this acc will NO LONGER BE IN SERVICE as i do not wna be associated with a lot of my old reblogs, and also because switching accs is easier than clearing out an account.
So I emailed Ben Coccio with some of my burning questions regarding Zero Day (and his work in general). I got permission to post these but aagghh I'm just so excited. I loved reading these takes and I think they're such an interesting perspective. It's pretty long so I put the rest of the questions under the cut :)
In an interview from a few years back, you'd mentioned knowing about online communities surrounding ZD. What are your thoughts on Zero Day’s legacy today as a cult classic, with such a strong fanbase 20 years on?
I think it's fascinating. I have theories, but even though I made the movie, I really have no idea. These are just complete speculation, so take them with a grain of salt:
I wonder if part of it is because America simply refuses to address its ongoing gun problem? Back when I made ZD, I was convinced that Columbine would be the last mass shooting of its size in my lifetime. I can't believe how wrong I was, but I can also totally believe it. ZD is 22 years old, so there are at least 2 generations of Americans that have grown up with mass shootings being a frequent terror in American life. So maybe this movie just articulates a fear or anxiety that is front of mind for a lot of people?
I also think it could be that ZD functions like a dark John Hughes movie or something - where the essential quality of the movie that resonates with people is not actually the nightmare subject matter, but its buddy-teen-movie vibe. I think it was Martin Scorsese who said that you don't watch a movie more than once for the plot - you watch it more than once for the story, and to hang out with the characters. I think the sincere depiction of being a teen - even in the context of them planning something awful - has the quality of hanging out with friends as a teen. And the characters are fun to hang out with, even though they are terrifying.
I think American culture tends to romanticize killers - from serial killers to Charles Manson to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. At the same time, I think all cultures tend to romanticize youth - and stories of self-destructive youth is a very romantic subgenre. I think it's possible that ZD's subject being young people and ZD's willingness to depict a mass shooting without demonizing the shooters speaks to a subset of young people who are enamored with a romanticized idea of school mass shooters. Perhaps they see the sincere depiction of Cal and Andre's humanity as a confirmation of this romantic ideal? Along these lines, Cal and Andre are good looking, charismatic kids, so there's that!
My last theory is that the movie came along as video on the internet was getting more and more widespread - I just checked and youtube came along in 2005. The movie was built on the idea of what my friends and I did in high school, pre internet, with VHS cameras. And that only got more and more common amongst middle class teens as the 90s wore on. So ZD is kind of tailor-made to be discovered on youtube at that time - it's actually kind of a great way to watch it, too, as opposed to other movies where that context would be a distraction. I remember that the shooting scene was put up by someone on 'liveleak' as actual footage from Columbine, which was both gross and a fascinating media ecosystem phenomenon.
With The Beginner specifically, was it strange working with Cal as an actor in such a different role compared to Zero Day?
Not strange, just different. Cal is a really good actor and we got to know one another so well doing Zero Day that we're practically like family. I think what was interesting was that it was a different kind of movie - it had a lot of improv, like Zero Day, but it had a different tone and had a different relationship with depicting a 'movie world'. I was going for a subtle surreal quality, I suppose. Zero Day was designed to be aggressively 'realistic' (maybe naturalistic is the better word?) and the beginner was meant to be built like a parable or fable.
So there were things I wanted Cal to do that were not realistic, or maybe odd. I was not experienced enough at the time as a director to articulate what I was going for, and too insecure as a person to accept that what I thought was right didn't work for a close collaborator of mine. A good example is when Cal comes home, after his parents thought he might be dead, he hugs them, and then excuses himself to go alone up to his room. Cal really had issues with this moment - he just didn't buy it. I was trying to be efficient in the scene, and not have a 'time passing' cut, or some other device. But I couldn't persuade Cal, and instead I just kind of tried to pull rank on him, which, considering how we make work together, was a total failure. Sometimes, when you're anxious or insecure, it's easy to get controlling or pushy - you just want to bypass the process and simply get what you want.
Would you change anything if you made Zero Day today? Not necessarily on a technical level, but in response to how much the culture surrounding guns and mass shootings in the US has changed over recent years.
I think if I made it today, I'd have to build it in a radically different way.
First, I think I would be more aware of choosing to tell the story of two male, white, middle class teens (as opposed to how I did it at the time - by unthinkingly defaulting to two, white, male, middle class teens because I grew up as a white, male, middle class teen). But I would still likely make it about two, white, male, middle class teens, because it's just easier to 'write what you know.'
Second, the changes in tech are such that white middle class american kids probably have a 16x9, 4k video cam on their phone, one which those kids use way more than if they lived in a time of miniDV camcorders -- not to mention the fact that they would be commonly framing video in a vertical format. So right off the bat, the images that made the movie would be totally different in a fundamental way.
Third, their phones are connected to the internet, social media, et al, and so are they. Does the phone service their parents use upload everyone's videos and pics to a family cloud account? If so, does that change what they shoot and how? Does the way the kids use social media scratch the itch that would have made them get out the camcorder in 2002?
Fourth, mass shootings and our reactions to them/motives for committing them have changed so much as they have gotten more frequent. They are no longer national events like Columbine was. Or, if they are, they don't last as national events in shared memory like Columbine did. Paradoxically, mass shootings like Uvalde and Sandy Hook - which warranted less overall coverage in the current media landscape than Columbine did in 1999 - make Columbine look almost quaint in comparison. For white middle class people in rich countries, mass shootings have become a fairly common tool for political violence in the name of a broad ideological project of intolerance - from homophobia to incel misogyny to racism to hatred of other religions.
When Columbine happened, I was not thinking in those terms culturally. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were enigmas to me. Their shooting an explosion of nihilistic violence that I was both drawn to with morbid fascination and repelled by. The Eric Harrises and Dylan Klebolds of today are Eliot Roger or the Tree of Life shooter or the Pulse nightclub shooter or the guy that shot up the sikh temple or the mosque mass shooting in new zealand or the guy that shot up the supermarket in Buffalo (and on and on). Many of these shooters' entire social lives consisted of participating in online communities dedicated to hate and cruelty which, although similar to the way Cal and Andre egg each other on in ZD, is not maybe a story easily told well with cinema.
Mass shootings were, long before Columbine, a tactic of political violence, from the Puerto Rico separatist attack on the house of reps in the 1950s to the Japanese Red Army attacking an Israeli airport in 1972 to the guy that attacked the congressional baseball game back in 2017 hoping to kill a bunch of republicans. It seems to me that a lot of the mass shootings we see in America today are a continuation of a long-standing trend of right-wing political violnce in America, and maybe now part of a kind of low-simmer civil war - maybe even at the same time that they are externalized suicides committed by severely alienated people with easy access to ridiculously powerful weapons . This has changed how we interrogate these events after they happen - we look quickly for political or ideological motivations. We also have new things we blame mass shootings on now - just recently, a jury convicted the parents of a mass shooter with involuntary man-slaughter because they did not stop their kid from shooting up their school.
Fifth, mass shootings have become such a part of our cultural life in America, that people deciding to enact a shooting are engaging with a much deeper meta-cultural narrative than the characters in ZD were. Where do these characters fit into that meta-narrative?
Do you find that your influences have changed majorly since you first started making films? Are there any themes, concepts or artists that you find you've pulled away from that used to influence you heavily?
When I was a kid, I was a picky eater. Now I like all kinds of food, even though I still have my favorite meals. When I was a kid, I would eat the same thing over and over again. Now, I go out of my way to try new kinds of food. I still really care about the taste and presentation of what I eat, but the most important thing now is what's behind the meal - who I'm eating it with.
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