Cannes Conversations — Weston Razooli lets his kids go wild

L.A. filmmaker Weston Razooli’s debut feature RIDDLE OF FIRE is like if THE GOONIES were directed by Francois Truffaut — a tale of three modern kids on an old-fashioned adventure in the woods, facing down a family of witches. Razooli tells host Rico Gagliano about his D&D-soaked childhood in Utah, how he cast the kids… and the afterparty following the film’s Cannes premiere, which sounds as magical — and kinda dangerous — as his movie.

Every May, the population of sleepy Cannes, France triples — as film pros and cinephiles from around the globe convene for the two-week movie-thon called the Cannes Film Festival. 

For the fourth season of the MUBI Podcast, we sent host Rico Gagliano into the eye of this celluloid storm, accompanied by an intrepid camera crew, to grab interviews with a cross-section of filmmakers who made Cannes 2023 one of the most celebrated in years. Guests include legendary director Wim Wenders, perennial Cannes favorites Kleber Mendonca Filho and Monia Chokri, and a slew of new filmmakers destined to be world cinema's next wave — from Belgian hip-hopper-turned-auteur Baloji to New York's wry boundary-smasher Joanna Arnow.

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To stream some of the films we've covered on the podcast, check out the collection Featured on the MUBI Podcast. Availability of films varies depending on your country.

MUBI is a global streaming service, production company and film distributor dedicated to elevating great cinema. MUBI makes, acquires, curates, and champions extraordinary films, connecting them to audiences all over the world. A place to discover ambitious new films and singular voices, from iconic directors to emerging auteurs. Each carefully chosen by MUBI’s curators.

