DAY OF RECKONING: An interview with Zero Day director Ben Coccio.
By Warren
Curry
3/21/03
Part 1 of 2
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DAY OF RECKONING: An interview with Zero Day director Ben Coccio. By Warren
Curry Part 1 of 2 |
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Zero Day is currently enjoying a very successful film festival run, having won the Best Feature award at this past January's Slamdunk Film Festival and it most recently grabbed the Grand Jury award at the Florida Film Festival. The festival accolades are also accompanied by some very practical prizes, as Coccio left Slamdunk with a deal to receive DVD authoring for Zero Day from Sony, and waltzed out of the Sunshine State with a $100,000 grant in goods and services for his next film.
Ben recently accompanied his film to the west coast, where it kicked off the Los Angeles New Filmmakers series at the (a little too) swanky Cinespace. While not the ideal setting for this movie (it's difficult to get totally invested in what's happening on screen when a group of people nearby are chatting away and sipping martinis), it was a treat to see the film on something bigger than my 27" television screen. I had the great pleasure of speaking with Ben the night prior to the screening, and below is the conversation my tape recorder captured.
(Visit the Professor Bright films website for all the latest news about Zero Day)
Did the idea for Zero Day pop into your mind before or after Columbine?
Definitely after. Basically, when Columbine happened, to me, there was something undeniable about the almost Shakespearean quality of this drama/tragedy of these two characters, their relationship, their plot, and that they followed it through. I remember when Columbine happened, I thought to myself, "You know, someday, someone's going to make a really horrible, epic movie about this." And I thought to myself, "It's a shame because I'd love to try to do that; I think could I do this justice." If I was going to try to make an independent feature film and try to get some attention on the festival circuit, it wouldn't necessarily be bad to go for subject matter that is polarizing and kind of shocking and would get attention. I also thought it would be a really great challenge to try to make this subject matter watchable, engaging and interesting. Even though it's depressing, tough and challenging, it could still be, maybe not entertaining, but compelling.
I have to imagine that when you were developing the script and putting the pieces together to begin production, there was a fear that Columbine was a little too fresh in peoples' minds.
Actually, in some sense -- this will look good to people out there (laughs) -- I thought that could only help. It was recent enough so that very few people would be engaging the subject matter, so again, it would help (the film) to stand alone. Even though it's so close to the subject matter, that's another part of the challenge -- will people think I handled it without being exploitative and without resorting to the lowest common denominator? I tend to agree that when you make a movie about an event like that, it's better if you make it many years later, because whoever's making it will have a lot of perspective. But, at the same time, I also thought that if you make it similar to Columbine, but clearly different characters, in a different place and a different time, it also brings up interesting thoughts in your head like, "This could happen again." And it could happen again -- there's really no reason why it couldn't. Although (the event) is very recent, that didn't seem so daunting to me. The only thing that felt daunting was that people might discount it as me just trying to capitalize on the incident.
Ever since The Blair Witch Project was released in 1999, a lot of filmmakers have been using the, for lack of a better description, "found footage" narrative device, which your film employs. What is it about that technique of a telling a story that filmmakers are so drawn to these days?
In my opinion, it's very simple -- film finally discovered the first person narrative. There were first person narratives before, such as the incredible Bogart movie, Dark Passage. Ever since The Blair Witch Project, it's been a more accepted device. At some point, there was a person who made the first film with a great flashback sequence in it. Maybe he wasn't the very first to do it, but he was the first to do it where other filmmakers saw it and said, "Flashback -- what a great idea!"
With this generation of filmmakers, we're aware of people like Cassavetes and this wonderful improvised feel to make (a movie) feel very real. There's something that people like about a film where you suspend disbelief so much that you're almost confused because it feels so real. So many of us grew up with video cameras and have home footage, and I think there's something to that. Home footage has this feel to it that's very difficult to fake and also has this intimate, wonderful feeling to it. As far as a first person narrative is concerned, it's a new way to introduce a character by not only showing what the character does and says, but also showing how this character is going to show you what he's seeing by controlling this camera that he has. Undeniably, for low-budget filmmakers, (this device) is very attractive for so many obvious reasons. You choose your point-of-view for the narrative, based on what the narrative is. It won't work for all narratives.
Did you ever consider telling this story in a more traditional way?
When I first started writing it, I was going to do it as third person narrative. At first, I thought it might be interesting to throw in a few scenes of home footage, but then I thought, "God, you can't have one of those movies where you just throw in those scenes." It almost never works -- very few movies have been able to pull that off. Then I was doing some research about Columbine and Eric Harris and Dylan Clebold (the murderers) and came across all of these almost quasi fan sites for these kids. I don't where these people got them, but they'd have their family photos on their websites. Pictures of them as little kids, as toddlers, as babies, as boy scouts, etc.
