Zooey & Adam is a dark, unsettling film about Zooey (Daria Puttaert) and Adam (Tom Keenan) -- a couple that has been struggling to conceive a child for months. During a camping trip meant to relax and get their minds off things, the unthinkable happens. The two are attacked by a group of drunk thugs and Zooey is raped. Soon after, she learns she is pregnant. Is it Adam's or is it the rapist's child? This thought begins to eat at Adam and his anxiety over the matter begins to tear them apart.

Director Sean Garrity shot Zooey & Adam in a style he's coined "solo cinema". There was no script for the film and he was a one-man-team behind the scenes -- directing, shooting, editing, and producing it all himself. He recently spoke with CityNews.ca from his home in Winnipeg about the film and his process.

BM: How did the idea for 'Zooey & Adam' come to you?

SG: Every time I go out to the bush, and Winnipeg is surrounded by bush, I have this feeling of, 'what if someone jumped out at me and tried to do something terrible?' It's so terrifying. And then [I think], 'what if my wife is with me?' And that's where the story kind of came from.

Can you explain the method behind "solo cinema"?

The idea is to use new technologies to take cinema back to where it was when it began in the late 1800s. In those first films, like The Sneeze (1894), The Kiss (1896), Arrival of a Train (1895), cinema was practiced by one person. Over the years, crews have gotten huge; even for my second feature [Lucid] we had at least 70 people standing around. There's this idea that with new technology you could make a movie by yourself but does anyone actually do it? So I thought I'd like to try it. Shoot it all by myself, do the sound by myself while I'm directing and producing, and then edit it and do the colour on my laptop. There's no compromise in terms of artistic vision when you're doing the whole thing by yourself. So that's what solo cinema is about.

How did the actors respond to this style and to not having a script?

They loved it. They thought it was awesome. The director's primary responsibility is to enable performance. Before we began, I wondered how could I best help the actors get to the place emotionally that they need to be in? One of the things I thought would do so would be to take away their text. So that they have to really understand emotionally the moment their character is in because they don't have any lines to fall back on, they have to make the lines up. I also used an element of surprise...they didn't know where the story was going or what was going to happen until they were in the scene and forced to react to whatever occurred.

Would a bigger budget have helped or hindered your creativity?

I produce everything I direct so I find that when there's a whole bunch of money, which doesn't happen very often, it makes it very difficult to be creative. Money brings with it all sorts of stuff. You have to account for it and take care of it and have insurance people and lawyers attached it. My experience is the more I've had, the less creative freedom I've had to explore the ideas I want to explore. The thematic risks I took on Zooey & Adam I don't think would have been possible with any budget at all. If I had even $500,000, I couldn't have done what I did on this film.

Any extra challenges doing it all yourself?

I had to hire a [lawyer] at the end of the day to go through the film with a fine-tooth comb and find all the logos that appear in the background of every shot. We shot it guerrilla-style...you pull out a camera and point it in any direction anywhere and you [end up with] 10 corporate logos in your shot. It was a fairly large task going back and clearing all of that copyright material out of the film.

How long did it take to shoot?

We shot it over a period of about three months...I wanted to have a sense of a season change so it goes from late spring to early fall in theory. We also had very tight beard control. Tom's beard was our marker to where we were in time and it was tough when I had to go back and shoot some extra stuff because we had to plan it around his beard. He had to come with a full beard and then we would shave it to a goatee and then we'd end with the stuff where he's clean shaven.

Who inspires your work?

For this film, the larger influences were [Danish filmmaker] Susanne Bier, some of the people in the Dogma95 movement, and [Vancouver filmmaker] Bruce Sweeney. Also, there's a Japanese film called Demon that was a very big influence on me for this project. I happened to see it in a key moment of life and it stuck with me.

What do you hope the audience takes away from 'Zooey & Adam'?

I hope the audience gets a very intense but authentic feeling emotionally. I went to great lengths to make it feel like a documentary and I hope it works subconsciously on the audience to bring them in a little closer to the characters. If you go through an emotional experience with these characters, and you really are feeling it, you'll walk away feeling a little unsettled.

Zooey & Adam opens at the Royal Cinema in Toronto on March 5. Find out more about the film at zooeyandadam.com.

brian.mckechnie@citynews.rogers.com

Top image: A scene from Zooey & Adam. Courtesy KinoSmith Inc.