An interview with writer/director Charles Pazos on April 4th, 2024

 

1. Artist statement: 

I'm an idea guy really. I work in different mediums, from sequential art to motion pictures to theater, focusing on storytelling and conceptual narratives. I can go from complete abstraction to grounded political theorems.

 

2. What's your ethnic background?

I'm a first generation American. Ethnically, I have a Spanish background. My last name is Galician. My mother is Cuban American and as a kid I lived in Spain for a few years, I went to school there, learning to read and write in Spanish. That was very influential to my consciousness. I have nice memories of it. Afterwards, my mother and step dad moved back to the USA and I spent my high school years in Miami before getting into the motion design industry and working in commercial art.

 

3. What's your art background?

As I mentioned, after art school, where I majored in computer animation and minored in film, I began working in the commercial art industry as a motion design artist working in broadcast. From there I was able to expand into post-production and was able to dabble in writing and directing. Later on, I was able to train exclusively as a writer/director. 

 

4. What's your theater background?

I had the opportunity to write, produce and direct a microplay in Miami in the 2010's and it was a very unique and enthralling experience. I'm still amazed at the organic nature of theater. As a guy that's worked in pictures all his life, it was cool to see a medium as alive as theater. No performance is ever exactly the same, it's not as robotic as filmmaking. There can be variations in execution that can be random and can even add to the performance, as well as sometimes hinder it. But the show must go on.

 

5. Are you planning any new theater productions?

The pandemic really hindered my exploration of the New York theater scene so I'm basically starting over from a community and networking perspective but I do have some scripts prepared if anyone would be open to collaborating on an off-off-off broadway thing. I've been working on my own performance art stuff, mostly as an exercise in experimentation.

 

6. What can you say about your filmmaking?

I've kept busy during the pandemic. I was able to shoot a lot of stuff in the city and deconstruct a lot of my previous processes. That was fun. After that, I remastered some of my previous HD narrative work in 4K and I completely reworked one feature into a webseries. I like the episodic format. I had never messed with it before but I ended up enjoying it. Watching what Lynch did with TP3 was inspirational. I learned that, as a director, you don't need to adhere to a strict format. You can just tell a story every episode and make it as entertaining as you want. I think the sweet spot for a webseries is around the 12 minute mark but I went way over that on some of the episodes, depending on the beat of the episode. 

 

7. What can you say about Vessel [ + Distortion ]?

That's my latest picture. It's basically a quick follow up to what my guy Brian Knox aka Anoxx has been up to and it explores the psychology of being a soldier. It was actually born from a webseries I was trying to create called 'Thought School Gangland' that never got off the ground. I had created this whole story about Knox dropping out of the military and falling in love while attending Columbia university. I might make that a comic book if I don't get it produced, we will see! I'm looking for a producer that is interested in helping me build some productions right now. I don't enjoy producing very much.

 

8. Do you consider your work anti-racist?

I don't consider my work racist, so sure, it's anti-racist. I've used people of color as headliners as well as explored narratives using people of color. In Intersections, I think every cast member was a person of color, except for the Russian character. The humanists believe there is only one race and that we evolved differently due to tribal, geographical and cultural trends. I don't really cast with people of color in mind. I cast the character according to how the actor can portray that character. My work has been extremely ultra-no budget so far so I pulled the elements together as best I could. Like I said earlier, producing isn't the strongest game in my bag. I'd rather focus on writing and directing.

 

9. Intersections was completely improvised?

Yeah, it takes a page from the 'Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David process' where you create a story with beats but you let the actors improvise the actual dialogue. It was an experiment because, at the time, the actors were only in town for the holidays and we were desperate to get anything done. I had this idea based on a night where I was stuck at a bus stop and hung out with this wild thug dude. He didn't rob me like the guy in the movie but I dreamed up this whole narrative about betrayal.

 

10. What are your political leanings? Conservative or Liberal?

I consider myself a progressive, although I am into religion too, so does that make me a conservative? I'm probably somewhere in the middle. I'm an existential thinker, mostly. I'm probably more Camus than Sartre, not much of a Fanonist. I'm not anti-european. After living in mostly leftist pro-african and pro-latin american anti-colonist cultural eco-systems for the last ten or so years I'm actually starving to learn more about European culture. That's probably because of those formative years of my childhood in Spain.

 

11. Are you pro-colonialism?

Colonialism is probably dead. The French and Russians are negotiating the Congo area now. There is an ongoing proxy war about it. I understand that Colonialism has abused areas due to bad management, exploitation and greed. The counter-forces are pissed about it. I mean, if you've been getting taken advantage of by bullies you would be pissed off too, I'm sure. The anti-colonialist forces have been backing Gaza as well. That conflict, to me, is the same deal as the American/Indian war from a few generations back. Native cultures vs a wealthy, modern, industrialized state. In Israel's defense, they were Pearl Harbored. In Gaza's defense, they have been dealing with water issues and illegal settlements. There is very bad blood there... it was a toxic situation.

 

12. Will your European curiosity affect your pictures going forward?

Doubt it. I am actually interested in creating a Basketball movie that would probably star two African-Americans. I am writing it now. But personally, I wouldn't mind traveling to Europe and taking pictures and learning more about it.

 

13. What is your position on the LGBTQ+ community? Russia has assigned them as a terrorist entity.

I did hear about that. I'm not that familiar with Russian culture but apparently the Orthodoxy have taken a stand against that movement. The Pope has been accepting of LGBTQ+ moderately so the Orthodoxy are a protestant Christian entity in some way. I don't have a problem with LGBTQ+. To each their own. I think the pursuit of happiness is a big deal and if people are happy being who they are then so be it. If my kids were gay or trans I would support them, but at the same time, I think kids should be able to grow up in as natural a habitat as possible. I'm into natural processes, I don't like a lot of special effects and CGI. That's why theater is so cool.