How did you develop the visual aesthetic, including the animation and artwork shot on 35-millimeter film?
Zagar: I’m interested in the way we view the world in present day, as opposed to the way we view the world in our dream states or memory. I think when we view the world in present day we see it as this muddy, ugly, reality-TV thing, because we view the world not through the lens of our eyes but through the media we watch. We wanted to make a movie that contrasted with how we view reality versus how we view dreams. For instance, when we imagine the 1970s, it’s very colorful. The 1930s is black-and-white, and people look a bit like Charlie Chaplin. We wanted to create a contrast between those two ideas and a space that felt like a dream, less like memory. And the only way we could do that was by shooting in a way that was like nothing you could see in your present-day reality. Our eyeballs view the world through 50-millimeter lenses. So we wanted to show the work on 10-millimeter and 90-millimeter lenses, extreme wide shots and extreme close-ups. We shot it in extreme clarity, so that wh
