Never meet your heroes they say. Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos defined much of my formative years in cinema and many others in my generation through their video essays on their YouTube channel Every Frame a Painting. Their passionate understanding of cinema as a storytelling vehicle and an art form is contagious and inspiring. When I saw they were premiering their newest short film The Second (premiering soon online!) at Fantasia 2024, I knew I had to be there. After a lengthy talk, I can wholeheartedly say: Meet your heroes. Enriching, eye-opening, and encouraging, interviewing Tony and Taylor was one of the highlights of the year.
Juan: Is this your first time presenting a project at a film festival? What makes the moviegoing experience different in these spaces, especially one like Fantasia?
Tony & Taylor: It is our first time presenting a narrative short we’ve done.
Tony: Actually, a friend just asked me how my experience so far was at Fantasia and I could only put it in these words; when someone tells you’re about to see something great, audiences tend to respond by folding their arms and saying: “Oh really!” and react to the film with a skeptical eye. [At Fantasia] Audiences receive the invitation to see something great with arms wide open. They want the film to be great. I think that is very different from any other place.
Taylor: Audiences here want to like the movie, they want to be here, and they are sincere. That is not to say people at other festivals aren’t. I have experienced people tend to keep their emotions closer to their chest, they are more reserved. At Fantasia, audiences are ready to say yes to anything, they are meowing at the screens, just going with the flow. They are here to have fun…and that’s great, it makes me very happy.
Juan: Taking into account all of your experiences before The Second, how do you relate to cinema as a medium for storytelling now, after the film has been premiered?
Tony: It is an interesting feeling because it still feels like a work in progress. For us, it’ll feel out once it is on the internet if that makes sense. When I was younger and I was approaching the cinema, say, through DVDs or watching on a small screen with headphones, it always felt like there was a distance. It was me and the screen as an object. You watch it, you enjoy it, you experience it, but you have no idea how it was all made. You have a rough idea of the process but it still feels like a magical thing you’ve encountered. Over the last decade or so of working in the industry, I understand more what’s going on at the back and it’s a dangerous thing. Because I know all the moves, when I watch a film, im thinking about where are they going with the camera, if they’re using a green screen, a lot or a set…which is not necessarily jading, but it makes watching something fresh much more difficult. The goal has always been to watch something and shut off my mind. There are movies where I begin mentally deconstructing what I’m seeing and then suddenly my mind shuts off and I go back to that early stage – I have no clue how things were done. I always use the example of The Tale of Princess Kaguya (Dir. Isao Takahata, 2013.) Intellectually I know how the film was made but I have no clue how it was done…
Taylor: Because Tony and I have worked together on so many levels, I think for us it is not that our relationship with cinema has changed, but I see it more as a kind of process. We’ve worked on many different movies and TV shows, and they all brought us here. We’ve learned, we’ve absorbed as much as we can. We take all of those experiences and move on to the next stage and see where that takes us. The process is so important to us. We have to keep moving on and forward to the next project. Hopefully, we can look back on it, reflect, and say “This is what we’ve made.”
Tony: I also like to spy on audiences to peep on their reactions. We were watching a movie earlier where a guy gets shot in the face and blood splatters all over. I turned to see the reactions and made a mental note: “Oh Ok! Stuff like this would kill it at Fantasia, got it.”
Taylor: That ties up with what he was saying about knowing the magic behind the movie. You start to analyze it and it has become a problem for me because I find it very hard to turn off my brain. When I go to a movie theatre or a film festival, I enjoy just watching other people. I can only live in my own head, so I like seeing what other people are doing. We went to a movie the other night and it was a great time. The crowd was so into it. At Cineplex and places like that, half the people are just on their phones. So I remember very distinctly taking a look around and watching people be excited. I could only think to myself: “I wish I could give people that. I want to be able to give them that experience.” I just hope we can achieve that level of engagement.
Juan: After focusing on the idea of the process behind cinema, do you think there is a balance to be found when watching a movie? Or after years of studying it, do you feel our brains are now corrupted forever?
