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With The Beginner specifically, was it strange working with Cal as an actor in such a different role compared to Zero Day?

Not strange, just different. Cal is a really good actor and we got to know one another so well doing Zero Day that we're practically like family. I think what was interesting was that it was a different kind of movie - it had a lot of improv, like Zero Day, but it had a different tone and had a different relationship with depicting a 'movie world'. I was going for a subtle surreal quality, I suppose. Zero Day was designed to be aggressively 'realistic' (maybe naturalistic is the better word?) and the beginner was meant to be built like a parable or fable. 

So there were things I wanted Cal to do that were not realistic, or maybe odd. I was not experienced enough at the time as a director to articulate what I was going for, and too insecure as a person to accept that what I thought was right didn't work for a close collaborator of mine. A good example is when Cal comes home, after his parents thought he might be dead, he hugs them, and then excuses himself to go alone up to his room.  Cal really had issues with this moment - he just didn't buy it. I was trying to be efficient in the scene, and not have a 'time passing' cut, or some other device. But I couldn't persuade Cal, and instead I just kind of tried to pull rank on him, which, considering how we make work together, was a total failure. Sometimes, when you're anxious or insecure, it's easy to get controlling or pushy - you just want to bypass the process and simply get what you want.

Would you change anything if you made Zero Day today? Not necessarily on a technical level, but in response to how much the culture surrounding guns and mass shootings in the US has changed over recent years.

I think if I made it today, I'd have to build it in a radically different way. 

First, I think I would be more aware of choosing to tell the story of two male, white, middle class teens (as opposed to how I did it at the time - by unthinkingly defaulting to two, white, male, middle class teens because I grew up as a white, male, middle class teen). But I would still likely make it about two, white, male, middle class teens, because it's just easier to 'write what you know.'

Second, the changes in tech are such that white middle class american kids probably have a 16x9, 4k video cam on their phone, one which those kids use way more than if they lived in a time of miniDV camcorders -- not to mention the fact that they would be commonly framing video in a vertical format. So right off the bat, the images that made the movie would be totally different in a fundamental way. 

Third, their phones are connected to the internet, social media, et al, and so are they. Does the phone service their parents use upload everyone's videos and pics to a family cloud account? If so, does that change what they shoot and how? Does the way the kids use social media scratch the itch that would have made them get out the camcorder in 2002?

Fourth, mass shootings and our reactions to them/motives for committing them have changed so much as they have gotten more frequent. They are no longer national events like Columbine was. Or, if they are, they don't last as national events in shared memory like Columbine did. Paradoxically, mass shootings like Uvalde and Sandy Hook - which warranted less overall coverage in the current media landscape than Columbine did in 1999 - make Columbine look almost quaint in comparison. For white middle class people in rich countries, mass shootings have become a fairly common tool for political violence in the name of a broad ideological project of intolerance - from homophobia to incel misogyny to racism to hatred of other religions.

When Columbine happened, I was not thinking in those terms culturally. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were enigmas to me. Their shooting an explosion of nihilistic violence that I was both drawn to with morbid fascination and repelled by. The Eric Harrises and Dylan Klebolds of today are Eliot Roger or the Tree of Life shooter or the Pulse nightclub shooter or the guy that shot up the sikh temple or the mosque mass shooting in new zealand or the guy that shot up the supermarket in Buffalo (and on and on). Many of these shooters' entire social lives consisted of participating in online communities dedicated to hate and cruelty which, although similar to the way Cal and Andre egg each other on in ZD, is not maybe a story easily told well with cinema.

Mass shootings were, long before Columbine, a tactic of political violence, from the Puerto Rico separatist attack on the house of reps in the 1950s to the Japanese Red Army attacking an Israeli airport in 1972 to the guy that attacked the congressional baseball game back in 2017 hoping to kill a bunch of republicans. It seems to me that a lot of the mass shootings we see in America today are a continuation of a long-standing trend of right-wing political violnce in America, and maybe now part of a kind of low-simmer civil war - maybe even at the same time that they are externalized suicides committed by severely alienated people with easy access to ridiculously powerful weapons . This has changed how we interrogate these events after they happen - we look quickly for political or ideological motivations. We also have new things we blame mass shootings on now - just recently, a jury convicted the parents of a mass shooter with involuntary man-slaughter because they did not stop their kid from shooting up their school.

Fifth, mass shootings have become such a part of our cultural life in America, that people deciding to enact a shooting are engaging with a much deeper meta-cultural narrative than the characters in ZD were. Where do these characters fit into that meta-narrative?

Do you find that your influences have changed majorly since you first started making films? Are there any themes, concepts or artists that you find you've pulled away from that used to influence you heavily?