Film Show 039: Kit Zauhar
An interview with the Asian American filmmaker about writing for the stage, subverting within stereotypes, the importance of play on set, and her new feature film ‘This Closeness’
Kit Zauhar
Kit Zauhar (b. 1995) is a Philadelphia-born, New York City-based writer, actor, and filmmaker whose works explore intimacy and communication in the lives of young people. As in the works of American indie filmmakers from decades past, her low-budget films are driven by dialogue and reflect the tumultuous transition into adulthood. Taking inspiration from Miranda July, Hong Sang-soo, and Ryusuke Hamaguchi, her films exhibit a thoughtful patience in navigating selfhood and interpersonal relationships, while also drawing from her experience as a biracial woman.
Zauhar’s debut feature, Actual People (2021), premiered at Locarno and was partly an auto-fiction. Her newest film, This Closeness, had its premiere at South by Southwest earlier this year and is a chamber drama about a couple—Tessa (Zauhar) and Ben (Zane Pais)—who stay at an Airbnb hosted by the shy, nerdy Adam (Ian Edlund). The film will be screening at Zauhar’s hometown of Philadelphia later this month as part of the 32nd Philadelphia Film Festival. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Zauhar on October 9th, 2023 via Zoom to discuss her new film, Asian fetishism, her theater-kid upbringing, how filming on set is like being at summer camp, and more.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: Since ASMR comes up in This Closeness (2023), I wanted to ask if you remember when you first got into it. Did you have any favorite ASMRtists?
Kit Zauhar: It was actually one of my professors who told me about it, freshman or sophomore year. I had really bad insomnia for most of college so I got really into it. I watched a lot of different ones—WhispersRed was a big one, and the girl who’s just called asmrmassage.
That’s one of my favorites (laughter).
She was a bit of a pioneer. Then there was that Russian girl, Gentle Whispering. I do get ASMR. For me, it was always comforting to watch and listen to them. I got into it when it really first started. I remember a bunch of people on YouTube were buying binaural microphones, trying to figure out ways to make the sounds feel as tactile as possible.
It was really interesting being aware of it when it was first starting out. I was buying toys for my niece and nephews the other day, and there are toys now being marketed with the label “ASMR.”
That’s crazy. I did not know that. I guess I haven’t been to a toy store in a while (laughter).
I love how the opening of the film feels like an ASMR video, with the person making the bed, with the mention of this smell of lavender, and there’s the sound of the shower. There’s a lot of priming for an awareness of sound and silence throughout the film. Thinking back to your childhood in Philadelphia, have you always felt attentive to the sounds, spaces, and silences around you?
That’s a good question. Honestly, not particularly. I really had an ear for dialogue, and that’s something I’ve always really liked and appreciated. Maybe as a result of that, silence became something I was a lot more aware of. But I didn’t really think about sound that profoundly or as something that had narrative weight until college. During our first year, for one half of it, you take a class called Sound Image. There’s one part that’s all about visual elements, and there’s one that's all about sound elements. You learn about sound design, recording, voiceover, and everything like that. That’s the first time I was really aware of the possibilities of sound for telling a story.
You mentioned that you had an interest in dialogue, though. Do you recall a moment from when you were younger where you were really excited about the potential that dialogue had?
I read a lot more, growing up, than anything else. Young adult books, especially for young women, are really catered to fast dialogue. There was that series, ttyl (2004), where the whole book takes place in a chat conversation. Obviously, the conceit is kind of dumb because, if something traumatic happened to you, you wouldn’t immediately log onto AIM and be like “OMG my dad just died.” (laughter). It was probably things like that.
Some of these things are explainable, some of them aren’t. Growing up, I was always interested in the ways people communicated or didn’t. I think being biracial and coming from a multilingual family also influenced that in some ways; the ideas of miscommunication or translation are still things I’m obviously very interested in. But I think when we’re young, we just kind of glom on to certain things. When I was young, I was always surrounded by people much older than me—my parents work in academia and medicine, so they were often having highbrow conversations with people. I think I felt a need to be able to understand, to join in and keep up. So that may have influenced that part of my brain.
