My First Film is now showing exclusively on MUBI. For more on Anger's film, go behind the scenes with an exclusive featurette.
My First Film (Zia Anger, 2024).
Between 2010 and 2012, Zia Anger directed a feature film titled Always All Ways, Anne Marie in her hometown of Ithaca, New York. She cast her friend Deana LeBlanc as a surrogate for herself, and her actual father as the father. The semi-fantastical, semi-autobiographical film had a beleaguered production—rife with Adderall, an unwanted pregnancy, near-fatal accidents, and imploding friendships. It was never screened or distributed, but Anger has long bore its scars.
Anger’s work has always been sharply self-critical and self-reflexive, and you can see commentary on the industry-perceived “failure” of making Always All Ways seep into her subsequent films, such as her polemical 2015 short My Last Film, which envisions a career-suicide note delivered via the film festival submission website Withoutabox. In 2018, frustrated by her inability to get another feature project off of the ground, as well as IMDb’s officiary parenthesizing of Always All Ways as “(abandoned),” Anger turned the production’s hauntings into a live multimedia performance titled My First Film, where sections of the film would play on one side of the screen and Anger would type live commentary on the other, interacting with the audience and occasionally pausing to Google something, pull up a YouTube clip, or AirDrop images to audience members. The performance debuted at Brooklyn’s Spectacle Theater and played multiple festivals before embarking on an international tour and morphing into a pandemic livestream iteration.
Anger’s new feature, also titled My First Film (2024) and adapted from that performance, is a final exorcism of Always All Ways, Anne Marie. The bulk of the sinewy, essayistic, and highly personal material is comprised of recreations of that film’s making, with the actress Odessa Young cast as “Vita,” a young and excitable filmmaker in over her head as she corrals friends, family, and neighbors into the hills and gorges of Ithaca to make her first movie. Devon Ross, from Olivier Assayas’s equally metatextual Irma Vep series (2022), plays Dina, Vita’s childhood friend whom she casts as her surrogate. The film breathlessly covers an ambitious amount of thematic ground, putting the creative process in conversation with stories of birth, abortion, and Anger’s family history, specifically her two mothers and father’s ties to the gay communes of Ithaca and the “town myth” of her own conception.
Anger’s filmography is full of doubling and fragmented identities. Fittingly, we first met in 2017 on the set of a music video directed by the cinematographer of My First Film and Always All Ways, Ashley Connor; we were both body doubles for the singer-songwriter Torres, who was performing multiple versions of herself. Our conversations throughout the years—the below included—have always skewed critical of and even cynical about the state of labor in the film industry. Before My First Film’s US premiere at Rooftop Films, we also discussed finally giving Anne Marie, Vita, and Anger herself a happy ending.
My First Film (Zia Anger, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: I described the movie as like a funeral for American independent filmmaking.
ZIA ANGER: Oh my god. Yeah.
NOTEBOOK: Or at least for that era. The film really sums up that mumblecore, crowdfunding, DSLR era of filmmaking. But even since you first started doing the performance in 2018, the film industry has changed so much. No one’s buying independent movies anymore. No one’s investing in them. It’s bleak.
ANGER: Yeah. The feelings I have about the film industry are really deep and rotten. It’s always present, and I was always aware of those rotten realities, the awareness of, like, I can’t believe I’m getting money to do this. But at the same time I wanted to take full advantage of that, and make something and find a process that made me fall in love with making things again. Maybe not in the same way, but I wanted to feel again: big, out of my mind, crazy, first-time crush feelings. I wanted to use every last dollar and work with the greatest people that I can possibly work with and let them do amazing things.
But the rarity was very palpable, like this unspoken thing. We were working with a lot of young people who hadn’t been on a film before. One of the actors came up to me in his last week of filming and he's like, “Zia, will it ever be like this again?” I started to cry. I was like, “No… but you’re gonna have a lot of other really great experiences!” It just felt once-in-a-lifetime.
NOTEBOOK: I felt very affected by the interrogating of the promises of that era, and the ethics of it. I love the scene where Vita is crying, and then you realize it’s from the point of view of her PhotoBooth screen right before she starts recording her Kickstarter video.
ANGER: It was a totally unethical time. I mean, I benefited from it [in making Always All Ways, Anne Marie], and I had terrible ethics. But who really benefited from it in the long run? Now, years later, it’s like, let’s check in on those people.
