indieactivity: Now that Die Like A Man is complete, what are your feelings about the entire project?
Eric Nazarian (EN): I am Feeling grateful and fulfilled. I know that I gave every frame in the film every last drop of my soul. That it is hand made with love and no compromises. The spirit of the film is raw like an open heart with scars from all the barbed wires. Challenges that we had to jump, tumble and run through to make it the way it deserves to be made. Authentic and true to the world and characters. I am most proud of the actors nuanced and layered performances.
The film feels emotionally timeless, thanks to the honesty and rawness. It unflinchingly explores the dangers of doomed machismo and the hope for reconciliation through conscience. I feel that the film will grow with time and is a love letter to L.A. It is also a cautionary tale that I hope will be an inspiring one. About the choices young people must make. And, the point of no return that our society is headed concerning gun violence.
Casting is one of those steps in a film production you have to get right. How did you get through it?
Eric Nazarian (EN): I wanted to cast authentically and organically to the material without cutting any creative corners. I spent over six months rehearsing and workshopping non-actors with professional actors through several conversations and improvisation techniques. My philosophy on casting is like making a custom suit or wedding dress. The script has to be tailored to fit the actor’s unique strengths and emotional presence. You can’t force an actor to fit into a part. Just like you can’t force someone to fit into a dress.
Everything has to be tailored organically. That way the performance becomes embodiment. It is not just acting like the great actors of the Stanislavsky and Stella Adler schools. The real work is personal and spiritual, not just dramatic technique. That comes last. The text, no matter how brilliant and singular, can never telegraph the raw power. The power of what an actor like Brando or Poitier can do. Such as a silent gaze that is worth more than a thousand words.
What went into the pre-production process for Die Like A Man?
Eric Nazarian (EN): I spent a lot of time location scouting. And, I spoke to the community leaders and locals. In Venice, Santa Monica, Culver City and the West side about making the film there. I developed a 4-point sort of Manifesto of grassroots cinema. This is a tool for social change; bridging local communities and activists/advocates for social empowerment. Through the integration of attention to detail and paying locally into the communities. This supports working communities through mom and pop establishments. With my dear friend Father Greg Boyle and Homeboy Industries. We started the casting sessions in 2019 and early 2020 before COVID shut us down.
Then started up again in 2021 with Homeboy and Pico Youth and Family Center. I wanted to give system-impacted youth and individuals a chance to workshop the scenes and really train them in technique. And, I shot a lot of scenes and locations on my iPhone as visual templates. Because, we had only 13 days plus 1 splinter day to shoot 116 scenes which was insane, but doable. I took the actors on a “field trip” to every secured location. I let them feel the rhythm and space of the underexposed communities of LA. And, I wanted to represent accurately in the film’s palette and vision. Overpreparation is key when there is zero margin for error.
Without giving anything away, tell us a little bit about the script, how did you come up with the idea?
Eric Nazarian (EN): I grew up in L.A. as an Armenian kid in the ’80s & ’90s. This was the era of Atari, N.W.A, and the Rodney King riots. When Hip Hop was king and our lives were a multiethnic mosaic of musical, artistic and street influences. Tragically, a lot of friends fell by way of the gun and absurd random violence in that “Decade of Death.” In 1998, I was location scouting for my USC film school project. I had a random, but fateful encounter with a teen on a bike. He had a gun on a Downtown L.A. side street.
He saw the Sony DV camcorder in my hand and clearly wanted to make a play for it. Our exchange was very brief and somewhat surreal. He could not have been more than 14. Then he made a point of making sure I could see the gun in his hand. Out of dumb luck, I recognized the name of his gang tattooed on his neck. I recalled the names of two high school classmates in the early ’90s who were from that neighborhood. To this day I don’t know if he recognized the names that I nervously mentioned. Who were my two classmates. But, just as quickly as he pulled out what looked like a .25, he pocketed it and pedaled away. And that was it. My heart was pounding in my throat as I stood in bright daylight. The bystanders didn’t even blink. Nobody cared.
