Interview: Tied up and tied down with ‘Sanctuary’ director Zachary Wigon

Creativity fascinates Zachary Wigon. “I love reading books about creativity and how it functions. It’s so interesting and so mysterious.”

In the eight years since his debut feature The Heart Machine premiered to acclaim at SXSW in 2014, Wigon has put his creativity to other uses. The thirty-six year old former Tisch School of the Arts student wrote film criticism for outlets like Slant and The Village Voice before working on the Amazon original series Homecoming as a co-producer and writer. His second feature, Sanctuary, is written by Homecoming co-creator Micah Bloomberg, developed together during the darkest months of the 2020 lockdown. After being shot over eighteen days in 2021, the twisted psychosexual rom-com starring Margaret Qualley and Christopher Abbott as a dominatrix and her client engaging in what is, unbeknownst to her, their last session, premiered at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival to fantastic buzz.

‘Sanctuary’ review: Christopher Abbott and Margaret Qualley sizzle in a twisty, sexy romance that slaps

The film, which has only two performers and one location, “is kind of like putting the director in a straitjacket,” according to writer Micah Bloomberg (with whom Wigon worked on the Amazon original series Homecoming), “but Zach delighted in the escape-artistry.” There’s a certain shot in the film that Wigon thinks about a lot in the context of the creative process. “I was minding my own business, not working on the movie, and then that just popped up and I was like, ‘Oh, this is great! Thank you, wherever this came from!’” We recently got to sit down with Wigon to talk about the mysteries of artistic inspiration, how cinema differs from the theater, and why Abbott and Qualley are so electric together onscreen.

Dan Bayer: I have loved Sanctuary since I saw it at TIFF last year, where it just popped in that lineup. It was something that was so fun and different and so I’m really excited to get to talk to you. You had worked with the writer of the film, Micah Bloomberg, on the TV show Homecoming, and then this came about during the pandemic. I’m curious, what excited you about this story and what led you to wanting to film it when you did?

Zachary Wigon: Well, I think one of the things that really excited me about the story was the idea of hitting these two conceptual poles against each other: You have the fantasy world and then you have real life, and one of the ways into it for me was you have this situation with the dominatrix and her client. The dominatrix has all the control over the client in the fantasy space. The client has all this capital power in real life. And then the movie poses this interesting question, which is, what if the dominatrix wants to take the power that she has in the fantasy space and turn it into power in the real space? And likewise, the client wants to pull his submissiveness out of the fantasy space and have actual power, and basically the way that they’re fighting for power in the way that the fantasy and reality are bleeding together. Taking those two very different poles and putting them in conversation with each other, that was really interesting to me. I felt like you could go so deep and have so much nuance in that conversation. And… I got so into that, I forgot the second part of your question, sorry. [laughs]

DB: What excited you about it? And then why was this the time to film it?

ZW: Oh, why was this the time to film it? I wonder if it’s more of an intuitive thing. I don’t know if I necessarily was thinking about it in that way. When Micah and I were on the phone and started talking about the idea… I feel like with a story that you fall in love [with], there’s something a little bit intuitive about it. It feels right in your gut, and as we started talking about it, I guess it’s a little bit [like] falling in love. You’re just like, “Yeah, this feels right. This is right. We should do this.” There’s a compass inside you that’s directing you. I hope that makes sense. I hope that’s articulate.

DB: That feels a bit appropriate, because that’s almost what happens in the movie, too. They realize a little late that they’ve fallen in love. Did you and Micah collaborate on the script at all, or was it more he would present to you what he had and you’d give feedback?

ZW: Micah wrote the movie. I developed it with him. So in the beginning, we were talking about working out the story, figuring out what it would be, and then Micah would write scenes and then he would come back to me. He would turn in sort of sequences at a time, 10 to 15 pages. So he would turn in 10 to 15 pages, I would mark it up with notes, we’d get on the phone and talk about it, and we went like that through the development process.

DB: And you ended up shooting this over two and a half weeks essentially at some point?

ZW: It was 18 days with one per weekend, so it was five days on, one day off. What is that? It’s three and a half weeks. Yeah.

DB: Yeah, and given that this is relatively short, it’s two people, essentially one set, compared to other shoots you’ve been on, did that feel like a really quick compressed amount of time to try to get this done, or did it feel like enough?

ZW: Well, did it feel like enough? I guess on one level, there’s always more that you could do visually, but I felt like, in a way, it was a thrilling thing to watch because the compressed amount of time that we had, the limited amount of time that we had to make it – and we shot it in sequence, as well. So what was cool about doing it in 18 days was it was almost like… Margaret and Chris have used this term, I think. It was almost like watching a play be played out in real time. We watched the story happen in front of our eyes as the crew relatively quickly, and that was really cool. You could see it unfolding, you could see the performances really tracking, stepping out in sequence, and that was a great thing to watch.

DB: It’s interesting because with two characters, Sanctuary feels like it could be a play very easily. So why the cinema and not the stage?

ZW: Okay, so I have this thing about movies. I think one of the most interesting things about cinema is the way that it can visually represent psychological effects and emotional effects, and the way that movies present a visual representation of how something feels is always fascinating to me. So what was exciting about this, the challenge of making this as cinema, was to take something where I knew that there would be an enormous amount of different emotional and psychological effects, because it’s a deep dive movie – as you said, it’s two people in one location… you can’t go out into the world, but you have to travel somewhere as a storyteller, so the movie travels into their heads. You’ve got to travel deeper and deeper into their heads. That’s the only place you can go.

So my thinking was, this will be an interesting challenge because there is a lot that you can represent cinematically because there’s a lot going on psychologically, but your visual tools are going to be limited. It’s almost like a fascinating challenge to see if you as a director can make it all work on a visual and cinematic level. The challenge of that, I was just really interested in that. I was interested to see what the movie would end up looking like.

