Expression Of Relief: Chris Tenzis On His Short "Big Touch"
Chris Tenzis is a writer, director, and editor who studied at the London Film School and American Film Institute. His first film, A Man & His Pants, premiered at the SXSW Film Festival in 2000 and won the Audience award at the NW Film & Video Festival in Portland, Oregon. He’s worked as an editor in Animation (The PJs, starring Eddie Murphy for Warner Bros.), as well as for Spectrevision and International advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy. His recent editing work includes Cactus Blossom, which won a DGA award in 2019, Elle, which won the Grand Prize Marlyn Mason Award at this year’s Flickers' Rhode Island International Film Festival.
His recent film, Big Touch has been selected by five Academy Award® qualifying festivals, two BAFTA qualifying festivals and one BIFA (British Independent Film Awards) qualifying festival. The diversity of the festivals by which it's been selected has been remarkable, from the AfroFuturism Film Festival to the Wholesome Film Festival in Baltimore and Mons International Festival of Love in Belgium. It has been selected by one of the biggest MIFF (Méliès International Festivals Federation) festivals in Brazil, featured by Kodak’s #shootonfilm campaign and used by the Compton Arts Alliance to raise money for the local arts community in Los Angeles.
An Afro-surrealist story about a giant woman and a tiny man who through the power of touch, experience an unexpected transformation.
The film is currently screening at the London Short Film Festival as a part of its “A Winter's Matinee of Romantic Films” series. We had the pleasure of chatting with Chris about the film, its origins, creating a cohesive aesthetic, the transformative power of touch, and much much more!
How did you come up with the concept for Big Touch?
Big Touch was inspired by the hyperrealism of sculptor Ron Mueck. If you haven’t seen his work, his subjects are people, often forlorn, suspended in time by the weight of their emotions. Some of Mueck’s sculptures are gigantic, towering over the observer, and other times they’re so small that they need to be placed on a pedestal to be at eye level.
I wondered if their size was somehow in direct relation to their feelings; not that one felt more than another, but that the feelings themselves dictated their size. For example, a man was tiny because he felt marginalized and helpless, and a woman was huge because she was swelling with love yet had no place to put it.
Then I wondered what would happen if Mueck’s creations could touch each other? Would they perhaps equalize in size because, for a moment’s relief, they would be reminded that they were not the sum total of the singularity of an emotion, but that they also had bodies with which to feel?
The film uses race in a clever, intentional, and emotionally visceral way to speak to the black experience. What was your process for sculpting that into the film’s symbolic narrative in a way that felt palpable and sincere?
There were many conversations during casting about how race could impact the film but we wouldn’t know until we found the right cast. Because the film was first and foremost about the universality of empathy through touch, finding a soulful cast who could communicate that narrative was my priority. Raymond Ejiofor was the only person we looked at who not only understood the character, but could express the emotions with his body. Astra Marie Varnado, who plays Judy, our heroine, was the only one we saw who was bursting at the seams to express love. Suddenly, with Ray and Astra in place, the film took on new meaning. Years ago, I met Robert Altman at the Austin Film Festival and he said that he didn’t cast for what he wanted, he casted for what he didn’t know he wanted. So the palpability and sincerity of the symbolic narrative is evidence of trusting that process.
The film features a lot of talented individuals, both behind and in front of the camera. How did you find your terrific cast and crew?
I had seen the L.A. premiere of Gaspar Noé’s Climax at The Egyptian and there was a Q&A with Sofia Boutella during which she gave a shout out to the choreographer, Nina McNeely. I knew I wanted there to be a dance element in Big Touch, so when I found out that she taught dance classes in L.A., Teck [Siang Lim], my cinematographer, and I coaxed our producer into enrolling. It kicked her ass since it was for professional dancers, but she got to talk to Nina afterwards who introduced us to Raymond Ejiofor, who had worked with Katy Perry, Sia, Daft Punk, Pharrell Williams, and he brought the tiny man to life.
