Fourteen years in the making and spanning eighteen years, Caveh Zahedi’s I Am a Sex Addict, despite a lukewarm reaction upon its initial release, might be the most important film of the new century and will slowly find its place as a major achievement in world cinema.

Talking directly to the camera on his wedding day, Zahedi uses reenactments, animation, home movies, photographs, and other visual aids to tell the detailed story of his sexual addiction; focusing close attention on the suffering he’s caused the women in his life. Not afraid of the unflattering self-portrait that emerges, Zahedi plainly shows us the considerable lengths to which he goes to feed his addiction and painstakingly examines his inner struggle to face it. When it is over, aside from being entertained, informed, and ultimately moved, we’re left asking how much of it is true. The answer, according to the filmmaker and subject, is all of it.

Ridiculous, embarrassing, and unquestionably courageous, I Am a Sex Addict is what Caveh Zahedi rightly calls a public service announcement. If only all PSAs were this entertaining.

Peter Rinaldi: There is so much to appreciate about this film, but mostly I appreciate the truth that’s expressed. Yet the question begs to be asked: If a part of your life unfolds in such a way that doesn’t necessarily lend itself to drama, do you flirt with bending or even completely breaking the truth to serve the film?

Caveh Zahedi: I don’t. What interests me more is the challenge of trying to find a way to make it work on film.

When anyone releases a film, they are instantly made vulnerable. Would you say with a film like this you’re made doubly vulnerable because it’s so personal?

I would say a film like this is triply vulnerable. It's more than just personal - it’s actually embarrassing.

But you’ve never really made a film that wasn’t personal and potentially embarrassing. Isn’t that true?

That’s true. But this is by far the most embarrassing film I’ve made. It’s hard because I teach and, the first day of class, someone is always going to ask, “What was your last film about?” So with relationships on the student-teacher level it’s especially awkward.

Can you explain the difference between the tuxedoed Caveh who talks to the camera in the film and the Caveh I’m speaking to now?

The one you’re talking to now is a better actor.

(Laughter.)

Well, whenever the camera is on, you really have to not only be yourself, but be yourself in a very specific way that the viewer will get exactly X from. Like when I talk to you, I’m not trying to control the precise effect as much because it doesn’t matter. It can be read in different ways by different people. But with a film you’re going for a very specific effect, so you have to have a very specific delivery, intonation and manner, which is very contrived. I do lots and lots of takes, and it’s not the ones that seem the most natural to me that we end up using. It’s a tricky balance of humor, information, vulnerability, etc.

You break the “fourth wall” by talking to the audience directly. Would you say you broke the “fifth wall” by stopping the narrative to talk about and show the actual actresses and each of their real-life problems with the production?

Yeah. That’s a good way to put it.

It gets really interesting for me when you cut to a quick behind-the-scenes shot of the actress Amanda Henderson, with a drink in her hand. Your voiceover tells us that she—the actress—has a drinking problem in real life. Then you cut right back to the story. I found it hard to reenter the story and think about her character; I was still thinking about the actress. Instead of being impatient with this, I found it even more interesting, but I imagine you’ve had audiences that found it frustrating.

They haven’t. I think people have become sophisticated enough that they actually watch everything with a double perspective. And I think cinema hasn’t caught up with the viewers in this case. I think my film does. I think people really appreciate that moment because they’re already doing that when they watch a movie. They’re already seeing it both as the actor and the character simultaneously.

There’s a particularly shameful moment in the film that has the potential to lose vast members of the audience instantly. It’s when you admit that it was only when the prostitute says, “Rape me,” that you were compelled to have sex with her. For me this is one of the most important moments in the film and I’m glad you were brave enough to include it, but I’m sure it was a difficult decision, since you profess a tremendous amount of respect for women in general. You must have battled with the question, “Must I tell the total truth? Won’t ALMOST the total truth be enough?”

Yes. I definitely have that struggle. That, for me, was a dividing-line moment for the film. I think you’re right—half the audience we lose there and half we don’t. And the whole film’s challenge was, can we get away with that? Can we have that happen and still have the audience stay with us? In Europe it’s very different, but in America, when that scene comes on, a cold chill goes through the audience. And I lose them.

The question was, “What am I trying to say?” That was an important thing for me to say because it was part of the message of the film. This stuff is not only shameful, but it also has all kinds of social and political ramifications, which is why the story is important.

For me, the whole question of rape in our society and how that affects our perception of our own sexual drives is really something no one talks about, and is really an important part of the shame and psychosexual dynamics of attraction. So that was a key thing. There were certainly things I did not include that I thought were just too much for the viewer. But it’s not that I’m ashamed of them. It’s just that you kind of have to understand your audience and what their cultural assumptions are, and how far you can push them. I pushed them as far as I felt I could push them and still have a film that could get out in the world.

Watching the behind-the-scenes features on the DVD, I saw an expression on your face that I recognized. It was the particular pain that comes with film production. Do you enjoy production at all?

I do enjoy production. I think it’s probably my favorite part of the process. If I could have my way, I would be directing every day on sets, all day. I don’t enjoy post-production nearly as much as production.

I’m shocked. I would have thought you enjoyed the puzzle that is waiting for you in the editing room.

I hate that part. It’s so painful to see what you’ve got and to try to make it work. And it’s so slow and it’s so lonely. I don’t like editing very much. I like the idea phase, when you come up with the ideas. That’s probably the most fun. And I just love the on-set-trying-to-get-it-right part. It’s definitely painful, but it’s also exhilarating.

People who are addicted to Internet pornography are also considered sex addicts. Even though it’s a very different kind of addiction, I imagine they also can relate to your story. Have you gotten responses from people that have that specific addiction or think they do?

Tons.

Wow. I really feel like this is a healing film.

It’s a public service announcement.

It really is. Which is why I don’t understand your reaction to its initial release. I’ve read that you’re disappointed with how the film has done. Surely, as a lover of film history, you must know that everything that’s been new and important throughout film history has initially been met with indifference or worse.

It’s completely a financial thing. I’m broke. I have to teach to pay my rent. And I spend dozens of hours each week doing something that I don’t want to be doing, when I could be making twice as many films if I wasn’t doing it. So that’s all it is. You want to be able to do what you love and do more of it, and if the film doesn’t do well, I can’t. It’s just that simple.

But in other interviews you’ve also talked about becoming more commercial with each film and wanting to keep that going in order to reach a wider audience. That worries me.

It worries me too. But I think I did that with Sex Addict. I made certain choices for commercial reasons that weren’t really my preference or what I find most radical. To me this film feels much more compromised than my other films. It’s also the film that the greatest number of people seem to enjoy, and it has made it possible for me to maybe make another one.

You just have to pick your battles. I feel like I’ve made films that are utterly uncompromising and as good as anything out there, but that very few people have seen or have any interest in seeing. Maybe they’ll become very important films one day and that would be great. But I just have to be able to keep making films. The real question for me is, “How is it possible to continue?” I’m just trying to find a way to do that. I don’t mind the compromises in the sense that there is always a tension or a balance or a dialectic between who you are and what the world is. What any artist does is to find a dialectical process or relationship with the world that works for both the artist and the world. Every artist has done this. Mozart. Beethoven. They tried to please their patrons and at the same time express themselves. Great work can be done that way. I even think you can argue that better work can be done if it’s not just you speaking to yourself but you speaking to others in the world, with their own views and limitations and differences from you.

I really think the transition from adolescence to maturity is realizing that other people are different from you. They’re not just going to come to you and say, “Oh, that’s so strange. I bet it’s brilliant! Even though I don’t get it, it must just be me who doesn’t get it.” I really think in early youth we’re very self-centered in our relationships. As we get more mature emotionally, we really start to see the other person, not just as a projection of us, but as someone different from us that we can actually give to and grow toward. I feel like that’s what I’m trying to do in my relationship to the world. I’m trying to grow toward it, and possibly the future will be different than the present and it will require different kinds of compromises or adjustments than the present does.

You’ve said that when you were young you wanted to be a commercial filmmaker, but one day you had a particularly powerful LSD trip that changed your perception of the kind of films you wanted to make. From that point, you said, you wanted to make personal films. Do you think maybe you need more LSD?

Well, you know, people change. Like right now I have a bunch of different film projects. One is my favorite, and to me it’s the most radical and the most exciting. But I can’t get any money for it, and nobody would ever distribute it.

Can I ask what it is?

It’s another autobiographical film. It’s very personal but in a completely different style from anything I’ve done before. To me it would be the most important film that I could make in terms of the history of cinema and the future of cinema. But how can I make it? I don’t have the time or money to devote to it because all my energies are going to surviving.

If you somehow got the money to make it, would you, without hesitation, spend the time to make it? Or would you consider the possibility of making other films that might better secure you a place commercially?

I think the question for me isn’t so much about which film would be most likely to secure me a place commercially, because clearly I’d rather make a film I believe in than a film I don’t believe in. It’s more about what would happen to the film after I made it, because there would be no means of distributing it. I could put it in a safety deposit box and hope that posterity finds the key. But what I want is very simple: It might be a delusion, but if I can make a few films that are interesting to me and radical, but also commercially viable — which Sex Addict was an attempt to do — then perhaps I’ll have enough money and clout to actually make the less commercial films. So it seems like something I shouldn’t do just yet, and then hopefully live long enough to do.

With the current reality craze in full stride, you’d think Sex Addict would be a much more marketable film.

Yeah. I thought that, but I was amazed at how hard it was to get this film into the world.

The ending is very powerful and moving. Was that your actual wedding day?

Yes. I got there at like two in the afternoon to shoot all the wedding addresses.

Wait — don’t tell me all the tuxedo stuff was shot on your actual wedding day.

No. I tried to shoot it all that day. I started at like two and the wedding was at six. So I talked for four hours to the camera. All of the wedding guests were in the church waiting and I knew I couldn’t do the last shot twice. I did a lot of takes, but it didn’t feel right. And then the church people were pounding on the door, saying we had to begin. The guests been waiting for like a half hour. I said, “Okay. One last take. I promise.” And they said, “Okay. This is the last one. We’re gonna start the organ music now.” And we said, “Okay. Fine. Roll the camera.” And it rolled, and I started tearing up. I knew right away that this was good. Then we went in and I got married.

You’re the only guy who would choose to do such a stressful thing on an already stress-filled day.

It was like the best day of my life. I got the ending of my film, and I got married to the love of my life at the same moment. It was like a simultaneous orgasm.

Peter Rinaldi is a New York City-based writer, director, and supporter of personal films.

Illustration:Heidi Elise Beaver

'Caveh Zahedi is easily accused of navel-gazing solipsism – the subject matter of his four feature films and several additional shorts is, first and foremost, Caveh Zahedi – but his inventive artistry and rigorous work ethic belie any notion that this method is too finite a canvas for a long career. Just as Hitchcock found dozens of diverse expressive forms within the thriller genre, Zahedi uses autobiography as a lens through which any topic may be considered. His latest and most wildly ambitious feature, I Am a Sex Addict, details, through reenactments and genre-deconstructing demolitions of the fourth wall, Zahedi’s own true struggle with, yes, sex addiction. A talented group of actresses take on the roles of his exes, while Zahedi plays himself from age 23 (with a sly wink at the absurdity of this convention) to the present. The film’s title, which Zahedi readily admits was in place before he’d really begun shaping the content, has an irresistibly exploitative bent that would do Roger Corman proud and alone is sure to expand the film’s audience beyond the hardcore fan base that has stuck by Zahedi through his previous features (A Little Stiff, I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore, In the Bathtub of the World). Whether or not those drawn in for prurient titillation will be ready for the painfully frank, unapologetically peculiar and often disarmingly hilarious micro-epic that Zahedi delivers remains to be seen. All that is certain is that, whether he scrapes up $10 or $10 million for his next project, he’ll find a way to plow on. A true “independent’s independent,” Zahedi has proved a master of adapting to circumstances; any filmmaker might take inspiration and instruction from his example.

The last few days I’ve been rewatching all your films. When you put them all next to each other, they start to seem like fragments of one greater work, but then I thought it was a credit to you that I hadn’t previously thought of them as such. They all stand up so well on their own, and though you always deal with similar material, you invent a new perspective every time. To what extent are you making a conscious effort to never repeat yourself formally?

I’m definitely trying not to repeat myself. It’s partly organic in that I get really bored doing the same thing twice. For example, with the video diary [In the Bathtub of the World], I tried to do it again a second time one year later, and just couldn’t get excited about it, even though the format really lends itself to being revisited. I really liked what I had done, and actually thought it was better than the last one, but I just got sidetracked and was more excited by doing something totally new.

Your oeuvre is unique to the point that it seems to defy conventional description altogether. Though technically the bulk of your work might be documentary, I’d be reluctant to call it that.

I don’t really call it documentary either. I call it hybridization, I guess, when people ask me to describe my work. And I call it autobiographical, because that seems to encompass it all.

But I have this feeling when I watch your films that you’re not only the documentarian and the documentee but also in fact a performer. I think of you sometimes almost as a physical comic.

I do think of what I do as performative, but I see any performance as having a conscious and an unconscious element, so I feel both of those are operative, and I feel they’re both necessary for the film to work. I’m interested in the performance of everyday life. I think that everyone is always performing. Adding a camera definitely complicates the performance, but it’s a question of degree rather than an ontological difference.

Of course other people perform for your camera as well as you do, but there’s necessarily a different nature to those performances because you are the one in control of the camera and the editing.

Well, I tend to put people on the spot to elicit certain kinds of cinema-friendly reactions. And that’s one of the things that gets me in trouble with some viewers who find it morally questionable. But I guess I’m trying to get past people’s façades as much as possible, to get at something deeper and truer.

One of my favorite scenes in I Am a Sex Addict is when you step out of the narrative and show footage of yourself trying unsuccessfully to convince the actress playing Christa to perform a blowjob scene. The theme of coercion seems to come up time and again in your work.

I think life is really about negotiations, and that every act of will is a kind of violence. It’s very rare that another person wants to do exactly what you want to do, so you’re constantly trying to negotiate conflicting desires. Part of what I’m trying to dramatize and embody is that very complicated, constant process of negotiations that goes on, often in a very hidden way. Because people are either unwilling to express their desire in the face of another person’s desire, or unconscious of their actual desire. It’s almost a constant battlefield at every moment, of “I want this but you want that, so how about we do this other thing?” – “No, I don’t want to do that other thing.” – “Okay, how about just this one part?” – “Okay, just this one part I’m okay with, but that other part I’m not.” And I think filmmaking is like that, too. Every day we don’t get what we want, and we constantly have to process and deal with that grief. And try to get to a place of acceptance. I think that’s actually the main theme of my work. I have a film project called A Portrait of Caveh Zahedi as a Complete Failure that sort of addresses this directly through the form of an A&E Biography parody. I started it and shot some stuff, but it’s kind of on hold now. It’s not a project that I’ve been able to get any money for, so it’s something I just do when I can. A lot of the work I do now is really dictated by economics.

It does seem extraordinary for any American filmmaker to have completed four features, not to mention all the shorts, without a reliance on the traditional bankable elements. How do you approach funding?

You know, with great wailing and gnashing of teeth. I don’t know, my first film was student loans, the second film was grants, the third film was really cheap, and the last film was one investor who for some reason really believed in me and the project, for reasons beyond just the commercial.

You’re very good at adapting your aesthetics to whichever particular constraints, financial or otherwise.

I think when I was younger I was more Napoleonic about it, and I had a lot of Waterloos before I figured this out. So now I do think a lot in terms of budget and time constraints and what’s realistic. For me the joy of filmmaking is really the joy of solving problems. How do you make something good with this, this and this, and without using that or that? It’s like a puzzle. I think the economic constraint is a good one because it’s actually a social constraint as well. It’s a constraint on the [filmmaking] language you’re using as well, and it keeps you from going off the deep end into what would be nonsense for most. I saw Me and You and Everyone We Know recently, and I really liked it a lot. I thought here was a fresh and unique voice that didn’t follow the mold and yet was completely entertaining and fun. I thought it was a really great example of what the future can be. I mean, it’s like a Trojan horse; she got a lot of good stuff through the gates of Troy on that one.

My worry about the Trojan horse argument is always, who is subverting who? Have smart insights been snuck through to the unsuspecting public, or have smart insights been deadened by the vehicle?

Yeah, but I don’t think it’s a question of who’s subverting who. Both sides are being subverted mutually. And there’s a third thing created which is a non-authorial synthesis that happens at the level of language or culture, which is in a way more interesting than either the authorial intention or the social recuperation mechanism. It’s like when two ant colonies have a war, and each has their own architectural aesthetic, and when one of the ant colonies wins the war, the architectural aesthetic of the new ant colony becomes a melding of the two different aesthetics. So both sides lose in a sense, or both sides win, depending on how you look at it.

You give a monologue at the end of I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore wherein you offhandedly mention that your next project is going to be about your sex addiction. That was in 1992. What’s it like to live with something so long, and how intimidating is it to finally have this long-incubated film come to fruition?

“Intimidating” is a good word. So many years went by and there was so much pain and frustration and repeatedly-dashed hopes, that by the time the money actually arrived, it was really terrifying. The stakes were a lot higher than if I had just gotten the money when I wrote the damn thing. [laughs] There was a real struggle with fear of not being up to the challenge of what I had hoped the film would be... There were four different sets of producers at different points who all had options on it but failed to raise the money. And there was one producer who would only do it if I could get a name actor, so I think a year or two was spent just trying to get a name actor to read the script. That was its own complete nightmare. We sent it to Robert Downey, Jr., Vincent Gallo and Harmony Korine. And I was also trying to get Chloë Sevigny, because I thought she and Harmony would be convincing as a couple for the middle part of the film. I tried to get Steve Buscemi to be in it. Chris Eigeman I tried to get. But it was all very frustrating because I didn’t even want someone else. I just wanted to play it myself. It seemed like it was a bolder and more artistically profound statement to actually act in it myself.

It’s hard for me to picture someone else playing you.

I talked to most of them and most were very nice, but they all passed. And some said, “You know, you should do it yourself.” And I said, “I know I should, but these producers won’t go for it.” And finally it all fell through and the producers dropped out and I had no choice but to do it myself. So I actually tried to do it in 16mm about eight years ago, and I scraped a few thousand dollars together to shoot just a few scenes. It’s a long story, but everything went wrong and I ended up having to give up my apartment in L.A. where I had shot the scenes, so all the footage I shot became useless. I basically just gave up at that point. And then several years later I got some money to do it, but the budget restraints were such that I had to rethink the style of the film. And then it took three and a half years to get it right. It’s a tricky film.

Were you editing as you shot over those years?

Yeah, I would shoot a few scenes and then edit those scenes. And then I would reshoot whatever I wasn’t entirely happy with (which was usually almost everything I’d shot), and then reedit once again, etc. I thought that would be the optimal way to make the movie work, but it had a lot of downsides which I didn’t realize until later. Actors age, get deported, gain weight, leave town, lose interest, cut their hair. It was very hard to get continuity to work. And you can get really obsessive about fixing every flaw for a scene that you might not even end up using. We’d shoot a scene over and over and over and then finally just throw it away because it didn’t even fit.

There are some phenomenal orgasm performances from you in the film. What was your approach going into those?

Well, I’m just trying to [laughs] have an orgasm on film. And I was trying to have it be funny, and maybe I overdid it a little. I guess I think an orgasm is one of those kind of hidden truths. When I was younger I used to look at people on the street or subway and try to imagine them having an orgasm, and it was always very humanizing. It’s a very vulnerable thing, it’s a very ecstatic thing, it’s a very extreme thing. It’s a very uncontrolled thing where one’s facade is really let down. Also I think the orgasm is an objective correlative for what the whole film is. I guess I feel like what’s beautiful in art is excess, something irreducible that can’t be contained by the frame or by the story, and an orgasm is the perfect metaphor for that.

With sex scenes, an audience’s natural inclination can often be to react only with either titillation or discomfort, depending on how the scene is done. Neither of which necessarily serves your dramatic purposes. Was that a worry?

No, I was really looking forward to those scenes. It was important for me to represent sex in a non-titillating, non-pornographic and non-Hollywood kind of way. To show it in its awkwardness, its bumblingness, its humor and true strangeness. Because the film is so stylized, that came across in very odd ways rather than naturalistic ways. And yet that was definitely what I was going for — the truth about sex, I guess.

Do you feel your films invite hostility from the mainstream?

I think I’m confronting people. There’s a certain series of norms in our culture that tell us what it is to be a good human being, and my films embody a refutation of a lot of those ideas, or at least a dramatization of a possible refutation. I think a lot of people respond on a real visceral level when they feel threatened in their deeply held assumptions of what is good and true.

Although Sex Addict contains frank and difficult subject matter, it feels like you’re attempting to woo a mainstream audience. There are a lot of very friendly flourishes, such as the music and the animation sequences.

Accessibility becomes more and more of a concern for me. For Sex Addict, because the subject matter was so harsh, and what I was asking people to accept was morally dubious and borderline unacceptable, I felt I really needed to palliate that with a friendly style. It’s like that line by George Bernard Shaw: “If you’re going to tell people the truth, you’d better make them laugh or they’ll kill you.”

Is Sex Addict more truthful than your other work?

One axis of it is more truthful, and one axis of it is less truthful. In order to pull off something, you have to give up something else. It took years for me to find the balance that was acceptable to me, where I wasn’t selling out completely but also making a film that people could stand. It’s not the film that I would make just for myself, because I have a very high tolerance for what others would consider morally excruciating.

I like what you said about the different axes of truth and lies. Movies seem to be inherently a confluence of truth and lies at every moment, and to suggest that there’s a calculus to it, that by opening up one end you have to dilute it on the other, has a certain straightforward logic to it that I think sounds right.

Personally, I’m interested in shifting the axes each time. Finding another way to be truthful and another way to be dishonest.

If you did have your absolute druthers, what kinds of films do you imagine you would make for the next 10 or 20 years?

If it were up to me, I would make films that push the language of film as radically as possible, but also as playfully as possible. I mean, I’m really interested in films that are entertaining. But I love extremity as well.

Sex Addict deals with therapy explicitly, but all your films involve your character seeking one kind of catharsis or another. Do you feel like filmmaking is an effective form of therapy?

Film is such an intentional act and requires such manipulation and self-consciousness that its therapeutic function, for me, is never at the level of the issues that the film is ostensibly about — in this case, my sex addiction. For me, the therapeutic function is always at the level of the eternal combat that one is engaged in between one’s desire and one’s actuality. The struggle with the demon or the angel of the self and of art is always what it’s about. This film was incredibly healing for me not because of the sexual issues it raises, but just because of the incredible challenge of trying to make anything. And somehow making it and putting it out in the world with all of its limitations and being able to say, “I did this, and this is my self-expression.” Being proud of that and able to embrace it – the catharsis is at that level.

One of the first things I saw from Caveh Zahedi was a clip of him trying to convince Will Oldham to do mushrooms with him. Later, I saw a video-still of Oldham laughing wildly and driving through the woods in what looks like a fancy go-kart. It wouldn't be the only time Zahedi documented psychedelic indulgences, but there's more to his films than just tripping out. Gean Moreno interviews the no-budget filmmaker about confession, fandom, and divine intervention.

Like some hyperactive memoirist, Caveh Zahedi is certain the ego is the epicenter of every work of art. This has made him take autobiographical investigation as his dogma and absolute disclosure as an aesthetic. It’s as if the world would give him the slip if he ever lost sight of himself, and so, bony and big-eyed, he has starred in all his films. Sounding like a Saint John of the Cross for the age of reality TV, Zahedi has written, “all art is ‘channeled,’ i.e. that it comes from God.” Presumably this is why he’s so comfortable in allowing his movies to begin in such unpromising ways—a video diary of his uneventful life (In the Bathtub of the World), a road-trip movie to Vegas with his dad (I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore). It’s as if divine intervention will save viewers from the hell of unwatchable self-absorption. And when God fails, there’s always ecstasy and mushrooms.

Although he has milked the rogue genre of confession for so much of what it has to offer, it’s the exchange between humor and failure that animates Zahedi’s movies. Sparks fly when there isn’t ever enough money to get things done right; from the need for Zahedi to step in, because who the fuck can afford an actor?; from pretending his personal DV camera is no different from Lars von Trier’s pro equipment; from chasing the remote possibility that a girlfriend crying is a good stand-in for a climax in a film that is nothing but little crescendos that never really peak; from hoping that taping John Ashberry from the last row in the auditorium is kind of like having him star in your movie. This is another way of saying that it’s desire’s drive—rather than unabashed confession—that animates the work. And desire’s drive is never as revved up as when dealing with a poverty of means. Zahedi’s kitchen-counter cinema desacralizes the idea of Big Picture, an idea he seems to love anyway. This is his Agony and Ecstasy—and it plays in the key of nerdy indie rockers and bedroom-bound DJs.

FANZINE: So, I just finished watching the video of In the Bathtub of the World that you sent me and I keep thinking of all the stars that are “in” it—Frank Black, David Byrne, Will Oldham, Borges, James Joyce, John Ashbery.… Maybe we should start by talking about your relationship to fandom.

ZAHEDI: I have always idolized others, especially artists. When I was a kid, I used to write to TV actors and request autographed photos, which I would then put up on my bedroom wall. I realize that there is something arguably unseemly about fandom, but Van Gogh once said something to the effect that the best way to love God is to love as many things as possible. So I’m generally in favor of enthusiasm of almost any kind.

FANZINE: I’m interested in this unseemliness of fandom and how it intersects with the unseemliness of confession. The way that fandom’s fantasies organize your work brings you closer to certain visual artists, like Gary Lee Boas, than to other filmmakers. The presence of Will Oldham, for instance, in Tripping with Caveh is as important as the tripping.

ZAHEDI: René Girard says that the true repression in our society is not sex, which everyone seems to be talking about these days, but envy. Envy rather than lust, according to Girard, is the emotion that drives most of our behavior. He also describes envy as a kind of rejection of self—a kind of wishing one was someone else. I’ve certainly felt this, as well as the shame associated with envy. Confession, if it is authentic confession, implies that there is something unenviable about what one has to confess (otherwise it would be a form of boasting, rather than confessing). Interestingly enough, a lot of the film critics writing about I Am a Sex Addict accused me of boastfulness, which seems to me to be the exact opposite of what I am trying to do in the film—namely, confess). I find it interesting that this celebrity cultural moment is such that what is experienced by oneself as shameful can be perceived by others as boastful, simply because it is being made public, and the public arena is the arena of envy.

FANZINE: I’m sure I Am a Sex Addict has suffered various mis-readings and elicited strong knee-jerk reactions. Beyond good and bad reviews, have critics been projecting onto this film more than usual?

ZAHEDI: Yes, I think so. The most recent review described the film as having “a frankly disgusting plot.” I was struck by the use of the word “disgusting” to describe the plot of my film. What never ceases to amaze me is the inability of some critics to distinguish between the character I am portraying (which is me at a younger age) and the filmmaker who is making the film (which is me looking back on myself ten years earlier). I think whenever a film departs from the well-worn grooves of genre, personal projections tend to get triggered, as there are fewer recognizable landmarks to comfort the viewer. If you add material that is sensitive both emotionally and morally, and around which there tends to be a lot of personal trauma, you are opening the door to all kinds of usually repressed energies and paranoid fantasies to be unleashed in your direction.

