STUDYING THOSE AND OTHERS, THE FILMMAKERS DISCOVERED THAT THEY FOLLOW A SPIRAL STRUCTURE
Ryan J. Sloan and Ariella Mastroianni's Gazer, which premiered at Cannes last year, opens this weekend in New York. The New Jersey filmmakers (Sloan directs, Mastroianni stars, and they co-wrote the screenplay together) were interviewed by IndieWire's Christian Zilko:
“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.”
Sloan and Mastroianni also talk about their process with Amy Kuperinsky at NJ Advance Media for NJ.com.
Updated: Sunday, April 6, 2025 4:10 PM CDT
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