Taylor: It depends on your mood, where you are in your life, of what you are expecting from the movie. I’ve become so picky when it comes to choosing what I’m going to watch and because of that my moviegoing experience overwhelmingly has been good. I can turn [my mind] off and watch it. I can have my critiques and praises after but like I said I’m so picky I just don’t bother watching something that won’t make me feel that way. That also means I do miss out on a lot of stuff. But I think it is something you can’t control, it is something you just have to accept.
Tony: When we talk about writing, the word that we associate with it is literacy. In order to be literate in English, you need to both read and write it. To be literate in any language you have to both understand it and produce it in some way. Cinema as a language is only a couple hundred years old, but we still conceive it as reading. As if it only exists when we’re watching a movie. The other part, the “writing”, is the filmmaking aspect of it, which would complete the loop. Purely in those concepts, to have a passing grade in film literacy, we should be able to make and watch. I believe in our case, we have benefited in the past from taking the time to just study, to be exposed to theories and ideas, even if we don’t agree with all of them. I have met other people that you just learn filmmaking by doing it; by screwing lights and placing gels. I see their point but I don’t agree with them.
Taylor: We think we have to do both. Everything you do will be in service of the film. The job of anyone who is creating [a movie] is to have opinions, they should know what they like, how they see and how they are going to make something. The only way we could develop those types of opinions was by studying what other people did and by doing it and deciding if we liked it. Some people learn in different ways. we could do it just by being told but it won’t stick with us unless we do it ourselves. That´s how we have been doing it and we just want to keep doing it like that. We’re in this now and whether or not it succeeds or fails. We just got to keep doing the next one or else we’re not going to learn. So we have to keep going.
Juan: What was the last movie you watched that let you turn off your brain and watch instead of studying it?
Tony: One was a rewatch and the other was a first-time watch. The rewatch was Un Prophète from 2009 by Jacques Audiard. That movie is fantastic. I was worried about seeing it again because I seemed to remember the whole thing was handheld all the time. But when it started… the lead performance by Tahar Rahim was superb but I think the thing that stuck with me this time, now that I have more experience, was seeing all the ways the prison was laid out and how the different groups were set. How it was told. The sort of power shifts between the main character and the antagonists throughout the film. – Twenty minutes in when the main character slits the guy with a razor – I was like Jesus! It was just phenomenal to watch again. Now that I know more of the tricks of the industry, I know how things were shot and done. It felt really good to revisit a movie like that and to remember that even though it is two and a half hours long, it is still riveting, interesting, and political. It’s like a coming-of-age murder movie… The other movie I saw this year for the first time was Na Hong-jin’s The Wailing (2016.) When it started I thought it was going to be another serial killer movie and then I kept on thinking what the heck?! And it just kept going, by the time it got near the end I didn’t even know what to believe. That was fantastic. I knew how to do what they were doing until it got to the double exorcism sequence, that was such a cool executed idea. It is very anxiety-inducing, but mostly from the wrong footing it gives you when you’re watching it. You’re never quite sure what genre it’s going to end up being. There’s a protection that comes when you know a film is a certain genre because you can guess roughly where are things going to end, so you prepare yourself. This film kept switching and I couldn’t see the end.
Taylor: I watched Charade (dir. Stanley Donen, 1963) for the first time this year. I remember the first sequence where Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn’s characters meet and how witty everything was. It looked so pretty too. They’re just in hijinx and I’m there having so much fun. A perfect example of a fun movie with people who are good at their jobs. It was like a great souffle. A light dessert. There’s this moment when she is trying to escape from Cary Grant in the subway and then you see her hand coming up from a phone booth to dial it! That was my favourite thing I have seen this year. I wanted to frame that one moment. That very particular feeling of being someone in the audience who knows something that neither of the characters knows. It’s just for us to see and know. I feel like movies these days like to do winks and nods to the audience, kind of saying: “we’re on it too.” But I don’t want them to be on it. I want it just for us… That being said, I find it so much easier to turn off my brain with animation rather than live-action. I think it’s just because animation requires so much more suspension of disbelief from the get-go. There is a different way to engage with Live-action because you’re seeing real people.
Juan: Do you feel maybe Academia romanticizes the process of filmmaking?
