‘Gazer’ Director Ryan J. Sloan and Star Ariella Mastroianni Talk Their Paranoid Thriller
In Gazer—their dreamy take on the neo-noir—director Ryan J. Sloan and co-writer/star/producer Ariella Mastroianni play with familiar tropes while crafting their own uncanny version of North Jersey, a liminal space our unreliable narrator haunts. It’s a quintessential slow burn that envelops you in its small yet mighty flame, entracing you until the credits roll. Finally, after a successful festival run, the film has been unleashed onto the world via Metrograph Pictures.
In Gazer:
A young mother with a unique condition that progressively affects her perception of time is trying to save money for her daughter’s future before it’s too late. She takes a risky job from a mysterious woman with a dark past, which leads her to become entangled in a tense web of revenge, deceit, and murder.
In this interview from last year’s Fantastic Fest, we spoke with Sloan and Mastroianni about shooting for over two years, the magic of film, and the importance of physicality in creating Frankie’s character.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Dread Central: Congratulations on the movie. How does it feel to have people watch it and have it play at Fantastic Fest?
Ryan J. Sloan: It feels really good to be here.
DC: You two wrote [Gazer] together, right? How’d your working relationship start?
RJS: We’ve been collaborating for 10 years, pretty much. So we’ve been making music, writing short films, just always helping each other grow and evolve. And when COVID hit, that was kind of the catalyst for us. The world shut down. Ariella was furloughed from her job at the Angelika Film Center. I, unfortunately, had to continue working.
Ariella Mastroianni: Ryan was an essential worker, he was an electrician. He was working in a prison during COVID, which was ground zero.
RJS: It was a horrible place.. There were literally people you’d see in the hallways one day, and the next day…
AM: We were living with his parents. The whole thing was scary.
RJS: Yeah, we lost our apartment. It was rough.
So we were like, “Listen, everything’s falling apart. We don’t know if there will be a world to come back to. Let’s make that movie.” One of my favorite things to do in the world is to show people new movies. So I’m always showing Ariella something she hasn’t seen or vice versa. We were going through a lot of films like The Third Man and De Palma’s Blow Out, and we were just really inspired to make something in that vein. So we began writing in 2020 and got into production in 2021. We made a hard deadline, so we were shooting in April 2021.
DC: No, that’s smart. The only way you ever get anything done with filmmaking is to set those deadlines. It’s so easy to sit on something for so long.
RJS: Actually talking about Island Escape, the director, Bruce Wemple, what I love about Bruce is I always related him to Roger Corman in a way. He takes such small resources and he fucking plows through and makes it. I’ve learned a lot from him, and we used a lot of that ethos on Gazer.
DC: I’m glad you talked a little bit about Blow Out and the inspiration. I loved the noir element of Gazer, and usually, I’m so used to seeing a guy as the noir lead. So it was cool to have Frankie be our neo noir detective of sorts. What draws you to this genre?
RJS: I think for me, I’ve always loved those films. I grew up watching those films. My mother was in an accident when I was very young, and she was bedridden for many years, so the only way for her to kind of experience the outside world was through movies. So I spent a lot of time with her just watching things. She was a huge Pacino, De Niro, Kittel fan.
So yeah, those are just kind of the films that I grew up on and I’ve always just identified with. People talk about horror and how you can pack so many different messages into horror. It’s such a good vessel for that. But I also think that these people living on the outskirts of society and dealing with everyday struggles and nobody giving a shit, as well as what people are willing to do and how far they’re willing to go are just things I’ve always been interested in.
DC: Ariella, you also play Frankie. You’re on screen almost the whole time, and there’s so much interiority with this character. So what was it like writing that character but then also getting into her headspace?
AM: Yeah, I mean, it was difficult. Just the whole way we approached shooting, I’m surprised we were able to sustain it for as long as we did.
DC: How long did you guys shoot?
AM: We shot over two and a half years.
DC: Oh, wow.
RJS: Literally one or two weekends in April and November for two and a half years.
DC: So this is really a weekend project, doing it on your spare time type thing.