Was there a time when you were trying to keep up and aware that you were bullshitting?
I feel like that’s still what I do (laughter). I don’t know if that went away for me, ever. Sometimes, when you’re talking, you kind of black out a little bit.
I’m curious to know more about what it was like to grow up in this biracial family, specifically in relation to miscommunication and language. In my life, I speak to my parents in English and they speak to me in Korean, so there are always miscommunications and misunderstandings.
It’s interesting because I think Chinese is such a different, and in some ways, more poetic language than English. Also, poetry is much more inherent to Chinese. If you’re learning like, I don’t know, the King’s English, or whatever you want to call it, maybe that’s different. But if you grew up in China, you’re learning poems. It’s part of your introduction to reading and writing. So the inherent poetry of Chinese was something that I felt influenced by from an early age.
Similar to you, I speak English to both my parents because… otherwise my dad is not going to understand anything (laughter). Getting a broad grasp of Chinese, even, is difficult. But then being able to become an expert on technical language and these subtleties is really difficult. I’m not really great with technical film language in Chinese. I do think there was a rift as I grew up, where, to have more of a mastery of English and to continue building on those skills, I had to reconcile the fact that it wasn’t going to be the case for Chinese, especially because I didn’t have a way to practice it, sadly. I had to go to Chinese school to even keep up at a certain level, and Chinese became relegated to this academic territory, whereas English was a way for me to really feel like I was relinquished from the terrors of high school and the stress of my adolescence. In that way, Chinese kind of got an unfair rep in my head for a while. I’m still figuring out how to remedy that.
Are there specific things you’ve been doing?
I’ve been trying to watch more Chinese movies. I just went to China a few weeks ago, so I was practicing a lot more vocab. Everyone feels this way about their second language, the language we don’t speak. It’s kind of obligatory, and that sucks. Even if it’s something you enjoy doing or you’re doing it voluntarily, you have homework, essentially, and homework sucks in any capacity (laughter).
You mentioned the poeticism of the Chinese language. You have this film called It Was Fall (2012) from when you were in high school, and it’s based on a poem.
Oh my god, yeah. That, sadly, has found its way onto Letterboxd somehow. It’s a private Vimeo so I don’t know how people found it.
I think it’s on your YouTube page, under your name. [Editor’s Note: It’s on a different YouTube page.]
Oh, did I put it there as well? Maybe I did.
There’s also one of your other early shorts on there, Helicopter (2016). Did you want to talk about It Was Fall?
It’s just funny. Within the context of my oeuvre or whatever—obviously, I’m still quite young—this is the same as mentioning a film someone made, like, eight years ago. But this was something I made when I was like, barely through puberty (laughter). So it feels odd. I still write poetry, not that I would show people. But in high school I wrote a lot of poetry and we had Scholastic Art and Writing prizes, and I got to the national level, actually, with a poem I wrote. As I’ve gotten older, my taste in poetry has narrowed quite a bit, and so has my practice of writing.
What appeals to you about the poetry that you favor?
Something that I’m trying to do, whether that be writing a screenplay, writing an essay, or writing a poem, is to focus on making language concise. That doesn’t mean a character who knows it all and knows how to define every feeling as accurately as possible. It means being able to distill a feeling or sentiment clearly, using language in a way that feels realistic to my lived experience. That comes in a lot of different forms. Writing poetry throughout my life has helped me with that quite a bit—being aware of how language actually functions. Once you know that, you can heighten it and make it realistic while still maintaining a certain level of eloquence and dynamism.
I love how the act of writing poetry makes you recognize that language is kind of a farce. You have more control over it than people may ever realize. It’s interesting because that helps make your films feel so intimate. And even early on with something like It Was Fall, that’s intimate too because it’s a vertical video.
