Documentary maker Maximilian Dejoie confessed that he was feeling stressed while pursuing the subject for the Ji.hlava doc fest’s main competition title, “Everything Works Out (in the End)”.
The road movie portrayal of the American artist’s rapid transition from career as a stripper to aspiring boxer to writer and musician, literally fighting demons (as she sees it), was difficult to film, especially when working alone with a handheld camera.
“It’s kind of liberating,” Dejoie says of documenting in this way. This allows Caitlin Louise Doty, or simply Kate, to follow him wherever he goes…even if she reverses the direction of her life and calls the movie’s plot into question.
As audiences learned after Dejoie’s screening at the Czech Republic’s Top Doctors event, he followed Doty from Chicago across the northeastern United States for months, but was rarely given a second chance if he missed something.
“We had to configure the cameras and microphones so that they were always available,” he says. “You always have to think about composition and focus and this and that…I think the most difficult thing at the time was capturing the moment, because Kate wasn’t waiting for me.”
Doty always says convincing things when she’s not on camera, so if you asked her to think about it again while DeJois was rolling, the answer would be ruthless.
“She said, ‘No, I said it. The moment has passed.'”
Dejoie admits that filming was difficult for Doty as well. Doty welcomed him into her living space and underwent a major personality change while essentially living in front of the camera during filming.
“I was very interested in how she portrayed strip club life,” the director says. If anything, Doty seems to have been energized by her job at a raucous rock club where she was married to musician Chip Znuff.
Doty, who was raised in a traditional Catholic family, decided out of financial necessity to pay off his debts by working in the adult entertainment industry, hoping that the job would only be a temporary solution. But years later, when she felt that this work had become a defining chapter in her life, she decided to change things up and reconnect with her faith.
She began working in a nursing home for elderly Catholic priests and devoted herself to creative endeavors, recording her first album, writing a book, and later deciding to take up boxing.
“We shot a lot of material that ended up not being used,” Dejoie says. He thought that if Doty got in the ring, he would have a compelling plot line for his movie. But that stage passed and it turned out to not be the answer she was looking for in life.
This wasn’t the first curveball he threw while shooting. Shortly after arriving in the Chicago area to begin the project, Doty told him that, in his words, she was “possessed by a demon” and needed an exorcism.
Regarding his own thoughts on the issue of demons and exorcism, the Italian-born Dejoie says that he personally finds it difficult to believe that such things are real, but also admits that being close to Doty can make it difficult to maintain that position.
At one point, he says, Doty finally allowed him to film her prayers, but up until then she had refused to consent.
Afterwards, Doty told him: “If you have any questions, ask them now, because I won’t let you film them again.”
Dejoie started moving again when he needed a new data card for his camera. Then I realized I had accidentally overwritten the prayer shot. It was something the veteran cameraman and director had never done before.
She said to me, “That’s okay. The devil doesn’t want you taking pictures of this.”
“I’m not a believer, but at that moment, in that situation, I just thought, hmmm.”
The experience of exorcism led Doty to what he calls a “meditation on faith and salvation.”
Feeling the need to reconnect with her roots, she left Chicago in the final days before the 2024 presidential election and headed across the United States to her home state of Massachusetts.
At this more contemplative stage in Doty’s life, the director shot at a slower pace, leaving both audience and subject space to breathe, and Dejoie realized she had her own story to tell.
He knew that the film would end with a return to a quiet life. In it, Doty says that after everything, what she wants most is the chance to be “nobody.”
Dejoie said she knew that when she finally put down her camera, a film would emerge from what they had recorded together over many years.
he said to himself. “Just to see her go home, I’m going to build it with what I have.”
