Pirooz Kalayeh is really excited. I was literally on the edge of my seat (it’s a cliché, get over it) as we discussed his second directorial effort, the up-and-coming film Shoplifting from American Apparel, which will be shot in June 2011.
Kalayeh has adapted Tao Lin’s novella (loosely) into what will be, not necessarily an exact script based on the book, but a merging of documentary and fiction aspects within the film.
The film’s description on Kickstarter (the project has recently moved to IndieGoGo, but more on that later) is:
“Part absurdist documentary and part cinematic realism, Shoplifting from American Apparel moves between the life of the actual writer who has written the popular novel on which the film is based to the mishaps of a ragtag film crew who offer each other challenges to make certain scenes despite having unnecessary stunts go horribly wrong, budgetary constraints, and other unforeseen creative roadblocks.”
Perhaps that sounds a tad confusing, but adapting something about the actual book would be just as difficult. Not that much really happens in the book aside from some iced coffee drinking and a couple of jail scenes resulting from failed shoplifting attempts.
“I mean there are a lot of comments on culture, a lot of comments on how youth deal with things, but it’s sort of in its negative space, the things aren’t said, or in it’s quiet moments where the book really resounds big,” Kalayeh said.
In this sense, it only seemed natural to make a film that he said, literally shoplifts itself.
“I thought the only way to really adapt his novel and to really have a testament to what he was doing was to show the same type of innovation happening in film,” Kalayeh said.
Now let’s back up. Who is Pirooz Kalayeh, and what is he doing making a movie that embodies a new generation of writers?
Behind Kalayeh’s Lens
Courtesy of Kickstarter.com. Kalayeh is far right in the foreground.
Kalayeh has probably done everything anyone has ever wanted to do (Ok, maybe he’s just done a lot of things I think are pretty sweet). He has a background in everything from theater and music to painting and writing.
Middle school (seventh grade particularly) marked his first foray into the film world after he made quite a controversial film for his U.S. History class about what would happen if the South had won the Civil War. After that film, his teacher must have been impressed because he told him he didn’t have to come to class anymore and that he should just make films, Kalayeh said. He made small music videos and such in the auditorium.
“I started making rap videos in the school auditorium until I had a whole light system set up and an entire crew in 7th grade,” he said.
Then the production got too loud and his young filmmaking was shut down. But that didn’t really bother him. Kalayeh just moved on to whatever was next.
“Ok so the camera was taken away from me, I don’t have a camera anymore, what can I do next?” he said.
Part of Kalayeh’s philosophy comes from the school of thought of painters such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, where you make art with what you have. Kalayeh simply switched to whatever worked at the time.
He then got involved in theater in high school. Though he didn’t have any interest in college his father made him apply to one school, which was the University of Delaware, where he studied neuroscience (wait…what?).
“I was just too afraid to confront my dad because he was really big, really big guy and he was also a first generation immigrant because (I was born in Iran, came over 8 months old), I was only going to be a doctor or a lawyer or a scientist like him and that was it,” he said.
He said he only lasted for a year and then joined the band Cecil’s Water. After the band went defunct, he decided to go into writing, hence enrolling into the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.
He also had a stint in producing reality television.
“After the grad program, I moved to L.A., I somehow got into reality television. So like, they promoted me very quickly to somehow becoming a producer for these shows, like really bad reality T.V. but, you know, I enjoyed it. It was interesting, it was different, but my heart was always with writing,” Kalayeh said.
He then went to South Korea to teach as a professor and ended up meeting his wife there. While in South Korea, he filmed a sort of “joke documentary” on one of Lin’s poems from you are a little bit happier than i am that discusses a bear joining society and getting mad at society, thus invading a grocery store and causing a ruckus.
“It just really, really excited me. It was more exciting than any film I could think of ever in my life. I don’t know why, it just seemed so tasty,” he said.
He started a relationship (not in a sexual way, stop that!) with Tao Lin, when he wrote an article about Lin on his blog Shikow. This eventually led to Kalayeh’s first feature film.
The Human War
Courtesy of Sanghafilms.com
Through Lin, he met Noah Cicero, who wrote the novella The Human War. Kalayeh decided to option it for his first feature film, which he co-directed with Tom Henwood.
“I had just interviewed Noah and I was like, wow, I know all this stuff about producing television. I had spent my youth doing a lot of theater and acting and touring with this rock band named Cecil’s Water in Delaware for like three years. So, I knew a lot about performance and being on shows and putting things together, and I had just read Noah Cicero’s Human War and it was like, for a month I kept thinking about it as a movie and I thought it would go away, you know, but it wouldn’t go away, so finally I just called Noah and I said ‘Did anybody option your book to be a film?’” Kalayeh said.
Cicero had indeed had someone who wanted to option the book, people from My Name is Earl (Weird.), however they said the book was too short to be turned into a film. He told Noah that he should write a script based on the book that would be long enough to sell to them. However, when My Name is Earl passed, Kalayeh pounced.
