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“A Redemption Story That Gets Derailed By a Revenge Story”: Ariella Mastroianni and Ryan J. Sloan on Gazer
Gazer There are a set of rules that have long-guided ultra-low and microbudget production. Lots of daylight exteriors, one or two central locations (to minimize company moves and location rental cost), a small cast, no stunts, no child actors and a compressed shooting schedule. If today it’s not uncommon to see a 24-day schedule on films of $12 million, and most independents with sub $3-million budgets are boarded between 18 and 24 days, a filmmaker considering their first ultra-low-budget picture should think about going even lower, to 11 or 12 days, even. And, of course, shooting digital is probably the economically wise decision.
Knowing the above, then, Ryan J. Sloan’s, Gazer, co-written by starring Ariella Mastroianni, is something of a marvel as it blithely sidesteps all of this accepted wisdom. Shot on 16mm over 30 days, it’s the tale of a woman, Frankie, afflicted with dyschronometria, a condition that prevents the accurate assessment of the passage of time. A single mom, Frankie has lost both custody of her daughter as well as her job for reasons related to the day-to-day management of her condition. She meets Paige (Renee Gagner) at a trauma support group and accepts the woman’s financial offer to steal the car that will allow her to get away from her abusive partner. Frankie completes what turns out to be a dangerous mission but is stiffed by Paige, who never picks up the car, which turns out to have a dead body in the trunk. What follows is a twisty noir with multiple cat-and-mouse games in play, all seen through the viewpoint of a protagonist immersed in necessary self-doubt at every moment. The film’s commercial and industrial areas of New Jersey form a gritty dreamscape, Mastroianni gives an alert, arresting and ultimately very empathetic lead performance, and the filmmakers have incorporated some obvious influences — classic film noir, Dancer in the Dark, Memento, The Conversation and, with its flashes of body horror, Cronenberg — into an original debut that stands out in terms of subject matter, style and resourceful execution from much of today’s American independent film.
Gazer was last year’s surprise world premiere in Cannes’s Directors Fortnight, and it was subsequently picked up by Metrograph Pictures, which currently has it in theatrical release. I spoke with Sloan and Mastroianni around the corner from New York’s Metrograph Theater about their origins as filmmakers, the screenwriting process, Ariella’s balance of acting and producing, and Sloan’s momentary status as a wanted man during the production.
Filmmaker: How did you get into filmmaking? Neither of you have many shorts credits on your iMDBs, and now you’ve made a first feature that premiered in Cannes Directors Fortnight. What led up to that?
Sloan: I grew up in New Jersey, and my mother was a big cinephile. She had an accident when I was pretty young and was bedridden for many years. She was madly in love with people like Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, and Harvey Keitel, and I would sit with her and watch films. So, my cinephilia kind of began through her. I had access to a Super 8 camera and some digital cameras, and when Titanic came out, I memorized all of Leonardo DiCaprio’s parts. My mom was like, “Oh, maybe you want to be an actor?” And I was like, “Who tells actors what to do?” “That’s the director.” And right away I knew that was what I wanted to do.
Filmmaker: And how did the two of you begin collaborating?
Sloan: I met Ariel when she was 14. I was 17, and we connected over art, music and film. Over the years, we just kept talking about making a movie together. When COVID hit, it made sense to buckle down. I started working as an electrician when I was 13, and Ariella was working corporate, working for an agency, and then for the Angelica Film Center.
Mastroianni: I was in the programming team. It was right before the pandemic, and then I was furloughed.
Sloan: Ariella, at least, was circling the world that we wanted to be in, but I was so far from it.
Filmmaker: Were you an electrician on films?
Sloan: No. Residential work on people’s homes. After Cannes, I thought that might change.
Mastroianni: But right after Cannes, he went back to doing electrical work, and I was waitressing. We were at the Camera D’Or dinner, and then two days later, someone was yelling at me about their Caesar salad.
Filmmaker: So, you went straight to a feature without making shorts?
Mastroianni: We did one project together. My brother had passed, and the only way that I knew how to deal with it was to try to write something. It was the first kind of venture into filmmaking, but it was more like a way to grieve. We just got our friends together and shot a little something, but we kept it mostly private. But that same core team who helped us ended up doing Gazer, which was nice.
Filmmaker: How did you put that core team together?
