‘Riddle of Fire’ Director Weston Razooli On Goblin Children And Making The Ultimate Kids Movie
Films like Stand By Me, Now and Then, and My Girl are quintessential kids’ movies, as in they are perfect films about the experience of childhood. Now we have a new film entering the proverbial chat, this one with a dash or three of whimsy, never straying into tragedy or trauma but rather focusing on what it means to just be a weird little kid. This film is none other than Weston Razooli’s feature film debut Riddle of Fire, a modern-day fairytale that depicts a perfect kind of childhood filled with junk food, adventure, and blueberry pie.
In Riddle of Fire,
This neo-fairytale set in Wyoming, USA follows three mischievous children as they embark on an odyssey when their mother asks them to run an errand. On the hunt to obtain her favorite blueberry pie, the children are kidnapped by poachers, battle a witch, outwit a huntsman, befriend a fairy, and bond together to become best friends forever.
We spoke with Razooli about writing endearing little gremlin characters, Dungeon Synth, and the importance of scrappy female characters.
Dread Central: How did Riddle of Fire come to be?
Weston Razooli: Great question. Big answer. Many, many things. But basically one of them is I was trying to make the ultimate kids movie about the kids that have everything you wanted as a kid: motorcycles, paintball, guns, freedom, the talent to steal things…
DC: Video games.
WR: Video games, the banquets of food. Beautiful enchanted forests, really satisfying bad guys to shoot with paintball guns. So that was part of it. Another part was the script that I was trying to do before this was set in the same fictional town of Ribbon, Wyoming, but it was about teenagers. The main character had these three younger brothers who were these goblin-esque dirt-bike-riding, paintball-gun-toting little bastards.
Every time I would rewrite it, they would get bigger and bigger parts. And then eventually I was pretty sick of trying to get that movie going, and I decided it would be so much more fun just to write a really simple movie about these characters that I’d really, really kind of fallen in love with. Well, I mean, that turned out a little more complex than it was meant to be. But yeah, so those were kind of the inceptions of Riddle of Fire. It’s one movie to throw in all of my kind of childhood inspiration type stuff, or as much as possible anyway, and shoot it in my hometown.
DC: Oh, you shot it in your hometown?
WR: Yeah, yeah. In Utah.
DC: So you grew up in the woods basically?
WR: Yeah. I grew up in the mountains.
DC: Was your childhood like Riddle of Fire at all? I mean, obviously, you weren’t shooting bad guys. Or I suppose I shouldn’t assume.
WR: Riddle of Fire is my childhood, turned up to 11 for sure. We had dirt bikes and paintball guns, got in trouble with the police. Yeah, little troublemakers. But yeah, it was definitely similar to my childhood, for sure.
DC: But I love that your friend group is one, made up of young kids. It’s like Stand By Me vibes a little bit, but it’s boys and girls. So often it’s little dudes or girls hanging out. But here it’s a mixed friend group. And I know that there’s a little bit of a romance, but you mentioned that it was three little goblin boys first. So what inspired you to make one of the boys actually a girl?
WR: That’s a great question. I’m surprised people aren’t asking about that more. You’re the first person to ask about that. So I write equally, boy characters and girl characters. I love both, and I think it’s really important to do that. And so I thought if I was going to make a movie about these kids being the main characters, then one of them needed to be a girl. I mean, the relationships that I’ve had with girls, I’ve had some really great friendships that kind of can run in between friendship and romantic, and those are my kind of favorite types of relationships. I love scrappy little kid characters. They’re great. Tatum O’Neal in Paper Moon is one of my favorite characters of all time. I showed that to Phoebe Ferro, who plays Alice. So I love scrappy cool girls that, you don’t have enough of them which is such a bummer.
DC: It’s cool to see them together and show everyone just being friends and being little goblins rather than having to be like, the boys are the goblins and the girls play with girly toys. I love that your kids are just little endearing, shitty gremlins.
WR: Those are my favorite characters. Shitty little endearing gremlins are my thing, and that’s going to be a constant theme in all of my films. But yeah, I’m really glad you picked that up. And then, yeah, especially if Alice and Petal, because Petal, as you said, she retains the kind of femininity, but she’s still scrappy because also, I hate it when people write girl characters that are like, “Oh, if they’re scrappy, then they’ve got to be just totally masculine.” And it’s like, I don’t know. Even Alice loves to bake, she’s the baker, I don’t know. And she’s still got the best style with the bob and the glasses
DC: Were you ever nervous working with kids? I mean, people always say it’s hard to work with kids, and this is a mostly kid movie with kids cursing and doing crazy shit, and one of the kids even is subtitled.
WR: So I worked with some kids before in a short film, and then once for a music video. Why I’m not too worried about it is because Riddle of Fire, it was a fun movie. I mean, for the most part, it’s a fun action-based movie, with a lot of running, a lot of jumping, a lot of fun stuff. So therefore, my thing is if I just cast a kid who is naturally kind of funny or endearing or charming, it’s going to be okay. If I was making a pretty hard intense drama film with kids, that would be a way different story, and I would have a way different approach to that. But I’m trying to make a summer camp. My approach to that is I’m the kind of circus ringleader. Today we’re riding bikes and check out your bikes today that you get or your paintball guns.
DC: That sounds fun, though. It sounds like you’re a camp counselor.
WR: A Little bit, yeah. It was really fun, but it’s important to cast the right kids that get it. They’re down. They’re into getting a little scrappy, they’re fine with running in the woods and stuff. And they were all great. They all kind of wanted to one-up each other on the little stunts stuff.
DC: So true kid behavior.
WR: Yeah, very much. They got a little competitive and their parents were so cool also and so helpful and great. Yeah. But definitely, it’s a risky thing, but I think it’s like with the right kids and the right script and the fright energy, then it can be great.
DC: Well, and like I said, one of them is subtitled, but I love that. He feels like a little kid. And also he’s the funny guy in the group, and I’m just curious about that whole situation.
WR: Yeah, thank you. So Skyler Peters [is] the kid who plays Jodie. When I was casting the kids, when I was watching all the self-tapes, he was the only kid who made me laugh in his tape. And so I was like, “I have to go with him if he’s just naturally funny”. I met him and his mom for a callback, but he was so nervous that he didn’t really talk. But I could sense if I told him that he got the part, he wouldn’t be nervous or something. So I was like, “I’m just going to give it to this kid”. So I gave it to him, and then he got super happy.
Then he came to the production office a ton of times with his family to ride bikes, shoot paintball guns, get wardrobe, and get his head buzzed. And then I didn’t really realize until we’re shooting the first day of shooting, the first scene that we shoot, I’m like, action. And he’s like [mimics muttering]. I’m like, “Oh…” I’m like, “OK, let’s just say it again. Can you just say it a little bit louder maybe?” And then he is like, [mimics muttering]. I was like, “Oh, no, I’ve fucked up. I’ve cast a kid who’s too young.”
DC: A baby Boomhauer.
WR: Yeah, exactly. So I didn’t know what to do. I was like, we just got to shoot. I mean, we have to shoot this day. We just shot. And then luckily that night, or the next morning was when I thought, “Oh my God, if I subtitle him, then it will just be hilarious.” Also, he’s the most eloquent one. He uses the biggest word sometimes. He’s like, “So goddamn juvenile.”
DC: Oh my God, I just want that on a shirt with his little head going, “So goddamn juvenile.”
WR: But I had to rewrite the script a lot. I gave a lot of scenes to the Hazel character because of that. It was supposed to be Jodie that goes into the campsite and gets drunk, and I was like, no, I got to give this to Hazel thing, which was obviously the right choice. But yeah, you got to roll with it, I guess.
DC: Well, and I do want to talk about the music, because the music reminds me of the old animated movies I used to watch as a kid, like The Last Unicorn and the animated Hobbit. I wanted to hear about working on the score specifically to make this feel like a fantasy movie.
WR: Cool. Yeah. Well, first of all, I’m so glad you mentioned those because I was definitely going for a tone that is, I call it the dark seventies sci-fi fantasy tone. It’s like The Last Unicorn, The Hobbit, the Rankin and Bass stuff, I was definitely going for that vibe and the music.
So yeah, the music was one of the last parts I did for the whole thing. I discovered this genre called Dungeon Synth, it’s a sort of subgenre of music on Bandcamp and there’s tons of it. It’s music that is meant to sound like it’s made for fictional fantasy, video games, films, or sort of mood scapes. So I spent months just delving into Bandcamp and going down into the hundreds and hundreds of different artists, and I bought and downloaded so much music, and I weaved in and out. I mixed and matched tons and tons of tracks.
There are 25 different artists or something in Riddle of Fire, and yeah, it’s a lot of music. I’m really scared to work with a composer. [There’s] just so much music that already exists. And music is really, I mean, it is the tone of the film, so you got to get it right. It’s hard for me to love it sometimes, so I need to love it, and the more I can kind of play around with [the music] the more I feel comfortable. We’re actually releasing a vinyl for the soundtrack which will come out in a couple of months.
Categorized:Interviews
