Shot behind the scenes of Citizen Ruth, the ten-minute short offers an introduction to Zahedi’s directorial style and shows why he’s not a more prolific character actor
From 2005 to 2012, the Gotham Awards handed out a trophy for the Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You. Its first winner, a filmmaker known for what he calls radical honesty, couldn’t help but acknowledge how the award’s name, “sound[ed] like a back-handed compliment.” Maria Bello’s Rupert Pupkin-style mispronunciation (“Cavuh Zayeduh, I think”) couldn’t have helped. Backhanded compliments of one kind or another have always characterized coverage of Caveh Zahedi’s work, proving as ubiquitous as mangled versions of his name are across his vast library of features, shorts, and television episodes.
A similar mispronunciation kicks off one of the signature sequences of Zahedi’s body of work. Toward the end of In the Bathtub of the World (2001), a video diary of 1999 and Zahedi’s greatest feature, he brings us along to a festival screening of I Was Possessed By God (1997). That film sees Zahedi ingest a “heroic” five-gram dose of psilocybin mushrooms in an attempt to recreate an earlier experience of divine possession. We only catch snippets of the film in Bathtub. Nothing in the audience’s reaction suggests they’re especially enjoying themselves. We don’t see the question that prompts him to ask a question of his own, “Are you saying narcissistic and vain in the pejorative sense?”
Related: Read about another Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You with Frank V. Ross’ Tiger Tail in Blue
To watch any of Zahedi’s films is to better understand the myriad forms narcissism and vanity can take. No filmmaker I can think of has used so-called vanity projects for such unvarnished self portraits. Speaking to Mike Boehm of the L.A. Times in 2002, Richard Linklater defended Zahedi against charges of narcissism and compared his growing catalog to Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” “It will be one of the greatest poems ever written,” said Linklater. Though that lofty quote closes Boehm’s profile, the author opens with more guarded praise. He describes Zahedi as, “an independent filmmaker whose fans are few but passionate.” Boehm also shows the shock and revulsion that necessarily comes with immersing oneself in Zahedi’s films and spending time with “Caveh.”
Whatever the difference between Zahedi the filmmaker and Caveh the subject, and it’s not clear there is much difference, neither concerns themselves with censorship. They speak directly to the audience about addictions, compulsions, failures, and insecurities. They not only include the sordid details that most public figures take time to scrub from their bios but underline and emphasize them wherever possible. Caveh Zahedi is not unique in narcissism. He may, however, be unique among directors in his unwillingness to flatter the narcissism of his audience. Jonathan Rosenbaum describes the essential role of self-love in urbane movie-going, writing that movies “owe much of their appeal to their capacity to function as Narcissus pools, offering glamorous and streamlined identification figures to authenticate our most treasured self-images.” Other indie filmmakers show us the world as an educated liberal is meant to understand it and present even their worst foibles as charming and relatable imperfections. Zahedi shows the world in all its frustrations and suggests the way we might behave1 with a camera in our hands.
Zahedi’s films raise — and, then, answer — questions about his relative obscurity. A commitment to warts-and-all filmmaking has helped ensure Zahedi will never realize uncomplicated success or earn unqualified praise. At one point in A Portrait of Caveh Zahedi as a Complete Failure, the short memoir included with Factory 25’s collection of Zahedi’s work, the filmmaker describes surreptitiously removing Boehm’s article from his future in-laws’ copies of the Times. Though Boehm mostly raved about Zahedi’s masterful video diary, In the Bathtub of the World, he also referenced some of the film’s more shocking revelations, most notably slapping his partner. Another troubling confession comes when Caveh admits to fantasizing about his film school students. The fantasies and compulsive behavior presage a similar, more explicitly “confessional” moment in his subsequent doc-fiction hybrid I Am a Sex Addict. Zahedi’s highest profile film won him that Gotham Award and features admissions that continually complicate our relationship with the man on screen.
A safer introduction to Zahedi’s personality and filmmaking style, his first direct-address masterpiece, predates I Am a Sex Addict by a decade. Zahedi shot I Was in a Film Starring Laura Dern behind the scenes of Citizen Ruth2 (Alexander Payne, 1996), an Oscar nominee from a director whose continued success with audiences and the Academy remains as baffling as Zahedi’s obscurity is both frustrating and understandable. The ten-minute short follows Caveh as he kicks off a character actor career that will prove short-lived, possibly because he can’t play anyone other than Caveh. I Was in a Film Starring Laura Dern evinces that someone so emphatically themselves cannot be made to fit a scripted role.
We open the film with Caveh awaiting his flight to Nebraska on the eve of his “first real movie.” His wide-eyed enthusiasm is infectious and, ultimately, ironic. As soon as he’s reached his hotel and hit record, Zahedi immediately attacks the artifice inherent to putting a scripted performance on screen. Even when actors can write their own lines, they may struggle to find the appropriate middle ground between their natural delivery and something calibrated for audiences. In countless Academy-vetted performances, actors labor over their lines like they’re recording an audiobook or scream and shout as if for the benefit of an audience in the cheap seats. Even Caveh’s attempts to convey how he’d ideally play the scene resemble a Hollywoodized version of underplaying the material.
When the founder of Indiewire joined Zahedi’s 24-hour telethon3 and described his work as progenitors of YouTube diaries, I remember thinking it was surface-level analysis and practically an insult to a filmmaker whose influences tend toward the literary. Returning to his dispatch from the set of Citizen Ruth, however, we see the seeds of at least one TikTok subgenre. He’s effectively inviting us to “get ready with him” as he practices lines and tries on outfits. We become more than an audience and sympathetic ear; we become the crew he’d prefer to have at his disposal. He wishes aloud that he had better lighting and someone to workshop rewrites with.
