My First, My Last, My Everything:
An Interview with Zia Anger
By Juan Barquin
My First Film is a beautiful patchwork, stitching together pieces from director Zia Anger’s own life—including a number of goofy Instagram stories—and her art, from short films to the abandoned first feature film she ever sort-of made: Always All Ways, Anne Marie. This unreleased feature hangs heavy over My First Film, which was also the focus of a live traveling performance art piece that kicked off at New York’s Spectacle Theater in 2018 before going on the road (and virtually in 2020 at the height of the COVID epidemic). In it, Anger herself never speaks, instead chronicling her filmmaking journey through text on a MacBook screen and the myriad videos that pop up on it.
The feature film version of My First Film is less an adaptation of the live show than a fresh way for Anger to tell a personal story. At its core is Vita (an obvious avatar for Zia, played by Odessa Young), a young woman navigating the making of her first feature film and the trials and failures that come with that experience.
My First Film is surprisingly optimistic in the face of the cringeworthy and toxic behavior that the fictional director and her crew contend with on set. In spite of all the failure and frustration, it’s a film with a deep affection for the craft of filmmaking and the fools who have dedicated their lives to it. In sitting down over Zoom with Anger ahead of the film’s premiere on MUBI, we discussed the pitfalls and pleasures of telling a story in different mediums and whether or not one can actually attain catharsis through art.
Reverse Shot: What made you want to approach this story through a different medium, moving from performance piece to feature film?
Zia Anger: I never stopped wanting to make films. I could envision myself being a performance artist for the rest of my life, but I really wanted to fall back in love with making films. I was so skeptical that I ever could, but I wanted to get back out there. I never forgot the feeling of what it’s like to be out in the woods with your five best friends, making something that you think is great. So that was always the goal: to fall back in love. And I always knew that it might suck, and it might not work out, and I might totally regret it. And I also knew that I might never get to make anything again, like maybe I wouldn’t even get to make this film. Maybe I would get to make this film, but then I would not get to make another one, so I am very humbled by my experiences and the experience of [potentially] not getting to make something again.
And I did fall back in love with making movies. I had the most amazing cast and crew, the 22 days we shot were totally a dream and went off without a single problem, and that is not a credit to me. That is credit to the producers, to the cinematographer, to everybody from the camera assistants to the PAs to the cast; they made it happen and they did it in such a beautiful way and so kindly. They were all just so wonderful and fun, but then we had all this footage—and then we’re like, “Now we gotta edit this film.”
RS: What was it like trying to figure out the right approach to molding something so densely metatextual?
ZA: It started to get really crazy because the film was always going to incorporate the footage from the original film, and I was always going to appear at the end of it, but we didn’t know how much of the typing was going to be on screen, or that the Instagram videos were going to be in it, or the Maya Deren film would be in it. But I was working with two editors, Joe Bini and Matt Hannam, both of whom are incredible storytellers. Joe, from the very beginning, was interested in telling the story using everything we had available to us, and that’s what we started to do. When the character of Dina would say the Maya Deren quote, he was like, “Let’s get that footage and see what it looks like.” And it made sense all of a sudden. If you showed it to film scholars, maybe they would understand the movie without all this stuff in it, but I don’t want to show it to those people. I want to show it to people that don’t even know about films, who are like me [laughs].
Using everything we had was the best way to tell the story and most accurately represented what was happening in my own mind—which was incredibly complex and nuanced, incredibly comedic and tragic—and it all just made a lot more sense, so we just kept going with it and going with it. And then I got to work with Matt and he kept going with it even more and kind of challenging me. Both editors really challenged me, which was amazing and I learned more filmmaking editing than I’ve ever learned in my life.
RS: While watching the film, I kept thinking back to watching the live performance in Miami at Borscht, and it had me reflecting on how many young filmmakers I met and worked with there who were all given the chance to make a movie and thrown into a situation that sometimes they could barely manage, just like you were. And I wondered if there’s anything you think the film says to people who have gone through this, or haven’t yet, or if there’s anything beyond the film you’d want to say to them.
ZA: Take your time to be very, very sure that this is what you want to do and try a lot of different things. Live your life and don’t only try to make films because it is not something that just happens to everybody. I’m incredibly lucky that I got to make this film, and there’s a lot of reasons that I got to make it, but it will not happen for everybody. It’s funny that you’re mentioning Borscht because I remember, when I did that performance, it was on my birthday, and it was the last performance I was ever going to do. It was really memorable, even though I did a couple more after and then COVID hit, but I actually wanted to take acid before I did that performance, and I didn’t.
RS: You’d just flown in that very morning, hadn’t you?
ZA: Yes! I was already totally high! But, as the older me looking back on the younger me—the reason why I bring up the acid is because, bear with me, there is nothing as amazing in life as the oneness you feel when you are getting to make something with your friends. You do not need drugs to do that, you do not need acid to be there, and I think that’s when I started to realize that, when I was doing that performance, that was actually the highest I would ever be. I don’t need Adderall, I don’t need acid, I don’t need alcohol; I’m just high on life, baby! Which is totally crazy and cliché to say, but…
RS: I think that’s beautiful though! It’s corny, but the film itself is functioning on that same high of genuine joy.
ZA: I mean, we were riding the wave; it’s all these endorphins and oxytocin and all that stuff that comes along with making something like this; that’s the best stuff you’re ever gonna get in your life.
RS: It even extends down to that line in the credits, “we are all the authors of this film,” and the scene where you let the camera float by the entire cast and crew. How does it feel to come this far and navigate this whole journey, not just with yourself, but with a lot of the people who were with you for years and years?