Sloan: The first person that that we got on was our first AC, Nicole Lehrman, I saw a film called Whelm, which was shot on 16mm. It came out in 2020, during the pandemic, while we were writing. The film was beautiful, and I was most impressed by how sharp it was. So, I reached out to her, and I was like, “Listen, I don’t have a lot of money. We’re gonna be shooting on weekends. It might take a long time, but I need you.”
Filmmaker: Wait, she was your first AC, not your DP?
Sloan: Yes, the first AC. When I reached out to the cinematographer [Matheus Bastos], I was like, “So I have your first AC.” And he was like, “Well, I want to vet them. “No, this is your first AC. This is just part of the deal.” Luckily, they worked [well together]. They’re actually in LA together now shooting, so they’ve stuck together.
Filmmaker: As a producer I’ll say that unless the DP brings their own first, it can sometimes be a hard position to fill on a very low-budget film.
Sloan: Oh yeah, she’s the best. She stuck with us throughout the whole process and kept everything sharp and beautiful. She obviously knows how to work a camera. She also has a director’s eye. There were certain moments, like on a couple of shots, where she would just without asking permission pull [focus] all the way so everything blurs out. It’s beautiful. After I yelled cut, she would say, “I hope I didn’t overstep,” but it was great, and those are the kind of people I want to work with.
Filmmaker: How’d you connect with your cinematographer, Matheus?
Sloan: [Ariella and I] were working on a friend’s short film together. I was AD’ing.
Mastroianni: I was bringing the bagels.
Sloan: And we needed a gaffer. I reached out to a teacher friend at William Paterson University, and he recommended Matheus. I remember one day on set, it was a slow day, and we were kind of done. Matt just asked if he could take the camera and get an insert shot of something. The cinematographer was a gentleman and said, “Sure, go ahead.” And I watched him capture this one moment [involving] a pan and a tilt up, and I thought, he’s got an eye. We immediately asked him if he wanted to do that short film about Ariel’s brother, and the rest is history.
Filmmaker: Throughout all of this conversation, you’re basically talking about being a producer as well as a director. You have producers on the film, but what’s your relationship to them?
Mastroianni: A lot of the producers who are credited on the film came on after Cannes. [Executive producer] Sean [Glass] is a friend, and he called me after the Cannes announcement. He said, “Congratulations, but this is a whole other process.” He and Emily [Korteweg, executive producer] helped us navigate Cannes and then the Metrograph [acquisition]. We couldn’t have done it without them. But the actual production of the film was mostly just Ryan and I. We credited Bruce [Wemple, co-producer]. He’s a buddy who does microbudget genre films in two weeks for 20 grand. He was very helpful. But for most of the process, it was just Ryan and I pulling favors.
Sloan: We shot on weekends in April and November for two and a half years. And by weekends, I mean, like a Friday, Saturday, Sunday, here and there.
Filmmaker: And why April and November?
Sloan: I was trying to keep the seasons aligned. We wanted it to feel like it was a transition into winter. We wanted it to feel colder, but we didn’t want to shoot in the winter. In November, we were waiting until all the leaves died and the trees were bare, and then in April, we were trying to race the trees. The shitty thing about shooting over two and a half years [on weekends] is that you build up momentum, and by Sunday, you’re in it. And then Monday morning you have to go back to work because you don’t have money to shoot Monday morning. Every shoot I had to prepare a new speech to get people excited again. But the very first speech I gave everybody was built in with a quote from Tarantino, about how if you truly love cinema, you can’t help but make a great film. You carry that passion, that energy, and you inspire the people around you to trust you. You can get everyone on the same page [if you say], “Listen, I’m not doing this for fucking money. I don’t know if it’s gonna go anywhere. I’ll feed you really well, transport you and give you a place to sleep. But, I’m doing this because I love this medium, and I need to tell this story. Will you help me?”
Mastroianni: Some people won’t go for it.
Sloan: Some people won’t go for it. You want people that are on board. You want psychopaths. You need psychopaths.
Mastroianni: I think what convinced our friends to stay on with us for so long is that Ryan and I, in addition to doing the other roles [on the film], were working three jobs. I was working for someone out in California as a virtual assistant — data entry kind of stuff — before my job at the Angelika, from 5:00 AM to 9:00 AM. I’d go to the Angelika from 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM. And then we’d have music gigs from 7:00 to 11:00 PM.
