WUFF: What made you decide to set the film around the Olympics?

 

Charlotte Zhang: I was intrigued by how direct some of the consequences of hosting the 1984 Olympics were in regards to the conditions and events that culminated in the 1992 riots in Los Angeles. I wanted to make a film about scales of banditry and theft, orchestrated decay, all these things pushed to a fever pitch by the Olympics. Every host city has suffered – the veneer of triumph and celebration is offensively thin, the degree of dissonance people have to contend with daily needs no exaggeration. 

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WUFF: I'd love to hear about your influences for Tycoon, cinematic and otherwise.

 

CZ: The biggest was Killer of Sheep, everything about the film including its production model. There’s bits and pieces of inspiration from 88:88 – a Winnipeg classic made by my dear friend Isiah – Inland Empire, King Lear, I Come With the Rain, I Fidanzati, among others.

 

It’s hard to parse out specific influences because the process of making involves so much absorption. In general I’m very inspired by the artists that emerged from the Memphis rap scene in the 90s, the most radical sounds and syntax, much of it circulated via DIY distribution. I think a track like Let’s Make a Stain off DJ Zirk’s Underworld is a perfect example – totally hypnotic in its sparseness, you have two lines of repeated intervals, a minor 3rd and a minor 2nd, vocal track pressed flat against the ear, unremitting triplets, “Make no mistake/there is no escape” – an atmosphere can be conjured with just a few textures, deployed with utter certainty. 

 

Ken Lum is another longtime influence. I like declarations and declarative gestures, the way they leave you open to the world. I’m drawn to a certain deadpan sensibility.

 

WUFF: The xeroxed images give the film a real zine quality. Can you talk about those montages?

 

It’s a technique I’ve been toying with for a number of years. It entails working frame by frame, mixing stills from archival footage and my own footage, degrading them through repetitive xeroxing, xeroxing images on top of one another, taking distorted pictures of xeroxed images and then xeroxing those, looking for patterns and shared arcs of movement. It’s kind of nice that a 10 second sequence will take me hours, I always feel like I’ve come upon some greater realization about the images by the end. It feels like going back to cinema square one, like making a zoetrope. The right rhythm can imitate camera flashes or certain kinds of fireworks. I like the way they erupt into motion, there can be real effort or difficulty in how they move, like rolling uphill. The sequences seemed like a fitting element for a film interested in excavating historical memory in disorderly and dubious ways. 

 

CZ: There's this mood running through the film, a sense of aimlessness, but also like something is about to give. How do you cultivate that?

 

I think that was very much felt. I would have been shocked if it wasn’t also present in the film. 

 

WUFF: WUFF is a DIY festival, partly out of necessity but also by ethos. One thing I really like about Tycoon is how its DIY-ness feels like the film’s natural scale, rather than something compensatory. How do you arrive at that sense of fit between form, resources, and ambition (especially on a first feature)? 

 

CZ: On a practical level it helped that I shot this film slowly over the course of a year. I had time for grants to be rejected and approved, to make back-up plans. The dialogue in the script was followed closely, but the rest was kept porous for rewrites. Week by week I got to look at the materials I had gathered in pieces and stretch odd corners to get it to size. I like the risk of going too big, I think a certain shamelessness in doing so actually expands the breadth of the work. 

 

I’m opposed to this idea of making artistic decisions for the sake of performing ‘production value’ for an audience. Why spend precious time and space trying to offer those reassurances, to reify this logic of budget-as-legitimacy, when you can rethink form instead? What kind of artist would I be if I couldn’t at least attempt to convey the dimensions of something through the act of cutting, or with all the other materials I have at hand that can exceed one-to-one representational realism, that can swim in the negative space? 

 

For example, if I don’t have the budget Kathryn Bigelow had for Strange Days, would I then have no way of effectively depicting a militarized LAPD? How would that be the case when real evidence of such can be lived or witnessed every day in and of itself? How could I not also consider the ways the paradigm of policing has permeated someone’s inner world, undergirded a culture of technofascist racial cruelty, made itself present in ways beyond the plainly visible? You can have 42 million dollars and still blow it on an embarrassing white-moderate fantasy of post-1992 ‘reform’, or you can decide not to wait.

 

WUFF: That footage of the car doing donuts at the intersection is incredible. Where does it come from? 

 

CZ: Sideshows or takeovers are frequent in Los Angeles, they have been part of the fabric for decades now. I hesitate to say too much because I think it’s nice for what’s underground to stay underground, and either way I’m just another spectator, but I think like many forms of car culture, they both circumscribe and reconfigure the infrastructure of a given city; they make new sense of the sprawl. They are ambivalent expressions of rebellion and celebration, a way of occupying public space that’s spectacular and virtuosic and sometimes destructive, and I’ve enjoyed going to them for years. I think they are pure cinema. It’s thanks to a good friend of mine who is part of the scene that I was able to ride along and get as much footage as I did. I wanted the presence of sideshows in the film to be reflected in the structure of the film itself – circular motion and the shape of rings, explosive action punctuating ceaseless roaming from intersection to intersection, strange and evasive routes taken to rid a tail. 

 

WUFF: What are you working on now?

 

CZ: I’m currently writing my next feature, which is about a revenge plot in the San Fernando Valley that unfolds as a film-within-a-film. This part of the process always feels like the honeymoon phase, it’s so satisfying to be consumed with ideas all day about the characters, images and sounds to include, how I’d like to block certain scenes, just total infatuation. It probably makes me quite annoying to be around. 

 

In the meantime there’s short exercises I’d like to try, a few rolls of Super 8 to burn through, new cameras to test. Working to expand this xerox sequencing technique with new materials, a lot more cutting and gluing and color. I’m not so interested in showing these, more than anything they’re a way to keep my game up. I am also working on sleeping and getting my life on track so that it doesn’t get blown apart by the demands of the next production.

 

WUFF: What are you listening to these days?

 

CZ: A few DJ Screw tapes – Wineberry Over Gold, Blowin’ Big Behind Tint, and Screwed Up Texas. Internal Empire by Robert Hood, Pino Donaggio’s score for Blow Out. Just revisited Volume One by Shawty Pimp and MC Spade. A few tracks on constant repeat recently, like Dusty Springfield’s You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, You Can’t Hurt Me No More by the Opals, an orchestral arrangement of Nie Er’s Song of Mei Niang performed by the Shanghai Philharmonic. Summer is always the perfect time to revisit Kelis’s Tasty. And a lot of oldies, as per usual. 

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Tycoon screens on Sunday, June 7th at 6:30 pm at the Dave Barber Cinematheque