Well, the reason I filmed it that way… was that it was the first thing I ever made. When we were trying to frame it for our old school projector, it just didn’t work with the widescreen. I was just like, “Okay, fuck it. I don’t know what else to do, so let’s just do it the other way.” It ended up being a happy accident that vertical videos became so popular. But I didn’t have any greater intention then, other than just not knowing what else to do.
I once read an interview where you spoke about how you always knew what you wanted to do. Could you expand on that a bit?
I think I always knew I wanted to be, very broadly, in the arts. And very broadly, writing, and doing something theatrical. I was a lot of things that were not so admirable, obviously. But one thing that I am so impressed by in myself is my ability, ever since I was quite young, just to be like, “This is what I’m doing, and I’m not doing anything else.”
Notoriously, I would constantly try out summer camps and stuff when I was 10 or 11, and then be like, “I don’t want to do this anymore” and just leave the first day. I quit jobs all the time, too (laughter). I still quit jobs all the time. I get a really strong gut instinct when I feel like I’m not supposed to be doing something. I wish I could pinpoint it as precisely when I’m doing something I know I should be doing. But I think I’ve always had a very strong North Star radar. I pursued that. And I’m very lucky to have parents and a community who were very helpful and supportive of that since I was young.
Do you mind talking about how they helped you, shaped you, supported you?
Broadly, my mom was a Chinese immigrant who came from China to study medicine. All of her friends’ kids became doctors and lawyers, or were in finance and stuff. I think it would have been easy for her to feel that community pressure to ask, “Why isn’t Catherine doing medicine?” But she didn’t. The other thing is I really pushed myself very hard. Honestly, for my parents to have asked anything more of me, they would have been like, “That’s insane of us to do. We would never do that.”
Could you share some of the things you pushed yourself to do?
I wouldn’t go to summer camp a lot of summers because I dropped out of a lot of them, so I would just read monologues all day. I would find monologues online, read them, and then watch a movie in the afternoon. I had this weird studying regimen for myself. I remember when I was in middle school or early high school, they launched the Sundance Channel, so I’d watch stuff there. I’d watch a lot of short films, just being actively curious and researching. Also, I was kind of obsessively involved in my high school’s drama club. To a scary extent.
Why scary?
I was just obsessed. I did all the plays. I didn’t really watch Glee, but that kind of annoying girl on Glee, Lea Michele, I could see a comparison between us two in some ways. I really cared deeply about these things and put my all into them.
It makes sense hearing this. With Actual People (2021), I know you had limited resources and were like, “Okay, I’m just going to do it. I’m not going to wait for things to happen.” You had your friend Audrey [Kang, of the dream pop band Lightning Bug] in it, which blew my mind. I had interviewed her earlier that year.
Also, Gabby [Richardson], my other friend who’s in Actual People, was the one who shot It Was Fall. I have good friends.
And you have your sister [Vivian Zauhar] in Actual People too, which is very sweet. Do you just have one sibling?
Yeah, just one.
Can you share something about your younger sister that inspires you?
Growing up, I was quite shy and sort of a typical bookish, nerdy girl. With Vivian I was always sort of a crazy person because you get to be that with your sibling. But Vivian was always very vivacious, and she was very self-aware. She was crazy, but very aware of it and understood how she was coming across to people. I always really admired that. That’s why I planned to cast her. I think some really good actors, especially street-cast people, are often people who have a very ingrained and sturdy sense of self, while also being self-aware of how they come across. I don’t know why this comes to mind, but I think about Angus Cloud, R.I.P. He was someone who really had that. He was a very specific character, you really understood him. But he also really understood everyone else. That was something I saw a lot in Vivian from an early age.
You’ve said in another interview that you were trying to push against film-school tropes for the characters in Actual People. Do you feel that way in your everyday life, that you need to push back against people’s expectations of you?