NOTEBOOK: I was just talking about that after the screening. How occasionally I’ll still get a random update from something I gave ten dollars to like a decade ago.
ANGER: We were all just little capitalists on Shark Tank.
My First Film (Zia Anger, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: How did you approach developing and scripting this as an adaptation of the performance?
ANGER: After years of doing the performance I was like, Well, I still want to make movies… And, you know, we’re now in the world of IP. And so, as opposed to other movies I wanted to make that I was not able to get made, I was like, Now I have IP… Micro-IP, but still this thing that a lot of people had seen and a story I still wanted to tell. I had tried to make other movies in so many different ways, and I always thought that I was getting really close, but in retrospect I wasn’t close at all. Anyone can pitch a movie, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to make it.
But this was a movie I knew how to make. And basically when the pandemic started and I was on unemployment I called [co-writer] Billy Feldman, who I knew from college and had worked on Always All Ways, and was like, Let’s work on this script until unemployment runs out. And we continued to work on it for two years.
NOTEBOOK: You had so much material to work with—it’s kind of overwhelming to consider where to begin talking about it. There’s Always All Ways, footage from the making of it, the recreations and more narrative stuff, the performance, the making of this film, and all the moments where these things bump up against each other.
ANGER: The original shooting script did have elements from the performance; it was written with the conceit of “me” just watching my old film, and that’s basically what the performance is. From the first movie, I knew we were never gonna recreate the making of the airplane scene for instance [in which a local airplane pilot continually flies closer and closer to the crew during filming]. And CGI would look stupid. So we storyboarded it out in a way that we could cut back and forth between what we were shooting and footage from Always All Ways. There were questions like, could we match the color and lighting between those two sets of footage? And does it matter if we don’t? Could this be part of the slow unraveling that occurs in the film and can we make that make sense? That slow unraveling was more found in the edit, the idea of going back to old footage if something wasn’t working.
Working with the editors, Joe Bini and Matthew Hannam—what I hadn’t really realized before is that film editors are also editing you like someone edits a book; drawing lines through things, making you rephrase things. They’re trying to make sense of what I’m trying to say in the least complex way—with this film that’s like many, many levels—using the available footage. Joe and Matt had access to the finished cut of Always All Ways, but me and Megan Heard, the assistant editor, had access to all of the footage from that film and sometimes I’d be like, Let’s go a little bit deeper here and go through the old footage. There were infinite ways to make this.
My First Film (Zia Anger, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: On top of that you add archival material too, which adds another layer. There’s the silent films that were shot in Ithaca about women in peril, like If Women Only Knew [1921], and the historical stuff about the Lavender Hill gay commune where your parents lived.
ANGER: Without saying it, Joe had noticed this massive flaw in the script early on. Basically there was a lot of voice-over and it was hard to understand what Vita was talking about. We needed more than this one set of filmed images to illustrate what she was saying. This was the problem with the first fucking film; there was all this voice-over, and you would fall asleep listening to it. There is a scene where Dina is quoting Maya Deren talking about At Land [1944], and Joe had the very real thought [that] no one in the audience, unless they just read Maya Deren or watched At Land, is going to know what the fuck she’s talking about. So let’s just show it. Which seems so basic, but it was a mode of storytelling I hadn’t even considered.
NOTEBOOK: It’s documentary editing.
ANGER: Right, exactly. We only shot a day of reshoots, just inserts, and the only shot from it that’s in the film is a shot of Larry Mitchell’s book The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions [about queer communal living in Ithaca in the 1970s], which my dad talks about in the movie.
NOTEBOOK: Did you ever feel the temptation, going back to working with Always All Ways, Anne Marie, to try to fix things or excavate things that you were trying to say when you were making that film in 2010? Or are you over it at this point and just approached this as a different story?
ANGER: I was dealing with things while I was making that movie that I’m still dealing with. There’s this whole motif in Always about earthworms, and Anne Marie saying that she’s a worm, and in the performance I would explain that I liked earthworms because they held both sexes inside them. And so in this version, for example, I kept having this desire to explain myself further. And the more I would try to explain myself, the more it just became ineffable.
NOTEBOOK: And I love that that becomes a conflict in the movie! That the crew are demanding Vita explain the worms and she just can’t do it. It works as this unresolvable artist versus crew thing.
