didn’t really know me. Don’t pretend. When I won the 2013 award for Best Canadian Feature—not the best documen- tary, the best film overall—at the Toronto International Film Festival for When Jews Were Funny , I said to my then-wife: I guess I can’t use that narrative anymore. I’m now trying to write a one-man show, and I wanted it to be all about failure. My girlfriend, who’s a theatre director, tells me a little goes a long way. And it’s like, really? I could do hours about failure, I’ll never stop remembering it.
makes people feel good is feeling that somebody else has the same issues. You’re not alone. And yeah, it also relates to the fact that I have a persona. I even made a docu- mentary called I, Curmudgeon , although that was meant to be an ironic joke. But you know how your Not That Kind of Rabbi podcast is about spirituality? This part of my life is also spiritual. I’ve seen people affected by sad things in my films, espe- cially the one about ex-cons, A Hard Name . People told me that it changed their heart. I didn’t get that before, but now it’s an article of faith for me. Now, if I ask you to be in my films, you can say no. But I really want to encourage you to tell your sad story, because it’ll be good for other people. That’s what people need in a way. They need to hear about something specific, rather than general. My spiritual feeling is that we exist in the world to tell each other our stories, to make us feel like we’re connected. That’s why I make documentaries about people’s lives, and not about a baseball game or a famous person. RB: You know that Pixar animated movie Inside Out ? I showed it to my youngest son, because I wanted him to see that you don’t have to keep telling people that you’re OK and everything’s fine, because you need sadness to have a full life. You can’t just be, pull up your socks, go get them. And that’s a really important lesson for kids because otherwise we just take our sadness out to the backyard, bury it, and pretend we’re not that—because those people are not suc- ceeding in life, right? So when I think of how that can be part of a spiritual journey, the spiritual part for you, the sharing moment where we’re vulnerable? Because in some of the work I do as a spiritual director, you have to move people toward sadness, and toward death. AZ: That’s part of the reason I wanted to make a documentary about suicide. I was hoping my fear of death might mitigate a little if I made a film about death. The other thing in my identity is that I’m an old dad. I was almost 59 when my daughter was born. So, part of the thing is to put as much into her as you can, pack it in so that if I die when she’s 18 or something, she will be full of you. And unfortunately, one of the things I packed in during her childhood was sarcasm.
you would dominate. There was no such thing as docudrama back then, but that’s what it was. I had a final cut I really liked, and that’s where I caught the bug, you guys being bored together at Mister Donut at the corner of St. Clair and Vaughan, which had just opened at the time. There was a shot I had of all four of you sitting there waiting, and I thought that was the perfect ending.
RB: Years later, I saw you through the window at a coffee shop right after they
announced the Hot Docs film festival lineup. You were part of the press confer- ence, but you looked like you’d just run over your own dog. I remember telling you to be happier about everything. Like, you’re Alan Zweig now, people think you’re great at this, you know? AZ: But I always defined my life and my career in terms of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. When I made Vinyl , I was 48, and that was the first tiny bit of success I had after 25 years of utter struggle. If some- body met me from that point on, I felt like if you didn’t know me when I was a failure, you
RB: And you’re doing a podcast where you ask other people about their darkest moments too. AZ: That’s part of my thinking that there are things nobody talks about, and it would be good if they had a chance to. You ask a friend how they’re doing and they’ll respond that their life is going great. I know people who stopped being friends because this guy told him how great life was going and he was like, “I can’t be your friend any- more.” So, the idea is based on how what
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