Zadig – An Interview with Alex Graziani
Zadig, adapted from Voltaire’s Oriental tale, is a story of lost love set in the ancient city of Babylon. A lush world under the warmth of an orange sun is shattered when the main character is struck in the eye by an arrow and blinded. Shot in the exquisite landscape of Ouarzazate, known as the Moroccan Hollywood, this is director Alexander Graziani’s first film on this scale. It is a story of Fate, for the character Zadig, and for the filmmakers themselves as on the long road home, only hours after filming had finished, the film was stolen from the back of the van by a man on a moped.
Alexander Graziani, born in London, first studied at Chelsea College of Art, where he began making short films which received much praise and gained him a distinction. At LCC for the first time, with his film Zadig, he explored narrative with an artistic sensibility, in a magical realisation of the story on an epic scale. Alex has particular interest in physiognomy and faces in cinema.
Director of Photography Esther Theaker (far left) and Alex Graziani (left) shooting ‘Zadig’ in Ouarzazate.
On the 10th July, 2009, I initiated a conversation with director and friend Alexander Graziani about the aftermath of his lost work.
What were your first thoughts when you found out about the film?
What about, that it went missing?
Yeah
…To be honest I don’t remember.
I was told a couple of days after we got back from Morocco. Esther (DOP) and the producer were driving back to London, but the rest of us had flown. The back doors of the van flew open whilst they were driving and the suitcase with all the cans of unprocessed film fell out, it was the only thing that fell. They stayed an extra day behind looking for it… so I’d only been back for a couple of days… maybe three days… that they had spent looking and I think they might have even reported it to the police and the local papers before I was actually told so… What did I feel about it…
Did you think they were joking?
No, I didn’t think they were joking. I think my first thought was that they’d probably find it. And then I spoke to Esther and I realised how upset she was about it. I could tell she thought I’d be really angry with her. I didn’t feel angry with her at all – I don’t know why…
Why weren’t you angry at her?
Don’t know. I guess I had mixed feelings about… that’s probably what you wanted me to say isn’t it?
Erm, not really. I didn’t know what I wanted you to say.
I had mixed feelings about the actual film as it was being made. There were times when I thought I’d done a good job with the writing of it; there were times when I felt that it wasn’t going the way I wanted it to, for whatever reason. And when we were shooting it wasn’t going the way I wanted it.
Did you feel a bit of relief when you discovered the film was lost?
Yes. – And I think Esther had already come to that conclusion as well, she thought I would be angry about it, but also she thought I’d wished for the film to go missing, because it [the film] wasn’t really what we’d planned.
What did you envisage the world of Zadig to look like, if you could put that into words? It wasn’t meant to be a direct representation of the book, was it – what kind of world were you trying to create?
Well, I think you can see from the pictures that it would have looked like Morocco, in the end. And what was always there from the beginning, my original intention – was that I wanted there to be palm-trees and an orange landscape – an orange desert.
Zadig (Ben Peel) and Semira (Daphne Alexander)
I know that you wanted to make the film look somewhat like a cartoon…
I was thinking about that today actually, because I thought you might ask something like that, but it’s very difficult to give an example of how the film was meant to be a cartoon, only that it served as an excuse to put a lot of things into the mix. Normally a ten-minute film is very slow and ponderous, and the story isn’t…
Doesn’t develop much, doesn’t go into much depth?
It’s more the story’s non-existent, usually only a couple of things happen. What I was trying to do was to make a kind of fable, where lots of things do happen.
Do you mean that you wanted to cram a lot of things into ten minutes?
Yeah, that was basically an excuse to do that. Generally people’s first films are too long, and I think that’s because they have so much that they want to put in them. I saw this as my first proper film. It wasn’t a minute long like my others and so I think mainly it was an excuse although… maybe I’d follow that again and try and make another film that was a cartoon. I guess the other ones I’ve made are trying to be like cartoons also.
