Photo Courtesy Sundance Film Festival

Like so many sibling pairs, David and Nathan Zellner often finish one another's sentences. There's a fluid start and stop to their exchanges, as if what one stumbles to express, the other vocalizes with ease. They repeat one another as well, each an echo, and yet the two are immediately distinct.

Hanging out in the Sundance Filmmaker's Lodge on the afternoon of their last screening of feature debut Goliath, David sits the closer of the two. The writer-director of the pair, his attention is always direct, a never faltering focus seeming to aim him at some visualized destination. He speaks articulately, with no tension, the consummate leader, always seeming to know what he means and to know where it will get him.

Boyish in his open, kind expressions, Nathan sits arms length away and listens as David lays out details about the development of the film, the themes that resonate with him and the thoughts that cross his mind about filmmaking in general. "I have images in my head that I don't feel I've seen in films before, and so we're trying to accomplish those on our small scale and hopefully, eventually that will become a bigger scale," David says. "We want to push the envelope as much as we can while still having compassion. At least with the audiences we've been with they've gotten that, and that was a good feeling, that we're on the same page."

After producing a stream of hit shorts, David and Nathan launched into Goliath with their experienced skeleton crew and a story of grieving that at turns plays humorous, absurd and truly moving. On the verge of a bitter divorce, discontent, socially awkward husband (David Zellner) finds that his beloved cat Goliath has gone missing. Between scenes of disconnect with his coworkers and moments of solitude, his emotional distress clashes against moments of the ridiculous, and in this process, neighborhood sex offender Chad P. Franklin (Nathan Zellner) comes to embody for him the bitterness of all those troubles.

While the first act of the film wanders a bit, a great cameo by filmmaker Andrew Bujalski helping to distract from some confusion about narrative momentum, Goliath's turning point, and particularly its closing scene, rut out raw emotion that hits exactly that mark of the compassionate that David speaks about. While not a humanist film per se, Goliath's treatment of its characters, even as they delve into depressions and moral pitfalls, is ever humane. It's a thought-provoking and oddly comforting study of the human condition worn down by the process, and general inability, faced by people letting go of the things that most matter.

Between a host of other parties, meetings and interviews, David and Nathan graciously shuffled some time in a harried schedule to discuss four-minutes takes, the need for closure and the infinite possibilities of filmmaking.

SM: In terms of theme, the story can be read as one about moral scapegoats. When you're own personal life falls to shambles, you look for somebody with which to blame your own moral downfall. That's how I read it, but you guys had also mentioned in a Q&A at some point that it's really a story of obsession. I was hoping that we could talk about the space between those two ideas.

David: There were a lot of things like that that we wanted to play with. There's no black and white answer to it. Maybe for different people there are, but overall you can't so clearly lay out what's right and what's wrong.

One angle of it that we liked was, (the husband's) transferring all the pain of the cat, projecting it onto this person [Chad P. Franklin] that's very convenient for him to merit this generic 'bad guy," and thereby bringing closure to him. From the main character's perspective, in his mind, he was this hero who stopped the evil villain and was rewarded in the end. But, to outsiders, he's just this psycho stranger that roughed up this guy for no reason--

Nathan: Which is why we don't show what happens after that. It's all from (the husband's) perspective, and so after the attack at the end, he just goes off and gets another cat.

David: We also wanted to keep Nathan's character, the neighbor as complicated as possible. He's a registered sex offender, but we wanted to make it more complex than that, not say what his crime was. It could have been for something really awful, or he could have been an eighteen-year-old with a steady girlfriend who was seventeen. There are just so many different variables as to why he could have been labeled as that. We also wanted him to look clean-cut, normal, not look like the slovenly creep to make it all that much easier to demonize him.

I really like the idea that people transfer pain or guilt onto something else, and although (the husband) very much loved the cat, I feel like there's an element of it where he was imposing the last relic of his marriage on the cat, which gave it even more relevance to him. Like we were just saying, he wanted some kind of closure to everything, and this guy was able to provide it for him.

SM: Along with that sense of guilt, that need for closure, I felt that sense of outsiderness. Some of my favorite scenes were the ones with the groups of workers. How did you work with that group of guys?

David: That was the one part that wasn't scripted. Everything else was tightly scripted, but then when we were rehearsing and something seemed more natural or more appropriate, we were more than happy to abandon what we had. That's normally the way we like to work. For that nothing we could write would be as good or organic as what would take place. All the guys in the room were people either we'd known since childhood or just buddies of mine from film school, all people who at different points in my life I heard tell ridiculous stories. We just wanted to put them in a room with lots of testosterone, no women around and just let this meat head atmosphere prevail and create another environment or social scene from which he could further alienate himself.

SM: Both of the characters you play hold the emotional threads of the film together, and with other characters, there are interesting stylistic choices you've made. There's an element of absurdity. There's also a very strange, big brother stylism with the manager character who talks about the--is it mayonnaise packets?

David: The creamers.

SM: There's something almost hyper stoic with that performance, and even with the neighbor who points out in the first place that a sex offender has moved into the neighborhood, there's something very detached about her. How did you work with all these different styles?

David: We wanted a balance of stylization and truth, just weaving that together based on gut instinct, where it was more appropriate to go to the core reality of it and where it felt right to be a little bit more absurd with it...We definitely wanted to keep a reign on it because it would be very easy to get out of control and make the film uneven. But, going into it, we knew what we wanted and so it allowed us to keep everything in check.

Ultimately, what we want to do is avoid the extremes. I didn't want to be condescending to the character. As screwed up as the characters can be, I wanted to have an ounce of heart and compassion toward them. But, I also didn't want to go the other extreme of being maudlin and schmaltzy--

Nathan: Spell everything out.

