Isaiah Zagar from In a Dream

Jeremiah Zagar

(continued)

Interview by Alyce Wilson

Now over the course of the filming you actually made use of a variety of different formats. Was it a constantly evolving project that you said, "Well, this would work good for this or this would work good for something else"?

Once I shot the interviews in West Virginia and they were done in a more, well, tight style then you create this intimacy that's isolated, and then you recreate the stories through surreal imagery. It was always the plan. The imagery that we created we always wanted to shoot on 35 [mm]. And I always felt like you could never really show his work without it being on 35 and without it being on a steady cam. Like, until you saw his work on a steady cam and on 35, you were never really going to understand how detailed and how massive it was.

Yes, right. I love the shot where you have him standing and you kind of see — you're almost right in on his face, I think maybe even eyeball level, then as you pull back and you see this massive wall behind him with the huge self-portrait and you're just like, wow.

Right, and you understand that it's much bigger than a digital camera can actually capture.

Oh, yeah.

Usually, what happens on digital, you can see that's there, too, the work kind of turns to mush. The colors blend and the pixels blend, because there's just not enough information there.

And so at that point, was it after West Virginia that you brought in Erik Messerschmidt?

Yes. And Erik's shot every single thing I've ever done, except for Baby Eat Baby and Delhi House, which I shot. But everything I've ever shot on 35 or on 16, Erik's shot. We've known each other since college. He's just incredible. He is the youngest gaffer in the union, in L.A.

Yeah?

He works on a show called Bones.

Oh, I've seen that, yeah.

And he's just an incredible cinematographer.

I agree.

He really enabled us to do it. And Mark too, Mark Stetz. I've also worked with since I was really young. I've got to say, filmmaking is really about the relationships and the trust that you achieve with people over a long period of time. It's a collaborative art form. It's like you're hoping they will add something to the process that will elevate it. In the best cases, they do.

Yes. I'm thinking of the sequences of your father working on his mosaics. And, when juxtaposed with some of the really raw, emotional, handheld cut footage that you captured, it creates this understanding of what the art has been and does for him.

Yeah. That's great that you see it that way. That's absolutely the idea behind it. What is a dream world and what is the real world? What are the differences?

And the dream world that he creates through his art is his life, though.

It is.

It is his stories.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

How much [did] the collaborative effort with the other people that you worked with, your cinematographer, how much did that inform the film and its final result?

Well, I think everybody — Jeremy my producer, Keiko my editor, it's incalculable. I could go through, that's a whole two-hour conversation about each of them. They all did something completely different. Ross and Sam Pollard, who was the executive producer and consulting editor, they changed it, too. It's like everybody. I'm sitting here with my roommate right now and with her, just watching the film and commenting, it's like everybody brings their own role to the process of making it. You need people you trust.

That's really what it came down to. Keiko was really interesting, because the movie was at a standstill before Keiko joined the film, and it was mean, a little bit. It was mean to my dad. It wasn't seeing him as a full person, it was just really angry about what he had done.

And she came in and she changed it, she brought a part of the emotion to the film that it didn't have. And also the understanding of what it means to be married for 43 years. She has kids and she's married, and I don't have that kind of understanding. She really brought a part out in the movie that wasn't there before. And I'm an editor, so it made me see that I get paid to edit movies, but it made me realize that I have so much more to learn; so, so much.

Right. Three definitely is a poetry to the editing. When I think about some of the scenes again, just showing your mom walking through the house that's covered with your dad's artwork.

That's absolutely… Keiko put that at the end of the movie and I was like, "You got it. You did it!" My stuff is much more meticulous. It's much more flashy. [...] But Keiko's stuff is the stuff that really ended up hitting you at the end of the movie, you know? That scene when she walks through the house you realize she can't separate from this man...

She can't get away from him.

... no matter what.

And at the very end, when they're scouting out a new building and saying, "What could this become?"

Yeah. That's something that I shot and edited and waited for. And I would say that was something that Keiko enforced, because without ever working with her, that scene would never have been created. I would have never cut that scene. I would have never made that scene. That was really, really important. I would say that's true without Ross or Jeremy, too. It's also people pushing you to make sure you're making the best film possible. There are so many films that you watch in the theater and you think, "This movie could have been great if they had just put in another year or they had just put in another two years." But they didn't have the stamina to do it. They didn't have the will to do it.

You know what I think about a lot? I love sports. I absolutely adore football and basketball, and what excites me about them is the will. You have these two teams that are pitted against each other, and one team is not necessarily better than the other. They all have this immense amount of talent attached to them, because they're playing at this level in and of itself, but it's the will. The will is what's really exciting. That's what I see in filmmaking, too. The will. It's like my father and mother, everybody that I'm really attracted to, this idea of will. It's like if you will something to happen, it will happen. If you push it to that extent, if you're willing to take it further than the next person, then you have the chance of making something really great.

And also having the patience to wait out those couple of years when you said it really wasn't much of anything.

Yes. Patience and will are similar things.

Yeah. And faith I guess.

Yeah, faith. Faith is a big deal.