Filmmaker: What kind of music?
Mastroianni: We played private events.
Sloan: Ariel is a great singer, and I play guitar. We would also go down to Atlantic City and play covers from 10 PM to 2:00 AM.
Mastroianni: And then we would write.
Filmmaker: There are no more hours left in the day!
Sloan: Well, our breaks would be 45 minutes. We would go up to our room and write and then watch South Park and pass out at the end of the night.
Mastroianni: That was two and a half years. It’s one thing to be passionate and to ask people to give their time for less than their pay, but I think a big part [of our ability to do that] was just showing, showing them how much we were putting into the film.
Sloan: Shooting over two and a half years, by the end, people start dropping like flies, and I don’t blame them. I get it. It got to a point where it was just Arielle and I with a camera and a boom. And, you know, a lot of the time we would just tell the audio guy, “Don’t even roll. We just need to capture this now. People are walking by, cops are coming, we gotta go.” And then, post shooting, Ariel and I would go back to the locations in the middle of the night, she would walk around with a laptop in her hands [and watch the footage], and I would hold the boom.
Filmmaker: Basically, you’re doing live ADR.
Sloan: That’s right, yeah.
Filmmaker: So how many separate shoots went into the film?
Mastroianni: Probably six, because we had one summer [shoot] for the nightmare sequences.
Sloan: It was 30 days. We didn’t have any permits. All the locations were from customers of mine, and then the ones that weren’t, well, you know, we were shooting on the street. There would be certain days where [the location] would be [one] Ariel and I scouted, and then we go on the day, and it would be jam-packed with new signs and advertising. So, we would drive around until we found [a better location]. We were really stretched thin. We had a little car accident at one point. We were using our van as a dolly, and we were reversing in the opposite direction of where the cars are going
Mastroianni: We did a little tap [of another car’s front bumper].
Filmmaker: Wait, what happened?
Sloan: I’m operating the camera because our DP wasn’t available. Ariella’s holding the boom, and we bumped into somebody. I put the camera down and said, “I’m so sorry, are you okay?” And she’s like, “You fucked with the wrong bitch today! And were you using a camera?” “No cameras,” I said. We had to wait six hours for a cop, so our shooting day was fucked. We had a lot of things like that happen. I was wanted for murder at one point.
Filmmaker: What!?!
Sloan: Well, not murder but for a missing person. We were shooting the interrogation scene. I built that room in my dad’s basement. My phone is on silent, but I look at it and see that I got 10 missed calls from my mom, a handful from my dad and my brother. But, you know, we’re shootingr so I’m not responding to anybody.
Mastroianni: If you remember the interrogation scene, we have these printouts of a dead body, right? We had had our friend Graham go to CVS to print those out in the morning.
Sloan: He prints those out, he uses my card, which has my name on it, and he doesn’t tell them that it’s for a movie. At the end of the day, we’re loading out, everything went well, and I called my mom. “What’s going on?” She’s hysterical. “What did you do? The police were here and are looking for you.” What happened, apparently, was the night before, a town over, a woman went missing. There was blood found on the trunk of her car, and in the pictures we took we have a dead woman in the trunk of a car. So, the cops thought that I was involved with the missing person. I call the cops and I’m like, “Hey, this is Ryan Sloan.” “Where are you? We need you to come to the station.” I was like, “Well, I can’t do that right now because I have a whole crew that hasn’t eaten yet, and I need to take them to dinner. Will you meet us where we’re going?” And they’re like, “No, we need you to come in.” “I can’t come in, but I will be at this restaurant because I need to feed people. You can come and see us, you’ll see I have a camera and that this whole thing is silly.” They came to the Mexican restaurant, checked us out, saw the camera and let us go. But there was a moment when I was wanted in a missing persons case.
Mastroianni: And all I could think was that our photos looked good. Our art department did a good job.
Filmmaker: For a film made with few financial resources, you made a lot of decisions in the writing process that didn’t make it easy on yourselves. You’ve got lots of night work, stunts, some scenes with a young child, and, of course, many, many locations. It’s kind of the opposite of a small-scale indie based around a single location and not much at night.
Sloan: All the advice we got we went against, but not on purpose. As we were writing, we’re just like, “Oh, fuck, oh, fuck.” And then, “Whatever it is, let’s just for it.” It’s a miracle, it really is. It’s a miracle any movie gets made.
