park next Wednesday, July 29th!
RSVP here
7:30 PM Lawn Opens
8:30 PM Film Begins
RSVP IS ENCOURAGED BUT NOT REQUIRED AND DOES NOT GUARANTEE A PLACE. SEATING IS FIRST COME, FIRST SERVED. CHAIRS WILL NOT BE PROVIDED AND ARE DISCOURAGED BY PARK SERVICES ON THE LAWN. FEEL FREE TO BRING A BLANKET!
Encore. Bonus listen.
