- Yellow Veil Pictures
Writer/director Weston Razooli is a Park City native whose debut feature, Riddle of Fire (opening March 22 at the Broadway Centre Cinemas), is fantasy/adventure about three children who encounter danger while on a quest for ingredients for a special pie for one of their sick mothers. Razooli spoke about his childhood experiences and the influences on the film. [Edited for length and clarity]
City Weekly: What are your memories of growing up in Park City in the 1990s and 2000s?
Weston Razooli: Yeah, Sundance was a huge thing already. But as a teenager, we kind of just tried to like, sneak into parties and crash stuff. We didn't really know too much about the film part of it. It was mostly just an exciting party time for us.
CW: What is your artist origin story?
WZ: My parents were both artists of sorts. My mom was an elementary school art teacher, and my dad was an industrial designer/entrepreneur dude. ... In our house, he had a workshop with power tools and lathes and drill presses, and we would make wooden swords and costumes. My brothers and I would play in the woods, in the mountains, play a combination of Dungeons & Dragons with live-action sword-fighting. So that kind of fed my imagination. As a really young kid, I loved Lord of the Rings and the Redwall series. I wanted to be a writer when I was super-young. I started writing a book in second grade, and then in third grade I started to write an epic fantasy that I'm still writing today.
CW: What were the kind of influences you were thinking of for a kid adventure story like this?
WZ: Tons and tons of influences that range from the 1920s to the 1990s. I loved The Little Rascals growing up. My mom showed us the old show from the '20s, Our Gang, and also the '90s movie as well. So those, Ken Loach's Kes and Black Jack, Bogdanovich's Paper Moon is kind of an influence on all my stuff. Hayao Miyazaki, Princess Mononoke especially, the magic and action and adventure of that. Kurosawa ... Leave It to Beaver, The Sandlot.
CW: Was it kind of a no-brainer to make your film in Summit County?
WZ: Absolutely. ... Mostly for the landscape and the locations, of course, but also just the little helpful pieces that are there. I know a few people there; if we can't get this location, this lake, we can go to this waterfall or something. Also, my parents still live there, and they were very generous and helpful. My mom baked the pies in the film, and taught the kids to bake the pies, and my dad built the [gaming system] the kids use in the film. It was kind of symbolic, my dad making the high-tech thing and my mom cooking the loving, healing pie.
CW: You were willing to make these kids really kind of troublemakers. How did you think about making your protagonists interesting while giving them kind of a rough edge?
WZ: Yeah, some major influences I forgot were Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. And Oliver Twist, especially The Artful Dodger. So these kind of scrappier kids ... those are my type of characters. My brothers and I were kind of mischief-makers, with my friends and stuff with our paintball guns. Those characters to me are so funny and fun to watch. Watching these sort of stinker characters on a wholesome quest to gather ingredients for their sick mother, you don't want them to be too goody-goody. ... The kids that I cast have a good mix of scrappiness and cuteness. They all seemed like timeless child actors that could have been in a Little Rascals from the '20s.
CW: You mentioned in another interview that this was part of a group of stories you had in mind. Are you thinking about other stories in this world?
WZ: The script I was trying to do before Riddle of Fire was set in the same town—the fictional town of Ribbon, Wyoming—and it was about high-school kids, though. In that script, the main character had three younger brothers who were scrappy, dirt-bike little kids who wreaked havoc in the town. And every re-write of the script I did, their parts started to get bigger and bigger, until I was really like, "It would be so much more fun to make a movie about these kids, just on a little adventure." But I would love to make that other high-school film. That'll be down the road, though.