One thing is, obviously, as a young woman in film, and regardless of race, sometimes people just suck and don’t treat you the way you’re supposed to be treated. I think the thing that I most struggle with is, as someone who still gets carded, is how to assert power and dominance without being a bitch. In terms of the internal race struggle that I had when I was younger, for me that’s sort of dissipated. People don’t want to think I’m Asian because I don’t look Asian. I don’t feel a need to change anyone’s mind. I think in general, I don’t feel anyone’s need to change anyone. I don’t feel the need to change anyone’s mind about me, but I do struggle with getting that authority and sense of power that I kind of need to advance my career.
Have you experienced anything recently where you weren’t able to do something because of this lack of authority?
Less so now because I have a manager, which has been helpful. But I’ve seen various opportunities come to certain men—and this is not to say, “Oh, I didn’t get this because I’m a woman”—but I do wonder how much easier it was for them because they’re men. I really don’t try to dwell on stuff like that because I think it’s kind of pointless. At the end of the day, someone could just not give me something because they think I’m annoying or untalented or whatever, and that would suck even more (laughter). So maybe I wouldn’t inquire too far.
You have this fascination with white men, sort of treating them like a zoo animal. Do you remember when you first recognized that they could be interesting to you?
I went to a really diverse high school in Philly, so I had a very different experience interfacing with people at that age. I think white men were probably the smallest demographic at my school. It was something I didn’t really think about that hard because they were honestly like a minority at my school, which is kind of when white men come into their power. I was really shocked when I went to NYU. I was surrounded by white guys, many of whom came from incredibly wealthy, incredibly privileged backgrounds. I saw stereotypical behavior become alive and emboldened in these men, and at first I was very angry or at the very least irritated about their privilege and how they acted. But I’m interested in how “banal evil” manifests, and I think they’re sort of a perfect example of “banal evil.” There’s so many things they say and do that are not really horrific or horrible, but they push at a wound, and if you keep pushing at that wound, it’s going to open up. That’s something I was really fascinated by.
Later on in college, I also started to interrogate the fact that most of my role models in film, and in writing to some extent, were white men. This was not really in that way where it’s like, “If I ever met them, they wouldn’t care about me at all.” I don’t care about that. That’s probably true about most people. But more so, these people are missing something about language and art-making that has the specificity and texture that will match the things I’m trying to achieve in my own work. With that in mind, I started to become more open and aware of different filmmakers, international filmmakers, and international writers. That was sort of how it happened. I think by figuring out the language in which I want to work, I was able to go back to these archetypes and these people that I was fascinated by for so long, and view them through a more critical lens.
You mentioned that these white artists may not have had the specificity or the specific textures that you were looking for. In engaging with art from non-white artists, what did you find was missing?
I don’t want to say this in a “women are soft, men are hard” kind of way, but I think tenderness was the thing really missing from a lot of the work that I liked growing up. It’s obviously because, if you’re a man making a movie at a certain time, there’s gotta be a slight harshness to it because that’s what people are expecting. But when I found Miranda July, her work really spoke to me. There’s a lot of tenderness there, a lot of intimacy, but still a lot of play. Something that I really liked about a lot of work I saw from femme filmmakers, but also international filmmakers, was more of a sense of play. Hong Sang-soo’s movies, for example. And not taking the act of filmmaking very seriously, which was such a thing at NYU (laughter). It felt like everything everyone made was about to win an Oscar. It was a little bit like… we all have to get a grip! It’s crazy to be spending so much money and time on this thing that’s going to be, like, relegated to my YouTube that I didn’t even know was available to the public anymore (laughter). Things like that felt really cool to find out. That was a big thing for me.
Did you have to unlearn this notion of everything being serious?