I found Astra Marie Varnado, who played the giant woman, on Instagram. I DM’d her, I pitched her the idea and she got very emotional because the story was true to her own experience. She had never acted in a film, lives in Long Beach and doesn’t drive, so we Ubered her to L.A. to audition and I fell in love with her vulnerability. She was a lot shorter than we thought, so we had to get creative on set to make her appear gigantic, but it was the emotion in her eyes that won her the role and she is an absolute star.
The crew was made of people with whom Teck and I had already worked. We had worked with a Columbian filmmaker, Samir Oliveros, on a short called Cactus Blossom which won a DGA award last year. Being that I’m usually in an editing room, I had to have a strong assistant director to make sure that by the time I got back to the editing room, I had everything I needed. That was Samir. Our production designer, Karu de Jesus, had also worked on Cactus Blossom and our producer, Gabrielle Cordero, we had worked with before as well. We worked with friends so the vibe on set was really warm, lots of dancing and hugging when there wasn’t work to be done.
The film features some truly stunning visuals. Talk to us a bit about how you worked with your cinematographer, Teck Siang Lim, to discover the film’s aesthetics.
I cook for us and we eat and drink a lot and listen to Underworld. By this point it was our fifth film together. Teck and I both come from backgrounds in animation, so we were accustomed to storyboarding everything and we did a pre-vis; he sat in on the rehearsals and shot the rehearsals. We were prepared, but it’s uncanny how much is unspoken between us.
I think the technical appeal of Big Touch for Teck was that he wanted the challenge of conveying size differentiation exclusively with the camera. We weren’t going to be using any optical or digital effects and there were only a few practical effects, but the rest was how Teck placed and moved the camera.
Honestly though, the aesthetics started with the cast because I wanted them to have ownership of their characters. I asked Ray, who plays the tiny man, what color he associated with his character and he said rust.
That makes perfect sense because he’s broken. The young mom, played by Carly Stewart, who was the opposite of good touch, was hot blood red and cold silver, her textures metallic and leathery. The daughter then needed to be a muted version of mom’s colors, so she was mostly pink but with appealing textures, like satin and a soft, flowing ballerina poof, because all she wants is to touch everything. Astra, or Judy in the film, has a heavy heart, so she said blue, which became the only cool color we used.
Blue is right for her too since cool colors are less visible when interacting with warm colors, and it’s her feeling of invisibility that makes her so big.
As you mentioned a bit earlier, the film is a testament to the transformative power of touch. I’m curious, how has touch transformed your own life?
I grew up with a family that touched. When there was a shared laugh, it was met with touch. When there was miscommunication during an argument, it was met with the same touch. Successes and failures were met equally with a hug. No matter if the other person's emotion was hurt or joy, the same touch applied because touch was a way to communicate empathy, a shortcut to say, "I feel you."
We all carry our suffering with us all the time. Sometimes our painful feelings are so loud that we cannot hear the joyful feelings which we also carry with us all the time. But that circuit can be broken, if temporarily, by another person's touch which reminds us that we are not alone. Big Touch is an expression of that relief which started with my upbringing.
What have you learned about yourself or filmmaking in general through the making of Big Touch?
Actually, it’s been the process of submitting Big Touch to festivals that has taught me the most about who I am as a filmmaker. I’m learning that the prestigious, legacy festivals right now seem to have a bias towards cinema vérité social realism. I understand what Jean Renoir meant when he said, “Reality is always magical” because when you can capture it, it’s lightning in a bottle, it’s life, it’s the source and it’s very, very hard to do. Just look at the money that pours into visual effects in order to make them look “real.” But that doesn’t interest me. I like seeing the strings of a marionette or the silhouette of a puppeteer and the unbelievability of those puppets; that’s what gets my imagination going and that’s when I participate as an audience member. No, I prefer the quote from surrealist Luis Buñuel, “But that the white eye-lid of the screen reflect its proper light, the Universe would go up in flames.” Cinema is closer to dreams than reality.
What drew you to the visual arts? How did you get into directing?
Martin Scorsese’s After Hours changed my life. I saw it when I was fifteen. From her loft window, Kiki drops her keys to Paul. To emphasize the accelerating danger of jangly, spiky metal hurtling towards our protagonist, foreshadowing the debacle that he would endure for the rest the film, the camera becomes our perspective while the editing stretches space and time so you don’t quite know how close the keys are before they impact. That was the single most exhilarating moment I had experienced from a movie as a kid.