FANZINE: But here the disgust attributed to the movie may be pointing back at the unseemliness of confession. There may be something abject about the act of disclosing every little detail about one’s life—it trespasses against certain notions of decorum or modesty.

ZAHEDI: Yes, which is why I made the film in the first place, and why I make all of my films: to trespass against certain notions of decorum or modesty. I don’t believe in decorum. I believe that decorum and modesty hide the truth, and that a lot of what is “wrong” in the world would be rectified if there were more truth and less decorum.

FANZINE: There is, of course, the “this really happened” effect of confession, but when I first saw the movie, I thought of it as a kind of meta-fictional exercise along the line of certain American writers like John Barth or Robert Coover. Confession, as an unstructured genre, gave you all this room to play. And yet, at the same time, the autobiographical element had to be treated as such.

ZAHEDI: What has surprised me is how many people refuse to believe that “this really happened.” I even considered putting a “This Really Happened” title at the beginning of the film to help make the point, but I abandoned the idea because I realized that people still wouldn’t believe me. To me, the “this really happened” aspect of the film is precisely what gives it its “surplus value,” as it were. Many people had suggested falsifying the “true” story for the sake of greater narrative power, but I resisted because the essence of the film is not the narrative, but rather the power of confession. Virginia Woolf once said something to the effect that she doesn’t try to write in a certain style, but rather her “style” emerges organically from what it is she is trying to say. For me, the meta-narrative elements in the film emerged organically as the film evolved.

FANZINE: I want to press the literary thing a little further, because, as I implied before, in I Am a Sex Addict, I thought the literary influences were easier to detect than the cinematic ones. Have writers been more important to you than filmmakers? And not only the American meta-narrators, but maybe someone like Genet who also sets up camp at the autobiography/fiction divide.

ZAHEDI: Yes, writers have been more important to me than filmmakers. My biggest literary influences are probably James Joyce and Wallace Stevens, both of whom are obsessed with meta-narrative strategies and, at the same time, have a quasi-religious relationship to the idea of “reality.” I do like John Barth and Robert Coover, as well as Genet (especially The Thief’s Journal). I personally find naturalism very tired as a style. I love Flaubert, and I love De Sica, but I also believe in the concept of originality. Robert Henri says that “we are not here to do what has already been done,” and I have to agree with that. This is also why I love Godard. He is constantly looking for new forms of expression.

FANZINE: Once you told me that you were interested in not only not repeating what others had done but in having a body of work in which all the films were different from each other.

ZAHEDI: I still feel that way.

FANZINE: Would this mean that you will someday work outside of an autobiographical framework?

ZAHEDI: Yes, my next film is outside of an autobiographical framework.

FANZINE: Could you elaborate a little on this new project?

ZAHEDI: I’m making a film about a historical event—the 1953 CIA-led coup that overthrew the democratically-elected prime minister of Iran.

FANZINE: Which of your contemporaries (filmmakers) do you relate to?

ZAHEDI: The filmmaker I relate to most is probably Lars von Trier. I also relate to the work of Harmony Korine, Spike Jonze, and Michel Gondry.

FANZINE: How about Michael Winterbottom? Tristam Shandy shares some meta-narrative aspects with I Am a Sex Addict, and 24 Hour Party People and 9 Songs are structured, in some way, from the perspective of the fan.

ZAHEDI: Yes, I do relate to Michael Winterbottom, and admire both 24 Hour Party People and Tristram Shandy, which as you note, are strikingly similar to I Am A Sex Addict in their meta-narrative aspects. What I admire in Winterbottom is his willingness to take risks and to keep pushing the envelope. He also manages, unlike someone like Peter Greenaway (whose work I also admire), to pull this off (with the exception of 9 Songs) in a consistently entertaining way.

FANZINE: How do you view yourself in relation to Iranian—and other Middle Eastern—filmmakers?

ZAHEDI: Well, I’ve noticed that my films are very “Iranian” in the sense that they exhibit a lot of the self-reflexivity that is a defining characteristic of that national cinema. My own use of self-reflexivity preceded my exposure to Iranian cinema, so I can only conclude that it is either a remarkable coincidence or that it evinces some kind of genetic pre-disposition. In any case, it’s remarkable to me that a film like Mohsen Makmalbaf’s A Moment of Innocence is probably as close to I Am a Sex Addict as any other film I can think of.

FANZINE: Any thoughts on reality TV? Tripping with Caveh is billed as part of a “would-be television series.”

ZAHEDI: Although a lot of reality TV is crass and still contains elements of pre-reality TV, I do see the rise of reality TV as a positive thing, in the Hegelian sense. There is definitely an increasing dissatisfaction with the old forms, and an increasing desire for self-valorization. The culture of celebrity (which tends to make us feel bad about ourselves) and the very human desire for self-affirmation have formed a strange admixture in reality TV, which—while full of contradictions—is also the locus in which a historical dialectic is being played out. It strikes me as both inevitable and ultimately positive. It’s a democratization of television.

FANZINE: Do you see your films, with such small budgets, as a sort of democratization of film, making the whole production of movies a very quotidian thing?

ZAHEDI: Yes, I have tended to think of them in that way. I’m not saying I would never do a bigger budget film (I like to keep trying different things, as I said before), but I do think that the films I’ve made inspire people to make films because they demonstrate what can be done with no money. In that sense, it is a cinema of poverty, in the Stevensian sense of “Natives of poverty, children of malheur/ the gaiety of language is our seigneur.”

Most memoirs, like off-brand hot dogs, should come with labels that list their suspect ingredients. Outrage over James Frey aside, does anyone still believe that a person's reconstructed narrative of his or her life won't mix some snouts or tails among the meat? The best one can hope is that the inevitable distortions, in their mix of self-service and evasion, contain something unexpectedly revealing.

If Caveh Zahedi were a better liar - or at least a less scrupulous one - he might be filling a well-worn butt groove on Oprah's couch about now. Could there be a more potent title, in these gold-rush years for vicarious degradation, than the name of Zahedi's fourth feature, I Am a Sex Addict? It has that irresistible one-two of confession and transgression, the lure of an unholier-than-thou past chained away safely by sweet acceptance. A title card reading "Based on a True Story" would seal the deal.

But Zahedi's movie - a funny, inventive, ground-shifting hybrid of essay film, mea culpa, and pathological real-life romantic farce - aims for truth by wrecking its own verisimilitude. A micro-epic autobiography of broken relationships and sexual hang-ups encapsulating 20 years of the filmmaker's life, I Am a Sex Addict kids not only its no-budget resources, but the oddity of reconstructing personal experience in cinematic terms. When you edit the movie of your life, do you add stock footage of airliners whenever you took a trip?

By juxtaposing the admittedly fake, though, with the appallingly intimate (often within the same scene), the writer-director-star sabotages the idea that dramatic re-creation is more accurate if it pretends to be real. Since his first completed feature, A Little Stiff (1991), the San Francisco filmmaker has smudged the lines between documentary and fiction, incorporating family, friends, and above all an obsessive, neurotic cinephile named Caveh Zahedi into his seriocomic constructs.

Even when Zahedi appeared in Richard Linklater's animated fantasia Waking Life, he played himself: a gabby, spiritually yearning philosopher mulling over French film theorist Andre Bazin's concept of the "holy moment." That idea is central to Zahedi's work: When movies record moments of unmitigated life - an action captured in a single shot, or an actor merging somehow with his offscreen self - they're catching a glimpse of something created by God.

Granted, that's a strong claim for a movie called I Am a Sex Addict, in which the hero ducks into confessional booths to whack off and compulsively gets himself sucked off until he looks like he's going to yodel. Facing the camera in a tux, outside the hall where he's getting married, Zahedi chooses the moment to spill his guts about the erotic fixations that totaled his previous marriages. In interviews, he has said this much is true: He nursed a fixation with prostitutes and underwent sex-addiction counseling to help overcome it.

That he remembers the drill is clear. "My name is Caveh" is the movie's first line; a viewer mentally responds, "Hello, Caveh!" He traces his obsession back to a chance encounter with a streetwalker in 1983 Paris, where he interrupts his skeevy stroll to cock his head to the camera, announce that Paris is being played by a nondescript San Francisco exterior to save money, then resumes walking. The gag comes full circle a few moments later, when the camera locates the sheepish Zahedi in front of the Eiffel Tower.

Aha, we think: unreliable narrator! But Zahedi's digressive commentary, which frequently switches in mid-flashback from voiceover to direct address, bears the same relation to the dramatized flashbacks as his home-movie snippets. It complicates the movie's vantage point on the truth and his own culpability. Early on, he outs the woman playing both his first wife Caroline and the Parisian prostitute as a real-life porn star, Rebecca Lord. Given the director's fetish of choice, her trade is no small detail: It adds a Vertigo-like undercurrent of perversity to her scenes as Caroline. (Not surprisingly, the real Caroline turned down a comeback appearance.)

Indeed, if I Am a Sex Addict had been played as straight melodrama, its often harrowing sexual politics would have been risible. Spiraling from surreptitious dirty talk to rape fantasies and thwarted rough sex, Zahedi bravely lays open his libido; a macho poseur would have seen the role as a braggart's holiday. Zahedi, on the other hand, toddles toward a prostitute's rape-me beckoning like a dutiful child and widens his face in a half dozen of the funniest, least vain male orgasms in movie history - the faces our wives and girlfriends thoughtfully try to ignore. At the height of passion, you expect him to burst into "The Sound of Music."

But the movie's guiding musical spirit is Jonathan Richman, whose impish, open-hearted love ballad sends Zahedi down the aisle with his new bride in the last scene, taking leave of the audience and the camera. "We walk around like there are some holy moments, and there are all the other moments that are unholy," Zahedi wondered in Waking Life, considering the beauty that flickers even in ennui. "But this moment is holy, right?" Even better than a blow job.

Going in, a few things need to be said about "I Am a Sex Addict." There's no other film like it. It's embarrassingly frank and self-revealing, sometimes funny, sometimes creepy, sometimes both. It makes sex addiction look almost fun, at first, then ugly and dispiriting. And it just might be the truest film about addiction, of any kind, that has ever been made.

Written and directed by Caveh Zahedi, it stars Zahedi in the autobiographical story of his own sex addiction. A narrative film, it employs a number of documentary techniques, including Zahedi's running narration, on camera and in voice-over. At times, he interrupts a scene to address the audience directly, sometimes even to discuss production difficulties, and at select moments, he shows home movie footage of the real people who inspired the various characters.

These reminders of a reality outside the borders of the film frame don't take us out of the action but rather emphasize the significance of what we're seeing: a rare thing. Zahedi seems to be giving us his entire adult romantic history, from his early 20s through his 30s, and he's doing so with unsettling candor. This may be more candor than some will want, but the spectacle of a filmmaker really leading with his gut is as oddly refreshing as it is unusual.

Yet the distinct virtues of "I Am a Sex Addict" go beyond its honesty or novelty. With penetrating accuracy, the film captures the patterns of an addict's life, the rationalizations, resolutions and recidivism. Clearly, the challenge for Zahedi was to stay true to the reality of that life -- the endless spirals of repetitive activity -- while making the story of a revolving-door existence dramatically effective. He succeeds by concentrating as much on the women in his life as on his own story. "I Am a Sex Addict" is about how a man's peculiar addiction -- an obsession with having sex with prostitutes -- poisons his relationships with a series of worthy and intelligent women.

This prostitute fetish comes upon Zahedi with the suddenness of influenza. In 1983, walking down a street in Paris, the 23-year-old Zahedi sees a streetwalker who is a dead ringer for his wife, Caroline (played by real life porn actress Rebecca Lord). Thereupon the newly married and miserable Zahedi becomes fascinated with the idea of sex, not just with this prostitute but prostitutes in general. This fixation infects and dominates his fantasies, and he concludes that there's only one way to rid himself of it, by submitting to the desire. Thus begins a pattern that will soon become familiar: Every time is his last. Zahedi's intelligence provides him no protection. If anything, it makes him all the more skilled at devising reasons to give into temptation.

Not surprisingly, a romp with a strikingly beautiful Parisian prostitute (Olia Natasha) only inflames his obsession and dooms his shaky marriage. As the years pass, there are other relationships, with the proper Christa (Emily Morse) and the free-spirited Devin (Amanda Henderson). Zahedi gets respectable performances from all the actors, most of whom have never appeared before onscreen, but Henderson stands out in particular, infusing Devin with a personal philosophy and the sense of some underlying, rueful history.

"I Am a Sex Addict" is a comedy about something that isn't really all that funny, and Zahedi knows it. It's a sad story, a weird story and, in some ways, an unresolved story. From where did his obsession come? He has no pat answer, nor does he make his story conform to the conventional pattern of hitting bottom followed by redemption. The film stays medium cool, true and human. "I Am a Sex Addict" is a different kind of film, part memoir, part diary, part rant, held together by a curious singularity of vision.

-- Advisory: This film contains strong language, nudity and simulated sex.

E-mail Mick LaSalle at mlasalle@sfchronicle.com.

Caveh Zahedi has suffered for his art. He's been blown off by Jean-Luc Godard and the Sundance Film Festival, received hate mail and ruined two of his marriages. Nothing, however, compares to the terror of success. Blinking in the sunlight and looking like a small, nocturnal animal in black jeans, Zahedi sits outside his San Francisco apartment and recalls the moments before his film, "I Am a Sex Addict," won a Gotham Award as "Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You" in New York in November. "I was so nervous. I was hoping I wouldn't get it so I wouldn't have to go up and say anything," he says. "I was praying, 'Please, God, don't let it be me.' "

God ignored his plea, and Zahedi won. After 15 years of roadblocks and catastrophes, his little autobiographical opus about seeking acceptance through sex had itself been accepted. And so, voice trembling and hands shaking, Zahedi rose to give an acceptance speech so compelling it helped find a distributor for "I Am a Sex Addict," which opens Wednesday at the Balboa.

When it's suggested that not wanting to win an award indicates ambivalence toward success, Zahedi looks bemused.

"I think I have ambition, but I'm just really frightened." Of what?

His eyes expand to lemur proportions. "Of not being liked."

That's the crux of Zahedi's condition: He craves acceptance, but it has to be on his terms. And if making a confessional movie called "I Am a Sex Addict" seems counterproductive to the quest for unconditional love, it's emblematic of the 45-year-old filmmaker's approach to his art. He is fearless in demanding that audiences accept it, and its maker, for what they are -- warts included.

Alternately funny and infuriating, "I Am a Sex Addict" seduces the audience in spite of itself. Zahedi's portrayal of a man who trashes two marriages and numerous relationships with his craving for prostitutes is endearing to the point of pathos: Large of eye and small of bone, the fragile-looking protagonist seems as much a victim of his desires as his suffering girlfriends.

As he putters around the book-strewn flat he shares with his third wife, Zyzzyva managing editor Amanda Field, Zahedi describes the film as both "an attempt to transcend wanting to be liked" and a quest to be loved without restraint. "It's an infantile game you play where you don't believe you're lovable, so you push to see if there's a point where the acceptance stops," he says. "It's a similar dynamic with the audience: OK, will you still like me if I do this? And this? There's a perverse pleasure in being rejected, I think."

Zahedi has experienced plenty of rejection since making his first film in 1991, from hate mail labeling him a navel-gazing solipsist ("and self-indulgent," he points out, "and narcissistic") to a woman who approached him after a "Sex Addict" screening to announce, "I really like your movie a lot, but I hate you." It's no wonder he has a work in progress called "A Portrait of Caveh Zahedi as a Complete Failure." His career has had enough dips to inspire vertigo. A former Yale philosophy student, Zahedi's first cinematic venture was a pilgrimage to Switzerland to work with his idol, Jean-Luc Godard. After he called the director at 3 a.m., Godard stopped answering the phone. Zahedi moved on to Paris, where he tried to woo backers, including the French government, for films about poets Arthur Rimbaud and Stephen Mallarme and photographer Eadweard Muybridge. All declined. Deflated but undaunted, Zahedi returned to the United States and enrolled in UCLA's film school. There he and collaborator Greg Watkins made "A Little Stiff," in which Zahedi chronicled his unrequited love for an art student. The film premiered at Sundance and won critical acclaim; Zahedi responded by making increasingly experimental films. "I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore" attempted to prove the existence of God via a Las Vegas trip with his Iranian father and half-brother; "In the Bathtub of the World" recorded one minute of each day for a year. "I Was Possessed by God" followed Zahedi as he ingested hallucinogenic mushrooms and channeled the Divine.

"Sex Addict" continues Zahedi's tradition of simultaneously playing subject, object, author and performer in his own films (when not playing himself in friends' films such as Richard Linklater's animated "Waking Life"). Using a blend of first-person narration, re-enactment and home movies, his work explores his internal life while navigating the external world. The results are archly self-aware and, while they certainly aren't fiction, his movies don't really qualify as documentary either. Zahedi calls them "hybridization." Until "Sex Addict," many critics called them excruciating.

Zahedi's personal life has been as rocky as his professional path. As documented in "Sex Addict," for years he suffered from a compulsion to have sex with prostitutes and then cluelessly tell his wives and girlfriends every detail. They were not amused. With a pile of relationships on the scrap heap, Zahedi finally realized he had a problem, and started writing "I Am a Sex Addict" after returning from his first Sex Addicts Anonymous meeting. Analyzing his obsession in hindsight, Zahedi says he thinks "a moral repression was at the base of the addiction -- that there was something wrong with sexual desires, that they were hurtful or bad in some way. So you repress them, and they're not integrated into your being. It's like you're two people: there's the one that's just sexual and the one that's just nice. There was a kind of permission given by the prostitutes to let the sexual side out and it wouldn't be judged. They had a gaze on your sexuality that was different from your own repressive gaze. There's an incredible thirst for that, to have the guilt assuaged."

For a work with erotic desire as its narrative core, "Sex Addict" is remarkably unsexy, portraying sexual encounters as ungainly and even humiliating for both Zahedi and his partners. "It's not meant to be sexy; I can't imagine anyone thinking it's sexy," he says. "Some women told me they got turned on watching it, and I was just stunned. I couldn't think of anything that's less of a turn-on than my film. A lot of the impulse in making it was to show sex the way I experienced it, which was not the way it's presented in movies at all, but awkward and much weirder. My character is self-involved. That's his problem, and it's definitely true of me. But toward the end he has a glimpse of something outside the circle of himself."

Throughout the '90s, Zahedi pitched the film to numerous producers, and numerous producers sent it back. He approached actors, and actors backed away. Robert Downey Jr. was busy being arrested; Vincent Gallo became so involved in critiquing Zahedi's pitch that he never got around to reading the script; and Harmony Korine expressed interest, "but then his phone number changed and I couldn't reach him anymore." Even Steve Buscemi, a fan of Zahedi's work, turned it down ("I think he thought the character was unlikable").

So Zahedi played himself. Work progressed slowly. Seven years of footage had to be dumped after a tenant "kinda went insane" and trashed his Los Angeles apartment, one of the movie's primary locations. The French actress playing Zahedi's first wife was deported mid-production, requiring a weekend dash to Paris to film her final scenes (San Francisco locales stood in for Europe in the rest of the film). When the completed project was rejected by Sundance, Zahedi tried to distribute the film himself. Then came the Gotham Award, and his speech about filmmaker empowerment. Producers began returning his calls, and IFC picked up the film.

Now, with "Sex Addict" finally poised for release, Zahedi feels elated but ambivalent. "Mostly it feels really good." He pauses. "But surreal. I feel anxious about it."

Anxious that this might be another pinnacle before a plunge? That, in the end, nobody will like him? Zahedi looks like a deer in the headlights. "Totally."

The final moments of "Sex Addict" document Zahedi's 2003 wedding to Field. Walking to the altar, Zahedi weeps. Some wedding guests were probably in tears, too, since the ceremony had to wait while the groom finished shooting his preamble to the scene. It makes a perfect, and perfectly ridiculous, denouement.

"There's no end to the trouble you can get into," Zahedi says of his sexual addiction saga. Asked where he'd be if he hadn't overcome it through art and therapy, he pauses to mull. "Who knows? Probably a lot less happy, a lot less healthy and a lot less productive."

At the moment, Zahedi is happy and productive and working on his next film: An adaptation of James Joyce's epic of modernist experimentation, "Ulysses.

I Am a Sex Addict: Opens Wed. at the Balboa Theater, 3630 Balboa St., San Francisco, (415) 221-8184; and Shattuck Cinemas, 2230 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley, (510) 464-5980.

E-mail Neva Chonin at nchonin@sfchronicle.com.

Of all the filmmakers who I’d want to watch having sex — and that’s a pretty short list, mind you — Caveh Zahedi probably wouldn’t rank very close to the top. In his latest feature, I Am a Sex Addict, however, there is plenty of opportunity to catch Caveh in the act (or the simulation thereof), and the sight is by turns upsetting, exhilarating, and hilarious. Fitting descriptive shorthand for all of Zahedi’s work, an oeuvre that currently consists of four features and three shorts, and in which the ambitious, provocative I Am a Sex Addict can serve as both summa and introduction.

The San Francisco-based Zahedi has been making movies since the early ’90s, crafting works that defy easy categorization — the filmmaker prefers the term "hybridization" — but which are invariably dubbed autobiographical documentaries. All of these films star the wiry, wild-eyed director (now 45 years old), as well as sundry friends, lovers, and relatives, all of whom play themselves. In many ways, the films prefigure what we now call reality TV, transforming the real — and often the most humiliating, discomfiting aspects of the real — into dramatic situations whose approximate veracity leads to all sorts of ontological head-scratchers. That supposition aside, they’re also funny as hell. Zahedi’s films are largely concerned with his turbulent romantic life and artistic struggles, his fondness for psychedelics, and his penchant for philosophical gab. The occasionally irritating charmer that emerges is a navel-gazing celebrant of the quotidian, who, in his pursuit of an honest existence — and a similarly truthful representation of such — oscillates between self-laceration and self-aggrandizement. "I have this fear that reality isn’t enough…that I’m not enough," Zahedi says, with customary candour, in his 1994 feature I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore — a film which, he also says, proves the existence of God.

Reality may not be enough (reality TV certainly isn’t), but neither is fiction, and, in Zahedi’s films, it’s only their uneasy (unholy?) alliance that approaches something like the truth. Or, at least, approaches life as it’s lived. Zahedi claims to hate documentaries (again, in I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore) and thus all of his films, beginning with A Little Stiff (1991), more often re-enact, or re-imagine, portions of Zahedi’s biography rather than simply capturing them. The size of his filmography belies the fact that for Zahedi, no less so then for Fassbinder, Godard, Kiarostami, or Cassavetes, filmmaking and life are inextricably entwined. Given the incessant presence of cameras in all of Zahedi’s movies (and his subjects’ frequent annoyance at said presence), it’s easy to imagine that Zahedi would happily film his every waking moment if he had the budget. (Such an experiment forms the basis for 2001’s In the Bathtub of the World — more on that later.) Making a movie always means asking "What is the meaning of life?", but then also, "What is the meaning of representing life?"

In A Little Stiff, which Zahedi co-directed with his long-suffering cinematographer Greg Watkins, Zahedi plays a UCLA film student named Caveh Zahedi who pursues, with self-conscious abandon and not-so-quiet desperation, a fellow student named Erin McKim (playing herself). Deadpan, shot in black-and-white 16mm, the film recalls other American indies of the period (Jarmusch, Jost), but it’s quintessential Zahedi. His comic persona is already fully developed — the articulate stammer, the frequent and mischievous smile, the bulwark of neuroses. Woody Allen and Albert Brooks are obvious antecedents, but there is also a hint of the Godard of Soigne ta droite (1987) and Seymour Cassel’s manic Moskowitz. Zahedi’s wooing of Erin (a process that involves The Smiths, Tarkovsky, and LSD) veers from the bathetic to the endearing, but she remains largely immune to his charms. Critics weren’t — the film received praise from both Janet Maslin and Jonathan Rosenbaum.

With I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore, Zahedi adopts a kind of Ross McElwee guise, chronicling a Christmas Eve trip to Vegas with his Iranian father and 16-year-old half brother, Amin. Zahedi, somewhat estranged from both of them (father George having been a womanizer who rarely spent time with young Caveh and Amin being a surly teen), hopes that the trip will bring them closer — and, to ensure this, he brings along a few hits of Ecstasy, believing that the family that gets high together stays together. Little is seen of Vegas, aside from occasional desert vistas and shots of the neon-streaked strip — the film’s presumably teeny budget ($500 of which Zahedi spends to convince Amin to participate) restricts much of the shoot to a cramped hotel room. (Zahedi’s three-person crew, including Watkins, also squeeze in.) After much cajoling ("It’ll open up your heart chakra"), Zahedi convinces George and Amin to drop the E. Or does he? While their behaviour certainly indicates that they’re high — there is much spontaneous laughter, giddy confession, and hugs — the film’s assistant cameraman, Steve, later asserts that neither George nor Amin did actually take the drugs. The ramifications of this moment lend the film a pleasantly vertiginous ambience — is Zahedi’s family pretending to be high or pretending to be pretending to be high? — while dovetailing with Zahedi’s larger concerns of faith, examinations of which bookend the film. Just as Zahedi proposes that God’s hand is felt in every step along this small journey’s way, the filmmaker likewise requires that viewers accept his guidance. Even if what’s on screen isn’t gospel, it’s nonetheless a kind of spiritual truth — if Amin and George didn’t take the drugs, but then acted as if they had to please their son and brother, the effect that Zahedi sought was still achieved. The mere fact that they agreed to be in his film, reluctantly or not, is further proof that some kind of communication barrier had been broken.

Zahedi’s films are always about performance, but more specifically: how do you perform for others and how do you perform to get others to do something for you? A signature scene in virtually every Zahedi film features the filmmaker pleading with or attempting to convince someone to do something against their will. Such negotiations are commonplace enough behind the camera, but it’s rare the director who exposes his own tyranny. Zahedi’s persistence is generally amusing, but it occasionally morphs into a less-savoury imperiousness that undermines the charismatic, touchy-feely attitude he normally maintains.

