Weston Razooli explains how he made a "neo-fairy tale" with dirt bikes and paintball guns on 16mm with four child actors as his first feature film.
The Big Picture Weston Razooli’s “neo-fairy tale,” Riddle of Fire, was like unearthing buried treasure while battling corpses and unthinkable horrors at this year’s Fantastic Fest. For Collider’s Perri Nemiroff, the monsters were just as fun, but Razooli’s feature directorial debut stood out for its more whimsical, kid-centric narrative and his “stylized fairy tale” vibes, all captured on 16mm.
WESTON RAZOOLI: Riddle of Fire is, I call it, a neo-fairy tale. It's an action-adventure comedy about four little kids in Wyoming who ride dirt bikes and have paintball guns and are sort of these terrors around the town. They're kind of like goblins, and they're on a little quest to gather the ingredients for a blueberry pie for their sick mother. So it's kind of like Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood, but on motorcycles and with paintball guns.
RAZOOLI: The word green light doesn't really apply to me or this type of movie. I mean, it's as in indie as it gets. It took me a long, long time to -- I completely raised the funds myself and put it together. This is as indie as it gets. RAZOOLI: Yeah, I don't think so. I think the next one will be easier. We've already got some funding and stuff.
RAZOOLI: Yeah, I would recommend it. It really hones everyone's focus incredibly because you know how special this medium is, and how limited it is, and how much you have of it. So everyone's really, really on their game, and every shot is important and everything.
I want to go back to the cast, but you bring up the timeless quality. One thing that I found really interesting in your movie is that it does have a timeless quality where it feels like the story could play out in any decade, but then you also do include cell phones and the opportunity to be able to research on the spot.
All I can picture is my niece and nephew sitting like this with an iPad in front of their face all the time.If they wind up getting creative with the devices, maybe I'll feel really good about that, but yeah, it's not the same anymore. RAZOOLI: Editing this movie was truly a challenge because no take was clean, right? So it was kind of a Tetris game of, “What can cut with what?” Like, the wide shot can cut with this two-shot into this close-up, and how do I get out of that because I can't cut back to the wide because the continuity doesn't make because they're facing the other way or something. Every scene just took a couple of weeks at least to edit, like every scene. One scene took me a month to edit.
I was reading a little bit about a point system you had for the kids. I want to know which of the actors got the most points and who got the least points. They seem to be having so much fun promoting this. Your Cannes photos, the group photos, are way more exciting than the standard ones we get!
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