I always probably knew in the back of my head that it was like, utter bullshit. But I think I played into it. This is something I’ve talked about in other interviews. People always ask, “What was your time like at NYU?” And I know so many people say that they didn’t have a good time, or they felt like they didn’t get anything out of it, but I really came from a scarcity mindset coming from my high school. When I got to NYU, I wasn’t like, “La di da, this whole place is my playground.” I was like, “Oh, there’s still a finite amount of resources, and I need to find a way to take advantage of it.” For me, that was a lot about playing the game of how film school ran, which was taking yourself super seriously. I’m sure, to an extent, I did that because I was a delusional 21 year old operating on little sleep and Four Lokos to stay awake (laughter). But I think that was a notion that very quickly wore off after graduating and realizing, “Holy shit, how am I going to make my first feature? I can’t take myself that seriously because no one else does.” I mean, you have to have respect for yourself. But having respect for yourself is different from being self-serious. I had to abandon a lot of false pedestals I built for myself during college. And that’s for the better.
Do you have a favorite Hong Sang-soo film?
I really liked In Front of Your Face (2021). I was like, dying laughing during some of those scenes. That’s one that really sticks out. I’ve seen quite a few. I also really like Claire’s Camera (2017). Obviously, Isabelle Huppert is always a welcome addition. There’s something about having that same format and set-up in this really interesting, cool, beautiful location. I’m also a sucker for films about film festivals, because I think film festivals are such a crazy, interesting microcosm of like, adult summer camp. Whenever you can see that play out, it's kind of delightful.
I love the comparison to summer camps. What do you see in summer camps that you see at film festivals?
I mean, you’re oftentimes in this beautiful locale, surrounded by people that you, at best, tangentially know. You’re with all these new people, they have the same interests as you and they do exactly the same thing as you, and you really have no responsibilities. Or you have very minute responsibilities, just showing up for 15-minute increments for Q&As. You can do whatever else you want.
I love that. I’ve never heard it described that way.
Next time you go to one, keep that in mind.
You were speaking about your interest in theater from a young age. I know This Closeness was originally meant for the stage. How was writing it for the stage important to how it turned out? How did it compare to Actual People?
Every single first-year drama major is going to make the No Exit (1944) comparison, but that’s what theater, at its best, kind of is—a No Exit scenario. You’re just stuck with these people and hopefully something riveting or compelling happens. You just get to live with them. The world is confined and you can shape the space and people inside of it as much as you can. That can be true of film, but the space is alive when you’re in theater, which I always appreciate. Also, something I like about theater a lot, and something I like about more theatrical films—or even a Hong Sang-Soo film—is the lack of cuts. I know that’s very un-21st century of me, to be like, “I just don’t like when there are edits involved.” But as someone who acts, I watch movies and I can see that someone has worked their way up to crying and then they’ve said “action,” and then you just see tears rolling down their face. That’s not what’s interesting to me. I want to see the build-up. I want to see those moments that are cut out in a lot of edits of more mainstream movies.
Something that I learned in theater is how to make movements count. If you’re going from point A to point B, figure out a way to do it in a way that’s natural and not distracting to anything else that’s going on. I see a lot of that stuff missing from contemporary movies. There’s this indecision a lot of the time. I hate indecision in general, so seeing it on screen really gets me going. But those are things about theater I really appreciate and respect. Because there’s no cuts in a play, you just have to get to the next part.
That rings very true with This Closeness, and the film’s use of ASMR. I’ve been thinking about these things in the past decade, like ASMR or Twitch streams, which provide a mediated form of intimacy. I appreciate that your film forces us to face these things head on since it draws comparison to these actions and more typical forms of intimacy.
There’s a lot about how the expectation of intimacy is actually its downfall. So much of this movie is about the viewer getting to see close interactions. It’s also about ASMR. It’s also about this couple, which, seemingly, is so on the same page. But these expectations we have are the reasons why these people become so fallible. I think there’s something interesting to that. We also just live in a time when people are meant to put so much of themselves out there for other people. Especially as a woman, I feel that way. It was cool to make a movie that kind of subverts everyone’s ideas about what’s supposed to happen to people like this.