After testing out numerous takes on his lines, Zahedi shows off his wardrobe. Should his character, Peter, don a long, white button-down, for example, or a boyish striped t-shirt? Vest or no vest? As with the line readings, both the sheer number of options and the lack of distinguishing features between them offer fodder for comedy. An aside like “this collar isn’t staying very collar-ly” gets at the absurdity of costuming for the screen. Here too there’s a fruitless effort to find the balance between a natural appearance and something “in character.”
On set the next morning, Zahedi quickly shifts from nervous excitement to dejection. Payne has chewed him out for directing the other actors. Our protagonist doesn’t see the problem. “If I was directing,” he says, I would let other people make directions for Christ’s sake.” He describes feeling “repressed” and “oppressed” and there’s no mistaking the tension in his short exchange with a harried production assistant. A quick shot of Laura Dern’s bodyguard shows more unglamorous backstage detail. It seems perhaps an extravagance for such a small production and belies the approachable persona a star like Dern might cultivate. Zahedi has no interest in helping preserve Hollywood royalty or indie darling’s perceptions of themselves.
Zahedi’s honesty about the acting from his co-stars doesn’t come easy for most critics or, presumably, most actors. Someone who’s got a professional interest in the notion that the Oscar contenders are some of the best stuff their medium has to offer will never give us anything like Zahedi’s on-set assessments. “The acting kinda sucks,” he says, with a tone of earnest investment in the film’s success rather than malice. Even if it’s your introduction to Caveh, you start to wonder about the direction he says he has offered and the ideas for the film he longs to direct, if he only had the money.
The film closes with two clips from Citizen Ruth that include almost the entirety of Zahedi’s appearance in the film. He offers a sly reference to the filmmaking process, in which hours or entire days may go into producing just a few frames. We’ve spent more than ten minutes watching Zahedi sweat over what he’ll wear for less than a minute of screen time and how he’ll deliver just a pair of lines. He had to fly halfway across the country, from California to Nebraska, for the shoot. God knows how much time he spent considering the details of his performance and costume off camera. It’s also a sequence that imbues the film with the mix of self-deprecation, self-regard, and self-justification that define Zahedi’s on-screen persona. Most interesting of all, it serves his arguments that he could direct a better film far more effectively than continuing to argue to the camera could have.
You can (and probably should) laugh at Zahedi’s hand-wringing and resentment, but you don’t need to sit through the entirety of Payne’s film to know his bit player and former classmate has him beat. These 60-something seconds are more than enough to recognize Citizen Ruth’s shortcomings. Even watched in context, the clips can’t help but spotlight everything wrong with a brand of acting and filmmaking whose outsize acclaim are always inverse to their quality. Zahedi’s acknowledgement of these facts aren’t the most shocking or damning things he’s said or done on film. They may, however, be the most unforgivable, at least according to Zahedi’s peers. His character acting career since has been limited despite his otherwise prolific output.4
Zahedi’s subsequent work, most notably the extended self-sabotage chronicled in The Show About the Show, offers a painful, if predictable, coda for viewers who’ve kept up with the director’s career. The headline of a 2019 New York Times profile offers an appropriately dramatic summary of Zahedi’s experience working on the television series: “A Filmmaker Bared His Soul. It Ruined His Life.” The latest entry in Getting Stoned with Caveh (exactly what it sounds like) places the director across the table from wannabe bad-boy rocker Matty Healy of The 1975. Even the man who had Swifties calling for his head, a self-described “pretty spicy guy,” can’t believe it when Zahedi takes a phone call from his estranged wife on camera.
Unscripted moments like these come much easier to Zahedi than character work or conventional coverage. They are characteristic of his practice. That candid look at Dern’s bodyguard and the snippets of behind-the-scenes drama demonstrate the persistent, insistent gaze of Zahedi’s camera and how he’ll make even unwilling subjects into characters and demand equal transparency and investment from them. These qualities may explain why casting directors hesitate to pick up the phone and they have certainly contributed to feuds with film-world figures. The fearlessness to make even critics into collaborators — as he did with documentary programmer Thom Powers in I Was Blacklisted By Thom Powers (2012) — marks Zahedi as an especially thrilling filmmaker with a uniquely participatory body of work. There’s a chance any of us could wind up in a film starring Caveh Zahedi.
Watch I Was in a Film Starring Laura Dern on Zahedi’s Vimeo channel
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- “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” – Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself #1” ↩︎
- Citizen Ruth’s conviction-less politics predict equal opportunity offenders like South Park by casting both pro- and anti-choice advocates as gawping caricatures. Payne’s take on the Right looks obvious and pandering, his take on the Left just puzzling. Both sides, Payne argues, not only share a cynical thirst for media attention but, more surprisingly, a belief that they’re serving a higher power. A sequence in which Laura Dern’s Ruth watches two activists (Swoosie Kurtz and Kelly Preston) sing to the moon is so bad that Payne’s career should’ve ended right there. ↩︎
- The event, intended to raise money for projects including Season 3 of The Show About the Show, welcomed guests like Greg Watkins, Jay Rosenblatt, Rick Alverson, Dasha Nekrasova, and Matt Johnson. The conversations were predictably candid with Zahedi directly addressing his strained relationships with several guests. ↩︎
- He discusses Andre Bazin in Linklater’s Waking Life and he’s now appearing in Tyler Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point. After seeing Taormina’s latest, I can confirm Zahedi’s performance amounts to a wordless cameo. ↩︎