My First Film (Zia Anger, 2024).
ANGER: Something about falling in love with filmmaking again was about getting an idea down to its essence, where something doesn’t need to be spoken or articulated, or is deliberately unspoken. That’s why I love the idea of a mime [Anger’s mother is a mime, and the film’s climax is a pantomimed sequence].
You know that scene in Hook [1991]? It’s like my favorite scene of all time. The Lost Boys are sitting down to have a feast but there’s no actual food on the table, and Robin Williams is looking around like, What is going on? And they’re all miming eating and a kid picks up some food and throws it at Robin Williams and it hits him in the face. It was one of the most striking things watching that scene as a kid. There’s just so much joy in it. It makes me want to cry.
NOTEBOOK: I think there’s something really special, too, about miming something that’s very material and scarce and necessary for survival, like food or, in the case of your film, an abortion.
ANGER: Yeah, which again is something very unspoken in that I never told anyone about my abortions. I had two [which are depicted in the film]. They became something that represented a very difficult time in my life, and, obviously, there’s a lot of shame around them.
NOTEBOOK: I remember you telling me about an experience you had doing the performance somewhere in the southern US around the time it started to look like Roe v. Wade was going to get overturned, and how the audience response and people wanting to talk about it after was really affecting.
ANGER: When I started doing the performance I realized that I hadn’t really talked to anybody about it, and now I’m finally able to look at it from this new perspective that my abortions were two of the most awesome things I’ve ever fucking done. My abortions, getting an IUD, and getting a dog are the most liberating things I’ve ever done. Like, without the abortions, I would not have gotten the chance to do the performance. I would not have gotten the chance to make a movie. One of the things I’ve always hated in the film industry is the way abortion is portrayed. Rarely are you shown the actual, tangible fucking benefit of it. I decided I wanted to film an abortion scene that was warm and joyful.
I asked Twitter to recommend abortion scenes once and they were all, like, traumatizing or stigmatizing or boring, but my friend Anna Rose Holmer said to watch Agnès Varda’s One Sings, The Other Doesn’t [1977], where all the women in the recovery room start singing together, and I was like, That’s it! This is the greatest. I also have a friend who works at Planned Parenthood who texted me once, “We only have three CDs here and one of them is, like, Adele… If you were having an abortion, what music would you want to hear?” And I said that I think I would want Enya. And those two things are what got me wanting to make an abortion scene that was really magical and fun. The way I think about it now is really, really simple. I wanna put it on a big t-shirt. Abortion is birth.
My First Film (Zia Anger, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: In Always All Ways you quote a bit more from cinematic reference points—there’s a lot of Morvern Callar [2002] in there. Were there films you were watching this time around when you were crafting that more self-reflexive language?
ANGER: Not really; I was watching a lot of reality TV. I was watching a lot of Vanderpump Rules [2013–ongoing], which is very high drama and has crazy group dynamics and characters who are just really, really despicable. So that can feel like individuals trapped together on a film set. Apart from that, just Bob Fosse movies, All That Jazz [1979]. His movies can be autobiographical but also fantastical—so, so fun but also really fucking dark.
On Always, I was torn in so many different directions. Like, I also wanted to be Kelly Reichardt. You’ve met me. I am probably the total opposite of Kelly Reichardt, like, energetically. I’m not making Wendy and Lucy [2008]. I wanted to make an Apichatpong [Weerasethakul] movie. I am not making an Apichatpong movie. And because of that—the “I’ve gotta make this”—I was not working on process. I was not present at all.
NOTEBOOK: I’m really excited to talk about casting because it’s so complicated, this whole nesting-doll effect. You’re casting an actress to play you, and the character has cast her friend in an autobiographical movie, so there’s like traces or echoes of you in so many of these characters.
ANGER: And it goes farther! We don’t get into it in the movie because it would just get too complicated, but in Always All Ways, Anne Marie, the main character is actually making a movie about her dad, played by my dad.
My First Film (Zia Anger, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: There’s a scene where Odessa Young, who does an incredibly uncanny job of playing you with her Western New York accent, says to you directly, “I don’t think I’m doing a very good job.” Where did that line come from?
ANGER: She just said it. I don’t respond, and at first I questioned it. Like, does it seem mean or callous that I don’t say anything back? But I think at that point in the movie we’ve arrived at that: nobody knows if they’re doing a good job. There’s no way of knowing, so I didn’t want to validate that binary of “good” or “bad” from an industry standpoint.
