2.

BTdv: You've mentioned Ozu, Bresson, and Tarkovsky in the same breath when talking about influences, but only A Little Stiff has a careful and quiet formalism which could be compared to Ozu or Bresson. Your other work is hyperkinetic and technically haphazard.

CZ: A Little Stiff was my aesthetic reaction to the kind of by-the-numbers filmmaking that we were being taught in film school. My aesthetic changed after making it, and the aesthetic issues that fascinated me then were replaced by new areas of interest and fascination. Specifically, I have moved closer and closer to an aesthetic that valorizes the raw immediacy of the real.


BTdv: Paul Schrader wrote a study of transcendental film which was dedicated to analyses of Dreyer, Bresson, and Ozu. He writes, "transcendental style chooses irrationalism over rationalism, repetition over variation, sacred over profane, the deific over the humanistic, intellectual realism over optical realism, two-dimensional vision over three-dimensional vision, tradition over experiment, anonymity over individualization." Were these components of your aesthetic when you made A Little Stiff?

CZ: I love those three filmmakers, and I have definitely been influenced by all of them. But Paul Schrader's book is just a way of trying to impose categories on three filmmakers who defy categorization. It sounds good, and it's thought-provoking, but it's certainly not "true." I believe that the transcendental is less a question of style than a question of vibrational frequency. What those filmmakers all have in common is a high spiritual frequency, not a set of rhetorical strategies.


BTdv: Well, I don't think he intended this analysis to be prescriptive, but he's a strong Calvinist, so these issues interested him greatly. And they seem to interest you, too: there is a distinct thread of redemption in your work. Like Bresson—and Schrader, who pays direct tribute to Bresson (the end of Light Sleeper is identical to the end of Pickpocket)—you seem to indulge in the ritual of on-screen sacrifices, and you've made statements to that effect: you want to be a "mascot of humanity," invoking this phrase to characterize Jesus. Not bad company. Many American intellectuals and artists have a kind of flavor aversion to the subject of Jesus, having been immersed in a culture which peddles Christianity as though it's breakfast cereal, but you talk about Jesus as though you are the first to have stumbled onto him. In I Was Possessed by God, you "talk" about Jesus and the gates of heaven while in a totally delirious state. What prompts you to feel so much kinship with Jesus?

CZ: As far as I can tell, Jesus was the most evolved human being to have been incarnated on this planet. I find his teachings to be astonishingly radical—so radical, in fact, that no one seems to even understand them, let alone practice them. As for sacrifice, I think Bob Dylan is right when he says: "You're going to have to serve somebody. It may be the Devil or it may be the Lord but you're going to have to serve somebody." I don't believe in the devil, but I do believe in humility, and in the idea of service. I am trying to serve the art of cinema. Art is my religion. And I am willing to suffer in its service. Because there's no getting around it—if you try to make films, you are going to suffer. So the question becomes why? Why do it? And the answer is a religious one. Because I believe in it.


BTdv: There's a consistently disorienting element in your oeuvre. It could easily be said that each of your films is an exercise in self-fetishism ("narcissism" is too soft a word), but it could also be argued that they're all self-parody. The warts-and-all approach to autobiography is not very common, and it tends to strain the viewer's interpretive muscles. I'm curious if you see any significant difference between an audience laughing with you or laughing at you. In each of your movies there are parts where I'm torn between thinking you're terribly clever to make fun of yourself in this way or, conversely, "Poor Caveh. People will laugh at him!" Can you honestly say there's nothing masochistic in your tendency toward public self-examination?

CZ: The word "masochistic" can mean a lot of things. There's a certain amount of acceptance of suffering that is involved in making the kinds of films I make, but it's not masochistic in the sense that it gives me pleasure when people hate or judge me. I really don't see any significant difference between the audience laughing with me or at me. I'm laughing at me, too. But you're right that my films "strain the viewer's interpretive muscles," as you put it. A lot of people don't know how to interpret my films because they have no previous experience of the kind of place I'm coming from. My background is in philosophy, and I was trained to be self-critical. This is a Marxist practice, and one that I've always found fascinating. To treat oneself as subject and as object at the same time is a curious relationship to the self, and one that most people don't seem to attempt. But it strikes me as the quintessentially artistic relationship to life, in which everything becomes aestheticized. Baudelaire says: "I am the wound and the knife, the victim and the executioner." And I think that's a much richer way to experience life than by identifying with the self in a defensive and self-protective way. From where I'm coming from, the self is a problem to be overcome, not a given to be upheld.


BTdv: In the commentary on In the Bathtub of the World you admit that prior to screenings of your work, you have diarrhea and other psychosomatic manifestations of "a primal fear of being judged negatively." Yet you put yourself out there again and again to be judged. So maybe our definitions of masochism are different. Jesus chose his fate, but he was inherently divided on the issue. Is your will divided? Do you relate to the Kazantzakis remark that "My principle anguish and the source of all my joys and sorrows from my youth onward has been the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh"?

CZ: Of course my will is divided. But one strain tends to be in the ascendant, and that strain is the one that compels me to expose myself to judgment. But I see this as a sacrifice I'm willing to make for the greater good. And for me, the greater good is self-acceptance and not buying into the judgment of others. I think the judging of others is the problem, and any attempt to push the envelope of forgiveness is necessarily going to provoke judgment.