Transcript

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Heads up, audio listeners, you're about to hear a videotaped conversation. For the full experience, you'll find a video version of this episode on Spotify or YouTube. Being cute is better than being hot.- Um, no it isn't.- Yeah, cute's a lot better. The best things in life are cute. Like little puppies and kittens. Little cheeseburgers, little erasers shaped like penguin. Hamsters. Yeah, I'm guess I am pretty cute. Oh, God. Let's just go steal some ice. That is a scene from<i>The Riddle of Fire</i>, the debut feature from Weston Razooli. It's about these three very cute kids set loose in a very weird world. All they want to do is play video games. Instead, armed only with paintball guns and attitude, they end up facing off with a family of actual witches. Shot on 16mm, it's part seventies Disney adventure, part <i>Goonies</i>, all directed with the tender touch of Truffaut. And it's one of the few films I saw Cannes where the filmmakers seemed like they were actually having a blast. I'm Rico Gagliano. This is the MUBI Podcast. Welcome to a special season of Conversations from the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. This is episode four, Weston Razooli talking about <i>The Riddle of Fire</i>. And also about the after party they had the night it premiered. Yeah, we had a massive party,<i>Château de Feu</i>, chateau of fire at this villa. We like... That's not actually what it's called. No, I named it that. Yeah. It's at this villa that I named <i>Château de Feu</i> and we have, like, a paintball gun range, with, like, legit paintball guns. And it's, like, magic tents, and we had Disco Bambino and Sake DJ... It's all a disco. And it was crazy. My producer, David Atrakchi, he kind of put the put the thing together. What is a magic tent?- Was it just a tent...- It was a magical tent, yeah. Was it magical? Or was there magic being done in there. It was magical. It was a magical tent. But yeah, there was like a spice trader in there you could go see, talk to.- And there's a spice trader?- Yeah. What does that mean?- What? What does that mean?- You'll see in the <i>Spice Trader</i>. He like trades spice. So you could go talk to him and he could tell you, like, about spice. The spice trade. Yeah. What is he... It makes sense to me somehow. This is like, pretty classic about all of your movies for me. It makes sense to me. But I don't know why. Like, I don't know why a spice trader should be in the magic tent at Cannes, but, like, that makes sense. It was a surprise for me, actually. I was blown away by it, like I didn't... I arrived and it was like a huge surprise for me.- The spice Trader or the magic tent?- Both. Yeah. But in the paintball gun range though, it was like legit. Like it was actually pretty dangerous, I think, like, yeah... Paintball guns, for those who haven't seen the movie, paintball guns- play a major role in this movie.- Yeah. And we had a gun range with like gnomes and mushrooms and things. Yeah. In the movie, a lot of gnome like garden gnomes get destroyed by high velocity paintballs. Yeah. That is actually one of my favorite scenes. Just because it's so pointless, they're just, like, hanging out, talking and killing gnomes with paintballs. Yeah, that's what you do if you are a kid with a paintball gun and you have a second to kill while you wait. This is a great segue into my first question. Now that we're halfway through this interview! Is like, so it's a movie about childhood. I have to ask you about your childhood. What, where did you grow up? What was it like? Yeah, I grew up in, I actually grew up in Park City, Utah, for the most part, and did a lot of the stuff that's in the movie. Rode dirt bikes, paint balls in the mountains with my friends, played Airsoft, D&D, like larping. Stop there. LARPing. So I know what LARPing is. For those who don't, tell them. Live-action role play. You like dress up in armor or medieval clothes and you have swords, but like foam. They're like PVC... we'd build all of it. It's like a PVC pipe with, like a foam thing on it. And then we duct tape everything, and then you can wail on each other, and it still hurts a lot. And we'd also do arrows like, would you put like a little foam tip on the arrow and duct tape it? And it would hurt, like, as much as a paintball, but you shoot each other bow and arrows and stuff. Were you, you know, the whatever version of the Dungeon Master would be for that? Were you creating these scenarios? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So you were already a director is what I'm getting. Yeah. Yeah. I think a lot of directors I know like, were Dungeon Masters, it's a similar thing. Yeah, you're making a story. Is that true? What other directors are Dungeon Masters? Oh, my personal friends. I mean.- Okay.- Or personal friends like mine that are writers, yeah. I want you to tell me that, like, Steve McQueen was a Dungeon Master. Oh, yeah, yeah. No. Ingmar Bergman, he's like...- He was huge.- Yeah. It's like, he would always, like very powerful monsters. He'd have sick monsters. Yeah, he would really have crazy ones, yeah. Death had a lot of hit dice. I'd have loved to play a game of D&D with him. With him as a Dungeon Master, though. That'd be sick. What you need to do right now is to remake <i>The Seventh Seal</i> where they're playing Dungeons and Dragons instead of chess. I don't know. Okay, sure. Yeah.- Yeah.- And then I get 10%. Okay. Yeah, exactly. So there's your childhood. All of that is in the DNA of this movie.- Yeah.- Clearly. But I still have to ask you, like, I read somewhere that you have, like, an armful of scripts of many different genres. Why pick this movie, this kind of, like, kid adventure quest movie for your first feature? Yeah, I've written several scripts, but they're... sort of all the budgets just were like, too high, you know? I'd write a script with kind of like higher budget, lower budget, lower budget, lower budget. And then finally it was like I had to make something like super cheap. And for some reason I thought I was like, okay, I'm going to write a simple script that's just going to be like for kids an adventure in the woods and I'll shoot in my hometown and it'll be really cheap and easy, and it's like, no, it's not at all. For kids, like, was your first problem. Yeah, I have this problem too. Like, I like to write. I just naturally write adventure stories. So, like, every scene is a different location, which is really hard, you know, on, for production. But I just it's like what I do. I don't know. Kids are funny. They're just funny characters. And like, I, like the idea of, like, mischievous kids just kind of like, I don't know, beating up mean adults or like, getting revenge on adults and, like, I don't know, sneaking around, like, kind of, like playing, pranking adults and stuff and yeah, that's just funny to me. Tell me about finding those kids. Particularly let's start with Jody. We were before we started rolling, we were talking about Jodie. Jodie apparently picked people's outfits that they wore to your premiere. Is that right, first of all? Yeah, I think so. He... Yeah, they wore these like, he picked a green, like, snakeskin style three piece suit. And then I think he showed it to Charlie Stover, the other actor, and he was like, he found it in blue. So then they were kind of matching. They were, I was there at the premiere.