David: That's just as offensive to me as being condescending to the characters. It's condescending in its own way. So, we just wanted to find a balance and ride that fine line.

SM: From an editorial point, how did you work with that?

Nathan: Dave and I work really closely with the editing, and so there's a lot of input of what we're trying to do even from the script stage, but it does take a life of its own. We didn't really shift scenes much around, but there was a lot of experimentation in how long to keep certain scenes running, the physical lengths of it; when to cut out of a scene--

David: When enough was enough.

Nathan: What to show and what to keep hidden in some of the more crucial scenes--like the divorce scene, which is the four-minute long take of (the couple) signing divorce papers, or the cat scene where there's the discovery of original Goliath--how we edited around that, like David was saying, not to oversimplify the situation and make things very clear as to what you're supposed to feel.

With the divorce scene it seems that people have two reactions. Some people really get into it and feel the weight of the characters. Then some people get uncomfortable and shifty because it's so long.

David: As long as it's one extreme or the other, it's great because it means that they're totally engaged in it. We didn't want them to be indifferent.

We did test screenings for that scene a lot, and we were really concerned about it. We tried versions where we truncated it, and it totally lost its meaning. We made the right choice, I think, in keeping it as it was.

Nathan: There's almost a loud, with the audience, gasp, laugh or release when they've been watching someone sign papers for a minute, a minute and a half when suddenly they realize that the characters have to switch and go through it all over again.

David: We were glad when that point happened. There was a collective gasp. It was dead quiet before that, and then they switch and people sighed, so we knew that they were engaged in it when they were watching it. They understood exactly what was happening--

Nathan: What the stakes were.

SM: It was almost like the joke that runs too long and then becomes more interesting as it passes that two-minute point.

David: We had to really psych ourselves up to stick it out. If it didn't work, it could really kill the pace for the rest of (the film)...I felt like it would either come off really well or bomb and frustrate people.

Nathan: And, people start noticing different things in it. When you watch it, you first notice that the wife is signing papers a lot faster than the husband, and then you see how she's a little impatient. There actually are lots of other things going on during the scene than just straight signing papers. It's one of those things that you sit into it and go with the flow for a little bit and then get frustrated, accept it, and then there's the switch.

David: We wanted it to come full circle. You get what's going on right away, then you get a little tired but then you get into a groove with it.

SM: There's also the sense that the shot gives I don't want to say necessarily the turning point into the second act, but he certainly becomes much more manic after having to sign all the papers. The shot is, I think, 38 minutes through--

David: Around there.

SM: That first 38 minutes the audience is really wondering, "Where are we going with this?" and then all the sudden that shot hits, and we're siphoned more into the meaning. You talked about knowing when enough is enough, how did you decide, "We'll let the story momentum rise up here?"

David: [At the beginning of the film,] he was still holding onto the marriage, and it didn't fully hit him that it was 100 percent over until the signatures were made. That whole smoking thing--now he can smoke in the house, but he's really not.

Nathan: It's still that respect, feeling like he's in the relationship.

David: Just in case it works out, he's still holding on, but the nail in the coffin was the signing of the papers. There's nothing else to be done. There's nothing else to bring together. So, that coupled with this looming problem with the cat compounds on him.

Nathan: It's right after the divorce scene that he takes even the cat search to an extreme. It's definitely a lot more desperation.

David: It's a slow burn. We tried to structure it so that he wasn't instantly off the deep end. We wanted to get in the groove of the different dynamics that are in his life and then just have them come to a head.

Nathan: This one lady came up to me at our last screening this morning, and she first introduced herself as a cat owner. We've gotten a lot of that, which is really neat. She commented on the first half, that the reason why she really liked it is because she's lost a cat before, and it's just that waiting, calling, nothing's coming but you just keep calling the cat. It really resonated with her, and there's a lot of that in the beginning, where David's character is waiting for something to happen either with the cat showing up or the finalization of his divorce. It's an empty hope.

David: Until the end when he snaps, everything is out of his hands. Hopefully it comes across that she's in control of the divorce and how that's all playing out. He's not in control of his job, he's not in control of his cat, and those are the only things he's got going for him. So, when all that sends him off the edge, this scapegoat, this source of closure for him, all it meant was that it was what he has control of. It makes it nice and tidy in the end.

Although it's ridiculous and absurd in a lot of ways, just in regular, everyday life, denial plays such a large part in people's lives. It's such a survival tool to different degrees. A lot of people I know will really embrace it and ride it until the end. As a coping mechanism, instead of dealing with problems head on, it's a channel in another way to create closure and rationalize the world. I really like that dynamic. It plays out here in an extreme way, but it seemed like an interesting aspect of human nature to toy with.

SM: Wrap-up questions:...Why do you guys feel compelled to make films?

David: For better or worse it's my only skill and the only thing I'm really passionate about. If I'm not doing this, I'm just rotting. There's nothing else I can do, and so in some ways it's a limitation. Nathan has a computer science background--

Nathan: But, even with that, one of the things that I think we both like about film is just being able to create--either with drawings when we were little and you're playing with Play-Doh. Film is so many steps to the creation--the writing process, before that the brainstorming process, just having the ideas to picking out costumes, practical effects through shooting, editing, finding scenes, it's a really fun lifestyle.

David: Fun and collaborative. It's very gratifying. I just like storytellers and creating these worlds that in no other way can you create. I love just the infinite possibilities with film. From when I was little it just blew my mind that the possibilities seemed to go to infinity, that there was always something new, that there were so many aspects to the process of filmmaking that have yet to be explored. It's just very exciting to me. With so many other things, it seems that there's a closure to them. You can see the boundaries, and I just feel that film will continue to evolve in new and exciting ways, and that just makes it really inspiring, I think.

For more information on the film and filmmakers visit, only temporarily in repair mode, www.zellnerbros.com..