Filmmaker: Why were you so wedded to shooting on film?
Sloan: I have always just been attracted to film, as I mentioned. Growing up, I had access to a Super 8 camera. It’s just such a magical device. And [shooting film] you have to be calculated. You have to measure what you’re doing and know what you want because if you don’t, you’re wasting time and money. Quick story about the camera we used on Gazer. I bought an American Cinematographer magazine from a woman on eBay for [a story on Blade Runner]. She sent me a message saying that this was his son’s magazine. He was a New York City firefighter and a film enthusiast, William Pietra, who had passed. She and I go back and forth over months, becoming pen pals. I tell her that I’m in the market to find a 16mm camera, that I want to shoot my first film on celluloid because I believe in the medium, and I think we need to keep it alive before it disappears. She goes, “My son owned a 16mm camera, and my husband and I aren’t ready to get rid of it, but when we are, I’ll give you first dibs.” On eBay these cameras go for $6,000 to $8,000, and it was going to take me years to save up for this. And then a week later, she’s like, “I spoke to my husband, we’re going to get it appraised and wherever it lands, you have first dibs.” They brought the camera and all the gear to this Manhattan company, who appraised it for $1,000. I said to her, “Helen, the camera is worth $6,000 to $8,000.” She said, “I made you a deal, take it or leave it.” So, we ended up grabbing it, and we dedicated the film to her son. When we got into Cannes, I called Helen right away and said, “Your son is going to Cannes because his name is on the film.”
Filmmaker: Ariella, I want ask you about acting, because you talked about driving a truck during a shot, but you’re also in front of the camera. Tell me about that process of juggling acting with production details as well as the fact that you’re a screenwriter too.
Mastroianni: Everyone on this film had to wear many different hats. I think I’ve always been a sort of self-starter in that way. I grew up in Canada, in a very small town outside Toronto, where there was no access to the arts. I always wanted to perform, and when I was about eight or nine, I went to the principal’s office, and [said], “I’ve written a play. Can I put it up during the assembly?” In college, I studied journalism, but it wasn’t enough to study it, so I started a magazine, Naked, with a friend, and it ended up doing pretty well by the end. We shot Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber. Zendaya was one of our early covers. My process has always been, if I wanted to do something, I had to make it happen. For [my acting on this film], Ryan and I relied a lot on a very strict rehearsal process. What helped me manage producing and acting, being so split, was mapping out Frankie’s physicality throughout the film. That ended up being an important anchor. Her journey is very intense, and if I had days where I was going to be stretched thin, if there was a physical shape that she had, that would be the thing that would kind of drop me into character. So, we spent a lot of time just mapping out, if this were a silent film, how would her physicality express what she’s going through?
Filmmaker: How would you describe those physical states?
Mastroianni: In the beginning of the film, Frankie lives as a ghost. She’s a voyeur. She has learned to live this way with her condition. She’s very internal, she lives very small. She doesn’t want to be seen. A lot of her physicality is inward, so my head is down. I’m not making a lot of eye contact, I’m hiding, but as I become more active in the mystery and in clearing my name, you start to see Frankie’s voice and body take up more space. By the end of the film, she is fully open, fully present, and her voice is being used. So, we kind of like built that shape throughout the film. And most of my [performance] was just one take.
Sloan: I’d say 90% of Ariel’s stuff was one take. Knowing each other for so long, we had such a tight connection, and writing [the script] together, we have all this background, all this built-in backstory. I knew that at the very least, if I needed to work on any actor, it wouldn’t be Ariella. I knew I could count on her to nail it. And there were a lot of [scenes] where we would [shoot] Ariella last every time, which was very generous of you.
Mastroianni: In terms of shooting on film, there were two things [that enabled that decision]. Ryan storyboarded the whole thing, and we didn’t do full takes of coverage. If you look at the diner scene, it wasn’t that we did the whole scene on me, the whole scene on Renee, and the whole two-shot. I would do up to a line, then we would cut up to [another] line.
Filmmaker: To save money on film.