“I said ‘Well I would love to option the book.’ And that’s when the whole idea to do filmmaking began. So literally, right after I optioned the book, I flew to from Korea to Ohio. I’d never been to Youngstown, Ohio. And I went to Ohio and I drove to a Denny’s to meet Noah,” Kalayeh said.
Soon Kalayeh felt the urgency of the film.
“Noah was really desperate for me to make this movie. He was like ‘You have to make my book into a movie, there’s nobody else who can make my book into a movie,’ I was kind of surprised by the amount of pressure that Noah was putting on me…” Kalayeh said.
Kalayeh tried to be realistic about the film though. From his television producing background, he knew that there were a lot of elements needed to get a film underway and that there’s a high percentage chance of something going wrong. Especially in independent film.
“It’s not like making a painting you know, where you only have to buy paintbrushes and so many paint colors and get the right canvas. There’s so many people involved and there’s so many steps that have to get green-lighted before it can happen,” Kalayeh said.
That’s when Kalayeh said he decided he needed to get someone else involved and picked up the phone and called his friend Tom Henwood, whom he had met while he was at the Jack Kerouac school. Henwood had since moved to New York to start his own production company, SixDay Productions, which was doing fairly well, he said.
“So I got in a car, I had just flown to Youngstown. I drove to Brooklyn, I get out of the car literally in Brooklyn and I go ‘Look this is the book, and I want to make this book into a movie,’” said Kalayeh.
So then Kalayeh spent a period of time traveling back and forth from New York to Youngstown to complete The Human War, which is now be submitted to film festivals across the country. Different from his television producing days where everything was always neatly taken care of, Kalayeh was involved in all different aspects of this film.
“So literally, I came on as a director in Human War and I was doing every role you would imagine, like I was an editor to lighting person. There was a moment where the intern on set, he looked at me and he was like ‘So this is pretty cool man, so how long have you been working on the film?’ So he thought I was the lighting guy and I was like ‘I’ve been working for a couple hours now.’ And then later on in the day he found out that I was the director,” Kalayeh said.
Kalayeh then also did a documentary on Zen Master (doesn’t that sound badass?) Brad Warner, who would later become involved in Shoplifting.
Back to your feature presentation
Courtesy of Sanghafilms.com
While both films are about writers, Shoplifting is completely different from The Human War. In fact, Shoplifting is much different than anything else, really. Perhaps that’s why it was initially difficult to write the script for.
“It’s so confusing, believe me, it was a hell of a thing to write,” Kalayeh said.
Kalayeh’s approach to writing the script was kind of hands off in the sense that he just let it go where it wanted to.
“I knew I was gonna take some parts of the novel. But I didn’t know how it would work out. I kept it very sort of natural. So the writing process was ‘wherever it goes, it goes,’ “he said.
So, he not only had the elements from the book, but he also incorporated the making of the film into the film.
“I thought, wouldn’t it be cool to sort of show a filmmaker finding a movie at the same time as they were making a movie?” he said.
Kalayeh described the film as sort of a “new media” movie.
“It’s not quite a YouTube clip and it’s not quite a Hollywood movie, but it has elements of both in it,” he said.
There are some scenes that are planned, but then others that they’re just going to wing and see if it works. Whether it does or not, it will still be a part of the movie.
“Like, we’re going to go in for the shoplifting sequence in this movie, and we’re going to go into American Apparel and if they kick us out, they kick us out and that’s part of the movie. So, there are things that are not planned with what’s going to happen and then there are things that are planned, but purposely tongue-in-cheek sarcastic about it,” he said.
So, the film has both elements taken from the book, and then, in addition, it has faux documentary and documentary aspects to it. This created a need for multiple people to play singular characters for each element.
Lin told Kalayeh that the character Sam in Shoplifiting is actually him, while the character Luis was, in real life, Noah Cicero. Kalayeh said this was perfect because he had already done the film with Cicero.
Now, who to cast in the rest of film was also a question in itself. Some people wanted to cast Haley Joel Osment as Sam/Tao Lin, which would have been hilarious considering Lin had a character of the same name in his book Richard Yates. However, Kalayeh said that if he was Osment’s agent, he would never let him do this movie.
“There’s no way his comeback career is going to be this movie,” he said.
Then the idea of Elijah Wood was tossed around, since he was a minor character in Tao Lin’s book Eeeee Eee Eeee.
“I was like ‘Frodo? Are you serious?’” he said.
Kalayeh thought it could be funny to use him, and perhaps even possible, since Wood has a soft spot in his heart for indie films. However, the cost of having Wood (ewww that sounded dirty), even if he worked for free was too much. Kalayeh’s production wouldn’t be able to move around as freely. For example:
“The scene that I wrote on Hollywood Boulevard where Noah and Tao are making faces out of chicken nuggets on Marilyn Monroe’s star to say something about reality and fame, it’s going to be really hard with Elijah Wood with us because nobody’s gonna let us walk around,” he said.