It was the former that I remembered from In the Bathtub of the World, a year-long video diary in which Zahedi filmed one minute of his life each day. (The title is taken from a John Ashbery poem — itself plucked from a book that Zahedi claims, in voiceover, would make him a “better person” if he could ever finish it.) The first time I watched the film, the conceit seemed to impair the anarchic spirit that made Zahedi’s earlier work so pleasurable; the man it portrayed seemed similarly stunted, almost sour. Subsequent viewings, however, reveal Bathub to be a gentler, more melancholy film. Of course, Zahedi has shot much more than a minute a day, and the judicious editing of this footage — reducing each day down to an ineffable, 60-second moment — gives the film a compelling and elegiac grace. Given its constraints, Bathtub spans an enormous range of emotion and experience, all of it commonplace but usually quite wryly portrayed: Zahedi obsessing over favourite rock stars (Frank Black, Michael Stipe), dieting, getting stoned (of course), visiting his father in hospital, chasing out pigeons who have somehow infiltrated his apartment, exchanging Christmas presents with his girlfriend Mandy. At the beginning of the film, Zahedi shaves his head — lending him a far more menacing visage — and, as his hair grows back, the sense of renewal that ritual offered devolves into forlorn resignation. "Something’s wrong with my life," he says, shooting himself in a bathroom mirror as Fall becomes Winter, "I don’t know how to live. I don’t know what to do. I’m lost."

Such confused revelation pervades I Am a Sex Addict, Zahedi’s many-years-in-the-making opus of sex addiction and prostitute fetishism. It’s a film that the director alludes to as far back as I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore, but which, due to the vagaries of financing, he’s only recently completed. If there’s one constant refrain in Bathtub, it’s Zahedi’s constant spats with Mandy, and here, in Sex Addict, Zahedi exposes the root of his routine difficulties with girlfriends. Combining his regular tactics — re-enactments, actors playing real people, real people playing real people — with more conventional doc techniques (stock footage, animation), Zahedi traces the ups and downs of his romantic life, and how, beginning in Paris, that life was torn asunder by his overwhelming lust for paid sex. In customary fashion, Zahedi is both entirely self-revealing and self-justifying. He admits his desire to his French girlfriend, Caroline (porn star Rebecca Lord), hoping that such honesty will absolve him of any guilt or responsibility — and free him from acting on his desire. "Is there anything I can do so that you are not tempted?" she asks. Zahedi, who, in Sex Addict, ventures frequently into pure creep territory, replies that she can give him blow jobs more often. She obliges, going down on him thrice in quick succession, each time Zahedi collapsing in louder, more outrageous orgasms. Zahedi’s honesty backfires, of course, especially when he compulsively informs Caroline of all the women he would like to sleep with: "I had hoped that being completely honest would bring us closer together, but I seriously miscalculated." Soon, the filmmaker is jerking off in confessionals — it’s difficult to imagine a more apt metaphor for Zahedi’s entire project — then finally giving into his hooker fantasies. He’s particularly aroused when one prostitute impassively pleads, "Rape me."

When Zahedi moves back to the US, subsequent girlfriends cope with his addiction in various ways. A film student, Christa, is appalled when she learns of Godard’s supposed prostitute fetish but she is thoroughly disgusted when Zahedi confesses to the same. Devin, who he meets at a film festival in Austin, blithely accepts Zahedi’s proclivities, but, on a trip to Europe, is reduced to a sobbing, alcoholic wreck when he takes her with him to a brothel. Zahedi, meanwhile, keeps on justifying his behaviour. After visiting a Los Angeles massage parlour, he claims he’s "had a mystical experience."

Zahedi’s famous cameo in Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001) is the most exciting thing about that film, and, in just a few moments, he manages to unpack both Bazin’s ontology of the photographic image and his (Zahedi’s) own conflicted Christianity. Zahedi’s religiosity must be taken seriously, but it also must be recognized as being, at least occasionally, shtick. His faith in God is no more and no less sturdy than his faith in the verisimilitude of an image — or in himself. Sex Addict is an extremely forthright (and funny, disarming, and brutal) film, but it’s also wholly conscious of its own manipulations and dishonesty. The reality represented in Zahedi’s films — no matter how "confessional" — is always a product of condensation, perspective shifts, and omission. Appeal to a higher power excuses bad behaviour just as an appeal to reality masks all manner of cinematic feints.

Sex Addict concludes with footage from Zahedi’s wedding to Mandy. (In a church — with tissues being used only to dab eyes.) Conventional or not — Zahedi, we learn, has narrated the entire film wearing the tux he will wear into the ceremony — it’s surprisingly tender. Even Zahedi seems touched, and he’s finally relinquished control of the camera and shut his mouth. It’s a pure home-movie moment, but it reveals the filmmaker to be, at heart, a true romantic.

I recently saw an interview in which a popular epic filmmaker stated that a good film is one that you continue to discuss at length after walking out of the theatre. Judging by that criterion, Caveh Zahedi’s newest movie, I Am a Sex Addict, is truly great. I left the theatre feeling uneasy and agitated, and was unable to pinpoint the reason for this reaction until much later.

As a sex worker, my immediate desire upon watching this film is to do what I consider a large part of my job: to help Zahedi gain some acceptance of his own sexual fantasies. It’s an incurable instinct that stems from more than five years of having sex with, and hopefully helping, many shy, shamed, and guilt-ridden men. Caveh’s self-deprecating humor and conflicted sexual psyche unexpectedly brought out the super-whore in me, in a context to which I was previously unaccustomed. I suddenly felt a suprising urge to impose my own brand of carnal openness on a person who seemed to be very willfully turning away from it. Suddenly I began to see myself as less of a healer and more of a sexual fascist. It was unsettling.

The movie is a combination of video diary, documentary and re-enactment of real events. This true-to-life narrative is propelled by Caveh’s persistent attempt to rid himself of his obsession with prostitutes. It is structured by a number of strategies to “get it out of his system,” from masturbation, to talking to prostitutes, to acting out his darkest fantasy. It all begins with a French prostitute who looks just like his now ex-wife Caroline (both played by French porn star Rebecca Lord). From there he engages in a habit that he just can’t seem to break: cruising hookers and occasionally paying for sex. What he believes to be a harmless fetish becomes a real problem as the acts, and his unrelenting honesty about them, begin damaging his romantic relationships along the way. His first two marriages end in divorce, due in part to his need for extramarital explorations.

Caveh effectively conveys the thrill of merely approaching a woman and asking her, “Will you suck me?” Every woman in the movie responds with a performance of slap-stick simulated fellatio, except for actress Emily Morse, who plays Caveh’s girlfriend Christa. She is shown voicing her objection to this act in the movie’s self-reflexive parallel narrative about the process of making the film, which is a common aspect of Caveh’s work. He often documents much of what really unfolds during the course of creation and almost seems to be attempting to allow the movie to tell its own story, to direct itself. This lets the viewer in on fascinating details, like the remarkable parallel lives of the actors and their real life counter-parts. For example, Rebecca Lord, who is a make-up artist in the movie (while playing the role of his wife), is, in actuality, not only a porn-star but also an escort and make-up artist.

I caught up with Caveh at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Kristie Alshaibi: When you were at the Tribeca Film Festival you mentioned that you began working on I Am a Sex Addict more than ten years ago. Can you tell me a little more about that process, and when you got the idea to make this movie?

Caveh Zahedi: I got the idea for the film the night that I went to my first Sex Addicts Anonymous (SAA) meeting. I was blown away by the honesty and vulnerability of the other men in the room, and realized that I had never in my life heard men talking openly and honestly about their sexual problems before. I immediately realized the healing potential of making such a film, and decided that I wanted to do for other men what these men had done for me.

KA: What do you think makes your “prostitute fetish,” as you so appropriately named it, an addiction rather than just a misunderstood hobby?

CZ: SAA defines an addiction as not being able to stop doing something that you don’t want to do. A hobby is something one wants to do. As long as one isn’t trying to stop and finding that one can’t stop, then it’s not an addiction. If you can stop smoking when you decide to, you’re not addicted. If you’re trying to quit, but find yourself unable to stop, then you’re addicted.

KA: I noticed in the movie that you solicited mostly street prostitutes and went to massage parlors. Did you ever try calling an escort? If not, was it for economic reasons, or did you just prefer something in particular about picking a girl off the street?

CZ: I did have sex with escorts, but escorts were typically much more expensive. Also, a lot of the acting out ritual involved cruising, which doesn’t really happen when you call an escort service. Typically, I would go cruising, just to experience the rush of talking to them, with no intention of actually having sex. And then occasionally, my desire would get the better of me, and I would find myself giving in to the temptation, even though I hadn’t planned to do that.

KA: Your parents are from Iran, correct? Has your ethnic background had any effect on your own sexuality?

CZ: My parents are from Iran, correct. I think my ethnic background has had a definite effect on my sexuality. First of all, Iranian culture is extremely puritanical sexually, and I definitely inherited that sense of shame and repression. Secondly, being an ethnic minority (as an Iranian-American) is hard sexually, because one always feels marginal to the culture’s notions of what is sexually attractive. For me, the result was a compounding of sexual shame and a feeling of inadequacy.

KA: As a sex worker I’ve always been asked the question, “does your family know what you do?” So let me ask you a similar question. I’ve seen two of your movies so far (this one and In the Bathtub of the World). They are extremely personal and even confessional. Do members of your family watch them? If so what kinds of reactions do you get from them?

CZ: Well, most of my family members have seen enough of my work to know that they don’t want to see any more. I think it’s disturbing for them, and they’d rather not think about it. My youngest half-sister is a big fan, though. She likes all my movies a lot. Still, it’s embarrassing for me to have her see them.

KA: In the movie you list a number of strategies for “getting it out of your system” (“it” being your preoccupation with prostitutes). I noticed you never mentioned role-playing. Did you ever ask your partner to pretend to be a prostitute?

CZ: That’s a very good question. There was a scene in the film that involved role playing that got cut out, for pacing reasons. But yes, I did try that as a strategy. It never worked for me because I was much too shy and felt much too guilty to be able to role-play very effectively. The truth is I still have tremendous shame about my sexual desires, and role-playing is something that requires a certain amount of courage and self-acceptance. I have courage, but I lack the requisite self-acceptance.

KA: Are you still tempted to solicit prostitutes? Is the desire still as strong? Have you ever “slipped?” Do you still go to meetings for sex addicts?

CZ: I do still get tempted to solicit prostitutes, but only rarely, and less and less often. Basically, I get tempted when I’m extremely angry or upset. And for a variety of reasons, I seem to get less angry and upset than I used to, so the desire is not as strong as it used to be. I did “slip” several times after I started going to meetings, but I haven’t slipped in about 8 years. And no, I no longer go to sex addicts anonymous meetings. I went for several years, and found going extremely helpful, but at a certain point, it became a case of diminishing returns.

KA: At the Tribeca screening someone asked you about your current opinion of monogamy, given that you used to view it as a form of ownership. You said that you now believe in it. You also said something to the effect that other people may have non-monogamous relationships, and that’s fine, but that your wife isn’t into it. If your wife were into it, would you be as well? Or do you find that monogamy personally suits you better than alternative types of relationships? Can you expand on that?

CZ: I have nothing against non-monogamy morally speaking, but for me it never worked very well in practice. I personally find that the deep intimacy required to make a relationship work is severely compromised by the incredibly primal feelings of abandonment that come up whenever one person becomes sexually involved with a third party. Relationships are so much about trust, and trust is incredibly difficult to build. So, for me, why jeopardize something as delicate and fragile as trust? I’ve never met anyone evolved enough to be truly happy and intimate in a non-monogamous relationship, and I’m certainly not that person. But if someone were that evolved, I think that would be ideal. I used to be an idealist, and believed I could become that person, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten to know my limitations, and this is one of them. If my wife was into non-monogamous relationships, I suppose I might give it another try, but I would be suspicious of her reasons. I suspect that a lot of interest in non-monogamous relationships is the result of dissatisfaction in one’s primary relationship, and that getting involved sexually with other people is inherently destabilizing to one’s primary relationship. I think the solution is to look deeper into the roots of one’s dissatisfaction rather than to look outside the relationship for fulfillment.

KA: And finally, what are some of the most interesting or unexpected reactions you’ve gotten to this movie?

CZ: At Tribeca, all of the janitors and ticket-takers and popcorn-makers snuck into the screening and wanted to shake my hand afterwards. They were visibly sincerely touched. I was surprised that people who would never relate to any of my other movies (which are all decidedly on the artsy side) were so profoundly enthusiastic about this one. I think there’s a huge thirst among men for this part of themselves to be given a voice, free from the shame-based moralistic ideologies which have made them feel guilty for having normal sexual desires. Our culture has a false notion of what is “normal,” and a lot of suffering ensues from that. I think people really appreciate it when someone speaks out against the rampant dishonesty in our culture and tells it like it is.



Kristie Alshaibi has owned and operated ObjectifyMe.com, her independent adult web site, for more than four years. Kritie’s alter ego, the alien prostitute and porno actress Echo Transgression, appeared on MTV’s Sex2k, and is also the central character of her first feature legth digital film entitled Other People’s Mirrors. Recently, Mrs. Alshaibi became a founding editor of boazine.com and started her own adult web zine and podcast.

'PEOPLE THINK OF my films as cathartic," Caveh Zahedi says. "But they're not to me, at all. I'm just trying to make a good movie." It's easy to see how the misconception comes about — Zahedi has constantly renegotiated his existence and his approach to cinema through a series of autobiographical works. Shot in stark black-and-white, 1992's A Little Stiff is a low-key record of a romance that never quite materializes. 1999's I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore finds Zahedi trying to transform his relationships with his father and younger brother by dosing them with ecstasy during a Christmas Day visit to the gambling capital. Taking its title from a John Ashbery line, In the Bathtub of the World is a one-year diary charting everyday foibles and small triumphs (a role in Richard Linklater's Waking Life) as the filmmaker hones a confessional style of radical honesty.

The up front first-person humor of the latter two works takes a new form with I Am a Sex Addict, Zahedi's most commercial effort to date and certainly a movie that spells out what its about. Nosediving in and out of narrative frameworks to examine his prostitute fetish and the damage it has inflicted on his love affairs and sense of self, Zahedi mixes unflattering observations with comic scenarios of the Woody Allen and Albert Brooks variety. If a scene requires him to go back in time to his younger self, no problem — curly wigs and spray-on hair to the rescue! Before the lights dim for the first-ever retrospective devoted to Zahedi's movies (at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts), I talked to the man himself about his methods and madness.

Bay Guardian: As the title suggests, you deal with sexuality directly in I Am a Sex Addict.

Caveh Zahedi: Obviously, the film is in part a reaction against the way sex is usually depicted. Recently there's been a trend of people depicting sex more honestly, less romantically. One example that strikes me is that great scene in Late Marriage — that's probably my favorite sex scene in a movie. Even a film like Nine Songs, which I don't like that much, is trying to depict sex in a different way.

BG: It's interesting that you recently interviewed Vincent Gallo for GreenCine, because the two of you have just made films about sexual compulsion. The Brown Bunny, however, is opaque in its approach to the subject.

CZ: Weirdly enough, I tried to cast him in this movie years ago. It was frustrating, because he wouldn't read the script. He'd ask me to pitch it to him, and then say, "No, I'm not convinced." So I told him, "You should just read [the script]," and he said, "No, I don't read." After a few months of that, I gave up.

BG: Did I Am a Sex Addict's title arrive early on in the filmmaking process?

CZ: The title was the first thing that came. I thought of it at the first [Sex Addicts Anonymous] meeting I went to, and I just went home and started to write it, telling the story so that it started at the meeting and ended there.

BG: Have people who've gone to Sex Addicts' meetings seen the movie?

CZ: Some people came up to me after a screening in New York [at the Tribeca Film Festival] and told me they were sex addicts and they were very moved and glad I'd made the film.

BG: I like how you go outside of dramatization to talk about the real-life women who've inspired the characters, and also to talk about the women playing them. What was your motivation in terms of doing that?

CZ: I've always had this dream of a film that would be both a film and the making of a film somehow combined. I don't know why I feel the need for that — maybe it's genetic, because it's something that Iranian filmmakers do frequently. For me it's a question of the ontology of what you're saying. To just say something — you can't do that anymore. You have to explain how you're saying it and why you're saying it in a way that has the correct level of self-consciousness and irony. It stems for our culture and how everything is so fake and suspect that you have to really address the foundations from which you're speaking. So it was a way of really challenging the truth of what I was talking about and the untruth — to put that in the right pitch.

BG: Did you want to make a movie that changes the way people talk about sex?

CZ: Absolutely. My main reason for wanting to make [the movie] was that it occurred to me that there's an incredible stigma attached to sex addiction, that it's more difficult for people to accept, process, and work through their sex addictions in a climate where there is a stigma attached to it. It forces people to hide it, not to share it, and not to seek help. I felt like the more that could be done to destigmatize a very human and very widespread problem, the better for us all.

BG: Don't you think addiction is woven into the fabric of daily life at this point? Simply using technology can be somewhat obsessive-compulsive.

CZ: Daily contemporary society is crazy-making, and we all have neurotic reactions to things that aren't human or humane, because we can't process our emotions in the face of this onslaught of technological change, alienated relationships, and complete political disempowerment.

BG: Something that's moving to me, looking at your films, is that certain people and their stories reappear. Have you had that in mind when making movies over the years, or did that come about naturally?

CZ: I guess I just started making a certain kind of film, and eventually it became more conscious, and I realized, "This is going to be great, the more I do this, the more dense and effective it gets" — like a long novel by Balzac or Proust.

BG: What do you have in line for the future?

CZ: A political documentary, although I'm hoping to reinvent the genre [laughs]. My father's second cousin's father was a general in the Iranian army. He was the guy who overthrew the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, who had nationalized the oil industry with the help of the CIA. He overthrew that guy and put the shah in power and became the prime minister and created the secret police under the shah, which tortured everybody.

His son, my father's second cousin, married the shah's daughter and became ambassador to the United States. He was a big figure in the '70s, dating Elizabeth Taylor, hanging out with Andy Warhol, and throwing these lavish parties where he would give people diamond rings and Rolls Royces as presents. This was while a lot of people in the country were starving, and when the revolution came, they put a price on his head, and he's in hiding.

I want to make a film about the CIA coup in 1953, which was actually the first CIA coup to overthrow a democratically elected government — how that action led to current problems in the Middle East.

BG: Will you be dealing with it from a first-person perspective?

CZ: I will. I don't want to do a dry documentary.

BG: I've noticed that taking hallucinogens and documenting your trips is a recurrent element of your films. You often mark special days, such as holidays and your birthday, with drug trips.

CZ: Basically, my whole oeuvre comes out of a drug experience I had, an LSD experience during film school. I was trying to make Hollywood movies, but then I had this LSD trip that really changed my whole way of thinking about reality and the purpose of art. I decided it was more important to reflect reality as it is than to create these fantasies. I started on this path, and drugs were very important to me during that period — I would use them, like you say, to mark occasions, but also for inspiration. One of my film projects, which I haven't finished but I've been shooting over the years, is about drugs. Every birthday I've been shooting an installment.

At this point I really like filming my drug trips. I don't know if I'll get that into the Iranian film, but I'll try.

Egotistical.
Self-indulgent.
Pretentious.
Narcissistic.

The artist in question blinks and replies, "In a pejorative sense?"

In stark contrast to his hapless and vulnerable on-screen persona, Caveh Zahedi embodies poise and self-assurance when discussing his work. In the following interview, Zahedi reflects on his magnum opus I Am a Sex Addict and enumerates his idols and influences: Jesus, Godard, Hegel, Cassavetes, hallucinogens, and Walter Murch.


BRAINTRUSTdv: We're going to do this a bit backward and start with technology questions—like eating peas before pie.

You've been working in video for a while. What products or technologies have you used?

Caveh Zahedi: I started out on an EMC2, the first non-linear editing software to come out on the market. I edited both I Was Possessed By God and In the Bathtub of the World on the same EMC2 that had been used to edit Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused. It was frustrating to use, however, because by that time the company that made the EMC2 had gone out of business, and there was no tech support. So I was dependent on this one guy in Utah who used to work for the company and was now embittered and unfriendly. When I was finally able to afford Final Cut Pro, I switched immediately. I've been using Final Cut ever since.


BTdv: I noticed you were at PFA the night Walter Murch spoke about cutting Cold Mountain on Final Cut. Did you learn anything from his lecture?

CZ: I love Walter Murch. I love his mind, and I always learn a lot from listening to him speak. I have no particular interest in what software he uses, other than a craft interest, but I have a tremendous interest in his mind. The man is brilliant and always has the most perceptive and original things to say about everything.


BTdv: I take it you've read his books.

CZ: I've read both Murch's In the Blink of an Eye and Michael Ondaatje's The Conversations, and I have to say that of the two books the Michael Ondaatje is my favorite. In fact, I think it is a brilliant book and one of the five best books on filmmaking that I have read.


BTdv: What are the others?

CZ: The others are Bresson's Notes on Cinematography, Tarkovsky's Sculpting in Time, Ray Carney's Cassavetes on Cassavetes, and Godard on Godard.


BTdv: When you were in film school, the "DV revolution" was still nearly a decade away. Now DV technology and digital editing are taught alongside older technologies in film schools. Do you ever feel like part of the old guard even though you've switched to DV? Do you feel overwhelmed or disadvantaged with newer technologies?

CZ: I'm not a very technologically adept person, so I do feel easily overwhelmed by new technologies. But I don't feel especially disadvantaged, since everyone needs to learn the new technologies, not just me. My biggest regret is not that I learned how to shoot film, but that I spent almost ten years of my life making experimental films instead of making narrative films. I think I would be much further along now in my career if I hadn't taken that unfortunate detour.


BTdv: Speaking of your career, you've been associated at various points with Alexander Payne and Richard Linklater, and you were in the same Sundance "beginner's class" as Todd Haynes and Hal Hartley, both of whom went on to be commercially successful—no matter how proto-independent they may seem. What sort of perspective do you have on your own career choices when contrasted with the directions these other filmmakers have gone?

CZ: I oscillate between kicking myself and patting myself on the back. Obviously, my aesthetic and career choices have been tantamount to career suicide, but you've got to be who you've got to be. I wish I had the commercial instincts of the other directors you mention, but so far I've been on a different path entirely .


BTdv: You've mentioned great affection and respect for the work of John Cassavetes. On the surface, despite your aesthetic dissimilarity to Cassavetes, it would seem that you're working more in his uber-maverick tradition than many other so-called independent filmmakers are.

CZ: I certainly feel a lot closer to Cassavetes than I do to any of the other filmmakers you mention, as much as I may admire their work. But for me, Cassavetes is the greatest American filmmaker.


BTdv: It seems reasonable to assume that your scene in Linklater's Waking Life, which many consider the most memorable moment in the film, was unscripted and undirected—just Caveh being Caveh.

CZ: The scene in Waking Life was unscripted and undirected, yes. What happened was that I did four different monologues, and Rick chose that one as his favorite. But he also used another of the monologues later in the film, when his own character talks about Philip K. Dick. That was all from a dream that I'd had.


BTdv: How do you like Linklater's work? He seems to keep reinventing himself.

CZ: I think Rick Linklater is doing a fantastic job trying to push the boundaries of cinema in a way that is sustainable and accessible. He's a very brilliant person, and always seems to manage to find just the right balance between what is necessary and what is possible. I think he's doing an invaluable service for cinema. I'm not sure how other people see his work, but I see him as a kind of cinematic saint, by which I mean that his passion for film is incredibly pure and loving.


BTdv: You've said that video is more versatile than film. In what ways do you mean?

CZ: You can turn a video camera on in about ten seconds, and capture something that is going on right at that moment in your life. If you were using a film camera, you'd have to load the camera, etc., and by the time you were ready to shoot, several minutes would have gone by, and the moment you were trying to capture would be long gone. Also, you can carry your video camera around with you wherever you go and be ready to shoot something you see at a moment's notice. It's very cumbersome to carry a film camera around with you, unless you're shooting Super-8. But they've stopped manufacturing Super-8 sound film, so that medium has in effect become obsolete.


BTdv: Actually there's a guy in SF who is the last known Super-8 sound striper in the U.S. He started Super-8 Militia, they have dog tags and everything. Does it change your outlook knowing that you could get striped Super-8 film?

CZ: I think Super-8 has a place in the vocabulary of cinema, but its main use seems to me to be as a rhetorical device to imply the past tense or to provide a sense of nostalgia. An example of this is the Super-8 footage at the end of Drugstore Cowboy. It's a lovely medium with its own ontology and aesthetic, but it's like making daguerreotypes today. I don't really see the point, unless you're going for a very particular effect. Let's just say it doesn't interest me.


BTdv: You've also said, "I thought the next time I make a film I should make a thousand copies and just send them to influential people or people I like." Does this mean you don't see the theatrical experience as necessary? Eric Rohmer once said that he wanted his films to touch one person, not an audience. His films in particular seem geared toward the home viewing experience.

CZ: I don't see the theatrical experience as in any way essential to cinema, any more than the concert experience is essential to music. Many of my favorite films of all time I've only seen on video. Seeing them on video hasn't prevented me from being profoundly moved by them, and more moved by them than by other films I might have seen in a theater. And as much as I like concerts, I prefer records.


BTdv: I think this is something that has been true of our generation, yet older intellectuals and theorists such as Murch, Vittorio Storaro, and Jean-Pierre Geuens have written and spoken about the home format experience being, basically, corrupt and useless. Antero Alli, who is more or less a decade older than you, has said that he will watch DVDs occasionally, but never "the greats." For example, he says that he will only watch Tarkovsky in theatrical venues. What do you think about the disparity of viewpoints on this issue? Is it just generational? Circumstantial?

CZ: It's true that Tarkovsky's films benefit in a big way from being projected, but it's also valuable to watch and study them closely, with the ability to rewind and pause. My films benefit from being projected, too. All films do—especially comedies, because of the contagiousness of group laughter. But so what? We don't live in a perfect world, and I have no patience for the fetishization of movie theaters. With the exception of comedies, that whole cliché about the communal aspect of the theater experience strikes me as wishful thinking. The movie theater experience is usually an experience of collective alienation rather than an experience of community. I find watching a video with my wife to be a far more social and interactive experience than sitting in a movie theater with a bunch of people I don't know, and who I am almost certainly never going to talk to. It's like that Edward Hopper painting where the people are all reclining on lounge chairs in the sun, facing the same direction, but no one is looking at anyone else.


BTdv: It seems that all of your work is available on-demand at GreenCine. How do you feel about this technology? Do you think watching a movie on a computer screen is equivalent to watching it on a television?

CZ: I think video-on-demand is a godsend. I would much rather watch something I've just read about, in the immediacy and excitement of just having read about it, than watch something on a large screen that I was less interested in.


BTdv: I watched A Little Stiff for the first time the other day. I downloaded it from GreenCine and watched in on my laptop in a café. It was late afternoon, and I had to position the screen so that the sunlight wouldn't affect the image too negatively. It wasn't too noisy — only two or three tables were occupied. I had headphones on. It was the first time I've watched anything longer than ten minutes in that environment, and I admit it made me uncomfortable. I felt as though I was totally focused, and yet I was aware that I was trying to focus. The individualized experience is radically different from the theatrical experience, in which each member of the audience sees the same thing — the image projected with a lamp of a certain wattage, rather than on an LCD screen in battery-saving mode; everyone hears it the same way; the screening room is dark; etc. I'm curious how my café viewing description strikes you. Do you think the generation after ours will have an entirely new set of muscles for focusing on a feature-length movie in a busy environment? Or will people still want to go to a dark movie theater with hundreds of strangers?

