Piss Off The Neighbors

One of the first notes I took down when I re-watched Cassava Leaf yesterday was about the coyote sounds in the opening. The first time I watched it, that didn't stick out to me, but the second time I couldn't avoid it. It was interesting to me because the coyote is such an LA tarot card.

Tracey: I actually just saw a coyote when I was coming here, in Los Feliz. It was crossing the street right behind me. It was wild.

Why did you want to include the coyotes in there?

Tracey: You know, I honestly don't know. Yeah, I can't definitively point to why. I wanted to have this kind of surrealist element where there's something that's following the main character.

The thing that stuck out to me about it was the timing of the coyote howls. It’s when you’re setting up the world—Michael’s world—and the sound you chose is from a creature we typically think of as lonely. They're solitary, you know. They don't travel in packs.

Tracey: Mm-hmm.

And then, of course, the reason we see them in heavily populated areas like Los Feliz is because they've lost something. And, to me, that's Michael in the film. He's haunted by these things that he lost, things he's not sure he can get back, and he’s wandering LA like a coyote.

Tracey: You know, making any film or art, I would say there's an animating force to it where you're just unconscious. I definitely wanted Michael to be haunted, and for you to feel the haunting and the loneliness throughout.

Would you say your art comes from a conscious place or an unconscious place?

Tracey: I think it mostly comes from an unconscious place. I can't speak for anyone else, but I feel like I'm always thinking about things, whether it's things going on in my own life, things going on in the world, things going on in the country, things going on with my friends and my family. And I try to make sense of those things in my head as I'm just going about life. And they jumble around until they hit this kind of Tetris shape where they lock in. So I have an idea, and all of those things are present, and then they become present in a way where there's some organization and there's a narrative to it. It helps me deal with those issues that I didn't necessarily find any kind of resolve or reason for. But I can't speak to how or why it just. They jumble around and then they click in and I'm like, “Okay.”

What was the seed of the idea for Cassava Leaf?

Tracey: I think the seed of Cassava Leaf was me living in LA. Granted this is a fictionalization, but from my experienced I could understand living in Los Angeles and feeling this disconnect from the city. But also having an affinity for it as well. There’s this closeness, but also distance, to this place that I was living in. And then also there was this distance from a life that I believed I would live forever. Something that I feel like, yeah, perhaps was lost in a life on the East Coast. So I could get into the character's mind state of what does it feel like to kind of be stranded in paradise, so to speak.

So, why an author? Because that was the other thing that stuck out to me. It's an interesting because in LA if you say, “I'm a writer,” people are gonna assume you're a screenwriter.

Tracey: Mm-hmm.

There’s this feeling of being adjacent but isolated.

Tracey: Screenwriting, from my perspective, it’s a collaborative effort. You write something and then you take it to a team for it to be constructed. Like, the screenwriter essentially is writing the map, but then there's a director who's gonna be the captain to navigate it. Yeah. And that director may take different turns and do something that's not necessarily on the map. Whereas a novelist, they are the navigator and the captain of that ship. They are completely alone in dictating the experience of the audience. So I wanted him to be more solitary.

And they’re alone in their successes and failures. Michael seems to feel that like very deeply.

Tracey: Yes, exactly. I felt like an author would synthesize the loneliness and also harken back to some of that old, Raymond Chandler, Philip Marlowe stuff, where you have this solitary man in LA and he’s trying to find something. So there's a bit of a Noir-ish angle. And maybe he's not a crime detective, but he is a detective of his own feelings and his own work. So I wanted to pull from all of that and a bunch of writers that I love in LA like Charles Bukowski, Fante, Eve Babitz. There's a, a whole lineage of these great writers who speak about LA lovingly, but also of the pitfalls.

I was writing down the titles of all the books that were popping up while I was watching, and I was thinking about Eve Babitz, who’s featured prominently and who talked about how LA is a place that’s inherently unserious. And she actually felt like that's the best part about it. Like, you can't like it here if you don't know how to let go of yourself a little.

Tracey: There’s no permanent wins or losses here. I heard her once say in her writing that she could only operate either having a bunch of money or being destitute, but this was the place where both of those things coexist.

And it's interesting because Michael is somebody who takes himself seriously, that wants to take himself seriously, and that puts a barrier between him and the city.

Tracey: I agree. And to that point, I just finished the outline and am halfway done with this short story that I'm gonna make before the next feature. It’s about an East Coaster who's constantly talking down on LA, and we all know that person. It's called The Great Asshole of Los Angeles. It addresses those things. Like, there's a lot of people who come to LA really self-serious. And I don't necessarily believe that was me when I came to LA. I don't think I felt self-serious and I don't feel self serious now, but we have all encountered that person. They come to LA and they're like, “This is not like New York,” because of the bagels or the left turns or the pizza. I mean, Annie Hall, famously.

