For longtime movie-lovers Ryan Sloan and Ariella Mastroianni, the 2020 lockdowns turned a New Jersey attic into a welcome creative pressure cooker. The pair always dreamed of making a movie, but the uncertainty of the moment — not to mention the tight quarters — created a sense of urgency. Under duress, vibes came pouring out.
The result was Gazer, an icy, paranoid neo-noir thriller peppered with elaborate horror visuals. It follows single mother Frankie Rhodes (Mastroianni) as she battles a rare neurological condition and a ticking custody clock — all while unraveling a mystery laced with conspiracy. At times, Frankie’s blurred perspective swirls the reality of Gazer into full-blown horror.
Producing their script wasn’t a guarantee of making a movie. When they exited the attic, Sloan, a former electrician, and Mastroianni, a working actor and musician, hustled to actually do the thing. They financed the film entirely on their own, juggling minimum-wage jobs to scrape together a budget and shooting the 16mm odyssey on the weekends. Gazer isn’t just a debut feature — it’s a defiant throwback to how indies used to be made, and an ode to the movies, from slow-cinema classics to splatter horror flicks, that inspired Sloan and Mastroianni to embark on the journey in the first place.
Sitting down with Polygon ahead of Gazer’s theatrical release, the collaborators reflect on the determination — and gross-out special effects — required to realize their dream. The pair also shared some exclusive behind-the-scenes photos from their big nightmare-sequence shoot.
Polygon: Gazer is quite slick for a debut feature. And you got into Cannes last year! How did you find the confidence to just go off and make it on your own?
Ryan Sloan: We’ve always wanted to make a movie. I think it appears we just kind of stumbled into it, but we’ve been studying and training on our own for many, many years. Ariella has been training as an actress since she was a kid, and I’ve been just consuming films with my mother and my friends growing up. I’ve always wanted to direct, but I didn’t think it was possible. Life gets in the way. You start doing something and suddenly 15, 20 years go by. Then there’s a pandemic, and you’re like, Hey, what the fuck are we doing? The world could end tomorrow and we’re still not doing anything remotely close to where we want to be or what we’ve dreamed about.
So how do we rectify that? We decide to just sit down and talk about where our mutual tastes lie. And luckily it was all in the same world.
How did you wind up making a movie about this particular woman, suffering from a very particular psychological disorder, which still has room for a dream sequence involving a flesh gun? Gazer goes a lot of places for a first movie!
Ariella Mastroianni: It all came out of the character study, the kind of examination of this woman who is going through such trauma. The reason why we treated the nightmare sequences the way we did is because the whole film is from Frankie’s perspective. This is a window into her psyche — how does it feel for her? How does that translate? How do we want the audience to feel? And I feel like if it is a nightmare for Frankie, it should feel like a nightmare for the audience. But as we’re writing, every time we approach a scene, we always ask ourselves, “Is this real? Is this honest? Is it fun?”
Sloan: And there were definitely moments where we would say, “This isn’t the movie we want to make,” and we would get rid of those ideas. The full flesh-gun, flesh-box thing was definitely just born out of Frankie trying to interpret her haunted past.
Ariella, did you know you would play Frankie while you were writing? Did you write a part you wanted to play?
Mastroianni: Because Ryan and I were co-writing, I forgot that we were writing for me, in a way. We were only focused on Frankie’s journey. Who is this person? I would kind of fill those details out later. But it’s a lot of the references for Frankie were male actors. So Gene Hackman in The Conversation or Lee Chang-dong’s Burning, the actor playing Jong-su. We had Alien, Sigourney Weaver. Or Björk in Dancer in the Dark. But yeah, I wasn’t really writing for myself. I’m very different from Frankie.
How much of the look of the film was born from wanting to make the type of movie you like to watch versus whatever the story demanded? There’s a clear love for a certain type of film bursting out of the seams of Gazer**, but it also feels intentional.**
Sloan: We used the way The Wrestler was shot as the rubric of what we would do in the real world. So we knew it would be handheld, we’d be following Frankie nonstop, and it would be a little manic here and there. When we’re in Frankie’s apartment, the camera’s still handheld, but it doesn’t move. It doesn’t pan. It doesn’t tilt, because that is the only place where she feels comfortable. In the nightmare sequences, we’re always on [tripod] sticks or steadicam, and we wanted to create a very symmetrical look throughout the nightmare sequence. So it always felt very haunting.
We also pushed the film stock as well to create this kind of ’80s grindhouse look, which is fun. But I think once we discovered in the writing process that we could go experimental in these nightmare sequences, it just got me very excited about the ’80s schlocky films that I grew up watching. Robert Bottin’s special effects on The Thing were a big influence. We were trying to do more of that, but obviously budgetarily, we couldn’t afford it. It’s expensive to do practical effects even if you’re doing them at such a small scale as us. The flesh gun was supposed to be the only Videodrome reference. The hand through the chest was trying to rip off The Juniper Tree with Björk!
[The special effects were] hard to crack the code on, and on the day, we worked with what we had. It was funny, with the nightmare stuff, because our entire team was not on our side. While we were doing that, our DP was like, “Listen, just when you get the footage back and you put it in, you see it with the edit, just be open-minded to maybe get rid of it.” [laughs]
How did you wind up with the nightmare sequences? Was it clear Gazer would have some horror DNA from the beginning?
Mastroianni: I find those sequences to be the most essential in terms of Frankie’s emotional life and her psyche. She’s dealing with two of the most physical things: She’s dealing with the death of her husband and the birth of her daughter. We’re presenting the film from Frankie’s perspective, and it feels to her like a nightmare — that’s what we kept saying during the writing process, “Everything that happened to Frankie is such a nightmare, and we should present it that way. We should allow genre or use genre to elevate the sense of Frankie haunted by something that she had done.” So yeah, once we allowed ourselves to do that, we just went with it and had so much fun.
Sloan: I love horror. Horror is one of my favorite genres I go to the movies for. Even if it’s a bad horror movie, I’m happy.
Mastroianni: Also, it presents you with something that’s, to me, more real than what reality is. Sometimes, if you are representing something very realistically, it’s like the kind of poetic system of genre, and horror, and all of it. It reveals more truth than I think the truth itself, in a way.
Gazer is out now in limited release.
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