INTERVIEW: STEVEN ZAILLIAN
Armenian Film Society sat down with the legendary Oscar-winning filmmaker Steven Zaillian, ahead of his Netflix series earning 13 Emmy nominations, including nods for Best Writing and Best Directing. Steven Zaillian’s credits include films such as Awakenings (1990), Schindle
Armenian Film Society: I’m honored to speak with you about Ripley, which I feel is your finest work and an incredible achievement. Congratulations on all its success.
Steven Zaillian: Thank you for your kind words.
AFS: You wrote an article about your mother’s grape leaves recipe, which I find fascinating because of how descriptive it is, and how you write the recipe and the instructions with such detail and storytelling.
SZ: I can’t help myself, I guess. Even with a recipe, I have to tell a story.
My mother would make grape leaves a couple of times a month, and always on Christmas Eve, along with lamb kebabs and choreg with black seeds. She wasn’t Armenian, but took it upon herself to learn how to make Armenian food for my dad and my sister and me. Her grape leaves, I think, were her own take on it, the way she cooked them in tomato sauce. I’m sure this wasn’t an unknown way to do it, but I seldom see them cooked like that. They’re delicious, and I still make them with her recipe for my family to this day.
The other thing I notice about that article is that I’m describing in detail a process. I’m always interested in process, in all my scripts, including Ripley. The mechanics of his schemes, how you forge things, how police investigations work…
AFS: Can you tell me about your Armenian background and your family?
SZ: I was born in Fresno, but didn’t spend much time there. We moved to Los Angeles when I was two, and that’s where we stayed. We’d go to Fresno once or twice a year for holidays to visit some of my father’s Armenian relatives and my mother’s German relatives.
My grandmother on my father’s side died when I was quite young, so I never really knew her. Nor did I know my grandfather well. I remember him in his small farmhouse in Sanger, but unfortunately know very little about their lives before they came here. I’m not sure how much my father knew. He, too, was born in Fresno. He would talk about wanting to travel to ‘the old country,’ but died before he could. He died young, at 52.
AFS: Have you ever considered telling an Armenian story? Have you come across any Armenian stories that you have felt strongly about wanting to tell?
SZ: I have long thought about telling an Armenian story, and I continue to think about it. Every so often someone comes to me with The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. While it’s an excellent and important book, and has been made as a film, I don’t feel it’s the only Armenian story to tell.
With Schindler’s List, it was Oskar’s story of building a business that brought us into the broader story of the Holocaust. Without his story I would have been overwhelmed trying to write it. I feel the same way about an Armenian story. I need to come up with compelling characters who can take us through the story within the story, and I just haven’t been able to accomplish that yet. I feel like I’ll only have one shot at it, and if I don’t do it well, in a way that’s thoroughly engrossing, I’d be doing a disservice to such an important subject. But I keep trying.