5 Questions #6 : Christopher Zalla

The Director of Sundance 2023 winner Radical and 2007 Sundance Winner Sangre de Mi Sangre

When I was at Amazon and pondering how could we design a system to deliver excellent quality work on an accelerated cadence and that truly generated engagement, I pondered different themes that would connect emotionally with audiences and grab their attention from the start. Although it was recognized that most movies would appeal to multiple audience segments simultaneously, it often was thought that there were some that were not truly compatible with each other. For instance I love films that encourage folks to confront the status quo, and I like tales of triumph over adversity. The challenge is the latter group often fall into sentimentality. I always wondered how I could avoid that. It seemed as difficult as making something in another culture that appealed to both the mainstream and the arthouse audiences. Which is to say that when I got to see Chris Zalla’s latest film RADICAL, and see that it did all that and more, I was delighted. Likewise when he agreed to answer some questions I had about filmmaking process (not to mention do it so thoughtfully), I was again delighted. He does not disappoint.

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What can we all do to collaborate better?

Share the Vision. When I first became a filmmaker I was uncomfortable with the word, perhaps even the notion of a “vision.” It probably says a lot about me at the time, but it felt grandiose, even pretentious…and so I might’ve kept a lot of what I was doing to myself. I’ve since learned, through practice, that the core of my job is not just to create a vision, to champion it, but to be able to articulate it…so that everyone can understand, participate in, and even improve it. And this (is very important) should be done in writing, whether shared with others or not. Clarity is essential to directing, but a well-articulated vision builds a stable framework for true collaboration to flourish. And from the macro to the micro, It’s not enough just to say what the vision is, it’s imperative to explain why. In Radical, for example, telling the camera department that we were going to always have the camera at a 12 year old’s height, because I wanted us to see this world through the eyes of the children, might have been a restriction; but that restriction freed up the operators to be spontaneous and curious and give the camera a kind of personality and energy that actually, finally, turned a theory into tangible experience. My greatest joy in filmmaking comes from precisely this kind of collaboration, where together we achieve a kind of richness, some cohesive, organic thing that we might dare to call art. I’m not a musician, but I imagine it’s what being in a band must feel like…But this clarity needs to go both ways, and is especially important with Producers. It’s amazing to me how often people seem to not know what movie they are making until they see dailies, or even an edit. We should agree on what we are doing ahead of time, indeed, SEE IT, so we can all serve it and exploit its true potential. And of course, if we disagree on a vision that’s well articulated ahead of time, well, then we save ourselves a whole lot of time and money and misery by recognizing that. I worship at the altar of the best idea, but we have to all be making the same movie.

If there are certain qualities in cinema that lift the good into the great, what are some and what do you think we can all do to get closer to them?

For me, it’s the attention to detail. You can create a vision, a central action or dramatic spine - the name given to it by Elia Kazan (my mentor, Nicholas Proferes, co-Director with Barbara Loden of Wanda (recently named #55 of all time by Sight and Sound) was a collaborator of Kazan’s and taught his method) - which is vital as an organizing force, but it’s the thousands of little choices that flesh out that spine that make the difference, because they are what make the movie reflect an individual voice. Your voice. And you need thousands, because the realities of filmmaking are such that many of your ideas won’t survive the time-demands of production, the inevitable unforeseen problems, the cutting room floor, etc. But if you are thorough and your elements pervasive, enough of them — enough of YOU — will get through that the imprint will hopefully still be there. And the reason that this is so important is that these are the things that constantly keep you in touch with the source, with the reason you are making this movie, with your vision. And so while I might seem like an asshole on set by demanding that we get a detail right, what I’m really demanding is that I be able to keep that connection alive. In Radical, for example, I was brought a prop of a magnifying glass that had a plastic handle that I immediately rejected. Now I hate plastic things in general, but when they told me I had approved it during the prop show-and-tell in preproduction (I hadn’t), the reason I could say with certainty that I hadn’t was that when I wrote the script I had imagined my grandmother’s heavy metal and wooden magnifying glass that I used to sneak away to burn all kinds of things with sunlight as a kid. To many, I was probably being artistic or diva-ish or difficult. But to me, I was keeping a vital personal connection to the material alive. Most times, though, that personal connection is your craft itself: a concept (our color palette was the Mexican flag), or an image (like seeing Paloma’s father light a match from her bed, which required us to tear down and rebuild a wall to nail the shot as it had been originally designed), or a motif (feet/shoes, flies, mirrors…).

Where is there room for innovation in film & what antiquated processes are still entrenched?

- OR - 

What’s the best advice you’ve gotten from another filmmaker? (Use whichever question you prefer, I think this answers both, maybe?)

I haven’t met him personally, but there are two related quotes by Francis Ford Coppola that immediately come to mind: 

“…with any sort of art you have to take risks. Not taking risks in art is like not having sex and then expecting there to be children.”
-and-
“I just feel that at a certain point you have to go back to the beginning again. The best thing for me at this point in my life is to become a student again and make movies with the eyes I had when I was enthusiastic about it in the first place.”