NOTEBOOK: Like in that scene where Vita is throwing a fit over the pregnancy belly not looking real and says “It’s not going to be good!” and your/her dad is like, “That’s never stopped you before!”
ANGER: I’m still working on it, how to make something without worrying about the success or failure of it. This time around, this film is so self-reflexive that it allowed me to constantly check myself and remember why I was making it: I’m not here to make a film like anybody else, or a film that gets into a festival.
NOTEBOOK: Or to kill yourself or anyone else while making it.
ANGER: Right, totally. I was like, I know a lot of people say this, but I really just want everyone to have fun. [Laughs.]
NOTEBOOK: Another part that made me really emotional was the party in the barn after a night of filming, when the “Heartbeats” by The Knife needle drop hits.
ANGER: [Laughs.] I was just telling Odessa, like, “You guys only got to experience the good parts of indie sleaze.” It’s so funny we’re in this moment where “indie sleaze” is so romanticized.
NOTEBOOK: The younger cast got to have their little indie sleaze cosplay moment. I was just thinking that it’s only a matter of time before some kid on Letterboxd is like, “This is so indie sleaze.”
ANGER: Well it was taking place at that moment!
NOTEBOOK: But the thing about that scene that got to me is that everyone is going through the motions of having fun but looks so desperate and exhausted. Odessa does this incredible, kind of devastating laugh in that moment. I remember that feeling on sets.
ANGER: It was devastating in the moment [on the set of Always], because the thing that I had promised to these people closest to me I was unable to deliver: that this was going to start our careers, that it was all going to be worth it. I remember Billy and I saying on that set, “Our career is riding on this!” I didn’t deliver that at all. I don’t remember what that night was actually like, but it did feel like that. When I saw Odessa in Shirley [2020], I was like, Oh, she’s nasty. And I knew Vita had to be someone who is difficult and hard to like, because she’s putting everyone in these situations.
My First Film (Zia Anger, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: Was it strange then to have to recreate these conditions where you felt you were betraying actors and crew or putting them in danger? To restage your mistakes?
ANGER: I’m not judging myself anymore so much as being like, Holy shit, I would not do that again. But what was really amazing with the restaging was getting to see some of the reactions and dynamics that I couldn’t see fifteen years ago acted out by these young and talented people. Like seeing Alexis [Jane Wickline, whose part is based on cinematographer Ashley Connor] during the fight in the graveyard be so sweet and honest and really try and protect her friend, Vita, who is just totally dissociated was really, really moving for me, and I think for Ashley too.
But even looking back on low-budget stuff where everything is going fine, there’s still just like four people on the crew, and you don’t even think about it. You’re just like, sleep-deprived, always smoking cigarettes, always on stimulants…
NOTEBOOK: Adderall is like a character in this movie.
ANGER: Yeah. You just need to feel like God sometimes.
With other stuff, like restaging the accident of Dina running and falling on the pier on camera—the same pier we shot the first movie on—I felt ok with it because we could do it the right way, with actual safety parameters and a professional crew and actual blocking, and we weren’t shooting in February this time.
NOTEBOOK: I was still worried watching that shot because I had just listened to Devon’s EP and she has that single about not knowing how to swim.
ANGER: [Laughs] Oh god. Oh no. I didn’t think of that.
My First Film (Zia Anger, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: You’ve been working with Ashley Connor since college, and I think this movie is just the most Ashley movie I’ve seen with all of the handheld and all of the in-camera effects. It’s incredible and sort of recaps the techniques she’s developed over your prior collaborations in a really beautiful way.
ANGER: And here’s the thing! She was already experimenting with in-camera effects on her Bolex when I met her in college. On Always All Ways, I terrorized her. I put all of these constraints on her and had no idea what I was talking about. We shot on a RED because Billy knew someone who could get us one for free and I was like “I’m shooting all anamorphic!” I picked all of the heaviest equipment. And then in between shoots on Always I was her camera assistant on Thou Wast Mild and Lovely [2014] and got to see her do all of this stuff with just a DSLR. And so this time around I was like, I’m not saying anything. And it was a fucking joy to behold. She’d be shaking, rolling on the ground with the camera in one hand, moving something in front of the lens with the other, yelling out instructions to move around the lights. She was amazing.