Julia and Isaiah Zagar from In a Dream

Jeremiah Zagar

(continued)

Interview by Alyce Wilson

Do you still have plans to turn [Delhi House] into a feature?

Yes, I do. I do, actually. The guy who ran the organization is the most fascinating person I've ever met, one of them. I'm fascinated with the idea of loss, you know, this intense strength that people gain from loss. And he lost everything. He was a former heroin addict and a rock musician, and he went to India and it changed his life. He ended up saving lives because of what he had lost, because of understanding what loss meant. And I really like that as an idea. I think that's interesting. In "In a Dream," it's in there. I think that's present in everything I do. I like the idea of strength from loss.

Right. Do you think that's why you gravitate… I know you did some short films that were more experimental or including animation and everything, but do you think that's what draws you towards being a documentary filmmaker, is telling those stories?

Yeah, absolutely.

Creating awareness?

I think there's a lot of filmmakers that start as documentary filmmakers and end up making feature films, and the reason is that they gravitate towards real stories. People gravitate towards real stories. I love the fact that you can take a real story and make it your own. I love the fact that you can take something that is actually true and put your own truth into it, or however you want to say it, that it's happening in life and transforming into something beautiful. I love that idea. But I also love the idea of taking something that's not happening and turning it and transforming it into something new, too.

Like my favorite documentary filmmakers are documentary students who aren't pure. The pure documentary form is not exciting to me. I like the idea of adding a cinema to it. Adding some reality to it.

Right. And having an aesthetic sense, not just documenting it like cinema verité style.

Exactly.

Although you did definitely have some moments like that, and I think this was probably the section of the film that you said for 16 hours that your family was kind of falling apart around you. You were shooting and you were hating yourself at the same time.

Right.

And I see a lot of handheld stuff with your family for the first time.

I love that stuff, I do. I'm interested in the combination of the two. It's like there's a filmmaker called Ken Loach who filmed these incredibly realistic scenes taking place, intensely emotional, intensely realistic. And there was something about that that day that reminded me of his film, that excited me. You know? But also it was disgusting, because you're sitting there getting excited about this idea that you're capturing these really gut-wrenching moments that really don't exist on film usually. You know? And then it's your family, which is a horrible realization.

What made you keep going at that point?

Well, it's like I said; it's easier to keep going than it is to stop for me. Once you're filming there's this protection that the camera buys. If you film, then you can deal with the situation at hand, no matter how horrible it is. [...] I'm sure that's how war photographers must feel. I'm sure that's how people who film crime scenes must feel. If you have the camera in front of your face, you're doing a job; then you can handle the situation. I think it's somehow important for my parents, too. It was hard to tell my brother what was going on, because they needed an outlet and they needed somebody to talk to, and neither of them had it. And anybody, really, that they could be completely honest with. It worked out, because it provided me that outlet.

Right. So you're saying that the filmmaking itself served a function in the family at that moment then?

Definitely.

It gave them a confessional almost?

The reason it came out is because of the camera in many ways. It provided a forum for my father to be honest. And it provided a forum for him to be honest with my mother. I think that's what the camera did. Who knows exactly how it affected anybody? It's a crazy thing. It's a funny medium because…I always say it can be a great divider or a great unifier, in a way.

Sometimes when you put a camera in front of your face you can shove people away, and other times you put a camera in front of somebody's face, and they walk towards you. You never knew what the reaction is going to be.

Exactly. Now this film, to back up a little bit, started as documenting your father's life's work, his art. And that was, I believe, your mother's idea. Or suggestion.

Yeah. My mother saw my father drifting away from her and realized that we weren't part of his life anymore. I was in college, and I think it was her way... My mother's very concentrated on building the family unit. I mean, she's really serious about that. And she very much wanted me to get to know my father, as a man, I think. So she asked me to start filming. At first it was really unsuccessful.

Yes, you said you didn't use a lot of that early footage. [...] When did it start to become something bigger, the movie?

It became something bigger at the end of the summer when we went to West Virginia, which is the story of [...] the rape, the molestation story.

Right, right.

And then there's the stuff from early, early in the film about his nervous breakdown. All that was filmed in West Virginia. We had gone down for five days, and he just really opened up in a different kind of way. It wasn't that the stories were different than stories I'd heard before, but they were told with a kind of intimacy and honesty, that I think my mother was trying…That was what my mother's idea was -- trying to reach this kind of relationship -- took place there, in West Virginia. Then I knew I had a film. I looked at that footage over and over again for years before I actually did anything with it, but I knew there was a film. I just didn't know when there would be a film.

Are these the interviews that look like they're shot in some sort of dining room with the mirror in the background?

Exactly. A tiny little shack that my parents bought years ago.

OK. Yes, it definitely looks different from the interiors in South Philly. It's more open space.

It is. It's very different.