CZ: I have to say that your description of watching A Little Stiff in a cafe in broad daylight does make me cringe a little. Obviously, it's better to watch it in a quiet, private place and in the dark. But the same is true of reading. It's better to read a book in a quiet, private place, and yet a great book can be read anywhere and be deeply enjoyed. As for the future, I do think that the movie theater experience will become increasingly obsolete.


BTdv: You've said that you prefer to watch a DVD at home rather than go out to a movie. You've said that the home viewing experience empowers the viewer. This is a very unusual position for a filmmaker. How much power do you feel the viewer should have over his experience?

CZ: The viewer should have absolute power over his experience. A film isn't a sacred thing. It's just something designed to give pleasure. The pleasure is the point of it, and the viewer knows best what gives him or her pleasure.


BTdv: No matter how far-fetched, tell us what you see as the ultimate long-term goal for digital video technology in terms of production, distribution, exhibition, and public reception.

CZ: The beauty of digital technology is that it democratizes the filmmaking process. Anyone can make a film now, and anyone can put it on a DVD and hand it to or mail it to anyone else. This is a very good thing and really and truly is the beginning of a revolution in the way films are made and seen. I'm all for it and feel that it is already having a very positive effect in the world.

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BTdv: The squelched release of your second film, I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore, has been attributed to its unflinching and celebratory focus on the use of illegal drugs — specifically ecstasy. Your films always contained this element, though it seemed to increase over the years. In your first film there's a brief scene in which you trip on mushrooms, and one of the characters discusses wanting to trip while her cat is high on cat nip. But your second movie revolves entirely around trying to convince your father to take ecstasy, and your third movie, I Was Possessed by God, is an attempt to recreate a mushroom trip in which you seemed to experience "divine possession." You've also worked on a series called Tripping with Caveh in which you trip with other artists. What about the subject of tripping so thoroughly corrals your filmmaking impetus?

CZ: Well, tripping has been one of the most formative experiences of my life. It's what transformed me from an atheist into a theist. It changed my entire way of looking at the world, and opened up a whole dimension of experience that I had never known even existed before. This said, I don't think that tripping is for everyone, and I would certainly never recommend that everyone should do it. But for me, it has been profoundly transformational, and I believe that hallucinogens can offer true insight into the transcendental realms of human experience.


BTdv: In your latest movie, I Am a Sex Addict, you've headed in another direction, though you're still orbiting the subject of vice. One could argue that this is all evidence of a consistent artistic vision, but I'm curious whether you ever feel impoverished in terms of range. Would it interest you to direct a narrative script you hadn't written? Something totally impersonal but challenging on some other level?

CZ: It would interest me to direct a narrative script I hadn't written, if I was excited by it. But traditional narrative filmmaking doesn't interest me very much. I enjoy watching it, but I wouldn't want to make anything that didn't push the boundaries of cinema in some way. It's so hard to make a film. If it's not original in some way, I just don't see the point. What we don't need in the world are more stories. Not even updated ones. What we need are new perspectives, new ways of thinking and seeing.


BTdv: After I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore, you took a six-year break from filmmaking. Why such a long hiatus? What did you do in the meantime?

CZ: I spent every single day of those six years trying to raise the money to make I Am A Sex Addict. I failed miserably and made no other movies during that time, but it was hardly a hiatus. More like a nightmare.


BTdv: What does someone with your considerable energy do while not making movies? Watch, read, reflect, discuss, trip? Is that too reductive?

CZ: I like to sit in the sun and read. I like to memorize poetry. I like to swim and to recite poems in my head while I do laps. I like to meditate. I like to be in nature. I like to listen to music. I like to spend time with my friends. But my favorite thing of all is to try to think up satisfactory solutions to film problems.


BTdv: I Am a Sex Addict is a misleading title in as much as you claim to have recovered from your sex addiction. Thus, I Was a Sex Addict would be more literally representative, though as far as titles go it would lack immediacy and shock value. Can you talk a little bit about the healing process and what it means to have "recovered" from something as acute as sex addiction?

CZ: The healing process was long and arduous. I spent a lot of time writhing on my couch trying to resist the almost overwhelming temptation to act out my sexual impulses. And I did a lot of soul-searching. But the main thing for me was coming up with some form of preventive medicine. Since the addiction was rooted in pain and anger, I needed to find ways of reducing pain and anger in my life. And that meant engaging in some form of spiritual practice. For years, I did yoga everyday, and that actually helped me a tremendous amount. Actually, I still do yoga everyday. I also have a daily meditation practice.


BTdv: Sex Addict is brilliantly funny, and it is the first movie in your oeuvre in which the viewer doesn't feel pangs of guilt when laughing at you — it's the first movie in which you're aggressively winking at the audience, and the voice-over plays a large role in creating that effect. Did you make a conscious decision to be more overtly funny in your approach to Sex Addict than in your other work?

CZ: I think of all of my films as funny. It did occur to me that Sex Addict needed to be more overtly funny in order to get people not to take offense at some of the film's subject matter. Many of the events in the film are so morally dubious that humor was the only way of sugarcoating the pill, so to speak. What's that Oscar Wilde quote: "If you are going to tell people the truth, you had better make them laugh or they will kill you."


BTdv: You mean the subject matter was so sensitive that broaching it comically was a self-protective contrivance?

CZ: I don't think the comedy in the film was a self-protective contrivance. I think the comedy was there to protect the audience.


BTdv: I know you lost interest in making the movie at some point in the 1990s, and between then and now you've recovered from your sex addiction. Do you think you would have been able to laugh at this subject matter if you'd made the movie while it was still an open wound?

CZ: The original script was also quite funny, and intentionally so, but the humor was more vicious, shall we say. In other words, because I hadn't fully recovered, I was still acting out a lot of the same issues via the script.


BTdv: Do you feel you've made a better movie than you would have made when you originally had the idea?

CZ: The film is more generous now than it would have been then, and much less sadistic. I'm not sure that makes it a better film, but it's certainly a much friendlier film.


BTdv: One thing that struck me while watching Sex Addict was that you have innumerable scenes with gorgeous naked women — scenes in which you remain strategically clothed. I don't think anyone has objectified women so much since Fellini did it in 8 & 1/2.

CZ: I'm not sure I agree with your assertion that Fellini objectified women in 8 & 1/2. I would argue that he was deconstructing the male protagonist's objectification of women, as he did again later in City of Women. Nor do I agree that my film objectifies women. My character objectifies women, but the film is critical of my character.


BTdv: Even so, you may draw the wrath of female viewers.

CZ: The film is a portrait of a sex addict, and the women are seen through his eyes.

The film never pretends that what we are seeing is the truth about these women. If anything, it implies just the opposite. What's clear in the film is that he is unable to see them clearly and projects his own needs onto them. We, as viewers, can see that his view of them is entirely delusional. In this sense, I feel that the film is absolutely anti-objectification — only rather than showing strong women or fully developed female characters, the film shows the consequences of objectification. This is also a very Hegelian idea — that you have to go through the stages of history to get to the end of history.


BTdv: You've said that you'll continue editing Sex Addict until someone "wants to strike a print." That seems to be a very open-ended approach. If someone strikes a print, will that represent completion in your mind? Or do you feel some kinship with Frank O'Connor, who would sit and scribble copious emendations in the margins of his published books?

CZ: Wallace Stevens describes the creative process as "the finding of a satisfaction." And the simple fact is that the film won't feel finished to me until I feel satisfied with it. So far, I haven't felt sufficiently satisfied. I'm sure that a time will come—hopefully very soon—where I do feel sufficiently satisfied, and that's when I'll stop editing.


BTdv: Each of your previous movies is an autobiographical installment, looking at a particular point in your life, but Sex Addict is the only one which surveys a significant portion your life. In a sense, your three other features could be seen as studies, endeavors which prepared you for this magnum opus. Do you think the tight narrative arc of this movie will redeem you in the eyes of critics and audiences who were hostile to the "self-indulgence" and "lack of focus" in your other work?

CZ: I sure as hell hope so.

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BTdv: You've mentioned Ozu, Bresson, and Tarkovsky in the same breath when talking about influences, but only A Little Stiff has a careful and quiet formalism which could be compared to Ozu or Bresson. Your other work is hyperkinetic and technically haphazard.

CZ: A Little Stiff was my aesthetic reaction to the kind of by-the-numbers filmmaking that we were being taught in film school. My aesthetic changed after making it, and the aesthetic issues that fascinated me then were replaced by new areas of interest and fascination. Specifically, I have moved closer and closer to an aesthetic that valorizes the raw immediacy of the real.


BTdv: Paul Schrader wrote a study of transcendental film which was dedicated to analyses of Dreyer, Bresson, and Ozu. He writes, "transcendental style chooses irrationalism over rationalism, repetition over variation, sacred over profane, the deific over the humanistic, intellectual realism over optical realism, two-dimensional vision over three-dimensional vision, tradition over experiment, anonymity over individualization." Were these components of your aesthetic when you made A Little Stiff?

CZ: I love those three filmmakers, and I have definitely been influenced by all of them. But Paul Schrader's book is just a way of trying to impose categories on three filmmakers who defy categorization. It sounds good, and it's thought-provoking, but it's certainly not "true." I believe that the transcendental is less a question of style than a question of vibrational frequency. What those filmmakers all have in common is a high spiritual frequency, not a set of rhetorical strategies.


BTdv: Well, I don't think he intended this analysis to be prescriptive, but he's a strong Calvinist, so these issues interested him greatly. And they seem to interest you, too: there is a distinct thread of redemption in your work. Like Bresson — and Schrader, who pays direct tribute to Bresson (the end of Light Sleeper is identical to the end of Pickpocket) — you seem to indulge in the ritual of on-screen sacrifices, and you've made statements to that effect: you want to be a "mascot of humanity," invoking this phrase to characterize Jesus. Not bad company. Many American intellectuals and artists have a kind of flavor aversion to the subject of Jesus, having been immersed in a culture which peddles Christianity as though it's breakfast cereal, but you talk about Jesus as though you are the first to have stumbled onto him. In I Was Possessed by God, you "talk" about Jesus and the gates of heaven while in a totally delirious state. What prompts you to feel so much kinship with Jesus?

CZ: As far as I can tell, Jesus was the most evolved human being to have been incarnated on this planet. I find his teachings to be astonishingly radical—so radical, in fact, that no one seems to even understand them, let alone practice them. As for sacrifice, I think Bob Dylan is right when he says: "You're going to have to serve somebody. It may be the Devil or it may be the Lord but you're going to have to serve somebody." I don't believe in the devil, but I do believe in humility, and in the idea of service. I am trying to serve the art of cinema. Art is my religion. And I am willing to suffer in its service. Because there's no getting around it—if you try to make films, you are going to suffer. So the question becomes why? Why do it? And the answer is a religious one. Because I believe in it.


BTdv: There's a consistently disorienting element in your oeuvre. It could easily be said that each of your films is an exercise in self-fetishism ("narcissism" is too soft a word), but it could also be argued that they're all self-parody. The warts-and-all approach to autobiography is not very common, and it tends to strain the viewer's interpretive muscles. I'm curious if you see any significant difference between an audience laughing with you or laughing at you. In each of your movies there are parts where I'm torn between thinking you're terribly clever to make fun of yourself in this way or, conversely, "Poor Caveh. People will laugh at him!" Can you honestly say there's nothing masochistic in your tendency toward public self-examination?

CZ: The word "masochistic" can mean a lot of things. There's a certain amount of acceptance of suffering that is involved in making the kinds of films I make, but it's not masochistic in the sense that it gives me pleasure when people hate or judge me. I really don't see any significant difference between the audience laughing with me or at me. I'm laughing at me, too. But you're right that my films "strain the viewer's interpretive muscles," as you put it. A lot of people don't know how to interpret my films because they have no previous experience of the kind of place I'm coming from. My background is in philosophy, and I was trained to be self-critical. This is a Marxist practice, and one that I've always found fascinating. To treat oneself as subject and as object at the same time is a curious relationship to the self, and one that most people don't seem to attempt. But it strikes me as the quintessentially artistic relationship to life, in which everything becomes aestheticized. Baudelaire says: "I am the wound and the knife, the victim and the executioner." And I think that's a much richer way to experience life than by identifying with the self in a defensive and self-protective way. From where I'm coming from, the self is a problem to be overcome, not a given to be upheld.


BTdv: In the commentary on In the Bathtub of the World you admit that prior to screenings of your work, you have diarrhea and other psychosomatic manifestations of "a primal fear of being judged negatively." Yet you put yourself out there again and again to be judged. So maybe our definitions of masochism are different. Jesus chose his fate, but he was inherently divided on the issue. Is your will divided? Do you relate to the Kazantzakis remark that "My principle anguish and the source of all my joys and sorrows from my youth onward has been the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh"?

CZ: Of course my will is divided. But one strain tends to be in the ascendant, and that strain is the one that compels me to expose myself to judgment. But I see this as a sacrifice I'm willing to make for the greater good. And for me, the greater good is self-acceptance and not buying into the judgment of others. I think the judging of others is the problem, and any attempt to push the envelope of forgiveness is necessarily going to provoke judgment.


BTdv: In a recent interview, Elliot Greenebaum confessed, "I began [to make films] because I wanted to be loved—or liked. I felt that if I were a filmmaker this would happen. When I became successful I felt worse and more unsafe than before." After making the film Assisted Living, Greenebaum was not only "judged negatively" as a filmmaker but also as a human being—he was called unethical and exploitive and was compelled to write letters to journalists and audience members in order to defend himself. Similarly, you've taken it on the chin again and again—not only as a filmmaker but as a person. Critics call you narcissistic, vain, unethical, and average viewers write you hate mail.

CZ: I don't make films in order to be liked. I make films to be honest about who I am—and by extension, who mankind is—and I am willing to be judged negatively by those who feel a strong need to judge and distance themselves from others in order to feel better about themselves. Of course, I would rather be liked. But being liked isn't my goal any more than being judged negatively is my goal. My goal is to be as honest as I can be. And people who are striving for greater honesty in their own lives tend to appreciate my films, whereas people who are trying to protect a certain image of themselves tend to feel threatened by them.

It seems to me that as a society we are addicted to fantasy as a way to cope with the pain of no longer being in harmony with our true selves. Whatever the fantasy, it always involves an element of escape from the pain of being who we really are. My films are an attempt to strip away the fantasy and to see if it's possible to love and to accept who we really are. I am as addicted to fantasy as the next guy, but I find that the one thing that snaps me out of it is when another person is totally honest with me.


BTdv: One of your key theoretical preoccupations has been the idea of privacy, your conviction that the U.S. Constitution doesn't protect people from your camera. Again, I find an interesting analog in Elliot Greenebaum's experience with Assisted Living. He shot the film in a nursing home, using actual residents as part of the narrative (the film is not a documentary). Some of these people were mentally incompetent and unable to understand that they were being filmed. Now that most of these people are deceased, Greenebaum argues that the dead don't own the rights to their likeness. In this age of Reality TV, it seems there are new moral and theoretical problems arising every day. The ethics of spectatorship is beginning to concern us all. As Marguerite Duras said of the horrors of the Second World War, all of us must share in the guilt. How do you feel about Greenebaum's approach and defense? Is there any limit to the camera's impunity?

CZ: I agree with Greenebaum completely. I haven't seen his film—although I would love to—but it sounds like he did a wonderful thing to make such a film and to involve the residents of the nursing home in the making of it. I just don't get this "sanctity of the image" thing. To be a human being in the world is to be seen by others and to not be able to control how one is perceived. It's just our ontological condition. People are going to think what they want about you, whether it's true or false. It happens. I can understand that there are laws against slander. If someone says something untruthful about you in public, there should be a legal mechanism to prevent that. But to photograph someone, and then to use that in a film—whether it be a fictional film or a documentary—is nobody's business unless you are lying about them, in which case it is incumbent on them to prove that you are lying. This whole notion of owning one's image strikes me as an absurd extension of the idea of private property.


BTdv: I saw I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore on the festival circuit in the mid-nineties. It made quite an impression on me, though honestly it didn't read like a second feature. And that continues to be true of your work — each new thing seems to be made as though you've never made a movie before. Naturally, your on-screen persona is perpetually bemused (you have that deer-in-the-headlights look), but there's also a peculiar energy to the filmmaking that suggests a constant exploration of the craft. Everything always feels new somehow. That may also explain the mesmerizing quality of your monologue in Waking Life — even when you talk about filmmaking, it's as though you've just discovered it, and you can broach it with a child's carefree enthusiasm, no matter how arcane your subject matter. Do you feel that you have a more exploratory approach to filmmaking than others do? I know you admire Godard—do you feel any affinity with his constant experimentation and childlike fascination with the medium?

CZ: I do feel a deep affinity with Godard and would say that even more than Cassavetes he has been the biggest influence on my work.

My favorite thing in art is what I would call novelty. I see absolutely no point in doing what has already been done. And this is why I love Godard—because he is always striving for novelty. So many critics judge one's work in relation to a pre-conceived set of standards and expectations, but I feel they are missing the point of what art is. Art is not the same as craft. Art is novelty. Art is seeing something that one has never seen before. Art is seeing something for the first time. Diane Arbus once said, "It is what you've never seen before that you recognize."


BTdv: In a stirring essay, you write: "The medieval view of the artist is one I feel much closer to than the Enlightenment view. In the middle ages, the artist was seen as a humble servant of God, doing God's work to the best of his ability." Later in the same essay you admit to being irreligious. How do you incorporate medieval aesthetics into a religious vacuum? Andre Bazin talked about the introduction of perspective in painting as the first step toward secularism in art—mimesis as an attempt to replace God rather than exalt Him. Isn't that what art has become—a replacement for God?

CZ: I'm not sure I agree with you that art has become a replacement for God. Art is also a path to God. I don't think of myself as irreligious, except in the sense that I don't believe in or subscribe to any organized religion. I think of myself as deeply religious, in the sense that I believe in God and find the religious or spiritual dimension the most meaningful and important thing in my life. But art is my path to God, just as yoga or meditation can also be paths to God. Art is the path I've chosen because for some reason it resonates with my inner being, but it's only one path among many.

For the last decade and a half, Caveh Zahedi has been dedicated to making films that stand firmly outside the mainstream, that tear up the comforting façade of day to day gaze intently at the soul that lurks beneath-his own soul, specifically.

Since his wonderfully irreverent debut, 1991's A Little Stiff, Zahedi has been obsessed with autobiographical explorations of his own life, dramatizations in which he himself is the star. Through these sometimes hilarious, sometimes poignant reenactments, Zahedi seeks to find something deeper for himself, and for the audience as well.

His newest film, I Am a Sex Addict, explores, with a remarkable candidness, his own complex obsession with sexuality. Yet there is something grander here as well, a universal observation on the need for love and the ways in which desire manages to make an addict of all of us.

What first compelled you to begin using film as a means of expression?

I was in college, and I was torn between art and politics. One day, it occurred to me that filmmaking was the way to combine them both. So I set about learning everything I could about filmmaking, and over the course of the years, I fell in love with film, the way one falls in love with a person over time.

How have your films evolved over the course of your career?

I started out making fairly conventional films. And then one day one of my film teachers told me that my films had the same aesthetic as commercials. I didn't really see what was wrong with that, but then I read a book about the films of Jean-Luc Godard called Film and Revolution, which completely changed my way of thinking about cinema. After that, I started experimenting with film aesthetics.

So many of your films involve intensive self-exploration, what compels you to make yourself vulnerable in that way?

My favorite thing in life is honesty. I can't stand being lied to, and I feel terrible about myself when I feel that I am being phony or dishonest in some way. So even though being vulnerable is uncomfortable in a lot of ways, it still feels better to me than being dishonest.

What have you learned about yourself in the process of making these films?

When I first started making films, I honestly thought that I was the most talented filmmaker in the world, and that I would one day be recognized as the greatest filmmaker of all time. The process of making these films has taught me that I was seriously deluded, that film is an infinitely difficult medium that takes a lifetime to even begin to master, and that the proper relation to it is absolute and complete humility.

With I Am a Sex Addict, you're analyzing a former addiction you've since learned to control, but did making the film, and in a sense reenacting that addiction, test your resolve?

Yes, making the film did occasionally test my resolve. They say "once a sex addict, always a sex addict," and that's true to a certain extent. But there is such a thing as recovery, and oddly enough, having been a sex addict and having seen ruin my life, I think I have much better boundaries now than most people in similar situations.

You seem to use cinema as a method of revealing truths. What films, beside your own, are the most truthful to you?

A Woman under the Influence by John Cassavetes, The Idiots by Lars Von Trier, Naked by Mike Leigh, Contempt by Jean-Luc Godard and Gummo by Harmony Korine.

"I'm just trying to be real."

Indie with a capital "I," filmmaker Caveh Zahedi has appeared in his own films and the films of others (including an animated version of himself in Richard Linklater's Waking Life and in former film school chum Alexander Payne's Citizen Ruth). Unlike meeting other enigmatic filmmakers, when it's often hard to know how close you'll be getting to the real person when you meet them face-to-face, with Zahedi there's no such obstacle - what you've seen is what you get, up to a point. But as I discovered during an enlightening chat at Zahedi's San Francisco apartment-slash-post-production facility (where he's hard at work on a long-in-the-making magnum opus, I am a Sex Addict), Zahedi is a more personable guy than some may expect - given the amount of hate mail he's received over the years, due to what many perceive as the narcissistic nature of his films as well as for the controversial elements he dares to confront. They are indeed highly personal works that explore the self in "lay it all out there" fashion, but, as Phil Hall wrote in Film Threat, "unlike irritating one-note navel-contemplators like Henry Jaglom, Zahedi's films are rich with his extraordinary energy and optimism... even though his energy often seems to be channeled in the wrong directions and his optimism borders on delusional."

Whatever your take on Zahedi's films to date, he's indisputably one of indie filmdom's most maverick of directors, and a fascinating person. Now that he's resolved to let go of ever making his films "more commercial," Zahedi the artist (and philosopher, sex addict and actor) might only just now be coming of age. GreenCine celebrates the addition of some of Zahedi's films as Video-on-Demand titles with this engaging conversation.

Tell me about the project you're working on now.

It's a film called I am a Sex Addict. We're way over schedule and over budget. I've been working on it for three years.

Is it a documentary or a docudrama, or a mix?

It's a weird kind of hybrid. I talk to the camera, and I re-enact scenes with actors. And I'm using real documentary archival footage. It's a true story, but I'm using actors, as well as some of the real people involved.

When you appear as an actor in films, is your "character" different from your off-screen persona?

I try to be as close to myself as I can, to be as honest as I can. But it's hard. You're definitely trying to emphasize certain aspects of yourself, so it's kind of a weird mix of persona and non-persona. I'm not trying to do a persona. I'm just trying to be real. But there's an inevitable amount of "persona-making" that occurs in that effort, regardless.

Do you find that, with yourself or the other actors playing themselves, that the camera makes them act differently than normal?

Yeah, sure, the camera always alters them - but it doesn't just make it faker. It can also make it truer. It's like a distorting lens but sometimes that lens brings out something that's there already, but wasn't visible before.

Did you choose DV because it's more comfortable and easy to use than film, or is it purely financial?

It's totally financial. If I had more money I'd do it on film. I actually started shooting it on film a few years ago, but ran out of money and only had enough to shoot on video. We recently looked at some of the old film footage and it looks so much better. So we're actually going to use some of that in the film. But yeah, a DV camera is smaller and more invisible, but mostly it's just cheaper. I'm still trying to find the person who knows how to make video look as good as film. If you meet them let me know!

Video is so versatile - there are certainly things you can do with it that you can't do with film. Ideally you'd try to find something that has its own aesthetic and isn't just "sub-film." Julien Donkey-Boy looked nice. It was washed-out looking and very grainy. I thought some of the things that Hal Hartley did in Book of Life was the right idea.

Speaking of which, paraphrasing from your character in A Sign from God, are you really "not jealous of Todd Haynes and Hal Hartley for the reason" you think?

Well, if there's any rivalry it's purely on my side, not theirs. [laughs] I don't know, they both were at Sundance the same year I was and we were all at a certain point in the same group, and their careers took off a lot more visibly than mine. So I just felt a little left behind for a long while. But increasingly I've realized that what I'm doing is very different than what they're doing. It's definitely less commercial and probably less accessible. And I feel more comfortable with being who I am, and accepting that I'm not going to have as wide an audience as they will.

I seem to recall you saying that you didn't have the greatest Sundance experience. What was disappointing about it?

I'm always having these salvational strategies in my life, like, "If only this would happen then everything would be okay." And one of those at a certain time, was Sundance. And I think that's true for a lot of filmmakers, because so much can happen there. It's like winning the lottery; it can change your life. It almost never does, but it does sometimes. So I think I just had this salvational thing around it - "I finally arrived" - and then, you know, you really haven't, you just happened to be at Sundance for a few days.

Any thoughts on how new technology - DVD and computers - may affect how you put out your films, and how people watch them?

I think DVDs are having a big affect. I remember I once saw this documentary about the band Half Japanese, The Band Who Would Be King, and in it [singer] Jad Fair was sending tapes of his albums to all these different radio stations and people, trying to get them to listen to it. I thought that's really how you should do it. If your stuff is good, it'll get distributed through that system. I thought the next time I make a film I should make a thousand copies and just send them to influential people or people I like. With video it became more viable but with DVDs it's become even more so. You really can just bypass the theatrical distribution network, which is a killer for an independent filmmaker. They're like the devil - they block the gates and won't let anyone through unless you meet certain criteria, and if you don't go through those gates you go nowhere. And DVDs have allowed people to see films by much more obscure filmmakers. GreenCine's really a great example - they're creating an alternate network for a different subculture. People want to see these films, but before they couldn't because the distributors wouldn't let them, and the filmmakers couldn't show them for the same reason. So now there's another way around it. I think the technology really has made something possible that wasn't before.

How do you feel about people watching your films on their computers?

Ideally you want people to pay attention, but you can never control how people are going to watch your movies anyway. Any exposure is really better than none. If you write a book, people may use it for toilet paper if they want to, but they may happen to read some of it in the process. You can't really control what people do. You just put your stuff out there and hope.

I think it was David Lynch who put his films on DVDs without chapters at all, because he didn't want people skipping around scenes in the wrong order.

I think people should watch movies any way they want. When you make a film, you make it with a certain pacing in mind, including how long it's been on, how bored they'll be at this point and what's happened before it. But that said, once there was video you could no longer control how people watched it, how much they watched or where they started or ended. I know I prefer to watch DVDs over going out to the movies because I like to be able to stop it and get something to eat, talk about what I just saw, or replay a scene. It's much more empowering for the viewer.

This may sound trite but I'm genuinely interested: Who were some of your filmmaker influences? Filmmakers you like?

American experimental filmmakers like Brakhage and Bruce Conner. And Peter Kubelka. And I was hugely influenced by Godard. But I think Cassavetes is my favorite filmmaker. I also really love Ozu, Bresson, Tarkovsky. Lars Von Trier is my favorite contemporary filmmaker. I also really admire Harmony Korine, Ken Loach, Mike Leigh...