BTdv: In a recent interview, Elliot Greenebaum confessed, "I began [to make films] because I wanted to be loved—or liked. I felt that if I were a filmmaker this would happen. When I became successful I felt worse and more unsafe than before." After making the film Assisted Living, Greenebaum was not only "judged negatively" as a filmmaker but also as a human being—he was called unethical and exploitive and was compelled to write letters to journalists and audience members in order to defend himself. Similarly, you've taken it on the chin again and again—not only as a filmmaker but as a person. Critics call you narcissistic, vain, unethical, and average viewers write you hate mail.

CZ: I don't make films in order to be liked. I make films to be honest about who I am—and by extension, who mankind is—and I am willing to be judged negatively by those who feel a strong need to judge and distance themselves from others in order to feel better about themselves. Of course, I would rather be liked. But being liked isn't my goal any more than being judged negatively is my goal. My goal is to be as honest as I can be. And people who are striving for greater honesty in their own lives tend to appreciate my films, whereas people who are trying to protect a certain image of themselves tend to feel threatened by them.

It seems to me that as a society we are addicted to fantasy as a way to cope with the pain of no longer being in harmony with our true selves. Whatever the fantasy, it always involves an element of escape from the pain of being who we really are. My films are an attempt to strip away the fantasy and to see if it's possible to love and to accept who we really are. I am as addicted to fantasy as the next guy, but I find that the one thing that snaps me out of it is when another person is totally honest with me.


BTdv: One of your key theoretical preoccupations has been the idea of privacy, your conviction that the U.S. Constitution doesn't protect people from your camera. Again, I find an interesting analog in Elliot Greenebaum's experience with Assisted Living. He shot the film in a nursing home, using actual residents as part of the narrative (the film is not a documentary). Some of these people were mentally incompetent and unable to understand that they were being filmed. Now that most of these people are deceased, Greenebaum argues that the dead don't own the rights to their likeness. In this age of Reality TV, it seems there are new moral and theoretical problems arising every day. The ethics of spectatorship is beginning to concern us all. As Marguerite Duras said of the horrors of the Second World War, all of us must share in the guilt. How do you feel about Greenebaum's approach and defense? Is there any limit to the camera's impunity?

CZ: I agree with Greenebaum completely. I haven't seen his film—although I would love to—but it sounds like he did a wonderful thing to make such a film and to involve the residents of the nursing home in the making of it. I just don't get this "sanctity of the image" thing. To be a human being in the world is to be seen by others and to not be able to control how one is perceived. It's just our ontological condition. People are going to think what they want about you, whether it's true or false. It happens. I can understand that there are laws against slander. If someone says something untruthful about you in public, there should be a legal mechanism to prevent that. But to photograph someone, and then to use that in a film—whether it be a fictional film or a documentary—is nobody's business unless you are lying about them, in which case it is incumbent on them to prove that you are lying. This whole notion of owning one's image strikes me as an absurd extension of the idea of private property.


BTdv: I saw I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore on the festival circuit in the mid-nineties. It made quite an impression on me, though honestly it didn't read like a second feature. And that continues to be true of your work—each new thing seems to be made as though you've never made a movie before. Naturally, your on-screen persona is perpetually bemused (you have that deer-in-the-headlights look), but there's also a peculiar energy to the filmmaking that suggests a constant exploration of the craft. Everything always feels new somehow. That may also explain the mesmerizing quality of your monologue in Waking Life—even when you talk about filmmaking, it's as though you've just discovered it, and you can broach it with a child's carefree enthusiasm, no matter how arcane your subject matter. Do you feel that you have a more exploratory approach to filmmaking than others do? I know you admire Godard—do you feel any affinity with his constant experimentation and childlike fascination with the medium?

CZ: I do feel a deep affinity with Godard and would say that even more than Cassavetes he has been the biggest influence on my work.

My favorite thing in art is what I would call novelty. I see absolutely no point in doing what has already been done. And this is why I love Godard—because he is always striving for novelty. So many critics judge one's work in relation to a pre-conceived set of standards and expectations, but I feel they are missing the point of what art is. Art is not the same as craft. Art is novelty. Art is seeing something that one has never seen before. Art is seeing something for the first time. Diane Arbus once said, "It is what you've never seen before that you recognize."


BTdv: In a stirring essay, you write: "The medieval view of the artist is one I feel much closer to than the Enlightenment view. In the middle ages, the artist was seen as a humble servant of God, doing God's work to the best of his ability." Later in the same essay you admit to being irreligious. How do you incorporate medieval aesthetics into a religious vacuum? Andre Bazin talked about the introduction of perspective in painting as the first step toward secularism in art—mimesis as an attempt to replace God rather than exalt Him. Isn't that what art has become—a replacement for God?

CZ: I'm not sure I agree with you that art has become a replacement for God. Art is also a path to God. I don't think of myself as irreligious, except in the sense that I don't believe in or subscribe to any organized religion. I think of myself as deeply religious, in the sense that I believe in God and find the religious or spiritual dimension the most meaningful and important thing in my life. But art is my path to God, just as yoga or meditation can also be paths to God. Art is the path I've chosen because for some reason it resonates with my inner being, but it's only one path among many.