Azazel Jacobs | Interview

Azazel Jacobs’s Terri marks a rupture from his previous work, which fictionalized aspects of his relationships with his wife and parents. Yet the New York–raised, Los Angeles–based director—son of experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs and artist Flo Jacobs—says he was drawn intuitively to the movie’s story of a teen outcast.

“My world was so far away from The Breakfast Club,” Jacobs told us at Sundance, where Terri premiered. “But there was some part of me there that everybody recognizes and connects with. The high-school movie is very fertile ground—a constant stream of new experiences.”

In Terri, Jacob Wysocki plays the eponymous lead, a hulking kid with a massive chest and thick forearms. He lives in a crumbling farmhouse with his mentally impaired uncle (Creed Bratton), for whom he provides care. His life is slowly turned by developing friendships with the school’s vice principal (John C. Reilly) and two fellow outcasts, Heather (Olivia Crocicchia) and Chad (Bridger Zadina).

After the autobiographically inflected The GoodTimesKid (2005) and Momma’s Man (2008), Jacobs says he needed an emotional and stylistic remove. For the first time he worked from a script, by Patrick deWitt, that he did not originate.

“Patrick was a friend I originally met through my wife,” Jacobs says. “I knew him as a bartender initially. He showed me a manuscript that became his first novel, and I just fell in love with his words.”

Momma’s Man was shot almost entirely in Jacobs’s parents’ loft, drawing on claustrophobic interiors to underline the protagonist’s deepening feeling of entrapment. In Terri, Jacobs again worked with cinematographer Tobias Datum to find a visual correlative to the characters’ knotted emotional states.

“The two movies Toby and I most discussed were Hal Ashby’s Being There and Joseph Losey’s The Servant,” Jacobs says. “Ashby’s for the tone, using a fantasy and fable and keeping it so grounded. The Servant because of the camera. You feel the theatrical nature of the story in a very true and odd way.”

Jacobs also drew on high-school movies and recent festival favorites. “Keith Gordon’s Chocolate War stayed with me much more than I thought,” Jacobs says. “[Antonio Campos’s] Afterschool, I thought, figured out another way of depicting a school. I stole a couple of shots from [Lance Hammer’s] Ballast. I got to talk with Lance a bunch about how to handle kids. Again, I knew we were telling a fable. I wasn’t dealing with cell phones. There were no computers.”

The film climaxes with an extraordinary, nearly 20-minute scene. The protagonist has gathered uneasily with Heather and Chad. Fueled by whiskey, Uncle James’s drugs and nervousness, the three gradually reveal aspects of themselves.

“It was not storyboarded,” Jacobs says of the scene. “I was able to get the kids to move around and start working together. I was on uncomfortable ground.… There was only one right thing to do—to [create] an atmosphere that showed realistically what these kids were willing to do.”

Apprehensiveness is only natural when you’re the son of one of the world’s greatest filmmakers. “I still feel like there’s a lot left to learn from my parents. I get nervous when I show them my work,” Jacobs says. “In a way, I thought it was time for me to do a film my parents didn’t like. I thought Terri would be it. But they really loved it.”

He laughs. “Maybe the next one.”

Terri opens Friday 22 at Landmark’s Century Centre.