How disturbing is that?!
It was amazing. I'm looking at these pictures, and actually as a dry run for Zero Day, I took these pictures and put them in sequence to a Beach Boys song, "I Wasn't Made For These Times." That was what I used to have over the end credits until The Beach Boys said no (laughs). This little thing that I made as a video sketch, if you will, started off with a picture of a baby and moving up until finally we get to the age where they're recognizable as the kids on the cover of Time magazine. The question becomes: how did they go from here to here? I really started to become more aware of how charged the atmosphere could be if you let (the characters) control the narrative and you let them make these preparation/video diary tapes. You can really make it intimate and very uncomfortable for an audience member, but in a good way. (The audience) feels like they're watching something they shouldn't be watching, and there's no other way you could achieve that except for this first person narrative.
One thing I find interesting about these "found footage" movies like Blair Witch is that they're not marketed as fiction films. With Blair Witch that was obviously an advertising tool, and it worked to maximum effect. Even with Zero Day, if you visit your website, you don't come out and say that the film is fiction. Why is that?
The reason behind that is that it can't hurt to have there be confusion out there. If someone comes across it and thinks (the films) are real, they'll probably pay more attention, and that can never hurt. But, like you said, Blair Witch came out and that was the marketing tool -- to confuse you into thinking it was real, and a lot of people really did up until the last minute. Now, more and more people accept that as a narrative tool, and I'm not interested in fooling anyone into thinking it's real. I love all kinds of movies. Some of my favorites are like Raiders of the Lost Ark and those wonderful escapist fantasies, but the movies that have always kind of scarred me the most and impressed me the most -- the ones I couldn't get out of my mind -- are the ones where you felt like this is how real life is. When I would see those (films), I would just think, "Thank God someone's doing that." Like Scorsese films and Cassavetes films; even other films that are more surreal or more flights of fantasy where there's just a moment that feels real. For some reason, I just had this desire to make it feel real -- not to fool someone into thinking that it was real, but to make it feel like how things happen in real life.
You mentioned Cassavetes a couple of times, and much like his work, a lot of what we see in Zero Day feels improvised. How much of the film actually was improvised?
Every scene in the movie, except for two, was written in script form, and they all were written the way they happen on screen. But, the whole idea was that I wrote the script and I got the actors, and I wanted Cal and Andre to basically take what I'd written and say it their own way. We did it a million different ways and they would throw in their own flourishes, so in the end, there are some key moments that are improvised, that I never wrote, but I loved so much and I kept. But the overall structure and a lot of the lines (of dialogue) are actually written, even though it has that improvised feel. It wasn't like Cassavetes. I didn't say, "Your character is this and your character is this, now let's hit it and see what happens." We knew what was going to happen, but we had so much leeway and we could do anything because we were just rolling tape. To put it in a ratio, I would say 60-70% scripted to 30-40% improv. But that 30% can be a big deal.
One of my favorite improvs in the movie, and it ends up being, in my opinion, a very instrumental part of a scene, is where Cal instructs Andre to drive with his eyes closed. It really says a lot about their relationship, and it says something about Cal that I don't think the audience knows up until that point, about how he can control Andre if he wants, but he doesn't necessarily have to exert that control all the time. Because Andre and Cal had been those characters for a few months, it just kind of came to them, and it works great.
How did you find Cal and Andre?
It's funny -- I started writing the script,
and sometimes people have to do things to make themselves, you
know, make the movie. I knew if I put an ad in Backstage
and started getting headshots in the mail, I'd have to make the
movie. I wrote up an ad, and I was very vague and circumspect.
I said, "Looking for nerdy kid for coming-of-age movie. Preferable
if you have a friend." I wanted to have kids who were already
friends. Every headshot that I got was miserable except for one,
and that looked like a 13-year-old kid, who I thought was too
young. But I figured, "What the hell?" and invited him
to the audition and told him that if he had a friend to bring
him along. Then I really went out and started looking for actors
in earnest. I was living in New York City at the time, and I went
up to Connecticut and -- I'm not using hyperbole here -- I literally
went to every high school, public and private, in Connecticut
and asked them if they had a drama department, a drama club or
just a couple of kids who liked acting, to see if anybody wanted
to audition for a movie. I wanted kids who were comfortable with
acting, but weren't in any way professional actors. I had 3 days
of auditions, hundreds of kids, and in the end, the two kids I
wound up choosing are the kids from the Backstage ad. It
just turned out that they were the best. There were a lot of other
good kids too in the audition, and I ended up populating the minor
roles with them.
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