Mike Leigh has a process of putting his films together by collaboration with his actors. Do you do anything similar when putting together your films, in terms of improvisation?

Not really. Leigh has a theater background and his process really speaks to that. I really don't. I guess I'm more authoritarian or something, I know what I want and try to get people to do it. I'm much less collaborative with the actors than he is. It works for him but I wouldn't be comfortable doing that.

When you're filming, do you ever consciously channel another director, someone you appreciate or were influenced by?

I know Godard pretty well, know how he would have done things, at certain phases of his career. So there are times I may think, "Should we do it the Godard way or the other way?" But I'll usually try to find some new way that other people haven't done. Some of the early films, like A Little Stiff, had a lot of how Godard would have done it. Or not even necessarily like Godard would have done it but coming out of a certain tradition, and then trying to push the envelope of that and other traditions, Neo-realism and other things. But I don't really feel there's much of a tradition for what I do now. There are people who do things that are kind of close [to my work]. Alan Berliner is one who comes to mind - he made a series of personal documentaries. One about his grandfather called Intimate Stranger and one about his father called Nobody's Business. And then he did one about himself called The Sweetest Sound. He's very clever and inventive with using images and sound to convey things. I haven't so much studied his films as much as think, "Oh, he did that really well, I wish we could do something as well as Alan Berliner," or, "Something Alan Berliner-ish here would be good." And also a little Errol Morris. He does really great things, too. I just saw The Fog of War recently and have been thinking: I wish we could make my film more like this. So I guess it's more like osmosis.

Are you interested in the recent surge of reality and voyeuristic television programs?

Yeah, it is really interesting. I think it's a good thing. A lot of it is bad of course, but it's inevitable that something interesting will be alloyed with deleterious elements. But reality is where it's at, it's where people "live," it's what's deep and true. Our society has become increasingly fake. People's interactions are increasingly fake. Television is increasingly fake. And advertising is a big part of it. I think people really crave the genuine article. It's a really healthy impulse that people are more interested in reality than artifice. Reality does get alloyed with artifice but I think the trend is good. A lot of it is because of the technology - video has made it possible to film certain things that couldn't be filmed before. So there's been an explosion of people just filming their own lives and the lives of the people around them. There's a lot of bad stuff out there, but I think it's all to the good. It's like when people learned how to write - there's a lot more trash written, but a lot more good books written, too.

The technology's just starting to be old enough now where there are people who are adults whose entire lives have been filmed. I know some people who have hundreds of hours of footage of their lives. I don't - my parents never filmed me and I was born before video, so I have very little of that material to work with. But I bet there will be a whole bunch of films coming out that will encompass an entire life. And that's what films are great at, showing the passage of time. There was a film at Sundance this year kind of like that, Tarnation. And there was Capturing the Friedmans. It's definitely the wave of the future, because of the technology and the number of years it's now been around.

You brought some of your family members into your film I Don't Hate Las Vegas. How was that experience for you and for them, and would you incorporate them again?

I try to make films about whatever is most current in my life, or on my mind, or in my heart. This Sex Addict film I'm working on I've been trying to make for thirteen years. It was something that really occupied my mind for a long time. It takes awhile to make a film, and by the time you make it, you're usually already somewhere else. Which is both good and bad. But the issue that's closest to me right now is failure. It's something I've wanted to make a film about for a long time - coming to terms with your dreams not being realized. How that makes you feel and what you can do about it. And hopefully, how you can grow from it. Rilke once said: "The point of life is to fail at greater and greater things." But we live in such a success-oriented culture that there's almost no room for the lessons of failure. So anyway, my family isn't really that pressing to me right now. It's not where my head is at.

How did they feel watching that film?

My little brother liked it a lot. I think my father didn't really know what to make of it. Overall it was a good experience for everybody, but there was definitely some discomfort around it. I'm very embarrassed about my parents seeing my films, really.

In a way, your films are actually non-egotistical - in that you really lay yourself out there, warts and all. Is it hard to decide to keep certain embarrassing moments in when editing?

I definitely feel uncomfortable with things in all my films, because I just believe that what makes them good are those bits. David Lynch once said in an interview that all great films have at least one really embarrassing moment in them. And I try to make them as embarrassing as I can. The downside, of course, is that it really is embarrassing, but that seems a small price to pay for making a good movie.

It makes you more endearing to people...

Some people. [laughs] It also makes a lot of people really angry.

What sort of angry reactions have you gotten?

Well, I get hate mail. Very personalized. Some of them I respond to graciously, some of them I just ignore. It depends on whether there's any point in responding.

Is it from people who misinterpret what you're trying to say in the films?

Yeah, I think it's always based on that. And then a lot of people are just outraged at what they perceive as the solipsism of it. Some people get really angry about the drug stuff. Either they've had really bad experiences with drugs or family members who've been f----ed up by drugs, and then they feel like anybody who makes some drugs seem like not a bad thing is causing harm.

"It's a process of searching and flailing."

Drugs are one of the taboos in this country, and sex - and those are two of the things you're primarily dealing with. How do you feel about the way other American films have depicted drugs?

There have been really great depictions of drugs in movies, in various ways. I mean I thought Contact, which is not one of my favorite films, had an incredible drug sequence, when she meets the aliens - that's totally like a drug trip! Whoever made that had to have tripped, it was such an accurate evocation of the experience of tripping. The sudden shifts, and the bliss.

Drugs have been very helpful to me in my life, but I'm only interested in hallucinogens. I'm not into heroin or anything addictive. I can see why people are down on addictive drugs. I don't drink or smoke or anything. But hallucinogens get a really bad rap in this culture, and yet they're an effective way of attaining spiritual insights. So I think that part of the equation needs to be spoken.

I was interested in the way you depicted hallucinogenic experience because I once had a strange, interesting trip that I tried to write about, but I had a really hard time recapturing what the experience was like. Writing is probably even harder than film, but I thought you captured the experience well in I Was Possessed [by God]. After you watched the film did you feel it was close to how it actually felt for you?

Well, no. I mean it's impossible to film a drug trip. It's such an internal experience. I've been making the same film for years of tripping and filming it; every year I'll do a drug trip and then I'll film it. It's been going on for ten years now for a film I want to do about drugs. But every time I think, "I've finally captured it, this is it." And people will see God, or whatever was so clearly visible to me as it was happening - and then I look at the footage and it looks like a crazy person gesticulating wildly. I'm always really disappointed. So I actually don't think I do capture them very well, but think there's something that comes across in the physical seeing that is valuable. But it's just a fraction of what's going on.

Did you see Terry Gilliam's trippy Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas?

I didn't, no. But I was thinking of [Finn Taylor's] Dream With the Fishes - there's a very well-done drug scene in that film. And there was a scene in Go that was pretty good, where the cat's talking! [laughs]

Do you go back and watch your old films?

I don't. I don't like watching them. Well, occasionally there'll be a screening, and if I haven't seen that film in a while, I'll watch it just to see how it holds up.

How do you feel you've changed as a filmmaker? Have you come into your own?

A lot of people still think of the first, A Little Stiff, as my best film. I like it, but it's my least favorite because it's the furthest from my current preoccupations. Do I get better, do I get worse? I don't know. I try not to repeat myself too much, try to do new things. With the new film, I've been trying a lot of new things, and some of them don't work very well because I've never tried them before and don't know how to do them. It's a process of searching and flailing. That's why it's taking so long. I know how to do A Little Stiff and could make another film like that pretty easily, using little tricks to make it work and make it easy, or to deal with limitations. But I don't want to do that twice.

Are the "new things" you're talking about technical things?

Yeah. A Little Stiff was done entirely with master shots. One way to deal with the fact that you don't have dollies and therefore can't move the camera very smoothly is to not move it at all. You just set it down somewhere and let the actors move. And it works - as long as you make that your style. It comes out of poverty, but it works. Then you also avoid continuity issues and sound editing issues. And if you have people play themselves, then you avoid certain kinds of "acting issues" where you have people not playing the character properly. So there are things you can do to really minimize the downside of not having much money or experience.

I was interested in the piece you did for the Underground Zero film, particularly because it confronted a lot of the issues without being direct about it. Have you thought about doing any other pieces about 9/11 in the three years since?

I did that piece because I was really angry at the media and fearing World War III. I do think that the personal is political and that's what that film is trying to say, and my other films are getting at the same basic problem in their own ways - just not as overtly.

How did the class react to that piece? Did you ever go back and watch it with them?

The class actually ended before the film was finished so I was never able to show it to them. So I don't really know how they reacted. I've heard different stories, that some people really liked it, and some didn't.

Did any of them write to you?

I got a few nasty anonymous letters and emails.

Are you going to collaborate with Jay Rosenblatt on anything?

I would like to. I like working with him and we've been talking about doing something together for a long time. But I've been so busy. Anyway, it's on the table.

I enjoyed listening to the commentary that you and Greg Watkins did on A Sign From God's DVD - you guys sounded like you were having a good time and I picked up a few things.

We did that on the fly in one session because it's really expensive to rent the studio time. You just kind of do it and then regret it later, thinking, "Oh I should have said this!" or should have said that. But [commentary] really is an art form all its own. I think for my next one I'm really going to take the time to really think it through and do different takes and try to construct it more rigorously. It's a lot more work but worth it because it's there forever. I'd like to do commentary for all my films. That's in the works, too.

Do you remember hearing any DVD commentary you liked on other people's films?

I remember thinking the Trees Lounge commentary by Steve Buscemi was great, very down to earth and unassuming. Scorsese's commentary on The Last Waltz DVD is fascinating. Everything he says is fascinating.

So you're not going to do "the all-midget Little Women"? That was one of your pitches in Sign from God.

I'd like to. They have these annual little people conventions and this year's is in San Francisco, so I'm going to try to go and come up with a script based on what I see.

The pitches that you made in that scene, it was hard to tell whether the people you were pitching to knew beforehand what you were going to pitch, and then they laughed. Did they know?

No, they didn't. That's why they kept laughing. We thought we'd surprise them and let them react spontaneously. It works in the scene. It's kind of how it really was, where they really did laugh and then passed on every single idea. It was based on a real pitch session I had with American Playhouse, after I got a little attention from A Little Stiff. It was right after the First Gulf War and they were trying to do things on "Arab subjects." Because I'm of Middle Eastern descent, they asked if I had anything that might fit. So I went into their New York office with Greg Watkins, my collaborator, and told them all my ideas, and none of them fit at all. I think they were looking for more PC stories about, say, an Arab family with children who are getting picked on in school by other kids calling them names, and how they deal with racism, and of course, there's a well-meaning principal and a lesson learned by the bullies. You know, American Playhouse kind of stuff.

Could you ever conceive of doing a film that was farther removed from your reality? More fictionalized, or even a genre piece?

Yeah, I mean if somebody plopped a bunch of money down and said "Make (X)" I would do it - for the pleasure of exploring something different and, frankly, because I'd need the money. But in the absence of money, the things I naturally gravitate towards are the things that I do. And it's so hard to make a film that you really have to be excited by it. Money can excite you, or obligation can excite you or force you to do something. But as no one's made any offers, I'm just making the films that excite me. I've struggled with this a lot - I realized if I made more fictional-type stories I'd probably be doing better career-wise. And part of me really would like to and aspires to that. But when I get down to it there's always something within me that subverts everything and de-commercializes it.

Godard did Alphaville which was "science fiction" but more purely Godard...

Yeah, he's somebody who can't make a normal movie. And God bless him. He'd be a more popular filmmaker if he could, but those aren't the films he wants to make, or that he can make. He doesn't get excited by the same old narrative strategies. I'm starting to realize I'm not Hal Hartley or Todd Haynes. Both of them do their own thing. They have their own style - Hartley's style is a little more recognizable, whereas Haynes can straddle a broader spectrum of styles - but they're both true to themselves and are both really interesting filmmakers. But them being true to themselves is more accessible to most audiences than me being true to myself.

Some people don't find Hal Hartley's work very accessible either.

Right. But he's still more accessible than I am. The numbers prove it, I think. His films have made X and mine have made Y.

What about Alexander Payne? I know you had a small role in his first movie - would you want to work with or for him?

I knew him from film school at UCLA. I like him and what he's doing. It's not the kind of thing I would do. He has to make some compromises, he's trying to do good things within the system. I respect that. He's not somebody I feel especially close enough to cinematically to collaborate with. Except maybe we'd do drugs together.

I have this other film project called Tripping With Caveh. The idea is like Fishing With John, but instead of fishing, I'd trip with celebrities. I just did the first one, where I tripped with Will Oldham [singer from Palace Brothers, etc]. When I'm done putting that together I'll send it to a bunch of people and ask them if they want to be in the series.

I like it. And you, er, see this being on cable TV, or distributed on DVD?

I'd love to see it on TV but I can't imagine anybody showing it. I don't think television's ready for it.

Who else would be on your wish list for that series?

Everybody I like. I'd love to have Harmony Korine on it. I was reading an article about Charlie Kaufman and I was thinking he'd be an interesting person to trip with.

Yeah, although with him it's probably kind of redundant.

Hmm. I like Spike Jonze a lot, too. He's really great. And I heard Bill Murray trips - he'd be great.

I'd pay good money to see that.

Yep, me too.

It is October 4, 2003. I am watching a small crew prepare a classroom in St. John's Presbyterian Church in Berkeley. Caveh Zahedi is restaging an all-male Sex Addicts Anonymous meeting — the last scene for his new feature film, I Am a Sex Addict. Empty chairs form a large circle with a Sony PD-150 camera at the center. The wiry-framed Zahedi is behind the teacher's desk discussing camera angles with his friend and frequent collaborator, Greg Watkins. The "actors" stroll in. They are Zahedi's friends and colleagues: filmmakers, editors, sound designers, a radio producer. Zahedi reminds them that they are to ad-lib, drawing on personal experience as much as possible. On the walls, colorful illustrations of Ancient Greek battleships and hoplite shields dwarf a "Celebrate Girls" poster from another era. As the actors practice the obligatory twelve-step "Hi Caveh" in unison, it occurs to the cynic in me that this scene is telling. Four thousand years of Western Civilization has brought us from the bronze-covered battering ram on the wall to a group of men in a third-grade classroom discussing their inability to control their sexual appetites. As Zahedi fingers his new wedding ring and talks about how his fascination with prostitutes began, I realize he is engaged in a very sincere attempt to address this history through his personal experience. He continues long after the camera stops rolling, his audience enthralled. "I was walking down the street in Paris when I saw a prostitute. There was something about her — she was wearing this transparent blouse. It reminded me that I was pretending to be someone I wasn't. A nice guy with all these dark secrets."

For anyone who has met the wide-eyed Zahedi, it's hard to imagine him pretending to be anything that he is not. Solemn and restless, but almost childlike in his directness — this unadorned, uncensored quality is what makes his autobiographical films so watchable. His work is pervaded by an unabashed willingness to be vulnerable on camera. Some may find his films narcissistic and self-indulgent. However, many, like Joel Shepard, Film/Video Curator at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, find them inspiring. "I think Caveh is trying to express something very basic in himself that most humans can relate to — a sense of what consciousness is, and a kind of existential sense of what it is like to be alive on this planet." In 2002, Shepard chose Zahedi to be a Wattis artist-in-residence at the Center and believes he is poised to become a major international filmmaker.

Zahedi and Watkins co-directed their first feature-length film, A Little Stiff, while in graduate school at UCLA. It screened in competition at Sundance in 1991. The film re-enacts Zahedi's crush on an art student, and, in a risky venture typical of their work, the film uses the actual people involved instead of actors. Its black-and-white images, static wide shots, and long takes create a lyrical naturalism as Zahedi's obsession with the unresponsive Erin builds. The film evinces an unmitigated trust in its actors' ability to carry a scene and is devoid of the heavy-handed symbolism and overworked plots favored by so many first-time directors. Ray Carney, Cassavetes scholar and professor of American Studies and Film at Boston University, has devoted a chapter to Zahedi in his forthcoming book, The Real Independent Movement: Beyond the Hype (www.cassavetes.com). In a telephone conversation with me, he praised A Little Stiff for "its Bressonian austerity, in which a simple object, a door ajar, or the way Caveh changes his grip on an ivy clipping can convey a colossal emotional event." Poignant and dryly funny, the film contains many seeds of the pair's later work: the blending of narrative and documentary, the filming of true and unflattering chapters from Zahedi's life, and the mystical belief in some sort of grand design in the universe.

Zahedi's 1994 solo project I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore, is a delightful gamble, if not a sucker's bet. Zahedi sets up the premise: taking his father and estranged half-brother on a road trip to Las Vegas with the intention of plying them with ecstasy in order to get closer to them. Yet he leaves the rest unscripted — a bold move considering it was shot in 16mm, not video. The film, he tells us onscreen, is an attempt to prove the existence of God. He will eschew directing, shoot reality, and have faith that God will take care of the rest. And it works. For example, a roll of film was accidentally loaded into the camera twice, serendipitously creating a hallucinatory double exposure during the ecstasy experience. His small crew has a visible presence in the film and the dynamics of movie-making become part of the story. The film works on multiple levels, calling into question the camera's ability to capture reality and leaving us to ponder the relationship between documentary and fiction, truth and perception.

Zahedi's spiritual experiences with hallucinogens became the subject of his next film I Was Possessed by God (2000). The short features long takes of Zahedi on a mushroom trip, writhing in bed and possibly channeling voices from some universal subconscious. In the Bathtub of the World (2001), a video diary shot over the course of a year, shows him shaving his head to stimulate hair growth, fighting with his girlfriend, and lamenting that he's run out of ideas. Most recently, Zahedi's contribution to a compilation of films about 9/11, features Zahedi teaching a class at the San Francisco Art Institute two days after the collapse of the Twin Towers. The World Is a Classroom (2002) documents the real-life battle of bruised egos suffered when Zahedi tried to get his students to loosen up and move around the room. The confrontation between Zahedi and a student quickly escalates into an unproductive stalemate, until a round of "diplomatic" talks diffuses the situation.

The ideas of French film critic André Bazin clearly inform Zahedi's work. In Richard Linklater's 2001 animated feature Waking Life, Zahedi appears, extemporizing on Bazin's notion that while literature's strength is telling stories, the power of cinema is in reproducing reality. In Zahedi's interpretation of the Christian Bazin, reality is God, and, in framing reality, film has a unique ability to render the seemingly mundane moments of our lives holy. In his work, Zahedi takes Bazin a step further. Rather than aiming to reproduce reality as faithfully as possible, he experiments with relinquishing directorial control. He films reality, taking his own experience as the best possible source of material. Yet, Zahedi does not really help us filter through this material. He is an unreliable narrator, either stoned or too emotionally involved to offer an objective report on the action. Because of this approach, his films stay with you, as days later you find yourself still contemplating their ambiguities.

Zahedi screened a work-in-progress cut of I Am a Sex Addict at the recent Film Arts Festival of Independent Cinema. No chronicle of saturnalian delights as the title suggests, I Am a Sex Addict is rather a critique of the self, filled with dread, misgivings, and neurosis. It may be the most personal and embarrassing confession committed to celluloid. Standing in the backroom of the hall where he is about to be married to his girlfriend of six years, Zahedi describes his addiction to sex with prostitutes, which began in his early '20s, and his twelve-step recovery. He is expert at culling wonderfully awkward and intimate moments from his life. For instance, Zahedi is in a hotel room with a prostitute for the first time. As she methodically cleans him below the frameline, he turns to the camera — a man with his pants around his ankles, looking terrified and confused. Such moments engender a tenderness and empathy for the character. At other times, he comes off as an insensitive lout who can only see his own immediate self-interest. There's a lot of bickering and a lot of banging. While most of the sex is rote and played for laughs, Zahedi's orgasms during a series of blow-jobs are discomfiting in their excess and contrast with the sanitized and ritualized sex act usually depicted in mainstream movies. Provoking a mixed reaction to his character from the viewer is quintessential Zahedi. Carney finds this strategy admirable: "What a wonderful place to get your work to as an artist — one where the viewer does not quite know how to react. It forces us to stay open."

Like his previous work, I Am a Sex Addict reflects Zahedi's deep ambivalence toward narrative, and is an ambitious attempt to find a new form that can accurately capture human experience. But here his story is told in retrospect. With a mock-instructional format laying out the psychology of addiction and guiding us through dramatic reenactments of his past relationships, he has become a reliable narrator. His experience has been fully processed, and with the ironic telling of past events, little is left unarticulated or unresolved. At the time of our conversation, Zahedi is in the editing stage, struggling with this aspect of the film. "What I like about my films is that they usually give the viewer a lot of room. I feel like I erred a little bit on this one by trying to get it the way I wanted it, but yeah, I had a very specific thing I was trying to convey. It's a weird balance between getting what you want and letting it be. Now my task is to let it breathe more." He is contemplating opening up the narrative by combining it with the parallel story of making the movie. "There were all kinds of things that happened on the set that involved sexuality and power, manipulation. These seemed to me like interesting refractions of the other story."

Looking back on his motives for making the film, Zahedi says, "Something had happened to me that was universal and painful, and I felt like this is why it all happened, so I could verbalize it." The Amer-ican-born son of Iranian immigrants, he takes on his parents' past as well, "I think that the culture of my parents is a very unenlightened culture, sexually. I think I inherited some of that just from being their kid, but I also inherited it genetically. I felt like I was trying to redeem something that was very ancient and old in history." Zahedi is also interested in addressing the Puritanism of contemporary American culture. "I really want to explain sex addiction to people who don't get it and are judgmental about it. It's really obvious with public figures, like with the Monica Lewinsky thing, where people are like, 'he's [Bill Clinton] an asshole for doing that.' No one ever said, 'well, he's obviously got some pain that isn't being addressed here.' There was no empathy in the public eye."

Given these imperatives, I Am a Sex Addict was written initially to reach a wider audience than his experimental work. Zahedi conceived the film as a conventional, dramatic narrative shot in 35mm. He spent six years after completing the script in 1993 seeking a modest $2 million budget. He succumbed to the insistence on the part of potential investors that he find recognizable actors to play himself and the other major roles. Zahedi played the game, and the actors he approached either passed on it or never responded. He nearly gave up. But in 2001, he decided to forge ahead with an initial donation of $50,000. Settling for shooting digital video on a smaller budget, Zahedi had to revise the form. "It forced me to make it more experimental, which I am glad about. It's truer to my own aesthetic." In Brechtian fashion, the dramatizing of past events in I Am a Sex Addict is interrupted with second takes, actors forgetting their lines, and Zahedi breaking character mid-scene to address the viewer.

I Am a Sex Addict is also more humorous than Zahedi's previous work. Yet, Zahedi is also aware that his playful narration works to minimize character psychology, and, in effect, the ironic distance is somewhat at odds with the serious content of the piece. "I suffered a lot in that period, and I am not sure that comes across in the film yet. It's hard because you are always trying to make people laugh, keep them entertained, and then at the end, they're not going to buy [the epiphany] because you have sent them down this other path." These issues are difficult for any director working with both form and content of any complexity. Even tougher for one making autobiographical work, in which the script is deeply personal.

For Zahedi, the process of making the work is as important to him as the final outcome. He says dealing with frustration, humiliation, and his own investment in perfectionism during the making of the film has been incredibly painful but also productive. "It is very scary for me to make this film because I want to make 'the' great film, and it's hard to make this film perfect. It's quite possible that it will always have these essential flaws, but I feel like I am a better person for being able to do it anyway."

Few mental illnesses elicit laughter, but sex addiction comes close. Tell a friend that you have a problem with sex, and he's likely to say, "Yeah, me too: My problem is I can't get enough." But for millions of Americans -- experts put the figure at 5 to 8 percent of the U.S. population -- sex is as much a destructive force as alcohol, drugs, or gambling. Like other addicts, these people are powerless to stop acting out, compulsively driven to engage in one-night stands, extramarital affairs, voyeurism, or exhibitionism. In the case of Caveh Zahedi, the problem is visiting prostitutes.

Zahedi, an acclaimed local filmmaker, doesn't fit the sex addict stereotype of a leering man with trembling hands. He's as thin as a rail, with a shy, toothy grin and a welcoming manner. When he speaks, he fixes his listener with a steady gaze, as if he were trying to communicate his every thought telepathically.

Such a need for communication makes sense in light of his career. Over the past decade, Zahedi has become an icon of autobiographical underground cinema, a figure both heralded for his bald honesty and criticized for his unwavering self-obsessiveness. In his first feature, A Little Stiff, he re-created a past love triangle in which the woman he was infatuated with wanted nothing to do with him. In his second film, I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore, he took his real-life father and surly half brother on a trip to Nevada on Christmas Eve and plied them with drugs and money in the hopes of capturing art. Last year's documentary In the Bathtub of the World was Zahedi's most revealing work yet, chronicling 12 months of crying jags, drug trips, and odd dance moves.

But the movie that's closest to Zahedi's heart -- as well as other parts of his body -- has yet to be completed. For nearly 10 years, the artist has been trying to make I Am a Sex Addict, the story of his struggle with prostitution. During that long decade, Zahedi watched his footing in the film world slip. Once regarded as a promising newcomer on a par with Richard Linklater and Todd Haynes, the 41-year-old is now considered a cult figure. I Am a Sex Addict may be his best and last hope for commercial success -- as well as a dangerous flirtation with his unhealthy past.

Caveh Zahedi had a relatively normal childhood, although he moved around quite a bit. Born in 1960 in Washington, D.C., he lived in New York and Los Angeles until he was 9, when his parents shipped him off to a Swiss boarding school. His earliest memory of anything sexual is from age 8, when his mother found out about his father's mistress and took Zahedi with her to yell at the woman. Zahedi remembers not being sure what sex was, but understanding that "my father had had it, and it was bad."

In 1977 Zahedi headed off to Yale, where he acquainted himself with the era's "free love" ideology, as well as the ideas of Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. He began making films while completing his B.A. in philosophy, after which he migrated to Paris, intent on working with his hero, Jean-Luc Godard. Wandering around the city, upset with his lack of cinematic success, he began chatting up prostitutes. "I was flirting with them every day," he says from the window seat of his sparsely decorated Inner Sunset apartment. "I would be going somewhere and would just get off the Metro to go talk to them. I'd be hours late for whatever I was doing."

His first official visit to a hooker was done on a lark. "I thought it would be something pleasurable," he says with a sheepish grin. "But it was a very negative and traumatic experience, and I remember thinking, "That was horrible. I'll never do that again.'"

Still, the seed was planted. A couple of years later, Zahedi returned to Paris, deep in the throes of an unhappy marriage. When he tried breaking up with his wife, she attempted to kill herself; rather than leave her, he procured the services of another prostitute. Soon after, he told his wife about the transgression, but instead of divorcing him, she just stopped having sex with him.

By the time Zahedi relocated to Los Angeles to go to film school at UCLA in 1986, his compulsive behavior had ballooned, in much the same manner as other addictions. "The thing about sex addiction is that it has an escalatory quality about it -- the more you do it, the more you need to do it," Zahedi says. "You always up the ante."