Taylor: It 100% does. That´s human nature. We like to have that kind of figure in our heads, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Again, the job of a director in this day and age is to have an opinion, they have to say how they like to see things. That´s what’s going to get people to engage because how someone else sees is what makes us curious… I was trained as a classical animator and that means I took classes like anatomy to be able to figure out drawing. Even if you go back to masters, like Picasso or Rembrandt, so much of it is just pure working and trying and studying to create the masterpieces they have. They had to study, they had to sit there. I know some artists get scared to say this, but a lot of the way you learn is just by copying. You copy the techniques of the masters. There was an entire class I took where we were just trying to reproduce a style we liked. We need to be able to look at these other people and understand how they are doing it in order to better inform ourselves.
Tony: I have a two-part answer. First, it has to do with the idea of auteurism and the auteur theory. I think the auteur theory is a fantastic academic tool and a not-so-useful nuts-and-bolts filmmaking tool. It is incredibly useful in academia to look at a filmmaker’s body of work to see who they collaborated with and find that there is always a constant. It’s like surveying what they’re doing, and how are they changing across multiple studios or places: like studying John Ford at Fox or somewhere else. It is very useful in that sense. Where it breaks down, in my experience…is if like you walked on set and say Je suis l’auteur everyone is going to say “screw this guy.” Filmmaking is a collaborative process and without every other person there, there is no movie… There is this famous interview that always makes me laugh where Peter Bogdanovich asks John Ford how he shot a film, and Ford goes: “With a Camera.” That is such a great example of the dissonance between the two because I have met people who are [sort of] considered auteurs, and in my interactions with them, I found two things. They are very generous in giving credit to their collaborators privately and publicly and they also have strong opinions. When you get to interact with them, you can tell when that person in charge has a strong sense of what they want and knows how to articulate it to everyone else. I think when we talk about the authorial voice, that is what we’re really referring to. The captain at the head of the ship knows what they want out of this journey and everyone on the crew is working towards it collectively. But if you change the entire crew of the ship, it would be a different film… The perfect word I always use as an example of the difference between academia and practical filmmaking is the phrase mise-en-scene. Mise-en-scene is a great academic word, but a terrible filmmaking word. In academia you´re describing how all the elements in the frame interact with each other, the balance of it, the progression. It’s a terrible filmmaking word because on set you need to be able to take that end visual idea of what you want and delegate it out to every department. When you talk about the end effect of what you want to achieve on set, what you actually have to be able to do is deconstruct it into the different departments and mise-en-scene as a phrase just means the collective result, functionally it is useless. You´re hoping the result is better than the sum of its parts and that someone watching it feels that effect you have achieved.
Juan: Now that you have been the “captain of the journey”, how do you feel this will affect your future filmmaking and moviegoing experiences?
Taylor: I just want to do more. Now that I have done it once, I want to do it again and get better, and doing it again. Especially now that we have people that know how to work with us. We always joke with Nach [Producer for The Second] telling him that is tied to us forever. He understands what we’re doing and how we’re doing it, he understands our weird way of talking. We want to take other people with us on the journey to create something that hopefully somebody in the theatre will be engaged with the way the audience was here.
Tony: Now when I interact with [a film] I want to ask three questions: what is the filmmaking crew trying to do? Did they succeed or fail on that metric they were aiming for? Was it worth doing? The last one´s answer is going to change radically for different people. There may be films that I watch where I know exactly what they are aiming for. I know they nailed it. But I’m not sure if it was worth doing. But that is not ultimately for me to judge. When folks come up to me asking for notes or feedback I try to focus on questions one and two.
Taylor: We split the types of notes we can get or receive into two different types. Descriptive and prescriptive notes.
Tony: Prescriptive notes are very much what you should do to make the movie better: reframe a shot, cut earlier… Descriptive notes, which we generally feel are much more useful are about what you feel or you want to feel. I generally found filmmakers respond better to this because they can look at it from a different angle. For example, if I want you to feel scared in a scene, but you´re telling me you´re laughing, that´s a problem. We’ve also found that descriptive notes work much better with a prescriptive one that follows. The better notes we get are the ones that try to describe things and ask is this what you wanted?