DB: It does feel incredibly cinematic for something like this, especially since you have these long 360-degree pans. At the start of the movie, you’re looking upside down at Christopher Abbott’s character, and then you go all the way around looking up and then coming back down to him. And then there are these tilting camera movements that we tilt from one side, from 90 degrees upright to 180 flat. How did you come up with that as a visual style for the film? And what were you thinking of when you came up with that?

ZW: I wish I had a good answer for this, about how I tap into whatever creativity that went into creating this. Man, I wish I had a good answer. That’s a part of the process that I don’t really think I understand. You read a screenplay, and you have an idea of what emotionally and atmospherically you want the movie to feel like. For me, I meditate [laughs] and I drink a lot of matcha. And then you sit there and you’re reading it and sometimes you close your eyes and you’re just trying to imagine. You know what you want it to feel like, and you’re reading the script… and then you just try to close your eyes and you try to picture the movie in your head, and then these images pop up. But how you access them, I wish I had a better answer because then I could go there more easily. It’s always an effort.

DB: So it’s just something that you just sort of saw in your head as you were doing it?

ZW: Yeah. You’re reading it, and often it just pops. There’s a shot in the movie I always think about. This was the one where it was the most fully formed. Well, it was one of the ones where it was the most fully formed, where there’s a shot in the movie where Chris’s character is looking for something in the hotel suite, and he is looking underneath both sides of a long end table. And he goes like this [leans to one side], and then he goes back up, and then he goes like this [leans to other side], and then he picks something up and he holds it up, and the camera dips down, goes up, dips down, pulls up, and then pushes in. And that was just like, I was minding my own business, not working on the movie, and then that just popped up and I was like, “Oh, this is great! Thank you, wherever this came from,” [laughs] but I wish I knew!

DB: Divine inspiration, call it.

ZW: [laughs] I don’t know about that. Creativity is fascinating to me. I love reading books about creativity and how it functions. It’s so interesting and so mysterious.

DB: And that applies to Rebecca a lot in the film, too. She’s using all of her creative toolset to keep this relationship going.

ZW: I was thinking about her as just someone who is absolutely brilliant, perhaps the best in the world at what they do. Someone who is almost at a genius level of being able to understand psychology and effect with the toolkit that she has. That was in my mind from the beginning, to portray someone who is just so exceptionally good at this. To see someone be exceptionally good at their job and really have to go through a lot of contortions to get what they want, that’s always an interesting thing to see.

DB: Yeah, absolutely. It’s always fascinating to see people who are very good at what they do just do it sort of unfiltered.

ZW: I was thinking about Michael Mann movies when I think about that. The way that he’s always interested in professionals and professionals at the top of their game and what that looks like. It’s always really interesting, I agree.

DB: Yes! And what’s even more fun is that we, in the process of watching the characters do that, get to watch Margaret Qualley and Christopher Abbott do that, who are two of our best younger actors these days. And I had read that they were always your choices for these parts. When you got them on set or in rehearsal, did they have that chemistry that you were hoping for? Was it immediate or did you have to work with them?

ZW: Oh, yeah. It was great! And I think it helped that they were and are friends and they knew each other from before and they were looking to find a project to do together. And then also, in terms of chemistry, one of the things that I think is really helpful for screen chemistry is you want to make sure that the actors have very different screen presences or screen personas. I think chemistry is tough if both actors have the same energy, but I think they have very different screen energies, so they complement one another in this really lovely way. So yeah, the thing is, as you said, they’re two of our most gifted young actors, and when you work with people who are talented at that level, as the director, there’s really just not a whole lot that you need to do. You need to be there to answer questions if questions come up and talk a little bit about the flow of the story, and the characters kind of broadly, but in terms of specifics, it’s almost like if you’re coaching an amazing basketball player. You just let them go on the court and do their thing. I think that’s what a lot of working with actors is. Just give them the space to do their thing.

DB: Yeah, and they’re great. And it’s interesting that you were talking about the energy they have, how they have different screen personas and how that dynamic is where you find the interesting thing. One of my favorite things about Sanctuary is the very counterintuitive score by Ariel Marx. It’s very soft and pretty and the movie opens with that along with these pastel colored lights. Why? Where did that come from?

ZW: Why does it open that way? I think this is another one where it’s intuitive. I’m trying to think of how to intellectually explain it… I think I have an answer here actually. I think that the movies that appeal to me and the movies that I’m interested in making have a lot in common with fairy tales, or myths, or dreams. There’s something really powerful about a movie that starts with its own version of “once upon a time,” where what you’re doing is you’re basically trying to tell the viewer, you can forget about where you parked your car. Forget about what you have to do tomorrow morning. Forget about whatever your concerns are. Put your conscious mind to sleep. Put that away. We’re going to go somewhere else. You’re trying to talk directly to the viewer’s unconscious. And so that opening, I guess, is probably my way of trying to do that. It’s like, we’re going into a new space now, put that all to bed and come with me to this more unconscious place. That’s probably what it is.

DB: And they all lived happily ever after! [laughs]

ZW: [laughs]

DB: Well, that’s all the time we have. Thank you so much, Zachary, for speaking with us today. Before we go, I have to ask, because I’m also a lover of theater as much as I am of cinema, would you ever be willing to stage Sanctuary as a play?

ZW: [laughs] I think that it probably could be a great play. I guess for me, the medium of cinema is what I understand. I don’t know if I could ever do anything other than cinema. That’s the art form that I understand.

DB: So you wouldn’t do it, but you endorse others doing it?

ZW: Absolutely. Yeah.

NEON will release Sanctuary in select theaters on May 19.

Photo courtesy of Keith Barraclough