A teacher tries a radical new method to unlock student potential in Director Christopher Zalla’s drama, Radical.
Zalla’s film tells the fact-based story of Sergio Juarez, a new sixth grade teacher in a Mexican border town who is saddled with the worst performing students, but tries something different move them forward towards success.
On November 4, after the DGA membership screening in New York, Zalla discussed the making of Radical during a Q&A moderated by Director Braden King (The Evening Hour). During the conversation, he spoke about the techniques he employed to set the feeling for his film about an inspirational teacher.
“I felt like I really wanted us to go on the journey of a child and I wanted us to be the child. So I was sort of dogged that the cameras never higher than three and a half feet. They're kid height. The ongoing joke on set was that our visual inspiration was Charlie Brown. We spent the first seven or eight minutes of the movie almost trying to frustrate the viewer. It was this idea that we almost forced you to tune out a little bit. That there's stuff going on. You don't know who or what to grab and maybe that might help you have a sense of empathy. Then into that world we introduce this gravitational force. The Walter Murch [re-edited] version of [Orson Welles']Touch of Evil — which is actually a border movie — it's super inspirational for me. It was this like incredible example of marriage of truly oppositional film language within the same over overall piece of work. To me, the joy of film filmmaking is that we we get to create language.”
Zalla’s other directorial credits include the feature Blood of My Blood; the movie for television Beautiful & Twisted; and episodes of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and Law & Order. He has been a DGA member since 2007.