When people read the script, they said there was too much in there. I think they came to that conclusion because they were only seeing it in one way and that was that this film wasn’t a cartoon. They were seeing it in a very naturalistic way, which in the end I guess it turned out to be, because there wasn’t much of the cartoon things that I’d wanted to put into it. When we got there it was just a question of having to follow the script and just get the story across. I think if the film had been made in a different way, then the cartoony-ness would have been in there.
It’s interesting you wanted to make your film in that way, where many things happen in a short space of time, like in a cartoon. Your choice to direct Zadig in the way you did is similar to the way Voltaire writes…
Well, that was just my interpretation of Voltaire. I don’t think that’s necessarily true that you see it as a cartoon. Although I think, if people were actually illustrating a Voltaire book, it would be very easy for the drawings to become cartoon because it’s satirical, but if you were making an adaptation for film I don’t think one would necessarily see it in a cartoon way. The first time I read it I found it very funny, which I think added something towards the fact that I thought of it as a cartoon. When I showed it to other people, they didn’t necessarily find it funny.
The film you did before Zadig was a lot more akin to a cartoon, at least from the pictures I’ve seen of the Zadig shoot. And that one, you just made on a small set in the studio…
That’s what I mean. If it [Zadig] had been done a bit more cheaply, a bit more down to earth. The bravado of all the crew and all the money and all these other things that people thought were necessary… and that I went along with. They thought they were doing things properly, whether they actually did things properly or not – I don’t know.
I’d like to make another attempt at a cartoon, like early Disney cartoons, which are seven minutes long – Silly Symphonies. They’re seven minutes long, yet so much happens in those seven minutes, that if you were to write it down it would be long over ten pages – it’s usually considered a page of dialogue per minute.
You wanting to do cartoons – is a bit like when you used to say you wanted to make ‘painterly film’.
How do you remember that!?
It’s as if you want film to do things it’s incapable of doing, or at least haven’t been done before.
A cartoon!? Haven’t you ever seen a cartoon before!?
Yes, but making reality into a cartoon is something quite different.
Well… No, I don’t think so. There’s no difference between an animated film and a film with living people. – Disney made films! But I guess you could say there are some films which have some sort of cartoon element involved.
Like Totò [the great Italian comic] -
Like Tots exactly! There’s something cartoony about just his face and that’s what I saw. A lot of my thoughts came about when I was travelling around, walking for six hours trying to think about the film, or on the tube looking at people’s faces and I thought… these people are cartoon characters. I didn’t think that what I was trying to do was make a cartoon out of life, I think it does exist there: the face somebody pulls when they’re not thinking about what they look like, often it’s like a cartoon; it’s grotesque, full of grotesque features.
For a while you’ve been interested in the human face in cinema, which in part I believe has drawn you towards artists such as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Sergei Eisenstein and Chris Marker. Did you wish to explore and exploit the power of the human face in Zadig, and if so do you think you would have achieved it?
As well as me seeing faces in life and then going towards them, those film makers have led me to see faces, so it’s a dual thing. We met each other on the way.
But in Zadig would I have achieved it, well… In the writing I achieved it. I wrote about those faces. And, to some extent in the filming I did. There was a Moroccan whose nickname was ‘teeth’. We filmed this wonderful close-up of him making these bird noises, cupping his hands and making bird noises. He’d always have this smile on his face, his teeth would come out at an angle from his mouth.
(Laughter)
When he acted he would always make a serious face – he was playing a henchman. But when he felt he’d finished the part he’d go back to this big smile with his teeth coming out! So I always made sure that I stopped filming a little bit after he’d finished acting, so I got these teeth coming out.
…But yeah, we didn’t have long enough to film all the faces I wanted to film. Whether or not I should say it, the lead actors didn’t have the faces of the people I wanted.
Is that Zadig and Semira…
Yes. I always thought that looking for the character of Zadig would have been impossible because Zadig in the book was almost perfect and to find somebody who looks almost perfect is impossible. Although, when you film somebody, if the camera likes them, if their face is suitable let’s say, as soon as you project that face big on a screen, they almost do become perfect. So I felt I had that on my side, but at the same time there were so many different versions of the film in my mind it was almost like if you added a new element, then everything would have to change its order. If you added the face of a Moroccan, then everything would have to shift around a bit. I’d have to realise we weren’t in a cartoon land and that we were shooting in Ouarzazate. I’d have to let that… let that be, in a way. Do you know what I mean?