After the film was over, I spent hours in the library pouring over articles about Scorsese. He pointed to other films that influenced his visual language, like Shane for the dissolve forward of Paul as he ascends the stairs to meet Marcy, The Red Shoes for the pan to the window as he’s sitting on the bed with her. Scorsese was creating language with existing film grammar and a conceptual continuity linking his work to that of his predecessors, like a tailor who wanted the seams to be visible not only because of his reverence for their beauty but also because of his humility for their history. That’s when I understood cinema. And that’s when I decided, for better or worse, my life would be devoted to it.
In what way specifically did this experience impact your creativity?
In my own work, as well as the films I exalt, I am attracted to cinema that has veneration for the medium, that flaunts the tailoring—as I said, I’m bored by realism and seamless filmmaking—that reminds the viewer that when cinema goes beyond our natural vision and hearing, it heightens our senses. Sometimes, there’s nothing more beautiful than a well placed freeze frame. Or cross dissolve. Or both! But my goal is to create otherness that elicits a visceral and emotional experience so when the film is over, the viewer returns to their own reality with a new awareness and emotional vulnerability.
What films or filmmakers have inspired you, your style, or your approach to telling a story?
My bible is the book Film as a Subversive Art by Amos Vogel. Vogel, as well as Jonas Mekas, started the first micro-cinemas in the U.S. in the Forties. Vogel’s was Cinema 16 which eventually evolved into the Film Society of Lincoln Center. His book is based on the notes he wrote for those screenings. For him, subversion isn’t limited to taboo subjects but it could be a film’s formalism: Michael Snow zooming in on a window for 45- minutes, Peter Kubelka’s film made entirely of single frames of opaque and transparent leader thereby creating a psychedelic strobe confusing the brain into thinking that it’s seeing colors that aren’t actually there or Brakhage’s perpetual play of shapes and colors on the closed eyelid. Vogel’s book is a guide to understanding the entire language of cinema. William Klein, Dusan Makavejev, Vera Chytilova, Jack Smith, Radley Metzger, Agnes Varda are just a few who became model filmmakers for me, plus it taught me how Chaplin and Keaton were agents of subversion through pathos.
There was a cinema in London, The Scala Cinema on Pentonville Road in Kings Cross, which modeled some of their programming on Vogel’s book. I was studying at the London International Film School during the cinema’s final years. It was common for LIFF students to ditch class and spend the day at The Scala instead. That was my true film school. They’d play three different films a day and on weekends up to seven, from when they opened in the afternoon to when the busses started running again in the morning. Because the cinema was above a Tube station, the rumble of passing trains shook the theater. There were cats roaming the cinema, one of which brushed its tail under my leg while I was watching a Halloween night triple feature. Before they had an album, members of the band Stereolab worked there, Ralph Brown, who played Danny in the iconic British comedy Withnail & I, worked there and director Richard Stanley lived in the cinema in order to hide from immigration. Anyway, the Scala programming by Jane Giles was a major influence. She brought the transgressive cinema I had only read about to the screen.
What do you hope audiences take away from the film?
I honestly believe that right now empathy is the most subversive act in the world. If audiences can feel their hearts open to strangers after watching the film, great. If audiences can also feel their own simple desire to be touched, amazing. Then if they act upon their empathy and desire, success!
Do you have any future projects in the works that you can share with us?
Right now, my priority is getting Big Touch seen by as many people as possible. In Vogel’s book, he writes, “Art can never take the place of social action...but its task remains forever the same: to change consciousness. When it occurs, it is so momentous an achievement, even with a single human being, that it provides both justification and explanation of subversive art.”
That’s what I want. Yes, I’m writing a film which is more goodness, kindness and empathy, a film in which the protagonist has a servant’s heart and whose companion is equally pure, but still, Big Touch for now is the message, especially at a time during which there is devastating division in the United States and empathy through touch is catastrophically limited.
Wanna touch more?! Check out the link below:
What do you think? We want to know. Share your thoughts and feelings in the comments section below, and as always, remember to viddy well!