Taylor: There’s a third type of note, which are technical notes and that is literally how do I make a thing do what I want. Stabilizing a camera, punching in, crop, the lighting ratio, crush the shadows. People tend to like them more because it is also a thing they can check off, when you get to the previous two, they can become a bit more personal. It pretty much boils down to some people who just have an eye for it. Howard Hawks says if you give the same script to two directors, you’re going to end with two very different movies. We have to be able to understand that. We would make a completely different movie from someone else and we have to be outside of ourselves when getting or giving notes.
Tony: I’ll tag on to this since we both had this experience. When I work on something now as an editor to someone else’s direction. I try to be the editor I would want to deal with if I were the director. My job is to interpret your choices and find a way to express them in your timeline, with the footage, however, you want me to do it. I won’t make anything that resembles a directorial choice because I’ve sat in that chair and I know how hard it is. All of the many questions you get. I’m not going to attempt to undermine that. I’ve had experiences where I saw something like that happening and I kept repeating to myself: “No, you can’t do that.” The director is the director. In order for this ship to function, we have to let the captain do things, including things that we may have no clue if they’re going to work.
Taylor: A lot of that is faith though. That’s kind of the scary, but also humanizing thing about working in entertainment and or in art in general. There’s always one voice that you’re giving and you just have to have faith in that, even if you’re giving a lot of yourself.
Juan: How much cinema, as a visual medium, is influenced by things that are not visual?
Taylor: Everything. All of it, all of it is. Everything is influenced by everything…
Tony: There is this internet test that says to picture an apple and then there’s five pictures of apples going from one to five. Five is a perfect crisp beautiful apple and as it goes from five to one, it gets fuzzier, out of focus, and pixelated until at one there is a dark nebulous nothing. Taylor got a photographically perfect apple in her head, in my case was an abstraction in my brain that just said apple, not even a picture of it. That doesn’t mean I have no imagination, but it could mean I’m more inspired by sounds. I listen to people talk all the time in public and I’ll transcribe it if it’s interesting. We keep it in a notebook together. So Taylor will do a doodle and I’ll write down a line of dialogue I overheard on the street. So the influence does come from everything, as you can see we have radically different ways in which our brain functions. But that’s why we work so well together!
Taylor: We take inspiration and cues from anything. Chuck Jones said once that should take inspiration from anything. It could be a book, it could be a play, it could be a movie, it could be a picture, it could be a day spent on the beach, just take it…So we’re extremely open to absorbing as much as we can to then apply later. It is just not notebooks, but also pictures on my phone…
Tony: I walk down the street at half speed now because I’ll turn around periodically and she’ll be taking a picture of a window or a leaf.
Taylor: There is something to be said about that phrase: the devil is in the details. Just as important as big picture ideas like how the story is told, there are also those human elements of like, does somebody live here? What is their room like? Because we are creating, especially coming from animation, something out of nothing. We have to fill it in and make it feel real.
Juan: Do you think we don’t allow ourselves to grow in a rush to be ‘good’ filmmakers from the get-go?
Tony: Our running phrase is everyone used to suck. For the longest time, you couldn’t see people’s earliest work because they would be ‘lost to time’
Taylor: They would burn it!
Tony: Stanley Kubrick burned every copy of Fear and Desire (1953) except for one in like Rochester and when I saw it I could tell it was not good. That was the most humanizing thing I’ve seen seen from him, I just sat there and thought: “He used not to be that good.” That’s great, it’s inspirational.
Taylor: That goes back around to the dangers of auteur theory and teaching in that way because they’re not perfect. I love going to museums and seeing not the most famous or best works but the weird and small collections. You can see how good artists developed great ones. It is humanizing and it teaches you that nothing is brought to you fully formed like a masterpiece out of your head. It is a process and you learn slowly. You are going to fail. Things aren’t going to work. You might swing big and miss and that’s fine. You just have to keep going. That’s hard and that’s why we try to respect everyone else’s journey and their process. No one likes to fail when people are watching, but it’s going to happen and that’s okay, you know, that’s how the cookie crumbles.
Short Ends 