Recently, JustArts had the opportunity to talk to Ben Coccio, director of "Zero Day," a film loosely based off the Columbine school shooting.
JustArts: What I found most incredible about "Zero Day" was that fact that I was able to relate to Cal and Andre so well. How did you go about making Cal and Andre seem so normal? Was this portrayal of these characters one of your objectives in creating the film?

Coccio: I didn't want to demonize them, and I didn't want to lionize them; I wanted to humanize them. Traditionally in a narrative, the idea is that a character does something because they have a motivation to do it, and usually the motivation - even if you don't agree with it - you can understand it. In this movie, a lot of the motivation is cut out so you don't really know why they're doing what they're doing. The only thing you get is how they go about it, and what I wanted to do was to make them look like humans and be able to have someone like you relate to them and sort of feel attention in relating to them because then you think I'm relating to these two guys but look what they're going to do and what they do. Part of that was the writing, but I think a larger part of that was the acting and my casting and sort of purposefully trying to find kids who were going to be very natural in front of the camera and understood that the whole point of this thing was to approach it in that vein. At no point could it feel like a movie when they were acting which is a different kind of acting in which I think they were really well fitted to because they didn't have a ton of experience.


JustArts: That leads to my next question, which is why did you decide to use nonprofessional actors for your leads? Do you feel that if you had used professional actors to play the roles of Cal and Andre, the film would have been less realistic and successful?

Coccio: Yeah. I mean, to get myself going in the film the first thing I did was... are you familiar with a publication called "Backstage?"

JustArts: No.

Coccio: "Backstage" is a publication in the New York and L.A. areas. It's basically a newspaper for actors and performers ... So I put an ad in the back of Backstage and I tried to be very kinky about what I was looking for - I didn't want to say that I was looking for two kids to be in a Columbine movie because I figured that would really limit my pool of actors to choose from. All I got from the New York area seemed like a Law and Order extras reunion ... It didn't look right. They all looked like city kids - really cool or they had a very advanced sense of personal style whether you liked it or not ... So I went to up to Connecticut and contacted all the high schools and looked for kids who maybe had some experience acting ...For the two leads, I was looking for people who were already friends ... Andre and Cal were just the best. They were so great because they were really good actors, they were very different people, very different personalities, very different bodies - which is really helpful because you may not remember who is Andre and who is Cal, but you'll definitely remember that one is a blonde and one is a brunette. They just were head and shoulders above the rest.


JustArts: Was a lot of the movie improv or was it mainly from the script?

Coccio: Well, I wrote the script and every scene that is in the movie except for a couple is in the script. And generally the script is like an outline. I wrote it as an outline. I wrote a dialogue that might have been good if it was delivered verbatim, but my plan was to always have the kids deliver it their way, in their own words - There was tons of room for them to add ...


JustArts: The murder scene is shown only through what is supposed to be a high school security camera. Why did you choose to film the entire scene in this manner?

Coccio: Part of my decision to do this film in the first person is that it commented on a lot of different things at once in a lot of different ways. It sort of ended up being like a prism. One of the things that it comments on is the idea of narrative and the idea of who is the narrator of a situation. For most of the movie up until that point, Andre and Cal are narrating the movie. They're telling you everything. And in a certain sense, the one thing that I find really interesting is that it doesn't always occur to an audience to distrust them even though they are clearly not really trustworthy. You see a scene where they tell you something point blank, and in another scene they are totally being dishonest to their parents or friends and not letting them know what they're planning. But yet, sometimes an audience won't go back and re-evaluate what they said and start to look for cracks in it because you tend to trust your narrator, which I think is really interesting. And at one point in the movie, they narrate that the movie will end and the last thing anyone will see is them walking into the school and then there won't be anything after that, which is a great image for them to end on. That's like their romantic image that they get to end on. But it doesn't end there. Their narrative goes on and other people are going to have to deal with it now.


JustArts: And they're so different in that scene too. They're cruel and mean; it's totally different from the rest.