His marriage ended in 1987, and Zahedi continued to cruise the prostitutes on Sunset Boulevard, often for four hours a night. (Like many sex addicts, he also had a heavy drug dependency, needing to get stoned every day.) Eventually, he began cruising gay bathhouses and checking out more outré forms of sex. "At one point, the prostitutes weren't enough anymore. So for a time, it was transsexuals, and that seemed very exciting," Zahedi says, seeming uncomfortable for the first time in the interview. "Once you've gone past a point, the thing that you find a turn-on keeps receding -- like a mirage. It seemed to me at one point that there was no end to it."

Like many addicts, Zahedi functioned well in everyday life. In 1990 he even finished his first feature-length movie, A Little Stiff, although, like many of his fellow students, he needed a small push from the UCLA administration in order to graduate (he'd been there longer than the allotted three years).

Zahedi says he hit rock bottom in 1991, when he toured European festivals with A Little Stiff, which had gotten raves at Sundance. He traveled with his then-girlfriend, who'd told him she had no problem with his need for prostitutes. "I was trying to stop," he recalls, "but I thought maybe if I got her to watch, it would become this joint thing and wouldn't be a thing I was doing in secret apart from her. If I didn't feel guilty, I wouldn't want to do it anymore."

He took his girlfriend to a brothel in Germany, but the night didn't go as planned. According to Zahedi, the woman got raging drunk and caused a scene. "We broke up very soon after," he says. "I just felt like I was never going to be able to be in a relationship with anyone, and I felt like I would be alone all my life." But in thinking about the woman's drinking, he saw a connection between her need for alcohol and his need for sex. When he returned to Los Angeles, his latest therapist suggested that he go to a Sex Addicts Anonymous meeting. "It was really eye-opening. I totally related to everything everyone said, and I had a big shift in perspective in that meeting."

In fact, Zahedi felt so liberated that he decided to write a screenplay about his newly named addiction. His first move? Hire a prostitute to have sex with him so he could capture it on audiotape. Old habits die hard.

Sex addiction is a relatively new concept, a term coined by Patrick Carnes in his groundbreaking 1983 volume Out of the Shadows (which didn't really take off until Carnes ditched its original title, The Sexual Addiction). In his volume, Carnes explained how and why sex could become destructive -- and how a program based upon the 12-step approach of Alcoholics Anonymous could help to alleviate the problem. The book caused a sensation in therapeutic circles and led to the formation of numerous organizations, including Sex & Love Addicts Anonymous, Sexaholics Anonymous, Sexual Compulsives Anonymous, Sexual Recovery Anonymous, and Sex Addicts Anonymous. All the programs follow the 12-step guidelines, but some are stricter than others. SA, for instance, discourages both masturbation and homosexual sex, while SLAA focuses on "love addiction," defined as "a pattern of painful or obsessive romantic relationships."

Sex Addicts Anonymous, the program Zahedi joined, takes a more open approach, offering to help anyone -- gay or straight, male or female -- who wants to learn to abstain from "bottom-line behaviors" such as compulsive viewing of Internet porn, obsessive masturbation, peeping, flashing, or frequenting prostitutes. What makes SAA different from treatment programs like Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous is that attendees are allowed to use the thing that makes them ill. SAA members practice what they call "abstinence," differentiating between what is "bad sex" and what is "good sex" and then abstaining from the former while taking part in the latter. The philosophy has its critics, who compare it to telling an alcoholic he can have a bottle of beer but not a pint of whiskey, but thousands of people swear by it.

Many therapists argue that what SAA commonly refers to as addiction is actually compulsion, an "irresistible urge to perform an irrational sexual act," as Dr. Al Cooper, director of the San Jose Marital Sexuality Centre, puts it. In order for the illness to count as a true addiction -- listed as such in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the bible of psychological diseases -- doctors would need to show that it causes a permanent chemical change in the body. While there's no current proof that sex addiction causes a biological alteration, researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center are engaged in a five-year study of the electrical activity in the brains of self-proclaimed sex addicts to see if there is such a transformation. (Results won't be available for several years.)

Regardless of the controversy, the therapeutic community has embraced the model of sex addiction. There's a peer-reviewed medical journal called Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity: The Journal of Treatment and Prevention; an educational body, the National Council on Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity, based in Atlanta; and a growing number of in- and outpatient facilities across the country.

But back in 1991, when Zahedi attended his first SAA meeting, sex addiction was still relatively unknown. "What was kind of shocking was that there wasn't any vocabulary for [sex addiction]," he says. "The whole discourse among guys was a discourse of freedom or nature: Guys just need to do this."

Zahedi spent two years writing the script for I Am a Sex Addict, while attending weekly SAA meetings. Eventually, however, his visits grew more infrequent, until he stopped going altogether. "I thought I was cured; I thought I had a handle on it," he says. "The actual reality was the emotional turmoil was more than I could handle."

When he began shopping the completed screenplay in 1993, he got little interest. Written as an epic saga that followed him to Germany and Paris, the movie was budgeted at $2 million, a pittance by Hollywood standards but a heck of a lot for an untested director/star with what one critic called "an ugly face." Then there was the subject matter, which wasn't exactly Disney fare. "There was too much sex, it was too edgy, the ending was too preachy," Zahedi says. "The truth of the matter was I didn't have the experience to pull off a movie of that magnitude."

Instead, he shot I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore, an inside look at the dynamics among Zahedi, his father, and his half brother. Whereas A Little Stiff adhered to the standard "boy meets girl, boy obsesses over girl, girl falls for drummer" story structure, Las Vegas was an extended postmodern riff on creating art and surviving family. Throughout, Zahedi filmed himself during the kind of warts-and-all moments usually reserved for journal entries and late-night drunken confessions: apologizing to everyone for his insensitive behavior, complaining that his sound person (the ex-girlfriend from the brothel episode) had gotten drunk during the shooting and forgotten to turn on the tape recorder, and pushing his father to take a drug that could affect his heart's condition.

While Las Vegas received a critic's prize at the 1994 Rotterdam Film Festival and a prestigious North American premiere at the S.F. International Film Festival, it had many vocal detractors. A judge for the influential New York Film Forum theater reportedly watched five minutes of it before suggesting that the print be returned to the director -- immediately. The movie played for two weeks in select theaters nationwide and then disappeared.

"I don't think his work is for everyone," says local filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt, a friend and collaborator of Zahedi. "He makes a choice that he's going to offend some people, and he's going to push some people's buttons. I think he sees that as a function of art."

After Las Vegas, Zahedi didn't release another movie for six years. When he wasn't trying to finance his film about sex addiction, he was acting out his sex addiction, cruising prostitutes and strip clubs and flirting with strangers. As marriage No. 2 stumbled to a close, Zahedi headed back to Sex Addicts Anonymous.

But for all the help the program offered, Zahedi never fully bought into the SAA methodology. "I was a mediocre 12-stepper," he admits. "It didn't really make sense to me -- it made sense intellectually, as a concept, but I never really understood what the steps meant. One said to go to everyone you'd hurt and apologize. How am I supposed to do that? Everyone I've ever hurt in any way? Do I give money to runaway shelters? Do I give money to prostitutes on the street?"

In the end, it wasn't SAA that changed Zahedi's life. "I started appreciating the advantages and virtues of being with someone in a healthy way," he says. "I wanted it so much that when I did meet someone, I tried really hard to make it happen."

Zahedi met his current girlfriend in 1997, and he claims he hasn't been with a prostitute since. Although he gave up attending SAA meetings around that time, he borrowed many of the program's ideas to get himself straight. "Anything that's uplifting is an antidote to acting out," he says. "So I do things now that are uplifting, from yoga to meditation to making art."

Immersing himself in work, Zahedi shot a documentary, I Was Possessed by God, about a mushroom trip he had; acted in several independent films; and co-edited and co-starred in A Sign From God, a comedy of errors by A Little Stiff's co-director, Greg Watkins. In Sign, Zahedi plays a movie director who remains certain of divine intervention, even as his car, apartment, and girlfriend get carted away. In one particularly rueful scene, Zahedi meets with film producers and pitches several ridiculous projects, including a dwarf version of Little Women and a teenage comedy about Adolf Hitler. But even with a score by renowned musician Jonathan Richman and a screening at Sundance in 2000, A Sign From God proved less than a miracle at the box office.

Following a move to San Francisco in summer 1998, Zahedi recorded his magnum opus, In the Bathtub of the World. Filmed over the course of an entire year, the documentary distills Zahedi down to his essence, capturing all his neuroses and eccentricities at their most vivid. Adhering to director David Lynch's belief that the best scenes are the most embarrassing, Zahedi documents his tear-filled fights with his girlfriend, his bleary-eyed mushroom and Ecstasy trips, and his nervous upset stomach following an interview with alt-rock icon Frank Black. But Zahedi is interested in more than just titillation; he finds the poetic in the banal. At one point in the movie, he explains that he feels addicted to starting to read books, always hoping that the next one will provide him with the meaning of life.

"It's a really honest and really moving movie," says Joel Shepard, film and video curator for Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, which premiered In the Bathtub.

While the film may have shown that Zahedi was capable of wringing art out of a walk around the block, movie executives were less impressed. Of the 50 festivals to which Zahedi submitted the film, only five -- Los Angeles, Tiburon, Olympia, Athens (Ohio), and Infinity in Italy -- accepted it. The picture never received a full theatrical run, although it should be released on video by summertime.

"It's an indictment of the state of the indie scene when In the Bathtub is turned down by festivals," says director Richard Linklater, who cast Zahedi in his 2001 picture Waking Life. "There should be a fund to let Caveh do whatever he wants to do."

In the absence of such a fund, Zahedi's career may come down to a single film -- one that banks on the lurid appeal of the director's own sex life. For Zahedi to be mentioned in the same breath as peers like Haynes and Linklater -- not to mention his idols, Godard and John Cassavetes -- he needs I Am a Sex Addict to be a big success.

On a warm Saturday afternoon in March, Caveh Zahedi and his crew -- a cameraman, a sound recordist, a production manager, and a still photographer -- shoot scenes for I Am a Sex Addict. Due to a limited budget, the crew needs to film without permits in out-of-the-way places, where the process won't be interrupted by traffic or onlookers. Unfortunately, the red brick warehouses in the Bayshore District they've chosen to stand in for Paris in the early '80s sit next to a ship-repair factory. When the evening shift lets out, the workers dillydally by their cars, sneaking peeks at the cast, which consists of a half-dozen actresses made up to look like prostitutes. One woman wears a blouse as sheer as saran wrap; another sports shiny leather from head to toe. At one point, an actress in a skimpy red tube top and a wide-brimmed hat walks back from her car, her short skirt riding up to reveal her panties. It doesn't seem like the best atmosphere for a recovering sex addict.

"Who's next?" Zahedi calls. He films himself wandering by the prostitutes one at a time, asking them how much their services cost. While each woman has a different look -- haughty, sultry, uninterested, coy -- Zahedi shows no preference while in character, walking on without procuring any. But on two occasions after the digital video recorder comes to a stop, he lets down his guard, complimenting them on their performances.

At around 5 p.m., Zahedi's girlfriend shows up on the set. He kisses her hello, asks how her day was, and then returns to the task of re-creating his solicitations. She watches for a moment, before heading across the street to sit among the actresses waiting for their turns.

Zahedi asks one of the performers he'd complimented to change and go through a scene again. The woman wanders over to her car and slips free of her clothes -- right out in the open.

"Oh, my," Zahedi's girlfriend exclaims, "that girl's practically ... huh, well." She stops herself.

Zahedi lingers nearby, his steady gaze revealing nothing. Down the block, two workers from the ship-repair plant set up folding chairs to watch the filming. Apparently Zahedi's found a subject with broad appeal.

Last fall, Zahedi finally secured funding for I Am a Sex Addict, receiving $100,000 from the same individual who financed A Sign From God (and who wishes to remain anonymous). While the amount isn't nearly what Zahedi had hoped for, he's rewritten the script to reflect the smaller scope and budget, and has already shot a third of it. He's also altered the scenario to reflect the hard-won knowledge he's gained since 1993. He admits that he wrote the first version of Sex Addict as an attempt to out-transgress rivals like Haynes, whose shock-intensive 1991 film Poison was a favorite of critics.

"The first draft was kind of hostile," he recalls. "The humor would've appealed to angry twentysomethings. Back then, I had a kind of antagonistic relationship with the audience. Now I'm less angry or bitter and less interested in acting it out on screen."

As he continues to shoot, the pressure mounts. The deadline for acceptance of first-cuts for next year's Sundance Festival, a necessity for indie directors, is September 2002. Meanwhile, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts has chosen him for an artist residency in spring 2003, an honor that requires him to show a completed version of Sex Addict. (Past recipients of the residency have included filmmaker Charles Burnett, Village Voice critic Jay Hoberman, and documentarian Ellen Bruno.) Such pressures used to send Zahedi running for a woman in a short skirt and high heels.

To make matters worse, Zahedi continues to struggle with his problem, fighting his desire to procure prostitutes, visit porn Web sites, and flirt with strangers. He's given up smoking pot, but he hasn't cast aside mushrooms just yet. Junk foods like pizza, potato chips, and candy bars -- which Zahedi feels are as indicative of unhappiness as his sexual transgressions -- still sneak into his diet.

But his art thrives on drama; perhaps he needs to keep imbalance in his life. After all, how do you make a living mining your own life if you have little worth mining? Certainly, his problems with sex constitute the most scintillating plot line he's had. In the end, the difficulties that helped scuttle his career may now raise it to the next level. Of course, Zahedi's version of sex isn't exactly regular Hollywood fare -- but at least it's honest.

"Most people," Yerba Buena's Joel Shepard says, "when they make films about themselves, it's a bunch of lies -- and his aren't."

Caveh Zahedi, an independent filmmaker whose fans are few but passionate, can be summarized most simply as the Woody Allen of some parallel cinematic universe in which being awkward, funny, highly intelligent and neurotically confessional gets you almost nowhere.

This scrawny San Franciscan has made a career – although no steady living – of dumping his hang-ups, fears, lusts, romantic contretemps and intellectual passions before the camera. But while Allen’s on-screen self is a persona, a fictional construct, what Zahedi reveals is nearly unvarnished reality.

It is a brand of reality that, even though essentially comic and devoid of scenes of sex and violence, can easily violate a viewer’s comfort zone. That, say some Zahedi supporters, is why he is important – and why he has labored in obscurity and near-poverty.

“A Little Stiff,” an offbeat love story Zahedi co-directed with classmate Greg Watkins while at UCLA’s film school, was screened at Sundance in 1991 and earned a modicum of recognition. It was picked up by 16 film festivals. Two subsequent features, “I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore” (1994) and last year’s “In the Bathtub of the World,” were rejected by most of those same festivals – although a screening at the Los Angeles Film Festival did lead to “Bathtub’s” acquisition by the Independent Film Channel. The film, a video diary of a year in Zahedi’s life, will be screened Thursday at UC Irvine’s Film and Video Center. Zahedi will be there to answer questions afterward.

“Las Vegas” and “Bathtub” play more like quasi-documentaries than stories. Zahedi rolled the camera on unscripted episodes of his life as they unfolded. He was guided by his conviction that film’s greatest glory is its ability to show reality. Therefore an interesting and truthful story would take shape from filming real life.

“Caveh sort of obliterates the layer between fiction and reality,” says director Richard Linklater, a friend and fan of Zahedi’s since they met at Sundance in 1991. Linklater, the Texan whose films include “Slacker” and “Dazed and Confused,” says it irks him when he hears Zahedi’s self-referential style being dismissed as narcissistic.

“It’s not easy to find the universal in your own life, and he’s intuitively picking what hits a universal chord. When people say, ‘I don’t get Caveh’s stuff,’ I just smile. They’re not ready at this time, but I just know it’ll be there long-term.”

If a larger moviegoing public knows of Zahedi at all, it is probably because of his appearance playing himself in Linklater’s recent film, “Waking Life.” Into this strange dreamscape of a movie, in which live actors and their surroundings turned wavery, unstable and surreal through animated effects, Linklater inserted his friend to hold forth, unscripted, about the nature of film. In a much-remarked-upon episode dubbed “The Holy Moment,” Zahedi was seen expounding on the spiritual implications of film’s power to capture reality. Then he turned into a billowy talking cloud.

In his films, Zahedi, the 41-year-old son of Iranian immigrants, had bared flaws, feelings of inadequacy and episodes of questionable behavior that would send most people running for cover rather than risk revealing themselves.

His use of hallucinogenic drugs, especially psychedelic mushrooms, as a path to hoped-for insight and enlightenment has been a recurring motif. Perhaps the most disquieting sequence in a Zahedi film comes in “I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore” when he pressures his 62-year-old father and his 16-year-old half-brother to join him in taking the drug Ecstasy. Zahedi’s parents divorced when he was 8. He says that left him feeling abandoned and estranged from his father, an insurance salesman. The film shows his attempt to bond with his dad and his half-brother during a weekend trip to Las Vegas. Zahedi also conceived of it as a test of his cinematic credo: that filming a slice of unscripted reality could yield a coherent and involving movie.

“In the Bathtub of the World”(the title comes from a poem by John Ashbery) focuses mainly on Zahedi’s tempestuous relationship with his girlfriend, Mandy Field. Repeatedly, we hear her weeping in her bedroom after one of their arguments – and, repeatedly, we see Zahedi barge through her closed door with tape rolling.

Zahedi makes a multitude of admissions that don’t reflect well on him. He can come off as selfish, comically neurotic or just plain pitiful. He confesses for the camera that he slapped Mandy once (after she slapped him), that he feels unqualified to teach the college film courses he takes on to earn money, and that he feels compulsive about everything from sex to reading. He obsesses guiltily over his habit of starting books and never finishing them. He also allows himself to be shown deep in despair. “Something’s wrong with my life,” he tells the camera near the end of the film. “I don’t know how to live. I really don’t know what to do. I’m lost.”

“Caveh is daring to show himself as clumsy and embarrassingly off-putting,” says Ray Carney, a Boston University film professor and author whose specialty is independent film. He considers “A Little Stiff” one of the great films of the 1990’s and is devoting a chapter to Zahedi in his next book, “The Real Independent Movement: Beyond the Hype.”

“With the Woody Allen schmo, you are able to stand outside and say, ‘This is all a joike,’” Carney said. “In Caveh’s films, you really are in pain for the clumsiness of the character, the ineptness that is not laughed off. These films are comic, but in a very subtle way, where the comedy does not soften the emotion.”

Zahedi grew up in Granada Hills and won a scholarship to Yale, where he majored in philosophy and became enthralled with film. After graduating, he moved to Paris. His plan was to apprentice to his hero, French New Wave legend Jean-Luc Godard, and blaze a path as a politicized filmmaker. “I thought it would be easy just to talk my way into whatever I wanted I quickly came up against the brick wall of reality,” Zahedi said in a recent phone interview from the tiny San Francisco apartment he shares with Field, a literary magazine editor who has stuck with him despite his art’s intrusions on their relationship.

Ignored by Godard, he settled for film school, which he financed with student loans. Zahedi says he stayed five years at UCLA, accumulating a $100,000 debt that still stands, because he wanted to prolong his time making movies without having to face the economic exigencies of the movie industry.

Figuring that the everyday reality he knew best was his own, he made “A Little Stiff,” a reenactment of his unrequited crush on a UCLA art student. Actors would not suffice for Zahedi’s vision of reality. He not only cast himself, but persuaded the woman who had rejected him and the man who had been his romantic rival to play themselves. And he resolved to try to show himself as he was, without airbrushing the flaws and insecuritites.

“Our flaws are as important as our good qualities,” says Zahedi, a quietly intense talker with a reedy voice and the ability to fling terms such as “mediated” and “dialectic” without sounding pretentious. “To deny them is to deny a fundamental truth of the human condition. In our society so much is hidden that it creates a false notion about what it is to be human.

“People suffer under a false ideal that nobody can live up to. Whenever people have been honest about their own failings, it has made me feel it’s OK to have failings as well. It’s a weird, almost sacrificial thing, but by copping to these things, I’m doing it for everyone. Some [viewers] don’t forgive [the failings] in me or in themselves. But the more I do it, the more I feel it gives people power.”

Zahedi says his most embarrassing on-camera admissions are yet to come, in a film called “I Am A Sex Addict.” It will chronicle his compulsive visits to prostitutes and the resulting havoc on his relationships during his post-collegiate years in Paris and Los Angeles. Zahedi says he spent six years trying to raise money for the film and was willing to give way to a name actor if that would have attracted the $2-million budget he wanted.

He struck out and has settled instead for shooting it on video. The $100,000 budget comes from a Bay Area businessman whom Watkins, Zahedi’s film school buddy and still his frequent creative sidekick, befriended while studying for his doctorate in religious studies at Stanford. The same backer, Richard Clark, paid for “A Sign From God,” a 2000 release that Watkins directed. It featured Zahedi – as himself, of course – reenacting various career and relationship traumas he suffered during the early 1990’s.

Watkins finds little difference between the on-camera Zahedi and the everyday man. “His art is really about putting himself on screen.” Watkins thinks that “I Am A Sex Addict,” which they hope to finish by year’s end, gives Zahedi his best shot so far at taking their shared vision of reality filmmaking “over the hump” to a bigger audience, noting, “It has more promise for the simple fact it’s about sex.”

Zahedi admits that his lack of commercial success, even by modest indie standards, has caused him deep anguish – as do such continuing everyday realities as a stomach problem that has gone untreated because he has no health insurance. At one point, Zahedi tried to reflect his lot in a pseudo-documentary called “A Portrait of Caveh Zahedi as a Complete Failure.” In it, he played a documentarian interviewing people about Caveh Zahedi, a failed filmmaker who has given up and dropped out of sight. He shelved it when the cash came through to make “Sex Addict.”

“I don’t think he’s really thinking about quitting,” says Linklater, who gave a mock interview for “Complete Failure” during 1999, while Zahedi was in Texas to shoot his scene in “Waking Life.”

“I think he his compelled to create, which is the good news,” Linklater added.

“It would be nice if it were made a little easier for him. His body of work at the end of the day will be like a lengthy Walt Whitman poem. It will be a ‘Song of Myself.” It will be one of the greatest poems ever written, because it applies to everybody.”

For me, the central question in art is that of the ego. I suppose, for me the central question in life is that of the ego, but for me art and life are one and the same, so I will just talk about art for now.

The medieval view of the artist is one I feel much closer to than the Enlightenment view. In the middle ages, the artist was seen as a humble servant of God, doing God's work to the best of his ability. Starting with the Renaissance, this view gradually started to change. The artist became increasingly self-important as his faith in God increasingly diminished. The cult of personality replaced the ancient mystical cults, and the artist was increasingly seen as more than human.

This cult of personality can be seen in the way we view heroic artist figures such as Michelangelo, Beethoven, and Van Gogh, to name only a few. What we admire in these artists is their individuality, their uniqueness. But I believe that all art is "channeled," i.e. that it comes from God, however one defines that word. But the modern view of art is that it is the self-expression of a sui generis individual, a "genius" who is somehow more brilliant and talented than the rest of us.

The truth is that we are all manifestations of the genius of God. The artist is no different than anyone else except insofar as he is closer to the source of his Being. But today, the artist has acquired the status of a saint, and the culture of celebrity has become our new religion. Only instead of a panoply of saints, known for their virtue and good works, we have movie stars and rock stars as religious icons. These people are worshiped not because of their spirituality or wisdom, but rather because they enable us to project a more grandiose image of ourselves, namely that, like them, we too can be more important and powerful than we actually feel ourselves to be.

This problem of the ego in art stems in part from the fact that our self-worth has been severely eroded. To compensate for this erosion, artists have tended to emphasize their specialness, and to attempt to make themselves appear better than those around them. This is a big problem for the arts because if all art is in fact "channeled," then Art rests on a connection to the Source of all creation. The problem with the ego in art is that it destroys this connection to the source by positing itself as the source, much like the Satan figure in Milton's Paradise Lost.

This temptation is almost inevitable for the artist, as it was for Flaubert's Saint Anthony. But the greatest artists are those who resist this temptation. Rimbaud, who ultimately failed to resist this temptation and so ceased to be an artist before he died, referred to this aspect of art when he compared the artist to an anchorite. So the fundamental question for the artist, as indeed for anyone, is the question of the ego: namely, what to do about the existence of the ego? For the religious person, this question might be posed in the form of: what to do about the existence of the Devil? But I am not a religious person, so I prefer to talk about the ego.

Franz Kafka attempted to answer this question in several ways. One way was to not finish what he started (none of his novels was ever completed). Another way was to not publish what he wrote (most of his writing he never attempted to publish). Finally, he tried to destroy what he had written (he asked, on his death bed, that his friend Max Brod burn all his papers, a request which Max Brod fortunately disobeyed). But none of these strategies was sufficient unto itself, which is why Kafka did finish and publish some stories, and gave Max Brod the impression that he was at least ambivalent about his request to have his papers burned after his death. So what was Kafka doing?

I believe that Kafka was trying to resolve this problem of the ego in art: how does one make art that is not inextricably bound up with ego? And the simple answer is that one can't. Rather, one must engage with the ego in a dialectical and hopefully sly way, because the ego is exceedingly tricky, even if God is still trickier.

Maurice Blanchot, Kafka's spiritual heir and the most insightful commentator on Kafka's spiritual travails, argues that Kafka's strategy was a brilliant one, but that it must be seen holistically to be fully understood. For Blanchot, Kafka's art and life were of a piece and indistinguishable. In this sense, it could be argued that Kafka was the first performance artist, making of his life a work of art, and of his art a kind of exegesis of his life.

Blanchot inherited Kafka's dilemma, and solved the problem for himself in a similar yet radically different way: Blanchot addressed the problem of the ego in art by writing a work, Thomas the Obscure, that would pose a central enigma to the reader. The answer to this enigma would be found not in the work itself, but in Blanchot's life.

Blanchot has never allowed himself to be photographed. The fact that he has never allowed himself to be photographed means that he has no publically recognizable face. The fact that he has no publically recognizable face means that a question is posed by his supremely diffident relationship to publicity, namely: what does Maurice Blanchot look like? This question is echoed in his seminal work, Thomas the Obscure, by a related question: who is Thomas the Obscure?

In 1945, when the Nag Hammadi library was discovered in Egypt, the Gospel of Thomas was among the texts that were rediscovered. In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus asks his apostles the question: who am I like? According to the Apocrypha, Thomas was Christ's twin brother, and he is the only apostle who guessed the answer to the question, although the answer is never revealed in the text. But the answer is clear: you are like me.

The implications of this answer are far-reaching, and led to the complete annihilation of the Gnostics and of their sacred texts by orthodox Christianity. The Gospel of Thomas was one of these sacred texts, and was thought lost until 1945, when it was discovered in Nag Hammadi, Egypt. The astonishing thing is that Blanchot's Thomas the Obscure was published in 1945 as well, having been written immediately before the discovery of the lost Gospel. And yet, the lost Gospel was the missing piece that provided the answer to the enigma: what does Maurice Blanchot look like?

