The local filmmakers behind AZ If Productions, Sarah Zanotti and KD Amond, were gracious enough to answer a few questions for SoBros Network following my recent review of their film, Faye. If you haven’t read that yet, do that first here!
1. Do you think living together and working together helped your dynamic while you were shooting Faye?
We are not 100% on the context, so we have two answers for this one.
Part 1:
We were not roommates at the time of shooting, but we were throughout post-production and the pickup shoots…so in that context, yes, it helped tremendously. Being able to meet in the kitchen (aka The Office) and work in our pajamas just expedited the process.
Kd: When I would feel stuck on an edit, Sarah and I would simply watch, take notes, and discuss.
Sarah: Essentially we could work around the clock if we needed to…and because this all happened during lockdown, we wanted to! There was never a matter of having to get our schedules to line up.
Kd: Now that things are returning to normal, we schedule AZ if time throughout the week for our projects. We’ve gotten a little less casual (albeit still meeting in pajamas from time to time), but the weekly schedule helps us separate business hours from just normal living hours.
Part 2:
Kd: Living on the set of Faye together was great. After a 16-hour day the last thing you want to do is drive home. There were only 5 of us so there was a very tight-knit familial vibe on set. We ate together, worked together, and all felt the exhaustion together too.
Sarah: Any longer than 11 days and we probably would have all killed each other, too. Kd: Yea. Agreed.
2. What was the most stressful part about the entire process? From pen to paper to finally seeing the film at the Nashville Film Festival.
Kd: There was one day on set where we shot something insane like 20 pages. At 1 am, Sarah was laying on the floor while our make up artist Nichole Lim was putting gore makeup on her face. I was putting the makeup of a protruding bone on her wrist. And our fellow crew member Sara DelaHaya was feeding the three of us animal crackers and cream cheese. These desperate times went on until 4am. It was just a long and really tough day, getting Sarah in and out of makeup and changing the lighting setups for this particular scene. Not to mention the fact that Sarah wore white out contacts that made her completely blind.
Sarah: The filming process was equally the most fun and the most stressful part of making Faye. We had just come off of making a different feature literally 2 days before we drove down to Louisiana to start filming…so the exhaustion was REAL. On top of that, the role of Faye required some really heavy emotion and there were moments/days where it was difficult to stay in that space. All this to say, it was the time of my life.
3. How much of your personal experiences with grief was represented in the movie?
Sarah: I think grief is universal. We’ve all grieved the loss of someone or something. Even if someone has never grieved the death of a loved one, I feel like we are all tied to this collective emotional consciousness. Empathy is the greatest tool that storytellers have at their disposal…because you don’t have to experience someone’s identical circumstance to be able to put yourself in their shoes and feel the gravity of their situation. You may not understand the entire scope of it, but enough to tell a story that feels raw and truthful. It’s part of the human experience, which we are all inextricably linked to. We’ve both personally lost loved ones…so I’m sure a combination of personal experience and imagination worked its way into Faye.
Kd: Grief is so personal. Everyone experiences the phases differently and at different paces. We say it in the movie…it’s an ugly monster…and it’s never been defeated by a one man army…To expound on what Sarah said, we’re all human beings experiencing emotions. Putting an empathetic lens on the female gaze is what I love most about the kind of stories we write. (Wow, sorry if that got a little too film school geek there) But… our scripts…they’re dark….but they also have something to say.
4.) Sarah is the ONLY talent on screen for the entirety of Faye. Sarah, did you feel a lot of pressure being the only actress throughout the film?
Sarah: Weirdly, I didn’t feel that much pressure being the only actor on screen. It’s probably because I was either too tired to think about it that much or because we really had no expectations for this film. Faye was a passion project and, truthfully, a bit of an experiment. Kd and I wrote the script for Faye during pre-production for our first film, Rattled, and it was kind of like “hey, this could be really cool…or something we will never show anyone” lol. That mentality took a lot of pressure off of my shoulders. I also had the luxury of being in a room with four people who love me and who gave me the space to be as messy and as raw as I needed to be. If you know you can fail and no one is going to bat an eye, you feel free from the weight of perfection.
5. Do you guys have any other future projects in the works?
Yes! Always. There is nothing we love more than creating a new story. Currently we are in pre-production for our next feature. It’s a contained psychological thriller that we are set to film at the beginning of 2022. There are too many movies we want to make and what feels like too little time to make them all. We’re obsessed. Our film Rattled that we shot just before Faye should be available to stream next year.
6.) Being local, I have to ask, what is your favorite place in Nashville?. To eat, drink, or shop.
We can’t go a single week without eating pho from Vui’s at least twice. It’s the best thing on planet earth. We also love Craft Brew works on 8th avenue…on Tuesdays we go for the 2-for-1 tokens, come hang with us, Brittany! We usually bring our laptops because we have this grand illusion that we are going to get work done…but we inevitably just talk about serial killer documentaries and eat baked pretzels with beer cheese. Because we’re business women.
Follow AZ If Productions on Twitter and Facebook to find out where you can catch Faye and the rest of Amond and Zanotti’s work.
Brittany Fernandez is a Lifestyle Writer for SoBros Network. She’s a Nashville native covering events on the local scene, B-movie horror reviews, and everything in between. Her go-to karaoke song is “No Diggity.” Follow on Twitter: @brittbutspooky
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