ZA: The co-writer, Billy [Feldman], was there in the beginning—he was the first AC and I let him be the producer because he could get us the camera, so I was like, “You should be there.” And then Ashley [Connor] was the cinematographer; she had never shot a feature before, but she would go on to shoot Josephine Decker’s first couple features [Butter on the Latch, Thou Wast Mild & Lovely]. And I think that friendship, true friendship and true creative collaboration, is like poetry. There’s not really anything I could say right now about working with these people in particular that is more profound than, or even as profound as what it was like to work with them. And I think the film kind of feels like that. It could have all gone a completely different way considering the first experience that I had, which was alienating absolutely everybody around me, and credit to the people that came back and did want to work with me. That includes my dad [Ruby Max Fury], that includes Abram [Kurtz] who plays Cash and played the boyfriend in the first one—and I’m really grateful for all of those people for coming back, because they taught me a lot about friendship and collaboration that I did not know.
RS: I’m so curious about how that extends to working with Odessa [Young], because obviously there’s such a huge difference in telling the story between you directing yourself through a MacBook screen versus an actual avatar of yourself.
ZA: When I was doing the performance, I was like, “This is totally awesome. I am alone and I can do anything I want!” Then I realized that if I was going to make a film, I had to do better than I had in the past with collaborators. And so a big part of that was letting go of the control that I thought I needed to have, trusting that I would make the right decision about a collaborator and that they would go out and would have their own take on it. They would do it in their own way, but it would be better than any way that I would direct them to.
Odessa is just this incredibly talented actor who, from the minute I met her, I kind of thought we had enough of the same energy and she resonated with me as Vita. I didn’t think about casting myself as much as I thought about energy, finding somebody that could go there in terms of the tragedy, and the comedy, and that could be totally hateable, but, by the end, be somebody that you want to hug and love. I knew that she could do all those things, but the incredible challenge was just letting her. It was giving her whatever she needed to then make her own decisions. So I gave her every piece of information that she wanted about my personal life, from back then to now. I gave her every email that she wanted. I did an analysis of the entire thing with her and we did a huge amount of movement direction with Monica Mirabile, just to find the dance qualities and the embodiment of who this character was. And then it came time to shoot and it was just jaw-dropping, because everybody heard her speak for the first time. I have a very classic Central New York accent and she was all of a sudden doing that but, not in a bad actor way, just like she was really there. It wasn’t like looking at myself as much as it was like being around somebody who was incredibly familiar, and as the film went on, we just felt closer and closer together.
RS: Though you say you didn’t see her necessarily as yourself, you can’t totally remove yourself from her, right? Was there also some level of catharsis because she kind of is you?
ZA: At a certain point, I had to be very objective about what we were doing, so a lot of [that remove] was out of necessity. I can’t be breaking down about this stuff that she is going through, I’ve already done that.
RS: You don’t want to repeat the same cycle you’re talking about.
ZA: Exactly. I got to go through all of these things, but I got to see myself from this outside perspective and, in that way, got to really love and care for myself in ways that I, in the past, hadn’t. I think there’s an arc there in the story or in her work where you go from being like “this is a despicable person” to being like “this is somebody that could be loved.” And I don’t know when that arc happens, but I think it does happen.
RS: See I almost want to challenge you on that because I don’t think she’s that despicable. I think you’re maybe too hard on yourself. [laughs]
ZA: Maybe that speaks more to the—this is the dirty word—but the “universality” of the story, right? We’re all despicable at 23! Like, I was disgusting [laughs] So I think a lot of people seeing it are not going to say “yeah, she’s disgusting” because a lot of us had really shitty boyfriends and rolled 5000 cigarettes a day and conned all their friends into doing something for them. And it was all really well-meaning, but it was just very naive. So, I think that might speak to more of how we’ve all had this experience, but, on paper, Vita is kind of gross.
RS: I think part of the film is about forgiving yourself to some extent for those shitty things that you know you did. But, to press again, do you think you reached catharsis with that period in your life, or do you think catharsis is something you can’t actually land on?
ZA: Catharsis comes and goes. I think that the literal act of making it, of filming it, of shooting it, was incredibly cathartic; that is the creative side of me, and I really found that. But then there’s this other side, which is the icky side of you, that you’re always going to have to have in order to make it in this world. The world is a really difficult and hard place to live in—wouldn’t it be so wonderful if it was totally utopian, and no one had to work or make difficult decisions? What a way to live. But having to be that person too means that I don’t think I will ever necessarily find catharsis.
What I’m working on now is allowing those two things to be separate and understanding when I have to switch roles; not letting one side infect the other. It feels like catharsis is something that you find when you’re making stuff and that creative spirit is something that one has to protect if they ever want to do it again and again. Filmmaking is a capitalist art form, it is not straight-up art, because literally one frame of film costs money.
RS: The film is honest about everything that comes with making a movie and especially being a woman in an industry that wants to box you into something.
ZA: It’s definitely a balance between things, and I don’t think you can dwell too much, because what I’ve learned is that maybe it’s not too interesting to dwell on how much it sucks. You can make an entire film about how much it sucks, but to sit in that is not particularly interesting because everybody is going through it too, and not in a life-affirming way like “It happens to a lot of people. It’s just that nobody talks about it.” Like, no, we all know, we don’t need to talk about it.
RS: If you’re not showing that balance, what’s the point?
ZA: Everything is always really complicated and audiences understand that complication and are able to hold all of those things at once. That’s what I was going for and I think, in looking back at yourself, one thing that’s really cool is acknowledging that, back then, I didn’t know how the film industry worked and that naiveness was really beautiful. That naiveness is not forever, and it’s really nice being young and making films and not knowing how things work; you’re not worried about who you’re casting, or how it’s going to be received, or what someone says online about it. It’s honestly really cool to just go out and do it. Looking back, that not knowing, that’s the part of myself that I loved the most.