DAY SEVEN November 9, 2005

by Brent Simon

His latest film, co-written with his brother Jeff, is LITTLE ATHENS, and it takes place in a sun-baked Arizona town. Starring DJ Qualls, Shawn Hatosy, LOST's Jorge Garcia, Erica Leerhsen, Jill Ritchie, Michael Peña and Rachel Miner, the movie charts, with uncommon insight, a day in the lives of its marginalized, ambivalent ensemble. On the eve of its screening at AFI FEST 2005, Zuber kindly fielded a few questions about his film and his opinion of how much has--and hasn't--changed for today's youth.

AFI: LANSDOWN was so rooted in place. In your opinion, is LITTLE ATHENS similarly specific, and is setting by necessity essentially an extra character for you in film?

Zuber: Ideally, setting is an extra character in any film in the sense that setting should on its own convey mood and theme, and should provoke empathy for the (other) characters in the film. In other words, ideally, the setting has its own voice, apart from the voice of the characters, which helps to convey the story, facilitate arcs, etc. That's certainly something we strived for in LITTLE ATHENS.

AFI: There's a saying that life is a tragedy to the man who feels and a comedy to the man who thinks, yet in your films dark humor, eccentricity, pain and regret all seem to commingle. How would you best describe your point-of-view of the world?

Zuber: I don't necessarily agree with that saying. A man who feels may look at life as a tragedy, and at the same time have learned to sort of protect himself from this tragedy by having adopted a more objective perspective from which he can see the humor in this tragedy. It's been said that talented comedians often have very troubled backgrounds which have affected and continue to affect them a great deal, and the fact that they've learned to laugh and cause others to laugh at life's circumstances doesn't necessarily mean that they've stopped feeling. Laughter is merely one of a number of means of coping. With LITTLE ATHENS, we explicitly adopted a more removed perspective. For instance, we often stay outside the circle of action with a lot of wide shots, and we're very frugal about the use of close-ups or POV shots. From this removed perspective we can, hopefully, find the humor in the circumstances in which these young adults find themselves, while at the same time feeling empathy for them. In fact, I think humor can often facilitate empathy in the sense that when you're laughing, your guard is down a bit, and you can be a bit more vulnerable to empathy.

AFI: Is rehearsal a necessity in your opinion, or a luxury you can't afford on such tightly budgeted films?

Zuber: A necessity. All the more so on independent films because there isn't much time to figure things out on the set. In my opinion, to the extent possible, a film should be shot before anyone walks on the set. That being said, it's unfortunate that on independent films rehearsal time is so often hard to come by. But with LITTLE ATHENS we made sure to make time for it, and our actors were really great about making themselves available for it, even though they were all working for a song and even though they were all so busy working on other projects--projects which were almost always much higher-paying projects. As a director, I was quite fortunate in that sense, and I'm very grateful for that. Of course, I wish I had even more time for rehearsal, and I suspect most directors feel that way about most or all of their projects. This is especially true since I do very much enjoy collaborating with such talented actors, like the actors I worked with on LITTLE ATHENS.

AFI: What, if anything, do you feel is generationally specific about LITTLE ATHENS versus other day-in-the-life youth films? Have the proverbial "kids these days" changed much versus those of other generations?

Zuber: The angst that today's generation of young adults feel is something previous generations have also felt, to be sure. Nevertheless, in my opinion, it's probably even more intense today than ever before. The most extreme evidence of this includes the number of school shootings that have taken place in recent years. Sadly, they've become--or at least seem to have become--almost commonplace, and that's not something that can be said about previous generations. Kids who are lonely today seem to be lonelier than kids of previous generations, and kids who are angry today seem angrier than kids of previous generations. Of course, this increased loneliness--or at least what I perceive to be increased loneliness--is somewhat ironic in the sense that kids today are more connected to each other and to the rest of the world than ever before, with the advent of cell phones and the Internet. One of the legacies of the 1980s is that we're a more materialistic society, and that quality of our society has only increased since then. The pressure on young adults to [achieve] extreme financial success is a bit overwhelming, in my opinion. When the opportunities to do so just aren't there, some tend to get a bit lost, and feel somewhat left out of the societal mainstream. So, yes, in that sense, the notion of "kids these days" has changed. On the one hand, I hope that LITTLE ATHENS strikes a chord with all generations, but on the other hand I hope that the chord is struck in each instance by our having accurately depicted, from a more removed and objective perspective, the trials that some young adults of today's generation are going through, and how. And, hopefully, for aesthetic reasons, we've done that more incidentally as opposed to explicitly, simply by following these characters around for the course of a day, as opposed to commenting on these points directly. We wanted to allow audiences the experience of living in their shoes for a day, and to leave it at that.

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