‘We The Animals” Jeremiah Zagar Talks Adapting The Novel, Crazy Drone Work, And Lynne Ramsay [Interview]

Class and ethnicity are such an omnipresent force in your movie, along with the anxieties that are produced by those things. Did you come by that naturally, as you were making this sort of gritty, independent film, or did you have to seek it out?

Justin was really involved with every step of the process. A lot of the class things weren’t clear to me in terms of my upbringing. I grew up as, like, a weird artists’ kid in a weird artists’ place where class was kind of an amorphous idea. We were I guess middle class, but we were also transient and weird, whereas Justin’s family was solidly working class. So he walked me through the kind of house that we needed to get. This was kind of an important lesson. So Justin was involved in every step of the process, and I think if I had made the film without him, the film would have been garbage. And I think you have to think about that in terms of representation. When a film is this intimate and this much a part of an author’s life, you as a director, you’re not an author, you’re a translator. I wanted to be as good a translator as I could possibly be, essentially.

In terms of race, I certainly am grappling with my son being mixed, being half-white or half-Jewish and half-black, because my wife is black. We certainly are thinking about what it means for our son to be, as Justin says, “a mutt,” having a cross-cultural identity, and it was very important for me to make the film with that in mind. But, you know, the specifics of being half-white, half-Puerto Rican is very much Justin and Raúl and Sheila’s manifestation, and they did a beautiful job of trying to understand what that means. And then we had a lot of talks with the boys in the movie about what that would mean.

It’s still very palpable, though, which I impressed me. Especially with Sheila Vand—I’m most familiar with her as an Iranian vampire in “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night,” but her performance as a white woman in your film is so authentic.

That’s a testament to her. She’s an amazing actress. When you have somebody that can become something else as fully as Sheila—she completely immersed herself in a way that I’m still in awe of. And, you know, we saw a lot of people that ethnically were closer to her role, but she was more authentic to the role of Ma than any of them, and I think that’s a testament to how amazing an actress she is. Actually, Ma, the Ma, called Justin on the phone and she was like, “I thought Sheila did an amazing job playing me in the movie.” And Justin was like, “It’s not you! It’s a fictionalized character, Mom,” and she was like, “No! She was me, and she was great!” I think that’s a wonderful testament to what Sheila did.

We’ve talked a lot about influences, and I’m wondering what you drew from or how you decided to manifest the more surreal, childishly imaginative elements of the film.

The animation comes from this Czech photocopy animation where you can actually see the texture of the paper moving, and I really love that quality. You can see the ink moving, you can see the paper moving. The film is shot on film and you can see the grain moving—we shot it and just let the grain go thick—and because the quality of the grain is so tangible and textural, and the idea of the movie was that you could feel like you could reach out and touch it, that was the same ethos of the animation. In terms of the more surreal stuff, that stuff comes from the book and is just kind of elevated by the film visually. It’s in the book, but we’re trying to figure out ways to make it bigger for a visual aesthetic. That was the main aim.

So you read, “I am flying over my neighborhood.” How do you then achieve that on film? I remember seeing that scene and being like, “Wait, how much did they make this movie for?”

Technically, in terms of flying over the neighborhood, that was a tremendously difficult thing to do. In order to do that, we had to strap a camera to a drone and we had to watch the drone from a 50-foot scissor lift.

So they dropped off a 50-foot crane, scissor-lifted us up, and we were on our own. So we were on this 50-foot scissor lift, and when something’s 50 feet up, it sways in the wind and kind of blows back and forth. Which is fucking terrifying, so I couldn’t even stand, I was so scared. I just held on. And these guys at Brooklyn Aerials, they flew the drone off the scissor lift, 50 feet in the air from a grave, up into the air and then 200 feet over treetops to a river in Amsterdam, New York. It was miraculous. I mean, they would land the drone on the scissor lift, which, that drone was so big it could cut you in half, so they had to land this thing that was so big almost in front of them without falling off. I mean, it was insane. It was the scariest thing I’ve ever done, and I would never, ever, ever do it again, ever.

That’s amazing because you could have much more easily just explained that moment in voice-over.

Sure. A lot of things could have been average. But we were looking for exceptional. I think Justin’s book is exceptional, and we wanted to honor the book. It ultimately went back to that, always, “How do we make this movie exceptional?” And so I think the ambition of the entire crew was also exceptional. All 40 people on our crew wanted the movie to be amazing. And that’s what makes a movie amazing. It’s not a director wanting a movie to be amazing, it’s everybody involved wanting the movie to be awesome and giving themselves to that movie so that it is awesome.

“We the Animals” is now playing in select theaters. You can watch the trailer below: