An aura of effortless necessity — that beautiful and elusive, near chimerical, creative force like bewitched winds, that ultimately lands each piece of a project in its destined place — shimmers about Weston Razooli’s Riddle of Fire. It’s a sense of magic twinkling in dust that one can’t help but feel as one listens to him speak about the film’s creation; it’s a sense of easy prowess. I had the pleasure of speaking with Razooli over Zoom about crafting Riddle of Fire, a modern fairytale.
The film takes place in the fictional town of Ribbon, Wyoming, and follows three delightfully rascally kids — the cunning Alice (Phoebe Ferro), and brothers Hazel (Charlie Stover), the sleepy sensitive, and Jodie (Skyler Peters), the accidental stoic. They spend their summer riding their dirt bikes through town and shooting their paintball guns at indifferent street signs and at the adults who get in their way with equal determination. One day, they steal a gaming console in a truly masterfully-orchestrated heist, but their plan to spend a whole day in front of the screen is thwarted when they discover that Hazel and Jodie’s mom, Julie (Danielle Hoetmer), has password-protected their TV.
“I really lucked out with the casting of them,” he tells me over Zoom when I ask him how he found the young leading stars. “I had a great casting director named Jeff Johnson, who’s based in Salt Lake City, who’s cast some big movies and big shows, and he sent me hundreds of tapes. Those four kids were the only kids that I gave callbacks to and thought could do it.”
When the kids turn to Julie, who is in bed sick with a nasty cold that is lazily traveling through the town, to ask for the password, Julie hands them a deal: she will give the kids the password if they run an errand for her first. The kids have to go to Celia’s bakery and bring her back a blueberry pie that tastes just like the one Julie’s mom used to make — it’s the only thing that will help her to feel better. Only after they have retrieved the pie will Julie give them the password.
A simple enough errand turns sour when they discover that the bakery is out of blueberry pies, and Celia (Colleen Baum) is home sick. Celia refuses to bake, but agrees to give the kids her secret recipe. As the kids work to secure all the ingredients, they cross paths with a mysterious, mystic gang, who “steals” (snatches them up mere seconds before the kids can at the grocery story) the eggs they need, which is headed by a witch with eerie mind-controlling powers named Anna-Freya Hollyhock (Lio Tipton), and her equally gifted daughter Petal (Lorelei Olivia Mote).
According to Razooli, Riddle of Fire initially started life as a teen comedy-drama set in the same fictional town of Ribbon. “The main character was this teenage boy [who] had these three younger brothers that were these really scrappy, dirt bike riding, paintball gun toting, little goblin redneck kids that terrorized the town and terrorized him and his friends,” he says. Over time, however, the three goblin kids took center stage, and it feels a bit crucial, inevitable in an earned sort of way, that they did, as though their charisma demanded a greater scope.
“As I rewrote that script, their [the kids’] parts got bigger and bigger and bigger until finally I kind of just got sick of that script and really wanted to make a simple movie about those characters,” Razooli says. He went on to rewrite the script, using the three goblin characters as a base for Alice, Hazel, and Jodi, and then went on to film in his hometown “for not too much money,” he says. It scans as a case of following creative intuition, serving as a near lesson on the importance of doing so.
Razooli says that he “included this gumbo of all my favorite things as a kid growing up in Utah.” And when I ask him what all his favorite things are, the answer is simple. “Everything you see in the movie,” he says with a laugh. “Dirt biking, paintballing, playing in the mountains, fly fishing, spying.”
Ring of Fire was shot on 16mm Kodak film, which, along with its music that Razooli says is of a niche genre called Dungeon Synth — airy fiddles and blistering bass that sounds like something out of an ‘80s medieval fantasy film — outfit the film in an ethereal air. On the 16 mm, the colors become soft, like a day seen through eyes squinting against the afternoon sun; but they also become vibrant, making the emerald green of Wyoming’s wilderness glow like glass, like something out of the Land of Oz. Razooli says he tripped across the film’s music on Bandcamp during post production: “It’s basically music that is made to sound like it’s for a fictional video game soundtrack or fictional fantasy film soundtrack,” he says. (We can expect the soundtrack on vinyl soon, he says.)
Razooli is deeply fascinated by spying. In the film, Alice, Hazel, and Jodi make gadgets not only of their smartphones but also of various toys, using them to deftly spy on unknowing and, honestly, bumbling adults. Riddle of Fire features not only kids spying on adults, but also kids spying on other kids, with one stunning scene depicting a trail of adults being followed by the three kids, who in turn are being followed by Petal. It’s not so much a nefarious kind of spying as it is an inquisitive kind of spying, necessitated by their situation and desires. The kids here spy to attain what the adults can’t or won’t deliver.
“I think kids in general just like to spy when they can,” he says. “Things are so interesting and being a spy is funny and cool.” As a kid, he says, he and his friends did a lot of spying. “Just on random people around town and it’s really exciting and you’re full of adrenaline if you’re following someone. I wanted to make a movie that was all that.”
One of the most precious aspects of the film is the “kid logic” that Razooli baked into its dialogue and characterization. Often, when adults write kids, the kids end up being precocious, carrying adult minds in their kids’ bodies. In Riddle of Fire, the kids truly feel like kids, they make choices that feel natural and seem to follow their child-like understanding of the world, and their arguments are very much centered around what is crucial within a kid’s hierarchy of priorities. Razzooli’s dialogue is smart but also naive, understanding the ways in which kids tend to mimic adult rhythms while communicating that which is important to them.
This achievement of kid logic in a manner that respects the kids themselves is something else that Razooli achieved in an intuitive sort of way. “I don’t know how exactly I got it,” he says frankly. “I think kids are so funny in general, and I love writing [it], trying to write kid dialogue is also just pretty fun for me. [What’s more], you can get these thoughts that are kind of clever or really stupid but if you have a kid say it, it’s very clever.”
At one point, Alice, Hazel, and Jodi have a discussion about cuteness and hotness, and they land on the conclusion that being cute is better than being hot, which is just as sweet as it is revelatory. At a point later, when Hazel and Jodi come across Petal, the boys speculate about who she could be. They think Petal might be blessed or cursed, perhaps both — she appears in the woods like a fairy. But then they are in the position of figuring out the kind of person who is both blessed and cursed, trying to contextualize this kind of person within the world as they understand it. “Maybe rich people,” Jodi offers, are both blessed and cursed. Hazel turns to Petal and asks, “Are you rich, girl?” They carry the cadence of the adults they watch on TV and around them, but their thoughts and ideas are so beautifully unique to their kidness, to the experiences they have gathered in their short time — it’s a delight to watch.
“I mean, I’m also just kind of immature too, I guess,” Razooli confesses in regard to writing kid logic. “My mind works like that too sometimes.”
In directing the kids, Razooli says he would have loved to have more time to have allowed them to improvise, but a tight shooting schedule made that endeavor tough. This, however, is not to say that the filming process was tough. It too, as Razooli tells me, followed a frictionless pace resembling a river finding its easy course.
“It did come down to a lot of pretty simple directions,” he says. “And it came down to just ‘Faster, faster, slower, slower, quieter, louder’ [in terms of direction]. But other things I had to tone down. For example, Charlie Stover, who plays Hazel, does a lot of plays, so he’s used to really emoting and projecting. So I had to turn that down. And how I did that, I made his character sort of sleepy. I was like, Hazel, maybe he’s been on the riverbank fishing, lounging in the hot summer sun, so he’s kind of sleepy, to try to get him [Stover] to turn down the emoting.”
Because of the film’s intuitive truth — its authentic dialogue and honoring of the pulse of childhood — the young actors, according to the director, took to the film naturally. “Since it’s such an action-based movie, a lot of it [directing] was just me kind of being this circus ringleader/camp counselor, [being] like, ‘Hey guys, look at what we got today. Dirt bikes today, paintball guns, we’re going to be running in the forest’. Just keeping the energy really up and fun, and they really liked that, they all really naturally just got the story. They got the vibe.”
Though Riddle of Fire is his first feature, Razooli says he has landed on a certain failsafe when it comes to crafting: isolation. “I need to have time to just write a script alone, and be alone and really try to turn off phone and wifi as much as possible,” he says. “It’s getting harder, but I definitely need to have that time to write the entire script and rewrite it and then get it to the point where I want to show it to people and not send it to people before that. So when it’s that time, then that’s when I start trying to get it going and everything.”
I’m not surprised when he tells me that Hayao Miyazaki is his favorite director. For the amount of whimsy and playfulness and innocence that Riddle of Fire contains, a child’s wide-eyed curiosity for life balanced against dire odds, it makes total sense that the director of Studio Ghibli is someone Razooli admires.
Because the thing is, there are certainly high stakes in Riddle of Fire, to the extent that they place the film at a different register than other films that feature kids. Certainly, the kids want to make a blueberry pie, which is the small and innocuous goal that inspires its action, but as they follow Anna-Freya and her gang, they begin to traverse a path that leads them to uncertainty and violence; the adults in this film, in other words, contain a measure of the danger that they do in reality, their rugged contours aren’t smoothed over. In the film’s third act, one finds oneself riddled with worry over the wellbeing of the kids, for it does become uncertain. Will their bliss be punctured? Will they be forced to countenance the blunt unfairness of the world that fairytales only skirt around? This gravity is something Miyazaki films always lace through their whimsy and sweet beauty.
“[Miyazaki] has everything that I would hope to be inspired by,” he says. “His filmmaking philosophy is pretty in tune with mine, [and] I’ve learned a lot through him and watching his process — reading his books and obviously his movies.”
There is the idea of sickness that floats as a shadow at the periphery of the film in the manner of My Neighbor Totoro. The cold that Julie and Celia have in the film never fails to remind me of sickness that features in other films that, in my mind, sit on a plane similar to Riddle of Fire. It’s something that is also innocuous, but it could very easily become dire, in the way that it does in My Neighbor Totoro.
It’s a hefty metaphor that, to Razooli, was arrived at by necessity. “I used it as a literary device, honestly,” he says. “This is just the truth of the writing. I use it as a literary device because in these movies where kids are lost or on adventures or whatever, there’s always the scenes where you cut back to the super stressed out parents and the concerned adults, and it just kind of really ruins the rhythm and the magic or adrenaline or scariness of being on an adventure. So I thought, if I can just put the mother to sleep, then I don’t really have to do that. And then it also plays into [the film’s fairy tale notes with] the sleeping beauty or the queen who’s been poisoned or pricked her finger on the spinning wheel, but she needs the potion to heal her.”
He says the darker theme he wanted to explore was the idea of “pseudo-feral child relationships, or [the dynamic with] Petal and Anna-Freya and that kid who’s living off the grid and how that living off the grid is perceived by a child.” In the film, the kids are often unsupervised, and so they have constructed intricate and involving games not just to keep themselves occupied, but to survive their situations, to make the most of the independence prematurely foisted upon them. The necessity of this fancifulness is evidenced not only by the spying tools that they have manufactured of their toys and devices, but also the skill and confidence with which they move about their town — they know how to finesse the structures around them, they know to to take advantage of the adults, how to steal, how to get their way. Petal, too, is left to her own devices often as Anna-Freya and her gang wander away for their own nefarious ends; Petal, too, has attained an understanding of how to (through the magic she has inherited from her mother) manipulate the people around her, has learned independence as a means to survive.
This is part and parcel of the film’s thesis, Razooli says. “Riddle of Fire explores how children manage living in fractured households and can still manage to live happily and retain some magic of childhood,” he says. “That’s my hopeful, optimistic view of kids in those more unfortunate situations.”
At the moment, Razooli is very busy — he is finishing up a script for his next feature, in isolation of course. “It’s a Euro crime romantic thriller set in Spain and France, and it’s sort of a departure from Riddle in that it’s a pretty hard R movie about pretty adult themes,” he says. “But it definitely is going to be a very stylized, hopefully beautiful world that I want to make shot on 35mm.”
Razooli said earlier that many are expectant, waiting with bated breath, as he works on his second feature, and it truly doesn’t surprise me. Riddle of Fire is a tremendous testament to the young director’s skill and talent, which he possesses in a manner like his young characters who demand to be noticed and refuse to settle when it comes to their desires: in a capacity that is so evidently intuitively easy and unignorable.