The way I’ve always interpreted these is that I MUST, in some way, on every project, be experimenting with something new as it relates to the craft or form. It can be a hypothesis that I’m reasonably confident about, but it has to feel like a creative risk. There has to be uncertainty and danger. Cinema IS life, but if I don’t feel like I’m pushing my own personal boundaries, I feel cut off from that life. After Sangre de Mi Sangre, which has been called “unrelentingly dark,” “ruthless,” even “misanthropic,” in Radical, I wanted to really dive into very different emotions — all the way. I wanted to plumb the depths of friendship, of community building, of connection, of joy…I wanted to feel alive again, to feel young again. I thought one way to do that was through familiarity. Of course, it’s a huge creative risk to embrace the familiar, but in the short time constraints of a two hour movie, if I wanted us to remember what it was like to feel the joy of discovery (that to me is the essence of youth, and its loss the essence of growing old) I gambled that embracing the familiar (or the appearance of it, at least) would give us a portal to reach back and connect to when we were kids who were lost in the world and trying to figure it all out. And of course, I hoped that starting the journey there would allow me to stretch the rubber band the other way, pitting the familiar “rah-rah, you can do it” against the kids’ heartbreaking, insurmountable reality, that, in the end, might leave us feeling something bittersweet, something like love. I guess all of this reminds me of another quote that may or may not have been a guide for me on Radical:

• David Foster Wallace, 1993, "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction”

“The next real literary "rebels" in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of "anti-rebels," born oglers who dare to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall to actually endorse single-entendre values. Who treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that'll be the point, why they'll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk things. Risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. The new rebels might be the ones willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the "How banal." Accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Credulity. Willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows.

How do you know you are done with a film? What can we do to get there with all due speed?

For the most part, I think speed is the enemy of quality filmmaking. Everyone is in a rush in the business, which is of course understandable: time is money and many people are anxious to keep their jobs by getting things made - and made fast. And production will always have its obvious pressures which is the more difficult place to slow down (though I’ll always believe working on Saturdays costs a movie on screen more than it saves in the bank). But there are areas where extra time comes relatively inexpensively, like the script, soft-prep, and especially editing (which in the Indie context can and should be done outside of a post facility), where I feel a little more time, and the benefits of thoughtful reflection that come with it, could outweigh the need for speed. 

As for knowing when you are done with a film…I’m a huge believer in Incrementalism. IF the vision is the right one, and there’s a sense that you have captured it, my approach to editing (as it is with screenwriting) is to proceed very carefully so that you always keep it in a chokehold. Once I have a rough cut done, I’m a huge proponent of holding small weekly screenings for a small group (of different people each time). It’s so easy to become numb to your own work, to lose a little bit of touch with so many viewings, so many changes through the process, that I’ve found this helps me stay on the right track. “Is this still working? Did I lose something I had?” [One of the greatest skills of a director is to always see the details in the whole movie and the whole movie in every detail (“the forest for the trees (and back again)”. I’ve seen so many promising scripts or cuts get lost on subsequent drafts when inexperienced or unconfident filmmakers take too large a step; just because an idea is a good one, doesn’t mean it’s the right one…for your movie, for your vision]. It’s like a spiral where you are constantly refining bit by bit. At first you might throw out whole scenes, even storylines or characters - and sometimes you put them back in (one of my favorite things about the form is that old adage that you are constantly creating narrative, breaking it up into little bits, putting those bits together to create narrative, and then breaking it up again). The most difficult, but most essential thing, is to be able to constantly judge what you have with new, yet objective eyes. By the end you are left with a frame or two here and there. When I can’t go any further, I’m finished.

What is the kindest thing someone did for you professionally?

Two things. First, at Oberlin College when I had just discovered that movies were the product of choices that someone called a director was making, and therefore wanted to become a filmmaker, Jim Burrows returned to his alma mater for the first time since he’d graduated (a week after appearing on 60 Minutes as “Hollywoods Richest Man (you’ve never heard of).” I had been invited to have dinner with him at the President’s mansion because I had just founded the Oberlin Film Co-operative, in the hopes of scaring up some equipment so we might be able to teach ourselves filmmaking on campus. He was extremely supportive, gave me great advice (I asked him whether or not I should go to film school; he asked “Is this what you want to do with your life?” I said, “Absolutely.” He said, “Then what’s the rush, why not learn as much as you can before you throw yourself out there? Some day the door’s gonna open, and when it opens, you want to keep your foot in there…”), and then he invited me to come to LA for a week to observe him shooting a sitcom pilot. I’m sure it was a typical kindness from him, but for me, a kid from nowhere who knew no one, to be seen like that (at the end of dinner he asked me how old I was and then announced to the table “You see this, this is how I was when I was that age…”), just made me feel so seen, made me think that maybe this wasn’t such a crazy idea after all. 

The other was Richard Lagravenese. My girlfriend’s father at the time was his dentist, and pestered him for months to read Padre Nuestro (original title for Sangre de Mi Sangre). One night, at 12:30am my phone rings. “Chris, it’s Richard Lagravenese, I just read this script. It’s incredible, I’m not kidding. It’s so…unsentimental!” Ha, I’ll never forget the words. Anyway, a week later I was out in LA meeting his agent (Robert Newman) and many others. He literally opened the door for me, a kid he didn’t know, for no personal benefit. Well, except maybe to get the Dentist off his back. 

Some day I hope to pay those guys forward…

Director and Screenwriter CHRISTOPHER ZALLA is an American filmmaker best known for his acclaimed feature debut Sangre De Mi Sangre, originally titled Padre Nuestro, which won the US Dramatic Grand Jury Prize at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for Best Screenplay and Best First Feature at the 2009 Independent Spirit Awards. Zalla previously directed the television movie Beautiful & Twisted, a Sony/Lifetime production starring Rob Lowe, Paz Vega, and Candice Bergen. Zalla’s television directing credits include Law and Order, Law and Order: SVU, and Law and Order: Criminal Intent. Zalla has lectured on screenwriting at Harvard University and taught as an adjunct Professor of Directing at Columbia University’s Graduate Film School, where he received an MFA with Honors in Directing.

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