Going back to what we talked about with tropes, were you actively thinking about pushing back on these ideas with this film?
No, not necessarily. At the beginning of This Closeness, both Ben and Adam feel really stereotypical to me. And I don’t think you walk away from either being like, “You know what, you’re a totally different guy from what I thought at the beginning.” In some ways, I think more stereotypes about them are affirmed throughout. There are expectations about them that you don’t want to be true, but maybe in some ways are, like Adam maybe being into Asian women, or Ben being unsympathetic and kind of a jerk.
I think there’s actually a lot of room for subversion within stereotypes. There are movies where people try and push back against stereotypes which actually fail quite epically. I think about movies where it’s like, “We’re gonna cast this person of color to play someone’s best friend and she’s actually really outspoken and sexy.” You just think, this is actually every B-rated Netflix rom-com I’ve ever seen. This is actually more of a stereotype than if you had, for example, a really interesting, well thought-out Asian American woman who’s forced to be really academic or has really strict parents. At least that’s more true to life. That’s always something I’m thinking about. But I don’t really feel the need to push back against stereotypes. I just feel the need for characters that can encompass a lot of different things to be able to flourish narratively, within a cool storytelling environment.
How did you decide on casting Zane Pais and Ian Edlund for Ben and Adam, respectively?
Ian was a mutual friend of someone that I knew. It was very early on in the process of trying to get This Closeness off the ground, before Actual People had even gone to film festivals. The pandemic had just started but I was like, “I have this really small film, and maybe I can make it in a similar fashion to Actual People.” I just started putting casting calls on my Instagram and someone responded, “Oh, this sounds a lot like my friend Ian. You should have him audition.” So I did.
Going into the process, you would assume that casting the character of Adam would be very difficult, but he was actually the first person I cast. I made him come back again and again for auditions, and he just nailed it every time. I was sort of like, “It can’t be that easy. This is crazy.” Whereas on the other hand, I auditioned over 50 guys to play Ben. I was kind of like, “How hard is it to find someone to play an attractive, douchey white guy in New York City?” (laughter). But it was really difficult. I think it’s because I was trying to nail this really specific guy that everyone knows. But if you try to point to an actor who has that, it’s actually very difficult. I think that’s also why Adam Driver was so successful, starting off. He was this person everyone knew, and he so easily embodied it.
In both Ian and Zane, I was looking for an Adam Driver-in-Girls figure. And I think I found it. Zane was someone who had been recommended to me. When you do casting on a larger scale—not that my film was large at all—you get this huge sheet of just every single dude, and you sort through it. At the top is, like, Timothée Chalamet and you’re like, “...no.” (laughter). You keep going and going and going and then you find these gems and people you’ve seen before, and maybe you’ve thought about working with, and you start contacting them. Zane was someone we contacted really early on when I got this list and he agreed to do it.
Did the characters develop at all after you started filming?
Not really. I kind of hate backstories for actors. They’ll ask, “What happened four days ago?” I honestly just say, “Make up whatever you need to get to the point that I want.” I think it’s a little silly. I gave broader strokes. For me and Zane, something we could play upon, which comes across a lot in the film, is this idea of infidelity. The backstory was maybe, “We were both in relationships when we met, and we got together in maybe an uncouth way.” But I don’t want to be like, “We’ve been together for this long.” I think things like that are not helpful. I don’t think a stat sheet is going to make you a better actor. That’s trying to replace good direction.
For Ian, he had so much of his own idea of the character that felt really good, and I just kind of let him go with it. Also, as an actor, it’s your job to kind of keep secrets and mysteries from the other actors, because the whole idea is that everyone needs to be attentive to each other. I try to write characters who are people that we all know. Even if we don’t know them, we understand how they exist in the world. It’s sort of like having a paper doll. It has a little outfit on and you’re like, “I know what this outfit means.” You just ask, “How do I move in a way that feels expected, but obviously is imbued with my own life and movement?”