RJS: We paid for everything ourselves, and we didn’t have any help or anything. We even reached out to Kodak.
AM: I try to have a healthy separation when playing characters. For me personally, I don’t find it to be sustainable, to be in that mode all the time. But I think working on Frankie for that long…
RJS: It was bleeding over.
AM: It was bleeding over. There were certain habits that I was developing that were coming from Frankie. I mean, there was a moment, I think last year. Frankie’s such an internal quiet [character], she’s kind of living like a ghost. She’s very small in the world. I had someone, an acting teacher, sometime last year, ask, “Why are you hiding? What is happening with you?” I was like, “I don’t know. I played Frankie for two and a half years. I need to not.”
But I think to that point, because the shooting schedule was so difficult, and Ryan and I were wearing many hats, one thing that we discussed—which is not always how I approach something, but it made a lot of sense for this—was Frankie’s physicality. We worked very hard on it. We used it as a drop-in point for her.
So it’s like if we’re running around and taking lunch orders and putting up lights and doing whatever, if there was a physical shape Frankie had, I can at least start with that shape and have that.
DC: That’s so smart. Especially when you don’t have the back-to-back days to maintain that. I wanted to transition to talking about the 16 mm film itself. Especially for your first feature, why shoot Gazer on film?
RJS: Well, most of the films that I love and adore and that I grew up watching were shot on film. That’s number one.
Number two, I just think that there is something so magical about the process of shooting on film. I think that digital is so mathematical. It’s zeros and ones and film is this kind of this magical process. This film is running through this black box, capturing light, and creating this chemical reaction. You don’t really know what you’re getting until it comes back from the bath and there’s something so stressful about that.
But also there’s this level of discipline. I think this is the first time that many people were shooting on film. This was maybe the second time our DP ever shot on film.
DC: Oh, wow.
RJS: I think I was probably the most experienced one with shooting on film. So I wasn’t nervous about it, but it was amazing to see people suddenly lock in as soon as we were prepping to go. The amount of rehearsal that we had to do before that to get everybody ready to go. Our first AC had to measure where everybody was going to be. She was actually probably the most experienced. That’s why I hired her.
AM: Yeah, Nicole was our first hire.
RJS: Yeah. I watched the film that she did, and I told Matt, our DP, “That’s who we’re getting.” And he’s like, “I know a couple other people.” I said, “No, we’re getting her.” She was phenomenal. We love her. But seeing everybody, even the actors, everybody just locking in and getting excited. There was this energy on set. We would only do one to two takes. That’s all we could do. That’s all.
DC: I guess you can’t really do the usual take, take, take. You have to be prepped and ready to go. You don’t have a lot of chances to get it right.
RJS: We had certain scenes, like the diner scene, what you see shot, we didn’t shoot beyond that. So it was edited in camera. We had to do that a lot.
DC: Oh boy.
RJS: Which I’ve had a lot of experience doing growing up. So the main thing was trusting the actors and them being completely comfortable and aware of what they were doing, and also having the freedom to play in those moments.
AM: I also think it was a hard but necessary kind of thing for Ryan to do because Ryan was so good at making sure we were all prepared, but not prepared in a scared way. You want everyone on set to be prepared, but also to feel like there is space to play. That is such a hard line to navigate. But I think from a performer’s perspective, Ryan did that really well.
RJS: Yeah. And I think as a director, I don’t want to work with puppets. I want human beings who are going to offer something. And that’s what we did casting-wise. Obviously Ariella, her performance speaks for itself. But yeah, everybody brought something to the table.
I storyboarded all of Gazer, but some I didn’t even show to Matt. We would get on set and it was amazing to see the scenes either happen exactly as it was planned or change. You’ve got to be open to that because, to me, it’s the best idea. We all want to make the best movie possible.
DC: Hell yeah. So are you making another one, the two of you together?
AM: Gazer was always meant to be the first of three in a voyeur trilogy. Actually, in Gazer, we have hints for the next film on billboards and other external elements, like the radio.
Gazer is out now in select theaters from Metrograph Pictures.
Categorized:Interviews
