Director's Statement & Production History

It is very difficult for me to discuss the reasons for my making a film like this. Without going into too much unpleasant detail, I will say that I wrote the film during a particularly crazy bout of depression that went on for close to two years, and felt as if it would never end. This period was "inspired" by a ton of grim experiences piling up against each other in impossible tight succession, until nothing made real sense anymore, and I could no longer trust the validity of my feelings towards others. After enough incineration inspiration, I was riddled with guilt over circumstances I had nothing to do with, and was self-destructive to extremes that now seem almost comical. It would be a grotesque understatement to say that I had never experienced anything as damning as this before. I mean, I used to be a pretty happy person! I now constantly scared myself, and the most disturbing thing that I was able to imagine was one day finding myself in my forties, fifties, eighties, feeling the same horrible feelings, thinking the same thoughts, dwelling on the details of age-old conversations and circumstances, without moving on. Throughout this period, I was well aware of how ridiculous the whole thing was, understanding every detail of my situation with nightmarish precision, but that knowledge did not give me one iota of strength. The notion of centering a story on a self-destructive character who loses his entire life span to a series of hated patterns and repetitions that he understands inside-out, but is unable to take control of, seemed to be about the only thing left that I was able to feel for. And so, DIVIDED INTO ZERO was born. In fact, its birthing spanned an unbelievable three years.

Karim Hussain lit it, Patrick Tremblay, Julien Fonfrède and Robert Cotterill did all grip, dolly and A.D. work, Teruhiko Suzuki composed a typically moving score and David Kristian unleashed a full-on aural assault with additional musicand elaborate Special Sound Design & Sound Editing. I cast the adult actors through friends and friends-of-friends, and recruited the two exceptional child actors Max Firatli and Stephanie Kepman through my very brave casting director Ayala Piron. On my end, I wrote, shot, cut, produced and directed the thing, so if you feel like blaming anyone for the bad time you might have had watching it (and I sincerely hope that you didn't have a good time), I can't exactly pass the buck on this one. We began production with an intensive weekend of shooting in August 1996, and wrapped the last weekend around June of 1998. The film's final sound mix was locked in June 1999. As far as actual shooting went, there were three weekends and about four weekdays in total, spaced all but lifetimes apart and located in friends' homes, on abandoned apartment building floors and in neighborhood parks. And it took three years. Now, three years is a lot of time to be carrying any load, let alone one with so much personal weight, and as can be expected, a lot of things will happen over such a period. Among these many things, my life finally took many huge turns for the better. I began writing for a series of books and magazines, helped establish a major North American genre film festival and all of a sudden, had a stronger sense of ability then I'd ever imagined possible. During this period, I fanatically quit every chemical I had previously indulged in, even the cigarettes which I'd chain-smoked for years. The cleansing process was complete, but the film was only about one quarter shot. See, shortly after we had shot the first weekend's material, my Super 8 camera developed a shutter problem - the beginning of many long production delays involving equipment, people's availability and good old fashioned money. If you know anything about the arcane Super 8 format, then you know that it has become very difficult to find modern working cameras with sharp lenses without going through incredible expenses. We had begun with one, but now it was gone and there was nothing comparable to replace it with. After close to a year of working on everything but my film, and now more or less clear of the mousetraps of my mind, I took a deep breath and prepared to go back to the worst emotions I had ever experienced. ZERO's shattered fetus began to grow and take form once again.

Until this point, I had been shooting all of the film's interiors on Ektachrome 160. I was thus horrified to learn that during our hiatus from production, Kodak had discontinued production of this stock entirely, which none of us were able to believe could actually happen. Not only did this stock have very particular characteristics that would be almost impossible to emulate with another emulsion, not the least of which was a subtle predisposition to Blue, but this was a stock that Kodak had been manufacturing since 1971! While shooting with the last of our Ektachrome supply, our second Super 8 camera, this time Karim's old Elmo unit, broke down, causing us to loose a good deal of that weekend's shoot, and forcing me to abandon shooting on that gauge altogether. Actually, we first went through a glorious half-year charade which entailed my sending my camera to Los Angeles for repairs, finally getting it back, shooting a test roll, waiting for the results and then seeing the same shutter problems as before, along with the added bonus of a radically inconsistent motor speed. That was when we decided that Super 8 was not our friend. The final weekend of shooting, which included all footage with Max Firatli, was shot on 7250 16mm reversal. The fact that we didn't use a negative 16mm stock makes the discrepancy less apparent in the finished film, but I was furious to have been forced to go this route. My worry was that in a film that jumped chronologies left right and center, cutting to a finer grain look might lead the audience to mistakenly believe that they were watching a happening that was more recent in the story's timeline. Thankfully, this never seems to go down. Through it all, we were still working towards getting Karim Hussain's film, SUBCONSCIOUS CRUELTY completed, which made things even crazier. ZERO was always supposed to have been a quick shoot, and it was now languishing in a similar state of turmoil as the feature, and this time, it was entirely due to technical difficulties. Through everything, my friends in cast and crew stuck with me, and I give endless thanks to them for their total faith and support, for putting up with my strangeness and for working bona fide miracles every second that they were around. These types of guerilla-styled shoots can only succeed with the true passions of a unified team.

In June of 1999, my film was finally born, and it was time to sever the umbilical and let us each go our separate ways. But clearly, this wasn't to be. More and more, people are seeing the film and naturally, they've got their share of questions that they'd like answered. Most audiences want to know why I would make such an obviously personal character a child killer. I tell them that I am as non-violent a person as anyone could ever be - a peace geek no less. That the film is nonetheless the most honest thing I could ever have attempted during that period of my life. That I would work on it when I felt like cutting myself up. And that I have always admired films that play like celluloid Rorschach patterns. In the end, ZERO is an abstract but calculated meditation on the cycles of addiction and depression, colored here as the cycles of abuse. As the character is haunted by memories real or imagined, and is literally dying in his past, I shot it with the dreamy atmosphere of a ghost story. The non-linear, narrative structure came into being as a way through which to articulate a sense of suffocated dementia, where Two plus Two never adds up to Four, yet always does in a familiar yet alien parallel reality - a reality where literally everything adds up to Four, if you get what I mean. It is this element, perhaps more so than any of the film's more explicit passages, that tends to alienate certain audiences, and this is a rewarding thing for me to know. First and foremost, the film is about guilt and unwanted compulsions, and the electric cesspools of negative emotion that can stem from both drives. It is about the inability of the broken to move forward. I'm not entirely sure how clear any of this is to anyone who isn't me, but judging from some of the reactions I've had after screenings, certain people are touched in a special way. This surprises me, as I had truly expected for 95 % of any audience to wind up bored, confused or flat out furious. Many still are, and that is fine, as this wasn't the sort of picture designed "with the audience in mind", but the film has struck nerves with greater numbers than I had ever thought possible. Post-screening Question periods have gotten pretty emotional, because there's nothing I won't discuss on an open mic with people who just sat through my film. If you make a film like this, anything less than total honesty would be a cheat. In a sense, this is the one true difficulty with highly personal filmmaking. The filmmaker might evolve and change, but will always have to go back to when he or she was a different person, forever re-evaluating the past, and spending perhaps a tad too much time there in the process. Just the same, while I'm not crazy about some of the material near the beginning, I am truly proud of my film, and am gratified that others are affected by it. So I will continue to tear open old wounds, as I go backwards in time with roomfuls of strangers, to that period I nearly lost myself to forever. Great.

Thanks for being there with me. And if you hated the film but are for whatever reason reading this anyway, thanks for hating with me. Sometimes it can be a fine line.

M.D.