The randomness of that kid on a bike nonchalantly holding the handgun never left me. It still burns in my memory. To this day, I wonder what might have happened to that kid. If he got killed, shot somebody, ended up in prison. Or worked at Homegirl Cafe and made a 180-degree change in his life and got his tattoos removed. Many years later, he revisited me in Freddy’s character and the rest of the script started flowing out. An over adrenalized teen, a gun, a mission and the violence that is glorified in male-dominated societies. It was conditioning boys to become men through bloodshed and senseless violence. The memories of the ’90s; my loves, losses, the departed and favorite oldies music. All amalgamated with the need to understand the universal rite of passage of boys. Kids bullied into misguided notions of masculinity and machismo. It is tragic, timeless, modern and sadly prevalent. Why must men bury their emotions and always fight to secure status. But, when they cry or show emotion, society deems them weak or troubled instead of human? This is at the heart of the film.
Who is Die Like A Man for? Who do you think would enjoy it the most?
Eric Nazarian (EN): At its core, Die Like a Man is about the clash. One between a young man’s idealized image of himself. And, blowback of his decisions that destroy his delusions about all that he thought was true and good. Which turns out to be horribly bad. The film is for the kid on that bike. It is for the misunderstood and struggling youth who stare into the mirror with fingers curled into fists. This film is for the souls tempted to join a group, a gang, an army or a club anywhere in the world in order to feel accepted. It is for moms struggling to keep sons away from violence on the streets.
It is for any film-lover and audience member who wants to see a more layered, out of the box stand-alone film that does not paint within the lines and tries to offer a spiritual portrait of the streets and this young man’s misguided rite of passage. I would like to believe that Freddy’s emotional odyssey speaks universally to the kid in Afghanistan under threat of being recruited into a fighting force, or the youth with dreams in a housing project being forced to the precipice of choosing between the pen or the sword…or the high school freshman being hazed in the locker room who just wants to play ball. This film is for all of them.
How long did it take to shoot the entire film?
Eric Nazarian (EN): 14 production days total. 116 scenes.
How did you work with actors to get the best performances? Give us a typical on set direction at production?
Eric Nazarian (EN): 95% of my work with the actors begins several months before we shoot building the character and tailoring the pages I wrote to fit their inner lives. There is never a “typical” day on set when you have under 12 hours to shoot 9 to 11 pages on a very low budget. I spent several months with my lead actors discussing the emotional and spiritual lives of their characters. Who they were at age seven? Who they will be ten years after the film ends? Trust is the most important element in my work with the actors. I come from the John Cassavetes, Elia Kazan, Sidney Lumet school of really working the script to fit the inner lives of the characters and identifying their most powerful traits, then pushing them into directions unknown so they can bring out the unexpected without too much rehearsal but a lot of soul-searching.
One of the most powerful scenes in the film that Freddy and Solo nail is the final long-take confrontation that I choreographed and mapped out months in advance. The real time heated exchange needed to hit every major emotional beat without being interrupted by the cuts. In prep, I shot the last long-take multiple times on my iPhone and timed it. We only had time for three takes to execute it. Miguel and Cory hit the emotional bulls-eye of their characters with so much raw emotion fueled by their love and commitment to their craft and cinema, as well as the discipline of preparation that made the magic possible.
Die Like A Man had talent working behind the scenes. How did you handle creative differences?
Eric Nazarian (EN): I never just interview for positions. There has to be a trusting and honest connection on a human level first with my core collaborators. My job is to define every single aspect of the film’s look, feel, sound, acting nuance, storylines, subtext and how we can color this same fresco and palette together so that I can give the artists total freedom to do their very best work. I handle creative differences through overcommunication as much as possible. Of course, there are limits and sometimes the simpatico connection that you feel with a collaborator in the beginning may not pass muster when you are working around the clock as the pressures of production sink in.
What techniques do you use to ensure a film is cohesive and flows well throughout the story?
Eric Nazarian (EN): Casting truly is half the battle. When the right actor comes along like the brilliant and talented Miguel Angel Garcia and Cory Hardrict, Mariel Molino and Frankie Loyal, the scene-reads truly help bullet-point all that is working in the dialogue by what is acted visually and less spoken. I adjust the dialogue according to the gifts of the actors and spare no effort to make it as authentic to them as possible. Cinema is an audiovisual language first and foremost. It is not a literal one. We write and rip up the pages and write again in order to translate the vision in our heads onto the screen. When all is said and done, the power of the actors’ capacity to translate words into gestures and silences is what has to transcend the script into emotions that don’t need subtitles to be understood.
What shots and camera angles do you prefer for particular scenes and why?