How was it to act in this film compared to Actual People?
When I was doing Actual People, I would shoot an emotional scene and then immediately be like, “Alright, what’s everyone having for lunch?” It was really hectic. Whereas with this film, I would come to the set and people would already be there. It was like a professional, actual set. It gave me a lot of time to really focus on direction, acting, making edits to the script when I needed to. That was the biggest change. I was really grateful to have that.
I really like acting in my own things because a set is sort of like a play. In a play, the actors and the crew members both have to be up for either game. Actors are helping lug things on and off set. You will oftentimes see a stagehand dash on to do something. The idea of a theater set is that these roles exist on one plane. In film, a lot of the time, the crew is very separate from the actors, and that sometimes creates a gross power dynamic. It’s also just not as fun. We’re all together for this amount of time, let’s all equally get along, let’s all equally get to know each other. Being someone who’s on both sides of the camera makes me able to facilitate that collaboration more fluidly. That’s something that I really like to do.
I love that you said you want it to be fun on set.
I do want it to be fun! This is something I had to push back on at NYU. People would act like they’re performing cardiac surgery on their films. I was like, “Why are you so serious? This is crazy.” Art-making is a joy, it’s adult play. Being on a film set, and essentially being a playful adult, it’s a gift. It’s really annoying for me when I’m on set with someone who’s being an asshole because I’m like, “You really don’t have to do this.” It’s in your favor to be joyful. Unless you’re doing a really sad scene, and then there needs to be an amount of decorum and somberness. But if that’s not the case, I don’t know… it’s kind of the best job in the world, so why not be joyful when you get to do it?
Would you say being on set is similar to being at summer camp?
Totally. I mean, it’s the same idea. You’re put in this kind of intense situation with a bunch of people you might not know very well, but you bond really quickly. Whatever the opposite of “the narcissism of small differences” is. It’s like the empathy of small differences. I think it’s a really wonderful place to be.
Going back to your interest in white men, I was wondering if that’s why you have the Department of Eagles’ cover of JoJo’s “Too Little Too Late.” Why did you choose that song for the ending?
I found that song about a year before we shot. I think it’s kind of an incredible song. It’s so haunting but then it’s also a JoJo song. The meta level of it is that it’s a song that would be played at a high school reunion. It’s a throwback but it’s been given a ghostly tinge, which is very unnerving. It’s a lot like attending a high school reunion, an unnerving throwback. That was one reason.
I also just like the song. Weirdly, the lyrics capture a lot of the same themes of the film—power plays, love lost, etc. That was something that I liked about it. I’m also just sort of a reformed indie sleaze person (laughter). Whenever I come across a way to integrate that, I like to placate that soft spot. I’m really glad that song worked out because we got so used to it being at the end. There was a point where we didn’t know if we were going to be able to get the rights. I felt like, “I have nothing else to replace this with.” It became really ingrained into the way we thought about the atmosphere of the film. It’s also the only song in the film, so we wanted it to be weird and interesting and memorable.
There’s the part at the end where Tessa and Ben talk about Adam having a fetish for Asian women, and then Ben is horrible at talking to Tessa about that when explaining how he doesn’t have a fetish himself. I’m curious if you could speak to your interest in having this be a part of the film.
I think race is such a tricky thing in films because it either has to be fully unacknowledged, which is weird, but if it is acknowledged, how does one do that tactfully? I really wanted race to exist as a sort of specter. I really like the word specter for it. It kind of looms over and exists in some people’s minds, but not in a way that is debilitating to any events going through. When it does come up, it really feels like this ghost has suddenly entered the room. And it doesn’t really matter if people are ready or not—the ghost is ready.
