How 'Gazer' Made Cinematic Magic on a Low Budget

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In director Ryan J. Sloan’s Gazer, a young woman named Frankie (co-writer Ariella Mastroianni) copes with an illness called dyschronometria that hinders her ability to perceive time. In between listening to cassette tapes of her own voice to recall her past, she copes with a bland routine and tough personal circumstances: Her husband died in an accident and she has lost custody of her daughter. But when a sudden opportunity to make some fast money falls into her lap, Frankie sees a chance to set things right.

A moody, self-financed vision shot on 16mm film, Gazer is an absorbing mystery about the psychology of human behavior. Much like Steven Soderbergh’s recent Black Bag, the movie builds layer upon layer of clues about the nature of its character’s motives, only revealing the full picture with the gripping finale. In between, it reveals a filmmaking pair with serious ambitions on both sides of the camera. Loaded with imaginative dream sequences and a steady pace that grows more gripping as it moves along, the movie is a handmade cinematic treat.

Despite its modest budget, Gazer is directed with a studied approach that calls to mind a range of filmmaking traditions from Alfred Hitchcock to Christopher Nolan. It’s an impressive opening statement for the creative duo responsible as they make big plans. I spoke to Sloan and Mastroianni this week as they prepared for a multi-city tour with the film and considered their next steps.

You weren’t the typical film students. What led you to make a movie together?

RYAN J. SLOAN: Ariella and I grew up together in New Jersey. We've known each other for a long time. We've always championed each other. She always knew that I wanted to make movies. I knew she wanted to star in movies. So around the time of the pandemic, we were reflecting on where we were, where we wanted to be.

Our film school, our training, was really watching movies and acting classes over the years. We were revisiting all these films that we both loved, that we grew up with – like Carol Reed's The Third Man, Antonioni's Blow Up, Coppola’s The Conversation, De Palma's Blow Out. That was when we decided it was time to make that film.

There’s also a great history to low-budget filmmaking that sits at the heart of Gazer.

RYAN: We were looking at how Darren Aronofsky made Pi, how Christopher Nolan made Following, how the Coen brothers made Blood Simple. We were stealing the things that made sense for us. We didn't have any money going into this. We just had a story and a bit of grit and a lot of passion. And we knew that we weren't going to give up. That was one thing that Ariel and I agreed on. Also, Ariel was committed to having the same hairstyle for three years. We weren’t necessarily in a rush. Nobody was waiting for this. In a way, that was liberating.

Ariel, how were the challenges of writing and acting different for you?

ARIELLA MASTROIANNI: It was a really fun learning process. When you're writing a script, you feel like you know everything about the character on the page. So by the time we were finished writing, I thought I knew everything I needed to know about Frankie, like part of my acting work was done. But it was so exciting because once we started to work on Frankie and actually bring her into a physical space, I realized there was still so much more to discover. I realized that it was the first time I could see the difference between the written word and the space between the words, which is actually where you fill in the character. You are the space between the action lines. That was really fun to discover. It gave me a whole new reverence for the writing and acting processes.

You mentioned movies like Pi and Following where the viewer is placed inside the psychological disorientation of a character. How much did you want the audience to understand what was going on? Frankie herself is confused for much of the movie.

RYAN: I storyboarded the whole film and that process is really tied to my prep work as a director because I'm deciding pretty much where the camera is going to be and making sure that it makes sense to the story. Everything is told through Frankie's perspective. I think psychologically, we made a decision early on that. When the film is in the real world, it has a very French New Wave, handheld kind of thing, following the character from behind. Inside Frankie’s apartment, where she feels safe, the camera’s still handheld but it doesn’t move anymore, it doesn’t pan, it doesn’t tilt. It just stays still on Frankie. Then, there are nightmare sequences, these bits of Frankie’s past she’s still trying to reconcile with.

For those, we went on Steadicam and Styx and we went for this very Lynchian, Kubrickian kind of symmetrical experience. So it really unsettled the audience and also, you know, really pushed Frankie's psychological place at the moment.

ARIELLA: It was a really clear window into her emotional state. I think that's what drew us to the condition in general. We came across a couple of firsthand accounts and then spoke to some neurologists after. But really the through line was how lonely it was to live with a condition like that. It was this idea that Frankie is trying to live the rest of her life as a ghost. The voyeurism of that allowed us to see everything through Frankie’s perspective, so you’re uncovering this mystery with her, which was really fun.

You shot the movie with 16mm film, which most people wouldn’t consider to be the safest way to save money on a low budget project. What made you commit to that?

RYAN: Well, all the films that I grew up watching and that I love and adore were shot on film, so my idea of cinema was connected to celluloid and film grain. I didn’t give anyone another option. I told our cinematographer Matheus Bastos that we were shooting on film right away. He went and did his research. I think the story really lent itself to that 16mm grain. There’s something living and breathing about film. When you watch something that was shot on film, the film grain is literally dancing across the screen. I know this isn’t a film-versus-digital conversation.

It can be! Did you ever feel like, “Man, I wish I could just switch to digital to make things cheaper and easier”?

RYAN: I actually think that you have more potential issues with a digital camera. You spend all this money on memory cards and storage. You can’t shoot forever. You can do more with low light, but with film, it’s just math. You know that if you're measuring the light you know what you’ll get as long as the film lab is on top of their game. We went with Color Lab down in Maryland who were incredible and very helpful. Also, you have to know that the lenses that you're using are high quality. We went with ARRI and told them what we needed. They were very helpful.

There’s this story that when Christopher Nolan was shooting Dunkirk, the IMAX camera fell off the plane and sank to the bottom of the ocean. When they pulled up the magazine, it was still usable. If that was a digital camera, the footage would be gone. But they just had to clean it up and get rid of some salt.

Without spoiling too much, there’s an amazing nightmare sequence in the movie with a Cronenbergian object you call the Flesh Box. Where did that idea come from?

ARIELLE: I love the flesh box. It seems to be the deciding point for audiences on whether or not they stay or go.I'm so proud of that. There was one Letterboxd review where someone said they thought the Flesh Box was kind of cute. Even though these nightmare sequences are very surreal, I think they’re the most honest representation of what Frankie is going through. I love using genre for that reason. Genre can elevate this idea of truth through different lenses. This character is remembering past events and discovering them at the same time through the dreamscape.

Even before this film was a discovery at the Cannes Film Festival, you were talking about Gazer as the first part of a trilogy. How’s that coming along?

RYAN: Before everything with Gazer, we didn't know anybody. We didn't go to film school. We had no connections, no industry connections. In a big way, we just kept using the terms ultraviolence and punk rock. That's been like our energy. Nobody can tell us no, nobody can tell us what to do or how to do it. While we were making this film, we started conceptualizing the next film and we put in a little Easter egg in one shot on a billboard in the background for the next film for a company that's very prominent in the next picture.

We're writing this next film, we're madly in love with it, and we’re so excited. If tomorrow everyone's like, “Listen guys, you had your run, we're tired of you, we're gonna go back to the IPs and sequels, we're not gonna champion this kind of stuff,” we'd say good, “Go fuck yourself, we're gonna go make another movie.”

"Gazer" plays Friday - Saturday, April 11 - 13, at the Southampton Playhouse. For showtimes and tickets, go here.

This interview has been condensed and edited. Check out the full conversation later this week on our YouTube page.