Eric Nazarian (EN): I come from a photojournalist background and love the lens selection process in the shotlisting phase to find the right focal length and the right angle to shoot the scenes that capture a feeling that only the camera can capture. The images of Freddy working out and pumping himself up for the mission that he must fulfill we shot on longer focal lengths to really isolate his confused sense of machismo inside his room that we painted in earth tones as well as gun-metal grays to echo a sort of emotional prison that he is in. I wanted to capture the lived-in washed out Los Angeles street realism and not the over-filtered tobacco toned shots of the city that make it look muggy and ugly.
I wanted pastel tones, natural shadows and cooler shades to capture a more poetic realism as opposed to an adrenalized palette. Close-ups I try to use as sparingly as possible to capture Miguel’s incredible range of emotions. He goes through the full spectrum from laughter to tears and beyond. I wanted him to rage in his cage as naturally and honestly as he could. There is no landscape more stunning and cinematic to me than the human face. I can spend a lifetime studying portraits and self-portraits and trying to figure out the mystery and enigma of how a human face can speak volumes without a single word. The best films that are pure cinema do that for me. Films by Terrence Malick, Wong Kar-Wai, Robert Bresson, Martin Scorsese, Bernardo Bertolucci, Agnes Varda, Kieslowski and Ozu, among so many others.
What’s next for you? What are you working on right now?
Eric Nazarian (EN): I have a few irons in the fire. I have adapted BORN TO KILL by my dear friend and remarkable author T.J. English that is a true and incredible rite of passage story set in Vietnam and New York in the late ’80s and ’90s that I am very excited to make. Also, my longtime passion project GIANTS which was my Nicholl Fellowship winning script and parts two and three of my Los Angeles trilogy about the matrix of crime, punishment, the prison industrial complex and the changing face of Los Angeles. Think Michael Mann’s HEAT meets David Simon’s THE WIRE. Damn! That’s expensive. Ha ha!
How do you tackle projects with very tight timelines or challenging locations?
Eric Nazarian (EN): I love the prolific auteurs of the 1960s and 1970s world cinema, namely John Cassavetes, Jean-Pierre Melville, Jean-Luc Godard, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and of course the eternal passion of Martin Scorsese. They went into the streets and made it happen. A camera, a sound recorder with a small and crazy dedicated crew and the guts to stick to their guns and make cinema. Great resonant cinematic art should not be complicated. It should be able to be concieved and realized with a minimum of resources. I try to strip everything down to absolute essentials and have an honest conversation with myself about what I need as opposed to what I want to make my film.
How has technology changed filmmaking and in how have you adopted new methods in your productions?
Eric Nazarian (EN): If you really absolutely must make a film, you will find a way to make it happen. Get your friends together in a car, hit the desert and try to make a film without dialogue on your iPhone. There is so much we can do now thanks to technology. Everything in our lives today as it pertains to the second you grab your cell phone is rooted in cinema. Audiovisual storytelling. A different kind of Cinema is being born in the SIM card era. The iPhone is really a blessing when it comes to the immediacy of visualizing moving images and sharing with your collaborators. I would shoot the scene in my head at the location and text it to cinematographer Piotr Sobocinski in Poland. In real time he could see the location and ask questions that would help me better refine the shots so that we would be ready when the day came to shoot. I shot the film in LA, edited it in Guadalajara, Mexico with my dear friend and talented editor Luis Guillermo Navarro, and finished the film in Warsaw, Poland with the dedicated team of Mateusz Remberk and Dado Lukic.
What tips would you give aspiring filmmakers who are just starting their careers?
Eric Nazarian (EN): Your voice and your heart is special. Don’t let anyone dilute that. Don’t let any human being tell you that you have to fit into a certain paint-by-numbers mold, and that you have to second-guess your audience. Trust your heart and soul and stick to the script that you believe in because the road will be long and many obstacles will come, but you will outshine your most impossible moments by staying true to the heart of your dream and vision. Those who will get you will get you and those who will not, will not. Don’t try to appease everybody except your heart and the muse that inspired you to pick up that pen and the camera in the first place. Stay true to your first mad passionate idea that made you stop everything and reach for your laptop or notebook, writing a mile a minute as the idea came to life and you saw something truly magical that the Muse blessed you with. That is everything. All else must serve that beautiful mystery of cinematic creativity. Surround yourself with kindred souls and dreamers who are die-hard in their work ethic and get each others backs, no matter what.
Tell us what you think of the interview with Eric Nazarian. What do you think of it? What ideas did you get? Do you have any suggestions? Or did it help you? Let’s have your comments below and/or on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.
Socials
IMDb
Instagram
FILMMAKER INTERVIEWS