Blanchot has done an almost inconceivable thing by figuring out how to keep the ego out of the work of art in this way. The fact that he could not have known about the existence of the Nag Hammadi library text when he composed Thomas the Obscure can only be explained, it seems to me, by a kind of mystical channeling, or gnosis, on Blanchot's part. In other words, this information could only have been revealed to him.

Such revelation brings us to the question of the ego in cinema. Because the art of cinema requires the photographic reproduction of reality, Blanchot's astonishing solution to the problem is not an option for the filmmaker. In fact, the opposite strategy is required: a complex dialectic between celebrity (a quasi-inevitability) and anonymity (almost a spiritual necessity). In my own work, I have chosen to address this problem by making films about myself, and by consequently documenting the most intimate details of my private life. At the same time, I have employed one of the distinguishing elements of cinema: namely its unique relation to randomness, which one could also call Fate or Reality or God.

Another way of saying this is: how does one channel God in cinema? For me, the answer has been: by removing oneself from the equation. In other words: by surrendering will. But one cannot simply remove oneself from the equation, nor can one make a film without exerting will. So what does one do? A complex dialectic is required, in which will and the surrender of will work hand in hand, and in which ego and the repudiation of ego also go hand in hand.

All of my films have been an attempt to bring God back into the picture, so as to take my own ego out of the center of the frame. But the ego is a hydra, and keeps growing back. So how does one slay this self-regenerating dragon?

In I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore, I dispensed with the script entirely and trusted to chance (a.k.a. God) to provide the narrative of the film. I also enacted the dialectical struggle between ego and non-ego (between will and the surrender of will) by being both actor and director. These two roles were usually in conflict, but the embodying of that conflict was the true subject of the film. The result is a film directed by God, in which the ego self is not denied, but in which it doesn't have the upper hand either. It is an instance of God being trickier than the ego.

In I Was Possessed By God, the strategy was more direct and almost scientific. I ingested 5 grams (an extremely large dose) of hallucinogenic mushrooms during the making of the film. This obliterated my ego, at least ostensibly and for a few hours, and allowed God to "speak directly" through me. The ego is still there I believe, but it has been put in its place and, at least for a while, is no longer running the show.

With In the Bathtub of the World, my goal was to reveal the existence of God in all things. In order to do this, I resorted to randomness once again, and to a deliberate critique of "specialness." The film exploits the most democratic genre that exists, the home movie, in order to reveal the workings of the divine in all of our lives. I had no idea what would happen in the film, but I knew that only a subtle combination of will (demanding of myself that I shoot one minute everyday) and surrender (I would try to listen each day to "hear" what I was supposed to do that day) would lead to the result that I desired, namely a film that would also be a work of art, meaning a work that has in some way been channeled.

So who am I in all this? An Other, certainly. But also a specific Other: God. And also Thomas, Christ's twin brother, whose full name is given in the New Testament as "Thomas Judas Didymus," which means twin in three languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek). And also Christ, the link between God and Man, whom Thomas touches after Christ's death and in so doing finds himself transfigured, understanding that he is thereby touching his own death and that he is connected to his own divinity by death. And also Maurice Blanchot, whose face I have never seen and most likely never will, but which I know to be identical to mine. And also you, "cher lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère."

* the title is from Rimbaud

Forget that you're making a film for a moment, and come and read a little about Caveh Zahedi: filmmaker, philosopher, theosopher, sex-addict. An unlikely maverick figure (weighing in about 100 pounds, perhaps less), Zahedi is a kind of lonely arabesque in the California landscape, a dreamer, dressed in black, a man-with-camera "revealing himself to be an artist." He is the creator of two features, a drug video, and an accomplished video correspondence with experimental filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt. Looking over his complete body of work (only two features), one has the feeling he's made much more-he penned "I Am A Sex Addict" over four years, polished and revised endlessly, and there it sits, on the table, no takers, shopped about from agent to agent, vice to virtue, no hope of production-he's virtually abandoned the project. His predicament is much the same as how Jon Jost, another American maverick, describes producers as regarding his own cinema: "your forms are too extreme. The work is not commercial. There is no marketplace." No takers, even in a society where sex sells, is a terrible reproach, an absurd rejection.

Forget that you're making a FILM, as Bresson wrote in his Notes for the Cinematographer. In the cinema of Caveh Zahedi you don't have to act much, but just be.... The characters in Zahedi's films are not fictional, but true, and are acted by their real-life participants on a stage constructed by memory, revision, and angst over both. In his films the world is quite literally a stage in which the actor's and director's choices are not so much conceived as performed; not so polished as rough-cut into existence, stuttered, nuanced, depicting the constant struggle of making experience communicable to others. There's a kind of poverty in the way it's presented, too: as a kind of gift of, "Here. What do you think? Do you like it?" Otherness is strange, and when audiences tend to react negatively to his films they are more or less in consequence with the meeting of a strange-slightly extreme, staunchly uncommercial-sight.

Making the most of his surroundings, Zahedi's vision has less to do with ends as it does means. This is another way of saying that poets are born, not made, and when confronted by a man born strange, an audience has the choice of either rejecting or embracing "strangeness," or by fine-tuning their sensibilities, making a little space-the surfaces in Zahedi's films are always presented with a considerable humility, as "little," as small emotions (the kind that John Cassavettes said are most important and revolutionary), even though the experiences presented are of much more universal, broad, and profound significance than what passes for the "real" in movies today. That alternative voices exist-a truth that is acceptable in our record stores, on our airwaves, through recommendations from our friends (";Hey, have you heard...?")-for some reason does not extend to film in the same way. Cinema is a bit tougher to recommend, for reasons illicit or not widely acknowledged that have to do with our fantasy life, our spectrums of "known" circumstance. As a wise Irish actor once said of the United States, "All your movies have happy endings. There's no tragedy, there's no purgation.... Tragedy is a healthy thing, it cleanses one.... Without tragedy, by endlessly solving every problem neatly and wrapped up at the end of two hours happily, met with little sacrifice or the indifference of nature, the culture just gets sicker and sicker...."

The films of Caveh Zahedi are a tonic for a sickness of our time. In a modern America, a culture of irony, of not-caring, his films remind us of what is lost when all our energy is devoted to the cool and hip. In Pychon's phrase, "Be cool-but care," a lesson that too many of us just don't care enough about. It's unfashionable nowadays to care much about anything, and I think this is what's most unpopular about Zahedi. Like in A Little Stiff when he makes phone call after phone call to find out a girl's phone number, or when he listens to his headphones arms akimbo, or when he trips on mushrooms by himself, or when he attempts to drop ecstasy with his dad and brother in a Las Vegas hotel room. James Joyce said that history repeats itself, but with a difference; the films of Caveh Zahedi are about a surrender that repeats itself, eternally, but with this difference: that the sorrows and consequences of being are everything and nothing in the postmodern age.



OQ: How does cinema inspire religious feelings?

CZ: For me, reality is "of God," and insofar as film documents reality, it's basically documenting God. And in that sense it's religious.

And how does it seem to inspire religious feelings in both the viewers and makers?

Well, I think reality tends to be overwhelming, and I think by framing reality and reducing it, it enables one to see. This is really clear with documentaries, where when you are there experiencing something, it is actually not that interesting, but then when you see it on film, it's actually fascinating and funny and profound, and there's something there that elevates common experience. And it's not that experience is common, but we don't really see it. Film allows us to see it, by putting us in a position where we're not implicated, where we're not seen and we can just be open and vulnerable in a way that we usually can't be when we are in the world and being seen, and having to respond and feeling like having to defend oneself in that situation. Film helps bring down our defenses.

I've noticed that in A Little Stiff you've emphasized the physicality of life and the movement of bodies.

Well, in A Little Stiff it was more a question of another way of revealing character than drama. Normally character is revealed by a dramatic situation that sort of brings things to a head. But it seems to me that the body is like a fingerprint. I mean it is a unique expression of an individual, and everything about everything signifies that thing, and that tends to get short-shrift sometimes in the more Hollywood notion of what character is.

In your interviews you've talked about experimentation with drugs and how that can effect one spiritually, as a sort of spiritual quest, and that clearly has played a role in both of your films.

Well, taking drugs is scary, certainly, and there's always the fear of death in one's mind when one takes an especially large dose of drugs, which is what I tend to do in my films. But it's not just because it's scary. I mean, I could also bungee-jump if I wanted to be scared or come close to dying. I don't know why, but I've found that drugs take me to a place that I've never been able to access without-more wise, more awakened than any place I've ever been. And I find that space very valuable and instructive, and I've been fascinated by how that looks to the naked eye, to the human eye. There is definitely a disparity between how that looks and how that feels and I've been interested in exploring that disparity.

Falling in love and making yourself vulnerable, like your character in A Little Stiff or opening up channels of communication with loved ones with whom relations are strained like in I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore, is certainly putting oneself in danger, at least your ego.

I really believe in process art. I like art that is about process as much as the final product. I'm always trying to make films that, in the making of the film itself, somehow improve my life or relationships. In that sense, I'm always putting myself on the line. I'm not interested in a prefab kind of experience. It's always about testing and challenging and growing and seeing where something will take one. And the films all have that element, and when they don't, I just get bored.

And how about the danger of making oneself vulnerable?

Well, I guess that no one is really vulnerable, that, in the cosmic scheme of things, we're all safe and the truth can't hurt us, because it's benign. Of course I'm afraid of lots of things and I do feel vulnerable, but I'm always trying to learn not to be. And the films, among other things, are a kind of spiritual practice of being vulnerable and learning that one can afford to be vulnerable and nothing terrible will happen. The worst thing that happens is that people will hate you. That hurts, but it doesn't seem to really matter in the end. I think I've learned a lot about letting go of approval from making films that are vulnerable, that are more vulnerable than most films, and I try to make films that are more and more vulnerable. I mean, I think what I'm doing now is more vulnerable than anything I've done before, and they're terrifying to show people because of that. David Lynch once said that he likes films in which there is something really embarrassing, and I really like that idea. All my films really embarrass me a lot, and I can sort of tell how good it is by how embarrassing it is to me.

I'd like to read two different statements on the topic of how cinema "creates" memory. The first is by Jean-Luc Godard: "One could say television has 'un-taught' us to see. Television manufactures a few memories, but cinema-as it should have been-creates memory, i.e. the possibility of memory." I quote this because A Little Stiff is a remembered vision of an unrequited love. How does cinema "create" memory-or a virtual memory-and how, in the filmmaker, does it create a sense of nostalgia?

Well, I don't understand why television would differ from film in this regard. It seems to me that whether it's film or video, it's more about quality or content. The photographic reproduction of movement-whether it's film or video-captures time. This is what Tarkovsky says is the essence of cinema. And I think he's right; it is really capturing time, or reality, that is no longer present. And in that sense, it's a nostalgia machine, always capturing the past as a continual presence. And I think the reality is real-it's not fake; it is what really happened at that moment, but it repeats itself forever in a sort of Nietzschean "eternal return," and this gives it an aesthetic gravity that unrecorded time doesn't have. It's almost like it's denser, or the fact that it can repeat makes it have more memory, makes it more memorable, like an emulsion, but a thicker emulsion. So, yeah, it creates a totally different relationship with that record moment that one has to unrecorded moments. And that's why I'm trying to record as much of my life as possible, so that I can have a relationship to it that is more profound.

Harold Bloom said, "The experience of viewing anything, whether it be a motion picture of a street scene, or a twilight or a television screen, is the very antithesis, is the total denial of what it is that we are doing when we read deeply." How does viewing something in this regard represent an antithesis to the experience we have when we read a poem or a work of fiction?

I'm not sure what he meant exactly, but it sounds like he means the act of imagination. When you read a poem, you have a very personal experience which I think is very beautiful and valuable. And when you see a film or a television set or a sunset, you are actually seeing something that is not imaginary at all, but something completely real which has it's own parameters. It is a different experience to move toward something else and to experience the otherness of that thing-a divine thing, but an "other" thing-and to grow towards that. This is different than the eternal experience of the self, and a kind of at-homeness, and a feeling about who and what one is [that arises from reading].... And I think he's probably right. I prefer reading a poem to watching a film, personally.

Something that's being talked about and written about a lot lately is digital video. What are the possibilities of filmmaking in this newer medium?

Well. there's nothing really philosophical for me about this; it's just a very practical thing. It frees you from all the constraints of film. I mean, just practically speaking, you don't have to bend over backwards and kiss a hundred people's asses to be able to make a film and have to dilute your vision the way [film] requires when dealing with other people's money. Having done both of these things, it seems very clear to me that art isn't about pleasing other people. It's about doing something new that other people don't know how to see yet but will eventually learn to see. But if you are ahead, people aren't going to get it, and things that are ahead have a hard time getting financed. If you're interested in art, it's absurd, I mean, it's not possible to make art and get much support for it if it's truly cutting-edge art. And just in that sense it frees you up. And the great thing about digital video is you can edit without generation loss at home on your computer. So it's just much more radical freedom; people can express themselves more individually. Just in my own work, I've been so much more prolific and productive ever since I've gone video and have stopped trying to make it in the film world.

I have a friend who is not of the school that "more is better," but that if it takes ten years in a labor of love to put together a film (as long as it's in celluloid) then it will have greater integrity than anything shot on video, because of the flatness of the image and the poor quality that video provides. What would you say to this?

I'm less interested in the integrity of the image than the integrity of the artist. I mean, Hollywood movies are shot on film and they have no integrity whatsoever. Any Pixelvision film shot by an artist has more integrity than almost any 35mm Hollywood production. It's not about the medium-it's about the thought. I just saw a film last night called Don from Lakewood by Erik Saks. It's beautiful. It's shot on Pixelvision, it's astonishingly simple, and it's art. And it has no integrity of image quality [laughs].

What is the state of film distribution in the United States?

Well, it's not great. [laughs] i mean, it's really quite simple. Movie theaters require a certain number of people per night to make a film viable, so it requires a certain critical mass than, say, making a record album. Movie theaters just sort of cater to the lowest common denominator because they require a lot of people. It seems to me that as long as that's the case, people who watch movies in theaters won't see anything too fantastic, because the system will be against really great, innovative work. It happens occasionally, but it's a real uphill battle. I think video has been fantastic in this way, because work can be seen without 300 people having to see it on the same day in the same place, and I think the internet is a great thing, too. I see no hope, really, for old-fashioned film distribution to be viable for film or video art.

So you have hopes for the internet?

I do. I don't even try to get my films shown in theaters anymore. I just show them to friends, make videotapes, and send them out and let them find their way-the way people do with records and tapes. i think video has really helped people become more aware of film history, and therefore much more sophisticated as viewers, and I think that's a really good thing. People are going to become increasingly dissatisfied with low-consciousness cinema. I also think that the whole personal documentary movement has been pretty much a 90's phenomenon and that is a great advance; people are really turning toward the "personal" in a good way. I think documentary has really made the most progress, and fictional filmmaking has become more or less bloated by the financial constraints.

Where do you spend most of your time nowadays?

On my couch. Is that what you mean? I like lying down on my couch.

And what do you do when you're on your couch?

I meditate a lot. I like to meditate reclining and I try to tune into my body and try to listen for inner guidance about what I should be doing at that moment, and I try to do what I'm told. And just sort of take each day and moment, and not preplan things or have an agenda, but be in the "now." That's what I try to do. Of course, I fail miserably most of the time. I'm constantly trying to control my day and my life, but I find that when I don't, everything is much better, I'm happier.

How old are you now?

I'm 39.

And you made A Little Stiff ten years ago?

Yeah, pretty much.

How would you describe the past ten years? Have they all been spent on the couch?

[Laughs] Some of them were spent on the floor. The last ten years have been incredibly hard. I would say an incredible amount of frustration, but also a real humbling, has happened, which I think is invaluable. That is the way it looks from here: a big, frustrating lesson in humility.

Do you ever wonder if you've chosen the right path?

Yeah, all the time. Everyday.

I'd like to close with this comment that Coleridge said about choosing, about how you choose what most challenges you. He said, "You choose what finds you." Do you think you've chosen what has found you?

Yeah. Definitely.

And that you've chosen what is most challenging?

Yes! [laughs] Definitely.

Ox Quarterly © 2000

It is not uncommon for autobiographical aspects to creep into a filmmaker's output, but few cinema artists go to the lengths that Caveh Zahedi dares to reach. The 40-year-old actor/director has brought forth a rather unique oeuvre: every film revolves around his life.

But unlike irritating one-note navel-contemplators like Henry Jaglom, Zahedi's films are rich with his with extraordinary energy and optimism... even though his energy often seems to be channeled in the wrong directions and his optimism borders on delusional. In 1991, his first feature "A Little Stiff" (co-directed with Greg Watkins) recreated an unrequited college infatuation by bringing all of the actual participants in this one-sided love story together for the film. This unique collaboration premiered at Sundance and snagged Zahedi a theatrical run via Strand Releasing.

Unfortunately, Zahedi's career stumbled with his second feature, 1994's "I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore." This documentary, focusing on Zahedi's doomed attempt to foster family unity with his somewhat-aloof father and surly stepbrother during a Christmas trip to Las Vegas, won an award at Rotterdam and was picked up for distribution by World Artists. Unfortunately, it was barely seen, due in large part to a controversial sequence when Zahedi tries to ply the club drug Ecstasy on his father. Although the drug is never consumed on-screen (and actual on-screen drug use was never previously considered taboo), many exhibitors turned thumbs down on this little production and its American run consisted of exactly two one-week screenings.

The commercial failure of "I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore" kept Zahedi away from directing for several years, although he appeared on-screen in indie flicks including "Citizen Ruth" and "Treasure Island." Recently, however, Zahedi has returned to filmmaking with a vengeance, directing two more films (a short titled "I Was Possessed by God" and DV feature called "Video Diary," in which Zahedi filmed himself from January 1-December 31, 1999) and producing and editing "A Sign From God" (with Greg Watkins directing). "A Sign From God" played to positive feedback at this year's Sundance, signaling something of a comeback for this idiosyncratic auteur.

Film Threat caught up with Zahedi to trace his very, very personal approach to cinematic storytelling.

All of your films have an unparalleled autobiographical focus. At the risk of sounding rude, why do you only make movies about yourself?
I am trying to explore this thing called "life" as deeply as I can, and I feel I can do this most deeply by using my own life (which is theonly life I have any real access to). Put differently, I believe thatall works of art are autobiographical in some sense, and therefore why not be as direct as possible? It's not that I'm not interested in other people's lives - I am. In fact, my favorite literary genre has always been the biography. When I was a kid, I used to always go straight to the "Biography" section of the local library. I don't know why, I've just always been fascinated by other people's lives. Probably because I've always felt I needed a road map for my own life, and that other people's lives could provide this. So when I make an autobiographical film, it's not really as narcissistic as it seems. What I'm really trying to do is provide a road map for someone else. In other words, I'm trying to help.

It has helped me enormously whenever other people have shared with me honest and intimate details about their lives, and so I am trying to do the same for others.

Your first feature "A Little Stiff" played at Sundance in 1991. What was that experience like and how did the film benefit from its Sundance exposure? And how did that experience compare to this year's return to Sundance with the new feature "A Sign From God"?
I think my main experience at Sundance in 1991 was one of incredible disappointment. At the time, getting into Sundance seemed like getting into Heaven, but the experience of being at Sundance was nothing like the experience of being in Heaven (at least, as I imagine it). In other words, it was not salvational. The film got some favorable critical attention, and a small theatrical release from Strand as a result of being at Sundance, but my own experience of being at Sundance was a lot more like being in Hell. And I think it made me realize that filmmaking in itself would never make me happy. Which was very depressing to me at the time because I had spent the last ten years of my life doing almost nothing else, always with the hope that at the end of the tunnel there would be great happiness. But there wasn't, and I think there isn't.
This threw me into something of a tailspin from which it took me years to recover and from which, in many ways, I am still recovering. Which is to say, that ever since Sundance 1991, I have been trying to find a different path, one that would truly lead to happiness. And I don't think that giving up filmmaking is the answer (at least not for me). I think it's something much subtler, which has to do with how I approach filmmaking, and the expectations I have around it.
Which brings us to this year's Sundance festival. I had a much, much better time. Mostly because I was less desperate than I was nine years ago, and knew at a deep level that salvation would not be found there. Instead, I tried to just enjoy the experience, and enjoy the people and the community. It's not as if I'm totally "cured" of my filmmaking-as-salvation paradigm. I still fall into it frequently. But less so than before, and so I was able to have more detachment, and consequently much more fun. Hopefully, I'll just get better and better at doing this, and have more and more fun in life as time goes on.

"A Little Stiff" re-enacted specific happenings from your life by using the actual people involved in these events. What was involved in getting people to play themselves in re-enacting their lives and yours...and how much (if any) artistic license colored the recreations of these events?
In "A Little Stiff," the only difficulty in getting the actual people to play themselves involved getting Erin's ex-boyfriend to play himself. He was quite wary about being portrayed in a negative light (which in fact was my original intention), and it took a lot of fast talking and the promise of four hits of Ecstasy to get him to act in the film. But as we started to shoot his scenes, I grew increasingly fond of him and my initial intention of making fun of him in the film metamorphosed into something much more complex and affectionate.

As for the question of how much artistic licence colored the recreations of these events, there was certainly some artistic licence (I changed a few things around for the purposes of the film) but very little. My feeling at the time was that reality was ultimately more interesting than fiction, so I changed as little as possible and tried to bring out what was interesting or funny or profound about what really happened rather than try to second-guess what I thought would be interesting or funny or profound to some ideal viewer. In short, the goal in that film was to try to trust reality.

Many exhibitors refused to show "I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore" because of the lengthy sequence in which you present Ecstasy as a Christmas gift. How do you react knowing that films with excess and gratuitous violence have no difficulty finding screens but a small film in which people talk about taking one Ecstasy pill (without actually having the ingestion shown) is considered taboo for commercial exhibition?
Well, it doesn't surprise me. People shooting each other is considered fantasy, but actually trying to get someone to take Ecstasy in the context of a documentary film impinges on people's comfort zones. I mean, that's why I did it. I like to impinge on people's comfort zones, and I like it when works of art impinge on my comfort zones. It's just an æsthetic predilection.

"I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore" had only two brief theatrical play dates (a week in Los Angeles and a week in Boston). From an artistic and an emotional standpoint, how do you deal with the reality of a investing time, money and passion into a film which audiences may never see?
Well, I didn't deal with that very well emotionally. I became extremely depressed, and demoralized, and discouraged. Because audiences clearly loved the film. And yet it was a financial disaster. It took me a long time to recover from that experience, and my career (not to mention my financial situation) has never fully recovered from it. Quite simply, it broke my heart. But with all heartbreaks, time goes by, little by little the heart mends, and then one day you fall in love again.

"Video Diary" sounds like an acute professional commitment-filming scenes each and every day for 365 days non-stop. How did you psyche yourself up for such a project and did it progress properly according to plan?
I psyche myself up for things like this by an intuitive sense that I'm supposed to be doing this. It's a kind of sixth sense type of thing. And you're right, it was very hard, and no, it didn't always progress according to plan. In fact, there were days when I didn't film anything at all (I was either too busy, or uninspired, or I simply forgot). But I did manage to shoot something on most days. I have to say though that as soon as the year ended, I was incredibly relieved to be able to stop. In short, yes, it was an emotional and artistic strain, but also a great joy. In fact, one of the reasons I did it was as an antidote to all the waiting around that goes on in filmmaking. That is probably an even greater emotional and artistic strain.

God turns up fairly frequently in your films--He is credited as your co-director for "I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore" and is an eponymous presence in the upcoming "I Was Possessed by God" and "A Sign From God." At a time when the discussion of theology and the celebration of religious leadership is virtually absent from contemporary cinema, why are you bringing God into your films?
Precisely because I think it's the great taboo subject of our times. The word "God" sends many people running, and there is this great divide between those who use the word (usually people associated with conservative values) and those who don't. I feel I am trying to bridge that divide, because I think that the thing that is behind this word is precisely what unites all of us, and that it is here that we can be joined and undo the divisiveness and us-and-them mentality which is ultimately not a healing force in the world. And it is healing that interests me.
Plus, my own experience of going from an atheistic world view to a spiritual or religious one (and I would just like to say here that I belong to no church or institution or particular religious denomination) has been the single most important experience of my life, and I consequently feel that the spiritual question is the most important one that one can ask and/or try to address in this life.

" I Was Possessed by God" runs only 25 minutes. Why did you decide to make this as a short film rather than a feature?
I would have preferred to make it a feature, but it simply wasn't working as a feature. In other words, it would have been unwatchable, even for me, and I have a greater-than-average capacity for watching something that unfolds slowly. At 25 minutes, I find the film eminently entertaining (not everyone would agree), and I believe in making films that are entertaining. It's like if I were to have a conversation with you, I would try to make it interesting to you so that you would continue to give me your attention. It's the same thing with film. The difference in film is that I can't gauge your reaction as I'm speaking to you, so I have to make it for an ideal interlocutor, and that ideal interlocutor is usually my girlfriend (i.e. someone who is more or less on the same wavelength as me).

"A Sign From God" is an autobiographical story, but you gave the directing reins to Greg Watkins. Why did you decide to do this, and how does it feel to have your story cinematically helmed by another person?
Well, the whole thing was really Greg's idea, even though it was inspired by my own experiences. I used to call Greg up when I was upset (my marriage was falling apart at the time), in order to be able to vent and to get his advice, and he would always laugh at the stories I would tell him and kept saying that this would make a really good film. I was a bit skeptical personally, but I told him I'd do it if he got the money (not really believing that he would). And then one day he called and said he'd gotten the money, so we made the film. And of course, we collaborated on the film a lot (I ended up editing it), but it was really his baby -- it was his vision of life, not mine. As for how it felt to have my story cinematically helmed by another person, the truth is that it was hard for me, and uncomfortable, and I didn't always agree with his choices, and we fought a lot, but in the end I feel that he was true to his vision and to his sensibility, and that's what counts.
I like the film very much (just as I adore Greg), but I don't really feel that it's mine. Greg and I don't actually see eye-to-eye philosophically on the whole God question, so the film doesn't really even represent my point-of-view. In fact, the film mostly makes fun of my point-of-view. Which is fine with me. In my own films, I make fun of my point-of-view too, but not in exactly the same way as Greg does.

What new projects are looming on your artistic horizon?
Well, "I Am A Sex Addict," the story of my addiction to prostitutes is looming on the horizon. It's a film I've been trying to get made for many years, and it looks like Greg and I are going to be co-directing it in the Fall.

- If you are a prostitute and would like to reach Caveh Zahedi online, e-mail him at cavehz@earthlink.net and you can also write him about his films. "A Little Stiff" and "I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore" are available on home video from World Artists.