Sloan: To mainly save money on film. We cut one scene completely, but other than that, there’s nothing on the cutting room floor. Another interesting story: We did our short film about Ariella’s brother in Ireland at the time The Lobster came out. We love that film, Yorgos Lanthimos, and Yorgos’s collaboration with his editor, Yorgos Mavropsaridis. So, we found Yorgos [Mavropsaridis’s] information online, reached out to him, and had him edit that short. Over the years, he’s [Oscar]-nominated for The Favorite and Poor Thing. I did a two-hour and 20-minute cut of Gazer that I felt good about but knew something was wrong. I reached out to him and said, “Yorgos, the game plan was to have money set aside to pay you to edit this film. We don’t have the money. Would you be open to taking a peek at it and just letting us know what you think?” And he was generous enough to give us his notes. We went back and applied his notes. His main note was that we could be more brave.
Mastroianni: More daring with the edit.
Sloan: And we did just that. And because of him, I believe, we were able to cut this down to one hour and 54 minutes and get into Cannes.
Filmmaker: I understand, Ariella, that the neurological condition you found by reading a book by Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.
Mastroianni: Yes. As I was reading, I thought it was fascinating, and I started to wonder if there was a condition that wasn’t memory-based but more a lack of knowing how much time is passing. So, I ended up finding dyschronometria and came across an article where a woman described how it was to live with it. It was more about the emotional journey of living with it rather than the actual mechanics of the condition, and that became the framework for Frankie. We always wanted to make a noir, but we wanted to do a character study.
Sloan: We were inspired too by Paul Schrader’s man-in-a-room films. One of the first films I saw, when I was about six years old, was Taxi Driver. And that man in a room, he obviously has a mental illness. We can say that now but back them I’m sure they couldn’t articulate that. But this [character] who is struggling with themselves and a condition and trying to make a connection in the world – that was fascinating to us. We’ve never seen a woman in this role, a woman-in-a-room, so that was intriguing.
Mastroianni: We always say that Gazer is a redemption story that gets derailed by a revenge story. Frankie’s arc is getting to her daughter, but then this thing happens that throws her off the path.
Filmmaker: Did you have that line, that statement of intent, from the beginning? It’s a good one.
Mastroianni: At the beginning. We knew we always wanted to be on this path. Dancer in the Dark is one of my favorite films, and that was a major reference. But, gosh, we ran through a lot of when mapping out the story. We ended up writing the story a couple of times because we went through every character’s perspective.
Sloan: We were very inspired by Carol Reed’s The Third Man. The writer, [Graham] Green, made a whole novel and went through every single character’s journey. He knew where everybody was. But when you go into [the movie], you’re just following Joseph Cotton. We did a similar thing.
Mastroianni: The whole thing is from Frankie’s perspective. And because all the off-screen mystery is what affects her, we had to map out exactly what Henry, Paige and Claire were doing to see at what points their journeys connected. We knew we had to have certain anchor points. Everyone was an individual following their own mystery, and that was always very exciting to us. We had to do two things. We had to build the false mystery, this disappearance of Page, for the first half, and then once the turn happens, we had to unravel the true mystery, which was fun, but it was very difficult.
Sloan: It’s fun, because the audience is Frankie. We’re able to use misdirection because if Frankie believes then the audience believes. That was the guiding light for us. If she’s not going to believe a story point, then the audience is not going to believe it.
Mastroianni: It’s helpful too that Frankie’s not a detective but an amateur detective. So, what information can she get, have access to, and what can’t she get? Those limitations are helpful.
Filmmaker: What’s next for you guys?
Mastroianni: Gazer is always intended to be first of three in a voyeur trilogy, and we had been outlining the second film for about a year, and we’re in the process now finishing the script.
Filmmaker: Do you have preconceptions of how that second film should be made? On a bigger scale, perhaps, or keeping to the same kind of Gazer approach?
Mastroianni: We’re just writing the film that we want to see, right? I think we want to continue with that ethos hopefully throughout our careers. And doing it the indie way is sometimes the best way. There’s a lot of Gazer DNA in [the new film], which is a very, very small film and a very big film. We have some sequences that are more high concept, and it deals with the same kind of themes, but with a character who is the exact opposite of Frankie — he is totally embedded in technology. And he’s searching for a connection and forced out into the physical world to find it.
Sloan: We have a budget in mind, and an idea of the people that we want to work with. I think, similar to Gazer, we’re just going to go in full force and make it happen. If anybody doubts us or doesn’t believe in us after seeing Gazer, they’re gonna miss out, right?