- They were amazing.- It was fun. Yeah. One day I hope to grow up to be those kids. But like... So finding him, he's like, such a little, like, adorable beast of a child.- Yeah.- Where did you... tell me about casting. So I had a great casting director named Jeff Johnson who's was like the premier casting director of Utah. He cast, like... many movies that have good, great movies that have shot there. It was one of the tapes that was sent to me, and he was Skyler Peters, who plays Jodie, was like, he was literally the only kid who made me laugh. Okay, this is the big question that I started having about 10 minutes into the film. All of his dialog is subtitled.- Yeah.- Did... Was that written that way, or were you just like turning a weakness into a strength? Like, I can't understand this child? No, that was not planned. We start shooting and he starts talking and goes "Hey's..."What're we going to do..." And I was like, oh, I fucked up. You cannot understand him. And I was like, panicking. And we're roll... we're running around, we're behind schedule. And I'm like, what do I do? And I was like, I guess we just have to shoot. Like, we have to just shoot this day. I felt terrible, and then at the end of the day I was like, okay, what am I going to do? What do we, and then I had the idea like, oh, if we subtitle him, it'll be great. See. It'll give her a chill down her spine. Go get it! I'm not touching that demon. Why don't you just go take a bag of ice from the market? C'mon, it's chilling but it's kinda cute. Yeah, Jodie, it kind of looks like you. You're cute. I'm not cute, I'm hot. He's also the most eloquent one, you know. But you can't understand him. Yeah, he has the most to say. I just learned that, like, last night at your premiere was the first time that any of the kids had actually seen this movie.- Correct.- Which explains, like, some of the screaming that I heard during the thing. But describe their reactions like, what did they say to you after this? They said, so Phoebe said, who plays Alice, she said it's her second favorite movie after <i>The Lorax</i>. So it's pretty good. I think it's, and it's Charlie and Skyler's favorite movie, though. Lorelei, she says it's her second favorite movie after <i>Free Guy</i>. So you got two out of three.- Yeah,- But I feel like these are the luckiest kids in the world because they, like, basically they're like zero years old and they've just been portrayed as the most awesome, cool ass heroes.- Yeah, like ever.- Yeah. But it was really important for me to like... to wait to show the movie in, in the proper premiere setting. I mean, none of the kids had seen it. My family, they were there last night and they hadn't seen it yet. And then all the parents of the kids hadn't seen it. And then all the, my production designer hadn't seen it. And because like, yeah, I don't want to send a screener to, I want to, you know, I want to wait till the premiere and watch it in a theater with everyone and just be in the ideal setting and for it to be like a satisfying experience. That was really the epitome of why we, why we make movies. So I teared up several times watching this movie. And definitely it's the story. Like it's a beautiful story in a lot of ways. But there's also I mean, and I don't think it's probably lost on too many people, it seems to like mention, it conjures up a childhood that I feel like we just don't get to have in America anymore. And I don't know to what extent that was your game plan. Yeah. Yeah, it really was. I wanted to create a timeless adventure, that is, yeah... It's not really seen anymore in this day and age. I tried to create a timeless, timeless kind of setting. And the kids, you know, they do, they still have their phones, but they use them like, you know... like Star Wars devices, like little like utility belt devices, right? It's like they're binoculars or they're like, you know, like Google, like how to hotwire a car real quick and then like, learn it instantly and then, you know, which is like the coolest part of like, having a smartphone. Yeah, in my opinion. Right? And so... They only use it for good. Yeah, they only use it for like cool, like things not social media and stuff. I did want to say that like timeless adventures can still, are still possible in this day and age. Hopefully. Do do you think they are? Can we go back to like, you know, adorable beasts running wild through the forest, times? Oh, yeah. Have you been to Utah or Wyoming? I mean, yeah, I see kids like, yeah, I was I drove, like, a couple of months ago. I was driving through and like, there were these two kids with, like, bow arrows, like walking down the street of this little Utah town, like, up to no good. And I was like, yeah, those are some real fire kids. Weston Razooli, it's just a pleasure to talk to you. And I love this freaking movie, so thanks for making it. Thank you so much. Thanks for the great questions too.- What? Thanks!- Yeah. Yeah. Nice, did we get that on tape? Great. So that's going to be the entire episode is just you saying that. Weston Razooli. If his debut film <i>Riddle of Fire</i> doesn't become some kind of cult hit there is no justice in this world. While you await its release, find his short film <i>Anaxia</i> online, in which sorceresses drive muscle cars and can turn people into Chihuahuas. Meanwhile, this episode of the MUBI Podcast was written and hosted by me, Rico Gagliano. Ciara McEniff produced along with Elodie Fagan and Josefina Perez-Portillo. Sean Holdsworth edited the show and Michelle Cho is our supervising editor. Yuri Suzuki composed our theme music. Our camera crew in Cannes included Cédric Hazard, Alice Desplats, Rob Godfrey, Solal Coulon and Mathis Toti. Special thanks to MUBI's additional team in Cannes, Eric Issenberg, Sam Leter, and Ilyass Malki. This series is executive produced by me, along with Jon Barrenechea, Efe Çakarel, Daniel Kasman and Michael Tacca. And of course, to stream the best in cinema, head over to MUBI.com to start watching. Next episode, my conversation with Elene Naveriani from the country of Georgia. Her lovely new film is about unlearning how to be a woman. Until then, shout out to the bus driver in Cannes who delayed our departure for five minutes so a passenger on the sidewalk could finish smoking a cigarette.