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Jazz Infernal
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Will Niava’s Oscar-qualifying short film Jazz Infernal sees a young man from Ivory Coast arrive in Canada for the first time. He’s supposed to be meeting his aunt, but she doesn’t turn up, telling him to find his way to her place, and he doesn’t know how anything works in this strange new country. Lost and confused, he finds his way to a jazz bar. When people there realise that he’s the son of a legendary performer, they pressure him to play. but what they don’t know is that his father has recently died, he’s full of unspoken grief, and he’s on the verge of becoming completely overwhelmed.
Will himself is a little bit overwhelmed when we meet to discuss it. He’s in solo charge of his one-year-old daughter, who doesn’t understand why discussing his work should take even temporary precedence over making her a smoothie. She’s too shy to speak to me, but wanders in and out of the room as we talk, casting suspicious glances.
“The actor Ange Eric [N’Guessan] called me one day. He's very famous back in Ivory Coast. He had been living in Montreal for three years and no one knew him in Canada, so he was like, ‘Will, you’ve got to do something. We’ve got to tell our story.’
“We started talking for two hours and decided we wanted to talk about our very first day, you know, the very first day in Canada as an immigrant. For me, it was a hilarious experience. And by the end of the call, I went and met up with a great director and good friend of mine, Kristelle Laroche, to write, because she just has a golden feather. We came up with a script in no time, and I showed the script around and it was hilarious. But then my wife read the script and she was like, ‘It's not bad.’ And that really broke my heart.
“I know why she said that. She later mentioned, like, ‘Hey, if you have an opportunity, speak about the thing that lies deep within you,’ which is grief. My father had passed away and I just did not know how to speak about it. I wasn't sure about therapy just yet, and she was like, ‘Put it in your art.’ I took the script back myself and really poured my heart in it.”
I tell him that I like the idea of jazz in that context because it seems to relate to the experience of being in a strange place and the way that meaning is fused out of that chaos. Was that how he saw it?
“I think you said it right. Chaos comes together, you know, it's chaotic, it makes sense. And that's what jazz is. There's no rules, there's no lines you got to follow. Obviously you can read jazz, but I feel like if you play free jazz, it still makes sense at the end of the day. That's what this moment is, the experience of coming fish out of water with no contacts and being in the wolf's den, basically figuring out how to move. I feel like life kind of comes together for you, at the end of the day.”
I ask if any of his experiences made it into the film, and he says that he sees the film as allegorical.
“I find myself a lot in this character. At the beginning of my experience in Canada, I wasn't too adamant on even speaking too much. I was more observing. That I gave to him. I also gave him my grief. I too did not want to talk about it, and it seems like his whole environment is forcing him to face that.”
It's interesting in that so much happens to him rather than him driving the action. It's quite rare to see a character in a film who has so little agency but still puts so much personality across.
“That's right. And at the end, it was important for me too, for him to reclaim that or at least claim some sort of grasp on what's happening to him. It feels like it just spirals down after he snaps, you know, until the final reckoning.”
Knowing his lead actor well, was he confident that he could get that performance and make it work like that?
“Absolutely. I always saw him as the guy. It’s funny, because he came to me months after we wrote the script, asking me if he could have a role in the film. ‘What do you mean? You're the guy!’ But yeah, we had worked previously on a series and I saw that he had qualities beyond the melodramatic African series. He really dialled it in with the emotions in this one. I think he connected to me. We had long talks and he really understood where I was in my mind and what the characters needed.
“You know, it has a little bit of everything, this film. All the genres are in there. There's a little bit of thriller, there's a little bit of comedy, some drama. I'm interested in that emotion that we have in our everyday lives. We go through all those things, and I think he was able to channel that.”
We talk about the way the film looks, its consistent tone and use of colour.
“We worked very hard with my DP, Harley Francis, an amazing guy but very careful with his attention to detail. We didn't want to look like everything else that we see. You know, people usually light night in blue, but we wanted to stay true to the colours of my country, actually. Orange, green. It's kind of a theme. So the night feels green and it's bathed with the orange lights of this city. But inside, we kept that theme. Even with the clothing, you know? Our art director just put a touch that made it feel even more expensive, you know, like that jazz bar just feels like, ‘Whoa, where are we?’
“I also didn't want us to tell which time period we were in. I wanted it to be like at any point in the world, so the idea was remove any element that felt too technological. In the end, we kept the cell phone just to place you, but everything else feels like it could be from now or from the time before.”
There are also flashback scenes which connect the protagonist with his father.
“Yes. You know, those started as scenes of their own, like, they were not supposed to be flashbacks, but then our distributor told us they wouldn't take our film for distribution if we didn't cut it down from 25 minutes to under 20. My DP and producers radically chopped the film down to 15 minutes. This made no sense, so I took it back and took an advice of Sam Caron, my producer, to splice these Ivory Coast scenes into their memories. It just took a whole new meaning. So, yeah, it's a testament to the amazing team that I have and, I guess, how collaborative I am.
“The writing finally made sense once the edit came down from 25 to 16. I wouldn't add a single minute, but just to speak to the character and what it does to him, now it feels like he's trying to remember this song that his dad played, you know? And he's also dealing with that grief and it's heavy on him. We don't know quite know what happened to his father, but it's the spirit of his departure that remains in those sequences. I think that's beautiful because it's poetic. I'm very proud of it.
Cutting it down probably also gives it a better shot at the Oscars. How does he feel about being in that race?
“We're just happy to be part of the conversation,” he smiles. “It's great to be here right now, and it's amazing to have so many great collaborators. There's so many great pieces coming together for this period, and yeah, I'm elated. I manifested this when I started the project. I really wanted this to get to the places where we are right now.”