“Why would you go to a city where the only cultural advantage is being able to turn right on red?”

Tracey: Exactly. So that I wanted that for Michael’s character, but I also wanted to put him in a place that was foreign for me, in middle age or whatever passes for middle age. I mean, I could be middle aged now. I wanted to make him older than my own experience because I wanted him to be someone who had been in this state of taking himself so seriously for longer than he probably should have. Like he's been sitting in it for ten or fifteen years, in LA, but he’s made it his point to not enjoy his life. And he blames the city, but there’s something else he feels haunted by.

Yeah, absolutely. It’s in the opening sequence when he’s looking at the poster of him as one the best authors of 2010. Even just the world that he came up in is so lost. You know, like, it’s lost. It's not the Obama years anymore.

Tracey: Exactly, and that's what he's mourning. And I did put in places that I considered to be places we’re mourning in LA, sadly. Like, I put the Cinerama Dome in there. That's a great place of mourning. A cultural landmark, but it's been sitting vacant for half a decade. You know, just some of the beauty, but also relics that exist within the city. And I definitely love Los Feliz and Skylight Books, so I wanted to kind of curate a proxy of that so he could go there and, whether he knew it or didn't know it, he’s going to revisit a place that is exalting him. He's not going to a movie theater. He's in a bookstore, which is like his church.

So why was it important for you to have him to run into Fatima there?

Tracey: I think, for me, a lot of times people watch movies and say, “That could never happen, those coincidences don't happen.” But, when I live my real life, there's a lot of coincidences that seem so serendipitous you couldn't make it up. So I wanted something like that to happen because those things do happen. Like, people randomly miss a turn, and then there's an accident that happens there right after. But I did also want to create this mystery about Fatima at the bookstore. Maybe she's looking for Michael. Maybe she's not there for a conference at all. Maybe she's looking for him and she's heard he's an author and so she wants, in some way, to summon him.

Absolutely. I mean, that's an interesting about her character. It would almost be unsurprising to me if at the end she wasn't even actually there.

Tracey: You know, I just thought about the film in that way too. The whole thing could be a pure construction of Michael's.

Feral regret.

Tracey: Yeah, I think that’s a viable pathway for how to view the movie. And I made it in that way, you know, where the time is not as concrete. There's a lot going on in his mind. There's a lot going on that's kind of like emotional coloring. So I wanted to make the place they ran into each other like a place where she may be looking for him. Even if she wasn't looking for him, literally. She was like, “Well, I know his work might be here.”

It's clear what she means to Michael, but one of the things that makes her such a compelling character is it's not completely clear what Michael means to her. What do you think that meaning is?

Tracey: I think for both of the characters, the other represents some alternate path. And because it's a what if, it seems brighter. But even at the end, Fatima and Michael are idealized partners for each other, but it's clear that they don't work. There is a rhythm and a beauty to the reality of that. 

Yeah, I mean, it didn't work the first time around. 

Tracey: Exactly, and I think that's something that Fatima acknowledges in their final dialogue scene when she's like, “This weekend isn't real.” Like, yeah, this is something that we're doing, but I'm going home tomorrow to my real life. This is a pause button. What's really going on? She's dealing with her marriage and possibly the dissolution of it, or even just the difficulties that she expresses to Michael, and he's dealing with his own difficulties. And I feel like both of them represent a moment, to be honest, in a way that they weren't with their partners or about their lives. And you see it in the beginning of the film where Fatima was talking about her kids. She loves them, but then later on she’s like, “I don't necessarily want to just be a mom all the time.” And she’s terrified to do it by herself. So I think their relationship is a bit like an onion where, as their weekend goes on, the layers get peeled back until you see the real raw emotion.

I was struck with the idea that the weekend doesn't exist. Obviously she’s visiting and there is this sense of transit as something that distances, emotionally, and also somehow allows for more intimacy because of its impermanence.

Tracey: Yes, it is like you're creating this fictional world that can’t last, but is kind of like a stop gap in the real crises of your life. Both of the characters in Cassava Leaf are experiencing crises. And, to an extent, I show the Rochelle character experiencing that too, although she's not as focused on, but I wanted to show she's dismissive but she's dealing with her own things.

They're all well-rounded, even her for not being in it as long as the others. You empathize with all of them. Michael is portrayed very compassionately, but, for Rochelle, you also get the sense that he’s a person who would be hard to be with sometimes. Someone who’s always looking back.

Tracey: He’s the Great Asshole of Los Angeles. He's this guy that's always sulking and believes he's more serious than he actually is. A guy who imagines himself one way, and maybe he once was that one way, but he has not allowed himself to evolve internally to what his reality actually is. So he's kind of frozen in time, which is difficult for anyone to deal with.