Few directorial debuts in recent memory have felt as fresh as Ryan J. Sloan‘s “Gazer,” one of the highlights of the sidebar sections of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. The throwback neo-noir is a paranoid thriller about a single mother struggling with dyschronometria — a condition that prevents her from accurately perceiving the passage of time — who becomes sucked into a criminal conspiracy after accepting a shady job for easy money.
It boasts a star-making performance from Ariella Mastroianni, who co-wrote the film with Sloan, evoking the kind of character-focused movies that cinephiles are constantly lamenting Hollywood doesn’t make anymore. It’s also a truly independent film in every sense of the word, with Sloan and Mastrioanni pooling their wages from multiple dayjobs in order to shoot the film on nights and weekends.
In a conversation with IndieWire conducted at Fantastic Fest 2024, where “Gazer” made its U.S. premiere, Sloan and Mastroianni detailed the unconventional production process and only-in-America resilience that allowed them to make one of the year’s most unique films without any real outside support.
“It definitely began with a conversation about what kind of movie we both wanted to make. Because it’s not just about what I want to do as a director, but also what you want to do as an actor,” Sloan said, gesturing to Mastroianni. “What kind of role are you not gonna get cast in unless we make that movie?”
“It started with Ryan sharing with me all of the films that really excited him, and revisiting those films.” Mastroianni added, explaining that they were primarily inspired by classic thrillers like “Blow-Up,” “Blow-Out,” “The Conversation,” “The Third Man,” “Vertigo,” and “Chinatown.”
“We were like ‘What is the through line here?’” Sloan said. “And we found out there’s a structure that many of these films follow called the Spiral Structure, where there’s a character that’s traveling through but every time they hit this spiral, it’s something from their past that they can’t escape.”
That structure gave them the narrative core of “Gazer,” with Mastroianni’s Frankie constantly running into lapses in memory caused by her dyschronometria that make it harder to solve the larger mystery she has become immersed in. And much like their fictional protagonist, Sloan and Mastroianni found themselves working with incomplete information throughout the production process. The self-financed film was sporadically shot between April 2021 and April 2023, with the duo opting to jump into principal photography before they had an entire script written.
“We started writing basically as soon as the lockdown happened. And that went a full year, and then in November I just said to Ariella ‘We’re gonna get into production in April 2021.’ And she was just like ‘Uhh… okay,’” Sloan said. “We weren’t even done with the script yet. We went in with an unfinished script. We knew we had the beginning and the end, so we said we’ll do two weekends in April and we’ll do the beginning and the end of the movie, because we know what we want.”
After shooting a chunk of the film in April, Sloan and Mastroianni knew that they didn’t want to resume production until late fall in order to capture the seasons changing. That gave them a few months to figure out the center of their film. But in a turn of events that should feel familiar to any writer, they ended up procrastinating and becoming preoccupied with a new idea for a film that began with a dead body being found near an iconic football stadium. Eventually that idea was folded into “Gazer,” giving them a massive conspiracy to go along with Frankie’s personal character arc.
“Over the summer we were talking about the next movie — we really should have focused on one thing at a time — and I made a comment to Ariella that we should make a movie about a body in the trunk of a car at the Meadowlands,” Sloan said. “And she was like ‘Why don’t we do that in this film?’ That was kind of a key to unlocking exactly what this story is.”
While it’s easy to look back fondly on the chaotic writing and shooting process, both filmmakers emphasized that it was the only option available to them. The duo financed the film themselves and could not afford to block out a long enough period of time to shoot it all at once. They used their own home as a filming location and called in every favor they had, risking everything to make a film that they weren’t sure anyone would ever see.
“That was all the time we had,” Mastroianni said. “Ryan and I worked 2-3 jobs at a time, literally from 6am to 11pm, and then we would write.”
“We had zero support,” Sloan added. “Our families were like ‘What the fuck are you guys doing?’ Our friends were like ‘What the fuck are you guys doing?’ We couldn’t go to weddings, we couldn’t go to funerals. We chose our apartment based on the location we needed for Frankie’s apartment. It was a huge Coppola moment where we were just like ‘We have nothing, but we’re gonna throw that nothing into this and just make something. And if it throws us on the street, it’s worth it.’”
Despite entering the process with no real expectations, Sloan and Mastroianni received the closest thing that indie filmmakers have to a storybook ending. “Gazer” was accepted into Cannes, where it premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight section of the 2024 festival before being acquired by Metrograph Pictures. The filmmakers stressed that the film’s success was a validation not just of their own abilities, but the fact that a truly great movie is still enough to break into the industry. To them, the fact that “Gazer” made its way through some of the film world’s most exclusive gatekeepers to find an audience without any insider connections is proof that the indie filmmaking dream is still alive and well.
“As an independent filmmaker, you have this kind of idea that the industry is set to be against you. That there’s such a high barrier to entry, that it’s political. And there’s this preconceived notion that there’s no way to get in,” Mastroianni said. “Ryan and I had no connections, no support, no mentors. All we could do is make a film. Ryan submitted the film just in the general submission website on the last day for Cannes, and they watched it. And they responded to it. We found our people, and we found the people who within the industry are saying ‘We need to be supporting more independent cinema.’”
A Metrograph Pictures release, “Gazer” opens in select theaters on Friday, April 4.