Caveh Zahedi has made two feature films--A Little Stiff and I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore. He is currently at work on his third project, I Am A Sex Addict. I interviewed him because I feel he is one of the most intellegent, honest and innovative artists in the medium today.

Mommy: Why don't you start by telling me about yourself, where you grew up, went to school, childhood traumas, etc?

Caveh: I grew up all over the place: Washington D.C., NY, France. I went to boarding school in Switzerland for a while. I went to high school in Los Angeles. I went to Yale and studied Philosophy. Childhood traumas? My parents got divorced. I felt unloved.

Boarding school in Switzerland? How old were you?

Nine.

And you went alone?

Well, my sister was there also.

And how old was she?

Ten

Wow, that's young! Did that make more independent or more insecure?

Well, both. I mean, I think in some ways it might have saved me. It might have been worse to have been home.

At your home, or at an American public school?

At my home. I went to an American public school later and it was much worse, a reign of terror. Junior high.

That's when people learn how to be asses, in 7th and 8th grade.

I learned how not to smile.

Why did you start involving yourself in film?

Well actually, in 7th grade, my English class made a film and I got to direct it. And I got really excited about it and I thought about it all the time. It was about the end of the world and, you know, it turned out terrible and I don't know what happened to it. That was the first thing I did. Then in college, I was painting and I was a political science major and I flet like these two interests were kind of at odds. Then one day, I think I was eighteen, I realized that film would be a way to do both. I got really excited and I wrote a manifesto which I sent to all my friends. I went and bought a super 8 camera at the end of the school year and I had just read Faust and I decided to make a film of it. I went to Europe that summer with a couple of friends and I shot the film all over Europe. I played the Devil and my friend was Faust and my girlfriend was Gretchen. And you know, it was terrible, but I thought it was really good.

How long was that first one? Was it sync sound?

No, it was silent. I think I put music and sound effects on it. It was thirty minutes.

A silent Faust.

Yeah, it was really bad. Then, I made this boring documentary about South Africa, just using stills and didactic voice-over narration. Then, I made this very naive nature film about running water. I just did all these sorts of derivative things. I made a film of a T.S. Eliot poem "Ash Wednesday," for which I borrowed a skeleton from the Anthropology department. Then, I got into Godard and I made a Godard-influenced film. Then, I got into Stan Brakhage and I made a couple of Stan Brakhage-type films. I basically just copied everyone I liked for a while there.

I want to talk to you a little about your relinquishing your role as director to God in I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore. You state in the beginning of the film that you want to prove God's existence by letting go of your own control. And I think ultimately you do; I think there are definitely moments where a celestial hand reaches in and makes things perfect. Particularly the moment where the film has been previously exposed and the cast is experiencing an hallucinogen and visually it becomes very hallucinogenic because there are two images on the screen and you're not really sure which image the sound is coming from. So for the audience, it is a hallucinogenic moment and it works perfectly, even though it was a huge technical error. Tell me about this and your relationship with God.

I believe in God. It's sincere. My relationship with God is derived from halluncinogenic experiences: that was my way in. I took hallucinogens a lot before I ever had a "God" period. But after a certain point, I started experiencing something other than what I had been experiencing before, which was, you know, the usual: incredible happiness and these great colors. But then, there was one experience which was really fundamental, where I saw God, I had a direct experience of God as a visible presence. He appeared as the face of a clock with the letters E=mc2 written on it. Then, there were other experiences after that that were even more mind-blowing. The first experience, on mushrooms, was pretty determinate, though--where I felt God approaching me--this love energy which was a billion, trillion, zillion times greater than anything I could even begin to imagine. I remember it coming closer and being just so completely blown away by it. It was like the sun, this heat coming toward you and you just begin to melt. It was this power of love that was something unimagined and I felt really scared and as soon as I got scared, it started to pull back. And I realized that the only thing that was keeping it away from me was my fear, and that God was there, waiting for me to not be afraid. And it was just a glimpse. I'm making a whole film about these experiences called I Was Possessed by God. It's about mushrooms and God and these possession experiences I've been having. But I can't do it too often for various reasons, like it takes a long time to edit and I've also been very broke. I'm a bit baffled about how to proceed with it.

(At this point, unbeknownst to me, the tape has run out. Caveh tells me that he feels his decision in I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore to let "God" or reality direct the movements of the film is what he is the most proud of and what is philosophically the greatest contribution of the film. We end up talking about David Byrne and Frank Black and the seemingly inevitable flagging of musical innovation that comes with age and security; maturity equalling complacency. Then, finally, I realize all this is being lost.)

Mommy: What were we talking about?

Caveh: God and David Byrne.

Oh, yeah. Do you feel like you could resign yourself to mundanity?

I feel like the challenges that hit you later in life are greater challenges. A lot of my work was created under these sort of artificial circumstances, you know, college and the kind of post-college freedom of not having to make a living, really. I made the last film on credit cards, and that's something you can only do for a little while before it all collapses on you. I was lucky enough to be able to eek two features out of that extended adolescence. And now, I can't. I have no money, massive debts. So how I proceed with my life can no longer be what it was. It seems really clear that in youth, you have this incredible grace and energy and that energy does dwindle. But that doesn't mean that there are not great masters who are old.

I think there are certain arts which are more conducive to maturity.

And I think film is one of them, certainly more than music.

Film and writing and visual arts. but music, pop music at least, does belong to youth. Well, what are you going to do? Do you have a plan?

Well, I'm just kind of making it up as I go along. I'm trying to deal with the realities of my life and the financial aspects, while being as true to the artistic and spiritual guides as possible and pray that it will all come out okay and I can die in peace.

Are you getting any encouragement, financial or critical?

Yeah, lately a few good things have happened. A Little Stiff was just bought by the Sundance channel. A little bit more money and a few more people will see it. I think gradually, posterity will be kind to those films.

And if you put it all in perspective, at thirty-five you are really young for the profession. Really, you're just a baby compared to most directors. How's your father?

He's fine.

What did he think of I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore (in which he and Zahedi's brother are featured)?

He saw it. He didn't really get it. He just hopes it makes money.

Is that what he expects of you?

Well, it's all he can really understand. It's the framework with which he understands life. My little brother liked it a lot, which is surprising. He went to a screening and people were laughing and he loved that.

Did you ever find out if your father actually took the Ecstasy?

Not really. I could never really get a straight answer out of him. He claims not to remember.

Tell me about what you're working on now, I Am A Sex Addict.

I think it's my most mature work, if I ever can get it made. I think it's the best thing I've done. It's autobiographical, like most things I've been doing. About ten years ago, I started becoming sexually obsessed with prostitues. And it became this huge problem in my life. I mean, all these realtionships were destroyed because of this thing....

You were unfaithful?

Yes, and I just could not stop doing it. And it took a lot of pain and destruction in my life for me to sort of get a handle on it and to figure out what it was all about and what I could do about it. And I guess, about five years ago, I started going to Sex Addicts Anonymous meetings. It really helped me a lot. The film is the story of my sex addiction.

Do you deal with it with the same sort of humor you've had in your other films?

Yeah, I do. I think it will be very funny. I'm kind of down on humor these days--I'm really into seriousness--but I think I can't help but make it funny. But I think it will be funny like a Cassavetes film is funny, more than like a Dumb and Dumber film is funny. Yeah, I'm trying to do it with humor. I think that's the only way I can do it so people won't throw up.

You must have an idea now of why you had this addiction. Do you want to talk about it? Am I prying?

No. I mean, that's what the film is about. There are so many ways to talk about it, psycho-sexually or Freudinaly or Jungianly but the way I think of it most of the time, is in terms of what I would call the Devil or the ego. I don't believe in the Devil in any kind of literal sense, but I do believe there's this thing in all of us that's attracted to what we consider evil. And this was just very attractive to me. It turns me on, to think that I'm sinning: to transgress. And for various reasons, I'm sure some of them childish, this was the way my destructiveness and ego manifested itself. It was really a high for me to do this. My father was very unfaithful to my mother. It destroyed my parent's marriage. So I knew it was "bad" and I felt I had to be the opposite of that. And I think that the schism became so wide that at a certain point, it was overwhelming. And it was this whole PC thing I had from college, being a good Marxist and feminist and all that, that you don't do that kind of thing. So, I went the other way and did justice to those impulses, but in a really extreme way. It had a healthy side too, an attempt to accept this thing in me that I'd rejected. But at a certain point, it definitely became addictive.

You say "sinned." did it have anything to do with your actual religious upbringing?

Well, I wasn't really brought up religious but my parents are both Iranian and I'm sure that had a lot to do with it. That culture is very puritanical and also very sexually unintegrated. In that sense, it was religion--not my religion, their religion. I basically started working on the film four years ago and it's been a really frustrating experience. I've never worked on anything this long and all these questions come up: Should I change this? Am I selling out? They want name actors. They want to change the ending. This thing has been surrounded by a maelstrom of Hollywood insanity.

Well, you've escaped that with the last two and I think escaping that long is amazing.

Yeah, it was. If the films had done a little better, I might have been able to continue to do that, but there's no money to speak of. I could be angry about it, but that doesn't really help. I think I just have to work in any way possible within the system, in America in 1996. And all the models that I love--Cassavetes, Bresson, Tarkovsky--they were coming from an entirely different economic milieu. So, I'm just really groping with how to proceed with this.

How to make concessions without sacrificing.

Yeah... I may be going too far, but as far as I've gone, I've never gone far enough. So I just go a little further and hope I don't turn into all those other guys.

Mommy And I Are One ￜ 1996

He's been called the Iranian Woody Allen by those speaking Hollywoodese. In fact, there is something reminiscent of the New York neurosis-meister in the way Los Angeles filmmaker Caveh Zahedi takes us on a cinematic tour of his own psychological bends in I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore. And, as with Allen, questions of faith and God and sex figure prominently in the maker's mind. The comparison, however, stops there. Zahedi's ultra low-budget, reflexive, vérité second feature shares little in the way of narrative strategies or production values with the Woodman's classic comedies. Zahedi, who clearly relishes being in front of the cameras, is our personal guide on an entirely contigent journey with his father and younger half-brother (plus a very forebearing three-person crew) to Las Vegas where he tries to achieve familial closeness by convincing his father and brother to take the drug Ecstasy with him. He also tries to keep convincing us—and himself—that a movie is actually taking place, even when someone fails to turn the camera on. Judging by audience reaction at the San Francisco International Film Fest, where Las Vegas had its North American premiere, Zahedi has, at least, half-succeeded. Many found the movie very funny and refreshing; others found it a humorless exercise in high-concept self-indulgence. Indeed, Zahedi is by turns a charming and irritating filmic guide. Amid mock-serious self-revelations and pop-funny social observations—he has a great sense of comic timing—Zahedi also reveals himself to be a somewhat calculating, even cold-heated filmmaker who can switch in a heartbeat from comforting a broken-hearted crew member to asking if that scene of comfort got on film. Zahedi leaves us questioning his sincerity perhaps more than he wanted, but to his credit he leaves such uncomplimentary bits in the film. Zahedi (whose first feature was A Little Stiff) was in town for the SFIFF shows and we asked Lisanne Skyler to talk with him for RP —Ed.

LS: In what ways did your budget for I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore restrict or enhance your filmmaking?

CZ: My budget defined the film. it was made because I had $20,000, and I had to think of a $20,000 film.

If you had had $40,000?

About the same. Now, if I'd had $300,000, I would have shot the script I wrote.

What was the original script?

It was a John Cassavetes homage. I have this friend who is a poet, and he imitates other people. He says that you think you're imitating someone's style and you're really not. It's different and that difference is your style. So I thought it would be interesting to make films like other people's. [My films] are all homages to somebody. Well, I mean you think it's an homage to somebody and then it really isn't. But when I wrote it, it was an homage to Cassavetes. And Godard.

So you had the script and it was an homage to Cassavetes and Godard and you couldn't get the funding for it?

Right. You see, I've been making films for a long time. I've done all kinds of styles. At some point [earlier on], I was trying to make narrative films. You know, mainstream films. And I just couldn't really. It didn't feel right. I'd been writing a script about vivisection... you know, experimenting on animals, and I'm against that. I think life is sacred. So I was writing a script about it, but I didn't know anything really. I know people go out and research stuff and get to know a subject. It's a temperament thing, I guess, but I just didn't like doing that. [So] I was trying to write about something I knew nothing about, and as much as I could try to research it, I never really would feel confident that I knew what I was talking about. So...I know the person who met Jean-Luc Godard. He asked him his advice to young filmmakers. Godard said, "Get a video camera and make films about your parents."

Did Godard do that?

No, he never did. But I attribute that to mean, don't worry about budget, don't worry about that kind of stuff, just make films about what you know, and that you have feelings about. I think that's really why I made [Las Vegas]. Before this I made a film called A Little Stiff. I was writing the vivisection script and I took acid one day and was laying on my back and I saw a plane writing in the sky. I forget what it was saying, but it was something strange that on acid just seemed written for me. And I had this vision of Buddha holding a flower in his hand. I felt what that meant was beauty or reality or truth or whatever is given, it's waiting here to be taken. You don't have to work for it. It's just there. And the clouds were so beautiful, it was like, why make a film about vivisection when everything around me is so beautiful? It's a question of being able to see it. It seemed after that that I really wanted to make films about ordinary things and show them in such a way that people could appreciate them. I guess what I don't like about Hollywood is that it invalidates your life, you know, the whole star system and beauty system...invalidates the lives that we actually experience. So I felt it was important to validate the things we all feel and experience. A Little Stiff was an attempt to do that. I wanted to take the most ordinary thing that I knew something about, and it had to be my life. I took my most recent crush on a girlfriend. It seemed everyone could relate to that, a crush, it was simple and I could, you know, control the locations. Just my apartment, her apartment. I made that film against the whole Hollywood narrative thing. Actually, I saw a John Ford film at the same time called Fort Apache. I'm not a big Ford fan, but there was a moment in the film where they're drinking alcohol on this cliff and they're deciding what they're going to do to kill the Indians or something. And one of the guys takes a bottle and throws it off the cliff. There's this three-second moment when—it's a wide-angle shot, a real long shot—we're just waiting for the bottle to hit. It's this beautiful moment that had nothing to do with the narrative, the experience of throwing a bottle off a cliff and waiting to see how long it's going to take before it hits. To me that was exciting, an extra-narrative moment that was so beautiful. So the whole film was kind of trying to stay on that line between narrative and non-narrative and never go so far out that you lose the story and get bored. But the narrative was not central. It was really just trying to find all those moments and string them together. I'm getting side-tracked...

We're talking about the original script for Las Vegas.

Right, so after I made [A Little Stiff], I heard the thing about Godard and I said I'd make a film about my parents [but] my mother would never consent, so I'll do my father. I wondered how could I make a film about my parents since all they ever do is go to Las Vegas every weekend. So I thought, well, why don't I go with them? At this time I was into recording everything and I hadn't really written a screenplay. I had blocks about it, writer's block. So I thought, why not just tape record our conversations. I knew that would be more interesting than anything I could think of. It'll take me three days. Worse that happens is it's terrible, but it's just a three-day investment, $50 in tapes. So I did it. I had a Walkman and just recorded and I thought, "God, was pretty interesting." All the little epiphanic moments. I actually asked a bunch of people what film I should make after A Little Stiff. I had more commercial ideas and everybody said they liked the Las Vegas idea, which surprised me. It was my favorite too, because it was the most personal. Also, American Playhouse was saying they were interested in films about Arabs because the Gulf War had just happened.

How did you feel about being put into a category like that?

Oh, I was happy.

Really? Why?

Because it was money. I mean anything they wanted, any way they would give me money was fine with me. But they ended up not liking the script. Good Machine was going to produce it and they couldn't raise the money. Jim Stark was involved for a while and they went to all these people and everybody said, "No, it's not commercial enough, it's not narrative enough." They thought it was too weird. But it was a good script and people liked it, but we didn't have a three-act structure and the arc. It was very Cassavetes-like, all these moments that led to a very subtle epiphany. But, you know, to shoot it, I would have needed permits and would have had to shoot underwater. We budgeted it and it was $300,000. I didn't get the money and two years went by. Finally, I got a grant for $20,000. And I had no money at all. I couldn't pay my rent. In the meantime, I'd also written another script called I Am a Sex Addict, and I wanted to that film more because it was newer. I didn't know if I should take the money and make [Sex Addict], just say I changed [projects], sorry guys. But I thought that would be dishonest. So I told the [grant administrator] American Film Institute my predicament and they said as long as I kept the same title and the same basic premise, I could change it a little bit, but if it was a whole different thing, I had to get the NEA to approve it. I thought the NEA would never approve [Sex Addict] because it was very hard core and not very PC. So I said, "O.K., I'll make [Las Vegas] first." I knew it would make no money.

You really got it done for $20,000?

No. I got two more grants. One was $6,000 from the city of L.A. An Iranian grant. They give money to minority groups in the city. So I said, "I'm Iranian. It's about Iranians."

Are you happy with Las Vegas?

Oh, yeah, I love it. I keep changing it. Right now, there's one scene I'm not happy with. I might want to cut it down a bit.

Did you watch it on Sunday [at the San Francisco International Film Festival]? What was the response?

It's always astonishingly positive. I mean, there are people who hate it passionately, people who walk out, people who think it's incredibly self-indulgent and egomaniacal, and that hurts, it always hurts.

That hurts you?

Oh, yeah. Sure. I'm getting better at it, I guess. One is supposed to get tougher. I mean, I don't even know what that means, self-indulgent. What's not self-indulgent? It's just a category, not a category that I embrace. I can understand ego--that's a category--and somebody is ego-less or full of ego, but self-indulgent? My concept of the self is that it's transpersonal, and that by going towards the truest, deepest self, one attains the most universal, communal self. You reach others through the self and you reach the self through others. It's one of those things that at one extreme becomes the other thing. To say something is self-indulgent is not to see how the extremes merge. I think that art is self-indulgent in the sense that it's going within as in any spiritual quest. You go within to emerge on the other side. So the self-indulgent argument bugs me because it's such a different model of the self than the one I have. It implies that if you go in toward the self you cut yourself off from other people and that's bad.

Have people been critical of you specifically about the Ecstacy in terms of your dad's health?

Some people. I guess that's the main problem people have with it. They feel that it is immoral, that what I do is immoral.

And you do you feel about it?

There are so many levels. I don't believe anything is immoral. That's another category I don't really understand. I think there was definitely an unconscious paracidal impulse, part of me that wants him dead, unconsciously. That was one element of the film that I think I tried to be honest about. On another level, part of me was trying to prove something about God. It was like a gamble and people think it's irresponsible to gamble with someone else's life. I can see that, but I mean I gamble with my life and I gamble with other lives too. It's a weird thing. I guess it wasn't totally benevolent what I was doing, but I just used my intuition. I just thought that it's going to be a good thing if he takes this. True, he could die, it could be bad, but you know I didn't think it was going to be and then...it was a leap of faith.

Are you still going to try and produce I Am A Sex Addict?

I'm still trying, but actually I shot another film a few days ago.

What's that about?

It's called I Was Possessed by God. I've been experimenting with mushrooms for a few years. A year ago on Valentine's Day, I'd been taking large doses...I've been reading Terence McKenna's books, he to take heroic doses. I've done that. On this day I had an extraordinary experience and...I was possessed by a being which I don't know how to describe except as an angel or the holy spirit. This being knew everything and spoke in a voice that was not my voice and gave me information that I couldn't possibly know. It was the strangest thing, complete ecstasy and very spiritual--a sacred, holy, spiritual, religious kind of thing. I thought I must have attained a new spiritual plateau, that I'm accessing this spirit, these angelic forces. I took it again a month later to try to go there again, and I had a bad trip. I thought I was dying for six hours. I did it again and had an interesting experience and I had a vision of God, but it wasn't the possession spirit....I didn't do it again till January 1st of this year. My girlfriend....was there but she didn't want to take it, because she is afraid of drugs. I took three grams on January 1 and I had that possession again. This voice spoke through me and I was doing somersaults and flips in the air that I've never been able to do. I was being hurled around the room. I was like a thousand trillion watts of energy and my girlfriend was there, writing down what I was saying. At one point the voice said, and he talked like this, "THIS! IS! THE! VOICE! OF! THE! SIBYL!" It was very scary for her.

I can imagine.

It wasn't angry. It sounded angry but it was just this incredible energy that was going through me and it came out as incredible volume. It said that it was an oracle and the voice of the Sibyl and to ask it questions. [My girlfriend] asked all these questions and it answered. The first question was, "What should I do about my writer's block?" I don't know how but I knew how to let it speak. I could go back and forth between me and it. I could comment on it in my voice and we'd argue. I'd say something and it would yell at me and I would say something and it would say something back. My eyes would kind of go up in my head and I'd wait for maybe three seconds for the answer. And it said, "YOU! DON'T! HAVE! WRITER'S! BLOCK! THERE! IS! NO! SUCH! THING!" I felt like the voice, the being, wanted me to...record this. Well this was pretty trippy and it goes against people's ideas about God and humans, but at one point, it kept saying something about a lie. It kept saying, "LIE!" It was really stern, and it wasn't at all my vision of God which is very gentle and Jesus-like. This was an Old Testament kind of thing. My girlfriend asked, "What lie does Caveh do?" And the voice goes, "MY! NAME! IS! GOD!" Then I was thrown to the ground and put my forehead right on the ground. I felt that was a way of God telling me not to interpret this in an ego way. It's a very humble thing to be--God. It was, you know, trippy. And I thought, "O.K., I'm supposed to make a film about this." So I got a camera and was going to wait until I had enough money to do it right. I was going to grow mushrooms and show that and do it a bunch of times. I thought if God exists and I'm supposed to do this, then God will deal with the money.

Did he?

Well, yeah, he did. He never dealt with it as well as I would've liked. I was going to start shooting on my birthday, last Friday, April 29, and I had no money at all. I said, "Well, the money will come," and it came in little dribbles. Jay Rosenblatt sent me $100 and some other friends sent me $300. Somebody sent me some short ends. I rented a camera for $275, got a deal, had these short ends and shot it for $400. I had a cameraman and a sound person. Suzanne [my girlfriend] did sound, and we filmed it, and it happened. The God thing came, and for a half hour I was struggling with it and I didn't know if it was going to happen or not, and it occurred to me that it was a choice. I think everything is a choice on a very deep level. I'd had this weird illness and I believe that illness is psychological and spiritual. So Suzanne asked it why I was ill. It gave this answer which was shocking to me, and at one point it said I would be healed. I went [clap sound]...and it was going. So that's what my next film is. I'm still trying to raise money for Sex Addict.

What's it like directing and acting? How do you orchestrate these roles?

It's nice. I mean, it's harder. I just have to give up more control during the shooting. I have to trust everybody else. I don't at all think about the camera. I don't think about aesthetic things. I just say, "You guys use your own judgment." [With Las Vegas], I never looked behind the camera. In [I Was Possessed by God], I was on drugs, so I didn't even think about it. My films aren't controlled in that way. That's not what I do. I mean, there are so many great directors who are able to control the image. We talked about making your flaws your assets. I don't think I'm the greatest filmmaker. I don't know much about cinematography or storyboarding. The one thing I have which I think is special is I think I'm brave. Maybe it's a kind of narcissism or exhibitionism or confessionalism. I don't know what psychological quirk makes me this way, but I'm willing to be honest and upfront about things in a way that most people aren't...and that's what I try to maximize.

It's an interesting point. Often the director has to put on a facade of being in control.

I think it's oppressive. Because it's not real. Nobody knows all the answers, and nobody is in control. It's just a lie. One of my gripes in filmmaking is the absurd hierarchizaton of things. My way is to try and work with friends who respect me, so if I don't know what to do and I'm freaking out, they're not going to go, "Oh, he's not as intelligent as we thought." When you have crews and you don't know them and they're techies who have this ego thing about being professional...I've been in that situation and it was murder. Everybody is judging you while you are trying to be creative. So I say never again am I going to have anyone on the set who I don't know already.

How did you approach editing Las Vegas?

First, I panicked because I felt it was terrible..., that no one would find this funny or interesting and I had made a big mistake and my career was over. I come out of an experimental film background, so I decided I was going to cut the film to very tight segments, just because I didn't trust the material. Also my last film was minimalist and subtle and very simple and I went to these festivals and I could tell people weren't appreciating the film. I would see other films that I thought were not as good as mine that would get much more acclaim.... I felt that in my next film I wanted to be noticed. Because A Little Stiff was subtle, I thought people would see it was sweet, but it went right by them, whereas Poison [by Todd Haynes, also at Sundance '91] had intense scenes with people spitting at each other, really transgressive stuff. I felt that I could out-transgress everybody if that's the game.

Do you think that's what it's about?

On some level. On the marketing level, I Am a Sex Addict is an attempt to address that. It was, "O.K., I'll show you transgression." It was an ego thing. I wanted to be noticed. I wanted to be recognized and respected. I felt that I hadn't been sufficiently. Um, what was the question? Editing [Las Vegas]...oh yeah. So I started making an arty, pretentious film. I think I was trying to impress everybody--I was doing this quick cutting and the weird stuff and had all these intertitles that I thought were strange. Rick Linklater [who directed Slacker, also at Sundance '91] let me use his non-linear editing system for free, so I went out there [to Austin] for about a month and tried to cut on that. Because it was so flexible, I was able to do really quick cuts very easily. I showed it to someone. They said, "Caveh, you're out of your mind." So we put everything back and made scenes longer and re-established it.

Are you optimistic about getting funding for your next projects?

I am but because I believe in God not because I believe in the fairness of the world. I believe everything is a choice and I choose to make film. A realization I had a couple months ago was [that] I Am a Sex Addict has a million dollar budget...and I've never done anything with that kind of budget before and I don't really have the credentials to get the money. It's not commonsensical to give money to me, but I just feel if I want it more than anything I will find a way.

Have you talked to any distributors about Las Vegas?

No. Nobody has said anything. It actually won a critic's prize at Rotterdam. The critics loved it and picked it as one of their favorite films, but it's just too weird. I think we'll be lucky if we just make a TV sale and recoup some of our money. We broke even with A Little Stiff. I made a German TV sale which paid for the film. But it didn't pay for living. So I'm not very optimistic about distribution for Vegas. I haven't really started the process of trying to find a distributor yet. This is the first showing in America, then I'm going to show it in L.A. in June...

At the AFI Festival?

No, they rejected it. Almost everyone has rejected it. Berlin, Sundance, New Directors, AFI...

I heard that Sundance didn't know what category to put it in.

No, they just hated it.

Oh, I should ask you what I ask everyone I interview. If you were interviewing a filmmaker, say it was Tarkovsky...

I would want to know what his favorite films are. I always want to know. I know what his favorite films are.

What Tarkovsky's favorite films are?

He likes Diary of a Country Priest by Bresson and Virgin Spirng by Bergman, and he likes Buñuel. He really likes Paradjanov. It's in his book. I think I would also ask him for advice.

What would your advice be?

Trust yourself. Have faith. Believe that whatever you feel or think or know is worth expressing.

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