“I grew up high on a mountain,” says director Weston Razooli. “It’s a very fun place to let your imagination run wild.” Raised in Park City, Utah, the filmmaker spent his youth riding dirt bikes, exploring the local forests and getting into trouble – a limitless sense of freedom that runs through his scrappy and whimsical coming-of-age movie Riddle of Fire. In this debut feature, three BB gun-armed children – one so young that everything he says is subtitled – set off on a surreal quest to find a blueberry pie for their sick mother. It captures the idyllic kind of existence – captured in nostalgic 80s adventure movies like Stand By Me and ET – that has long been considered extinct. Think a 1970s Disney live-action, only for 2020s microdosers.
On screen Utah is traditionally seen through the lens of Westerns; with Riddle of Fire, Weston translates the landscape he was raised in into a kind of childhood playground. His own earliest film memories include cult classics and little known animations, from Night of the Hunter and The Apple Dumpling Gang, to The Biscuit Eater and Little Rascals. By the age of seven, he was already writing stories (including a high fantasy adventure saga which he says he’s still working on) and at ten was given his first video camera. It was at this point he started translating his stories onto celluloid, making short films with his own scrappy band of friends before starting work in a film production studio in high school. By 18, he was onto California College of the Arts to study illustration and graphic design.
“Going to film school is the opposite of what you should do as a filmmaker”
“I always wanted to be a filmmaker, but I [also] wanted to do costume design and concept design and illustration. Only doing illustration is not enough, or writing a comic is not enough. I need to write and make the poster and the trailer and edit.” (He would do all of this on Riddle of Fire, too.) “No real filmmaker is going to go to film school,” he says. “It’s the opposite of what you should do as a filmmaker. It’s a waste of time, because the best way to learn filmmaking is by making a movie and the worst way is in a safe filmmaking environment like film school. It’s a con.”
Riddle of Fire, in Weston’s own words, “flipped a switch” on his career; it was one of the first films selected for the 2023 Cannes Film Festival’s Director’s Fortnight and went on to play alongside his hero Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron at the Toronto Film Festival, a fact he calls “too weird to even consider as reality.”
He’s just finished the script for his next film: a Poliziotteschi-esque Euro-crime romantic thriller set in Spain and France It is one of the 10 film ideas that he says he hopes to execute over the next 20 years. “My first few movies are going to be smaller genre movies and eventually I’ll move into making my epic high fantasy saga,” he says, and then grins. “After I’m able to acquire gigantic budgets of course.”
Writer: Anahit Behrooz