Coccio: Exactly. That's the thing. You need to see it, I think. Not showing that scene would be a cop-out, first off. If you don't see it, you could like them. And telling it that way takes out their ability to influence it. In other words, they seem really mean and awful in that scene, and half of that is because it's not from their point of view anymore, it's from a godlike point of view now. The more real that scene feels, the more awful it feels, which is the point. The point is to make it feel awful and final and terrible and senseless and pointless and mundane in a sense, and at the same time, it's hard to just turn away.


JustArts: How closely did you intend for Andre and Cal to resemble real-life Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold?

Coccio: It was definitely not so important that they physically resemble them. This clearly is a movie after the fashion of Columbine. I chose not to make it about Columbine because I wanted freedom to change things. I think the point of making a movie about something like Columbine is to put it in a form where people can get their minds around it. In real life, it is almost impossible to get their minds around it.


JustArts: I think in a way this made it harder. I would like to think of these guys as really despicable, horrible people, but now I feel sympathetic for murderers.

Coccio: I definitely wasn't trying to condone what they did. It does make it more complex in that sense. The way you deal with it in real life is to simply demonize them and say that these are just awful people, end of story, let's not think about it. But I don't think that's the best thing to do. I think we should just confront these things and look at them. But I think to do it in a movie is great because it's a way that you can confront it in a forum that works well. You go in, the movie plays, and when the movie is over, it's over. It's not real, no one really died and you can compartmentalize it and work on it with your mind. So I wanted to make it very evocative of Columbine. There were actually a few factual things I took directly from Columbine, for instance one of them going to their prom the night before and them stealing guns from friends and relatives - There were times when I would take artistic liberty, but generally speaking it wasn't so important that I follow Columbine perfectly - but there were some things from Columbine that I thought needed to be dramatized.


Justarts:You can't really find a reason for why they do this because it doesn't really seem like anyone is treating them that all that bad.

Coccio: I think a lot of middle class high school life is very suffocating and bizarre and weird and it's a weird four years. There is a lot of tension under the surface but it's not necessarily going to explode in violence. The fact that it did with these kids ... there's really no easy answer and I definitely don't want to peddle any with the movie. So I thought it would just be very interesting. I'm trying to debunk a lot of Columbine myths, and I'm trying to remind you that just because they tell you that that's not why they're doing it, doesn't mean that's not necessarily why they're doing it. If they say something to you, anything about why they're doing it, it's hard to parse out ... are they going to be really honest in these tapes? I don't know. I just think it's interesting to play with that ...


Justarts: What message do you want your audience to take from this film? I had always hoped back in high school that if there were students who were going to do this kind of thing, I could know it and report them. But instead, these guys are pretty normal and I would never expect people like them to do that kind of thing. Do you think that "Zero Day" can be in any way useful in preventing further attacks of this kind?

Coccio: Yeah, I do. I think in a weird way it could be. It's never going to be useful in a sense of helping to create a profile for these kids because I don't think there is one ... The unfortunate reality is that you can't know people as much as you'd like to. Even when you really know someone, you may not ever really know them. But first off, I would say that I have a feeling that if there were kids out there who really wanted to shoot up their school, I don't think that this movie would make them psyched to do it. I think this movie might even knock them down a bit because the finality of it and the mundanity of it when I show them actually do it - there is nothing fantastic about it, it is just awful and boring and terrible - When kids want to do something like this, they look for cultural myths as a touchstone for them to encourage them. They would be more interested in a movie like "The Matrix" where the whole world is a lie and a construction by evil robots that is designed to keep everyone down and there is only one guy who can stop it who has to use tons and tons of guns ... My desire is to try to start a wider cultural dialogue that may be a little more complex than it was before. After something like this, maybe we shouldn't look for blame immediately, but maybe we should be a little bit more complex when we think about these things. Maybe it's not so bad sometimes to admit that there is no reason, or no good reason, and sometimes things just happen that are really bad and the best thing you can do about it is to move on and recover. I don't think that that's a bad method. That's life.