Robinson Devor's film Zoo is a docu-drama about a Boeing engineer whose secret sexual life led to his unexpected death, and one of the most talked-about news stories of 2005. Known at this year's Sundance as "the horse-sex documentary," the film gets its title from "zoophiles" or "zoos," terms for people erotically attracted to animals. Zoo focuses on a small group of men who chatted online, and got together periodically to make videos of themselves having sex with Arabian stallions. (Bestiality wasn't illegal in the state of Washington at the time; it is now.) Because the family of the deceased wanted nothing to do with the film, and most of the zoos are present only in audio interviews and referred to by their online handles, much of the film was open to interpretation. Devor uses lush natural images, and a mix of the mundane and the bizarre, to provide balance to the sensationalism and revulsion present in the original coverage of the story. His film pushes you toward quiet contemplation.

Shot in 16mm., in the Pacific Northwest, Zoo is more indebted to fiction films like Happy Together and Hiroshima, Mon Amour than the documentary work of directors like Errol Morris. It's filled with beautiful, lyrical filmmaking, often pushed to abstraction, but, unsurprisingly given the subject matter, never shakes a mood of uneasiness.
Nerve spoke to Devor about his evolution as a filmmaker, his approach to re-creating an infamous news story and how in the world he got funding for this movie. — Bryan Whitefield



Your films have gotten increasingly abstract, from Woman Chaser, which was eccentric and stylized but also fairly straightforward, to Police Beat, which structures a mysterious and oblique narrative around real events. And now Zoo, which is just something totally different. Is that you stretching your wings, or is this the type of movie that you've always wanted to make?

Leaving Los Angeles is a big part of it. When I moved up to Seattle, I stopped seeing things through the eyes of someone on the periphery of the film industry, and started to see the world more broadly. Then I partnered with [writer] Charles Mudede and picked up some of his influences. We both have an appreciation for beauty and try to find that beauty in anything we do. But most importantly, I do want to make films for the sake of art and not commerce. It's a difficult path with filmmaking, the most expensive medium there is. But when you work with somebody who cares deeply about art and not about selling a screenplay, it gives you a wonderful sense of freedom. And Seattle isn't structured around commercial filmmaking, and you have people taking the art of film seriously, so it was really encouraging and empowering to work up there. In addition, there's a lot less dialogue now, which may also make it feel more experimental.




How does your writing partner feel about that?


[laughs] Well, he writes with images thankfully. He had the idea to start the movie from under the earth and move through a mining tunnel, which is an unexpected way to start. Dialogue is wonderful, but a lot of times it's fluff, and it didn't really serve a purpose in this film.




Even though the movie is about actual events you're not really being held to making a traditional documentary. Did that make things more difficult or did it leave things wide open?

It was definitely helpful, because I could imagine things the way I wanted to imagine them. That all came about by doing audio interviews and having only that to build from, so that you had to use your imagination. It was very freeing, and gave me a little more control in terms of the visuals. On the other hand, it wasn't easy to get people to participate when you're dealing with somewhat sordid subject matter. It took us five months to find a horse farm that someone would let us shoot on.




Many of the characters are represented by actors, but it's still rare that you see their faces directly.

We wanted to invert as many aspects of the documentary form as we could. We wanted real people acting out their own lives, which is not something you typically see. We wanted actors to be kept in shadows to blur the line between real person and actor. And we saw these guys as operating in the shadows of normal society, so that was part of the decision to keep things dim and indirect and even noirish. And we knew we were going to have recordings of real people running throughout the whole thing. So we created essentially an audio version of the film, without imagery, and that acted as our script.



Is it difficult to take on a project with this kind of subject matter, knowing you'll have to be immersed in it for an extended period of time?

Not at all. We conceived this film in cinematic terms, not intellectual and certainly not moral terms. We had elements that seemed like gold. A secret society of men on summer nights, in pastures, underneath a volcano. Those were the things that drew me back time and time again, and I was happy to be out there working in those elements. And the interviews weren't playing while we were shooting. They were things that would be playing in my head if I needed them, but making the film itself, besides the difficulties that always go into low budget filmmaking, was pure pleasure.




Some of the scenes at night are extremely beautiful, and even when the men are walking through the pastures with the horses, it plays as a sort of paradise.

It's easy for me to romanticize that without thinking specifically of the end result, a man dying. But this is what people love to do. Get together with friends on a warm summer night, have some drinks and then go find some action. . .




It's not easy for a man to have sex with a horse. I was thankful you didn't show the mechanics of the act, although you must have had to deal with that yourself.

Well, that's not what really drew me to the subject. I have no doubt that human beings can and will have sex with anything under the sun. They will find a way to do it. I was more interested in these men and the kind of community that they built, and sex was only a small component of that community. But a lot of time is spent in this movie under very somber circumstances and around a tragic event, so ramping up the sexuality would've worked against what we were trying to do. They certainly showed me a lot of material, and really what they wanted to show me — and what I wasn't able to get into the film, because I couldn't find the right way to do it — was that, contrary to what the horse rescuers thought, these animals weren't forced to do anything. They weren't tied up or trapped or anything like that. What I saw was pretty amazing. It was really just a guy petting a horse in a field and then the horse, completely of its own free will, would do some moving around and eventually mount him. It was outrageous. But part of the animal cruelty question is the conditioning that happens with these animals from the time they're born, and that I don't have the answer for.



You've gotten a lot of support from Sundance; all three of your films were accepted there as well as being part of their Director's Lab program. Does that kind of support give you confidence to make the movies that you want to make, believing they will find an audience one way or another?

Sundance has meant everything to me, in the confidence they've given me, and their encouragement for artists to go out and do their thing. They recognize people that wouldn't be recognized without them. With Police Beat, I was on the verge of giving up until they accepted it and championed it as best they could. So I have nothing but extreme gratitude for them. We're obviously not commercial filmmakers, and we're not in L.A. or New York, so that kind of support can be essential to getting a film made or seen.



How did investors react to the film? It's got to be wild to walk into a meeting to get money for a movie about guys who fuck horses.


[laughs] Yeah, well, we made seven minutes of the film, and I took it down to L.A. to see if we could get financed. It was the sequence where they're walking through the rhododendrons at night, and then Jenny, the horse rescuer, goes to the ranch to pick up the horses, and you see the noose. And we showed those to Daniel Katz from ThinkFilm, and his eyes were just wide open, and he was grinning and he goes, "It's a horror film right?" And I was like, "Right!"



You agreed with him?

Yeah, in the sense that everyone is going to see something different. I wasn't going to tell him that no, it's a love story or an experimental film. I think even though the scenes were beautiful, he was imagining the demise and the end result, so I could see where his mind was going. I just thought it was an interesting reaction, one I hadn't thought of myself. And who was I to disagree while in desperate need of finance? [laughs]


And what was the reaction of the audiences at Sundance?


It was different at Sundance. Some of the pressure was off because Think had already bought it. But then the pressure goes back on, because depending on the critics or the audience reaction, it may never get a theatrical release. So when the reaction was largely positive, that definitely helped us. I've heard that European festivals are a lot more vocal when they don't like something, and American audiences are kind of trained to be more polite. So it's hard to tell what people really thought of the movie. We have heard the negatives too, that it's not an exposé, it's not a depiction of raw, factual data or a procedural that goes through and explains with dates and times. But those things really were not important to us.