Originally, Lin was going to play himself in the movie, however, Kalayeh had some reservations about this.
“Now Tao is a sweetie pie, but I felt like I really needed to specify to Tao what it meant to actually be in a movie… Tao was very excited to be in the movie until he heard that he would have to wake up every day and show up to something. So he was like ‘I donno, I donno if I can do this.’ (In a Tao Lin voice). Very sweet, you know, like not, he like, he totally wants to do it, but at the same time [I think] he was afraid whether or not he would fuck shit up,” Kalayeh said.
Lin recommended one of his friends, Jordan Castro, who he said could do a good impression of him. When Kalayeh heard his impression, he thought it was awesome, but he said didn’t want Castro to act like Lin in the film, he just wanted him to be himself.
So Castro was cast as the real Tao Lin, but who would be cast as the “movie” Tao Lin?
Kalayeh met up with Brad Warner in New York and they passed Melville House (the publisher of most of Tao Lin’s work) and upon discussing Shoplifting, Warner mentioned he would like to act. And, there it was, the perfect person to play the movie Tao Lin.
Later on Lin said he would be in the movie, but he said he would do so by making comments after the movie was filmed using iMovie, which he uses for his MDMAfilms.
In addition to Lin’s iMovie clips, there will also be animated g-chats (g-mail chat), as well as “graffitied” text inserted throughout the film, Kalayeh said, which he attributes to his painting background. He said he also took inspiration from when he did comics (yes, he does that too), where he said he’s not good at drawing and he would actually comment on that throughout the comic.
“That way, we’re clearly defining with a visual font, what we’re making fun of,” Kalayeh said.
The film’s script is also not strictly set. For the first about three times they shoot a scene, it will start off with something in the script. The next couple of times it will be ad-libbed, which is exactly what Kalayeh wants because then people won’t be able to tell what’s “real” and what’s the movie.
“In this case, you know, what was written, I knew was entertaining, but there were so many elements which were ad-libbed and because they were ad-libbed, and because I would be working with nonprofessional actors and professional actors, that this gauge of what was good or bad acting and what was good or bad in the movie would suddenly become extremely wide. Like the aperture of the lens would suddenly become telescopic. Like the whole world would be able to fit in it,” Kalayeh said.
He said he believes that people are very sophisticated when it comes to viewing films, in the sense that, people know almost immediately if a film is good or bad. Kalayeh said he wants to mess with these perceptions.
“When you’re watching something and you cannot make sense of it exactly and it’s changing on you, and what you thought is documentary suddenly becomes film and film, documentary, you’re way of ascertaining whether it’s good or bad anymore, fails. So, that is the main impetus for the film, that if we can create this failure in the viewer, then suddenly the film will begin operating more like an experience. The experience of viewing it would basically, I donno if it would actually widen a person’s lens of what was good or bad forever, but it would certainly mess, for the hour and thirty minutes of the film, it would definitely mess with what their perceptions of good or bad were,” he said.
Investment Time
In order for Kalayeh to make the film in June 2011, he wants to try to get about $37,000. He put the project on Kickstarter (a site where people ask for donations up to a certain amount, but if the amount isn’t reached the project gets none of the donations). However, Kalayeh recently started to have reservations about the site.
“I feel like 37,000 [dollars] for an independent film on that kind of site is not going to happen unless you have a large investor,” Kalayeh said.
He said he thought that, typically the only films on Kickstarter that had a chance were docs with a cause behind them. He didn’t think that a humorous film that was completely outside of the mainstream would get enough money because people wouldn’t think that it deserved it.
He said that mostly those who were fans of the book would have enough of an attachment to it to invest.
“Only people that love Shoplifting are really going to invest in it and most of the people that love Shoplifting don’t have any money to invest anything,” Kalayeh said.
Kalayeh said he wants to raise the money so that he will be able to pay the staff as well as cover the costs of traveling to different locations in New York, Hollywood and Ohio to shoot scenes.
That’s why a few days ago, he decided to move it to IndieGoGo, where you get to keep the money regardless of whether you reach the goal. However, Kalayeh said he was scared that people who tried to donate at Kickstarter wouldn’t go to IndieGoGo.
He said he thinks that getting $10,000 might be possible on IndieGoGo. This would affect the project though in the sense that some people probably wouldn’t be paid, so he would have to discuss it with everyone involved and it would become a “passion project.”
Kalayeh seems to be along for the ride though, and doesn’t mind doing what it takes to get the film off the ground, while being open to any ideas or innovations that happen in the film along the way.
“If I’m gonna make this movie, why not make it as risky as shit?” he said.
Check out the featurette to Shoplifting below, as well as the short film Kalayeh did of Lin’s bear poem, as well as The Human War trailer.
To donate to the Shoplifting film, go here.
Shoplifting From American Apparel Featurette – Director’s Commentary from Pirooz Kalayeh on Vimeo.
The Human War Trailer from Pirooz Kalayeh on Vimeo.
Bear Video from Pirooz Kalayeh on Vimeo.