Yep.
We were scared that if we just went to Morocco and filmed the Moroccan landscape, then… that wasn’t the film we wanted to make, that would just be somebody’s holiday snaps and that wouldn’t be at all the things we’d been talking about for such a long time. It would be very easy to do that. I mean, I’ve never seen the footage, so I don’t know, but from the photographs you get the sense that it was more the Moroccan landscape that took over.
It wasn’t necessarily what I’d wanted to do, but like I said what I wanted to do changed throughout the making of it, depending on what idea I was fixed on in my mind at that time. The film didn’t start off even as a cartoon. There was a big period of the preparation where I wanted it to be an Italian comedy, which of course has cartoon elements, but mainly I wanted it to be an Italian comedy of the 50′s or 60′s.
Like Fellini?
No, not like Fellini – more like Dino Risi or Pietro Germi or Mario Monicelli. Fellini isn’t really in the spirit of these directors… Fellini does something more than that.
…Pasolini shot in Ouarzazate, he shot Oedipus Rex in Ouarzazate. There are people there who remember him very fondly, he paid them very well. As soon as I saw my film through the eyes of Pasolini, which is a dangerous thing to do, but which I did or tried to do at times, I saw a different film, which was much more like his Arabian Nights or The Decameron.
I had this image in my mind of the brother of the guy we stayed with, and although we’d already picked the actor that would play Zadig, I still had in my mind that this man might be better suited for the role. But he didn’t look any more like a cartoon than the actor, but for some reason in the landscape of Ouarzazate, he sat well.
Was he Moroccan?
Yes of course.
I did think when I saw the pictures of Zadig that he looked like a white man dressed up as a Moroccan and it came across as less sincere.
Yes, I was worried about that. When I was writing the script I thought that it might be a good idea to find the location and the actors on the day of shooting, but it was felt that to leave something like the main character to chance was too big a risk to take. Which in retrospect probably would have been the right thing to do… in fact we did do – to a certain extent, with minor roles. The day we did that the most was the most successful day.
You wanted to do that because you feel there’s some truth gotten from using people who aren’t used to the camera?
Well that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to find that person on the day of shooting, but there’s some sort of chance element that is quite exciting.
People that aren’t used to the camera react very differently to people that are.
It really depends on the person. That isn’t necessarily always so, just because somebody isn’t used to the camera it doesn’t mean that they’re not going to display some sort of behaviour that is maybe even more offensive than an actor might do. I think it’s quite a tricky thing to be able to act. I think it’s quite a hard thing, you probably either have it or you don’t. There’s a lot of people trying to act. But I think everybody has the capacity to act under the right direction or mood or whatever.
A lot of the big actors find themselves playing the same roles because there must be part of them which just is that character anyway, and so in a sense they’re not pretending. Maybe in a way they’re playing themselves. De Niro plays the same character in lots of films.
It was Bresson’s theory that actors were for the theatre and that for cinema there was to be a new approach. That’s his distinction from the theatre, or the movies that came before, he wanted to draw a line and say, well this is something different, this is where you no longer use actors from theatre doing theatrical things. He only wanted that person [non-actor] off the street to be in his film once and after that they would never act again.
I was going to ask you to describe some of your favourite shots from the film. I remember you saying one was your best ever…
I don’t know, it felt the best. It’s difficult, because that isn’t a shot. It’s in the desert somewhere, I’ve never seen it and I don’t know what it would look like.
And that was the tale of Alex Graziani’s adaptation of Voltaire’s Zadig, of which only a collection of beautiful emblems remain.
Listen to extracts of music recorded for Zadig
Interview by Joe Wensley, Photographs by Victoria Batt and Lucy Butler and Music recorded by Frank Barlow