‘I wanted it to feel like a kids’ movie made by kids’: Weston Razooli on his Cannes-wowing film Riddle of Fire

Remember last year’s Cannes film festival, when Anatomy of a Fall, The Zone of Interest, About Dried Grass, and Fallen Leaves vied for the Palme d’Or ahead of international releases? The French press also found a new auteur hero in the Directors’ Fortnight selection: Weston Razooli, the debut director of the madcap 1980s-inspired adventure movie Riddle of Fire.

Cahiers du Cinema magazine put the young Utah film-maker on its cover, declaring him “capable of perpetuating the very essence of cinema as a collective experience”. The focus on Razooli – Cahiers’s cover star this year is Cate Blanchett – took American critics by surprise. Where had he come from? Five days after he submitted the final cut of Riddle of Fire, Julien Rejl, the director of Directors’ Fortnight, confirmed the film was in the reckoning. The film-maker had previously directed only no-budget, no-crew shorts with friends. His sole previous festival credit was Jolly Boy Friday, a short that played at the Lower East Side Film Festival in 2016.

A self-taught practitioner who began making stop-motion videos with Playmobil and Lego figures as a preteen, Razooli majored in graphic design at college. He didn’t know anyone in the film business before Riddle of Fire, but he did try to crash Sundance parties with his friends as a teenager.

“My dad is an industrial designer and my mom is an elementary-school art teacher,” he says. “They were very supportive, but they are artists and they have very high standards with art. They insisted that, whatever I wanted to do, I had to do it properly. I had to work hard, and that’s been critical to my practice.”

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Partnering with the Utah Film Centre, he spent several years raising the budget for Riddle of Fire. He pitched hundreds of times over three years to raise a modest budget from private-equity sources.

“I pitched it as a pretty commercial movie,” says Razooli. “I think naturally, luckily, the film is on the fence; it’s 50 per cent artistic and 50 per cent commercial. It’s an action-adventure in the style of Home Alone or The Goonies or Stand By Me. I thought about forgotten Disney family films like The Apple Dumpling Gang and Escape to Witch Mountain. But it was very hard to raise the money. It took a long time.”

Growing up in west Utah like I did, you get to use your imagination a lot. We got in trouble. A lot of the movie is my childhood, exaggerated

—  Weston Razooli

Riddle of Fire pivots around three rambunctious tearaways, Hazel (Charlie Stover), Alice (Phoebe Ferro) and Jodie (Skyler Peters), as they spend a freewheeling summer racing around on bikes in Ribbon, Wyoming, where they call themselves the Reptiles and embark on a series of quests. Their first is a heist. They steal a new video-game console from a local factory but are thwarted when Hazel and Jodie’s mom locks the TV with a password. Confined to bed with a cold, she promises to give them the password if they bring her a blueberry pie from the local bakery to cheer her up.

Several misfortunes later, the gang tail a redneck named John (Charles Halford) after he buys the last speckled egg in the supermarket. They plead for this crucial ingredient for blueberry pie, only to end up peering through his windows, which turns out to be the base for a strange taxidermist cult called the Enchanted Blade, led by a junior witch named Anna-Freya (Lio Tipton).

“I wanted it to feel like a kids’ movie made by kids, so you could really enter into this kids’ world,” says Razooli. “Growing up in west Utah like I did, you get to use your imagination a lot. We had a lot of freedom. We had dirt bikes and paintball guns. We got in trouble. We played Halo a lot. A lot of the movie is my childhood, exaggerated.”

The detail of the world of Riddle of Fire recalls Anna Biller’s Tarot-inspired props for The Love Witch or S Craig Zahler’s multitasking as writer, director and composer on Bone Tomahawk and Dragged Across Concrete. Every aspect is a labour of love. The scrappy kids’ characters correspond to fantasy archetypes: Anna-Freya is a witch, Petal is a fairy and Redrye is a huntsman.

“It’s important to me to think about all the concepts of design, like costume and titles,” says Razooli. “I did all the VFX for the apps and the scope maps the kids use that you see in the film. I drew on all the dirt bikes. Partly it comes down to budget. Everything has a handmade feel because it is handmade. But, to me, movies aren’t just movies. The screen is the canvas for so many mediums, not just directing, right? There is concept design and costume design. You are writing, directing, composing and editing.”

In this spirit, Razooli has founded Anaxia, a production company with grand multimedia plans.

“It’s going to be a production company, but it’s going to be more,” says the film-maker. “I want to make a lot of clothing and fashion and merch and stuff but also objects. For now it’s just me, but I’m thinking about the futurists and the way that the artists involved with futurism would do these crazy events. They would do a show in a Zeppelin. They would cook and serve these bizarre dishes. I want to do that. I want to make spectacle.”

Riddle of Fire opens on Friday, June 7th