Obviously, I don’t look white. For me, something I am very conscious of is—I’m going to be honest—I’ve dated a lot of people who date other biracial women. Do I think that is a coincidence? Very possibly, because, out of anywhere in the world where there are a lot of biracial women, a large city like New York would be the place. But is it weird? Yes, obviously. Are these men all white? Yes, obviously (laughter). But you can’t spend your life wondering these things. I can’t spend my entire life wondering if every man who’s attracted to me or whoever has been attracted to me did so because of something more than the unique beauty inside me, or what I have to offer. At the same time, it is something I want to try to find a way to address, because it is fun. If I help some other woman feel like she’s not crazy for feeling that way, or if I can help—through a small line of dialogue in this larger conversation about the fetishization of Asian women, and the murky territories of sexual politics in an ever, we’d like to believe, liberalizing age of sex and identity—I want to try and do that.
The films I make are always a sounding board for the contemporary issues that I’m thinking about myself. Actual People was a lot about finding one’s identity, this idea of being Asian American, trying to find intimacy as this person. I think now that I’m getting older and I’m looking back at relationships with a clearer head, I am interested in these larger ideas of like, what does it mean to have a fetish? How can this be weaponized, if it even is happening? It’s something that I’m interested in.
In another interview, you said, “I’m going to probably do more for the world making films about characters like my shitty white boyfriend than I am completely ignoring them in my cinematic universe.” I’m curious, do you make films with this intention to do “more for the world”?
Not necessarily. If you’re a young woman of color, it’s just expected that you are (laughter). No one’s asking this of… I was gonna say Roman Polanski (laughter). No one’s asking that of any of my contemporaries who are white men. No one’s asking them to address anything in their movies. But I think if I’ve benefited from other social justice efforts, I myself should probably add to the conversation. I don’t say that begrudgingly. I just think that’s part of the give and take that you’ve entered into as a part of a certain society. My films are not meant to change the world. But what I want them to do, hopefully, is change the way people see it ever so slightly, and also change the way people see young women of color ever so slightly. That’s all I can really ask for.
When I said “do more for the world,” I think I meant that people are really tired of seeing a lot of characters, but they don’t really know what’s to come next. I know personally that I don’t need to see a lot of the various women of color that are portrayed on screen. This is a very small thing, but I wanted to bring it up. I don’t want to say which movie, but a recent movie came out with a young woman of color in a supporting role. And in multiple reviews of this film I read, the reviewers, who are all white, all addressed her in this way that was like “we always welcome the ‘always entertaining’….” It felt like they were afraid to not say something nice about it, because they didn’t want to come off as assholes, but they couldn’t give her the benefit of a whole sentence about her performance or her presence. It was weird. It was one of the only times I’d seen something like that.
I’m tired of those kinds of characters—the “always welcome” type. No character that’s interesting to watch is “always welcome.” That’s the whole point of an interesting character. We don’t want this person. They’re not welcome, but they’re here. So now this is a situation we all deal with. Where’s the “always surprising”? Where’s the “always controversial”? For me, I just want to keep making characters who push back against this, and push back against a character that makes a white person feel good to write about them. It’s something I really felt with Actual People. A lot of people were like, “God, this girl is just so annoying. I can’t even be nice to her even though I feel an obligation to.”
There’s a question I always end my interviews with: Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?
I kind of did that earlier, with my North Star radar. But I was traveling with my mom and my sister for four weeks in Asia. And my sister is always like, “You’re so old.” Because to her, I’m ancient. But she says that I act very young and I’m still very open. And I do think that’s true. I feel very open to the world and its possibilities, today being an example. Everything else in the world seems to be falling to shit and no one seems to be able to do anything properly. I still feel like I have a lot of hope. If not optimism, I have an openness and a receptiveness to the world. I think that’s very important as an artist. It’s something I really look for in other artists I admire. To have it in myself feels comforting.
More information about Kit Zauhar can be found at her website. Her debut feature film, Actual People (2021), can be watched on demand via Vimeo here. Her newest feature, This Closeness (2023), plays in Philadelphia this month as part of the 32nd Philadelphia Film Festival.
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