(First published by Headstuff.org)

 

In June, 2026, Caveh Zahedi's Ulysses, New York (2022) screened in Belvedere House, Dublin, as part of the Bloomsday Film Festival. The conversation below has been edited lightly for concision and clarity.

 

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Q. Before we get to talking about Ulysses, New York, maybe you could tell us something about how you first came to James Joyce's work, and what it means to you at this point.

 

A. I read Joyce's work in college, in my Freshman year: it was assigned to us, but it really knocked my socks off. It inspired me a lot, and taught me to re-think not only literature, but the possibilities of any medium. I just loved how free it was, and experimental, how it completely re-thought what a book could be. I think maybe even at the time I read it, I thought, I would like to make a film of this. I guess I thought that I could learn from Joyce, and it would be interesting to see how one could apply his innovations in literature to cinema.

 

Q. Well, you eventually made Ulysses, New York: a film about a play, about a book, which is about life – and you make a point of including the day-to-day lives and experiences of your actors in the film. Was all of that difficult to manage? Was it chaotic or fun? Did you feel that you were tapping into Joycean energy as you were working?

 

A. Yeah, it was very chaotic, but only because I didn't realise it was the centenary of the publication [in 2022]. I was a month away from Bloomsday, and I was just like, Oh my God, I wish I'd known, I would have tried to do the play and film this year. I knew it wouldn't have been as meaningful to do it any other year. So then my producer talked me into trying it. I only had a month to write it, and stage it, and shoot it. It was crazy, but I did it. Of course, everything went wrong. But all those things that went wrong are also part of the fabric of what it is, which is reality.

 

Q. My impression is that self-examination is a key part of the drama and process of your projects. How central was self-expression or self-discovery to the making of this film?

 

A. It was really an attempt to adapt Joyce's formal and philosophical conceits to me and my life. I've always been drawn to the idea of a day, one day, as a kind of microcosm of a life. And Joyce does that in Ulysses: really, it's his whole life in a day. And so it was just a pretext to look at my life, the people in it, the art-making, and my relationship to the history of cinema. Among other things Ulysses is a kind of love-letter to the history of English literature, and I think in a lot of ways my own film is a sort of love-letter, or essay, or manifesto on the subject of film and film history. There were definitely different strands going through it, but it's more about me than about Joyce. Joyce is the vehicle through which I explore some of these questions.

 

Q. As you've mentioned your art-making: your work is sometimes described as a cross between mumblecore comedy and Cinema Verité. I guess that's a way of saying that there's so much humour, and self-awareness, and provocation in your films that they can be hard to categorize. How would you describe your style?

 

A. I mean, I would just say that I'm trying to document my life as it unfolds. And I'm trying to create a map of the human that is more accurate, and maybe more broad in scope, than what we normally get. That in itself is very Joycean, because Joyce is trying to broaden the scope of what it means to be a human being, and also of what's visible in literature. Famously he has scenes of shitting, and masturbating, and peeing – he just brings in all these parts of the self that are usually repressed or censored in some way. He says, let's celebrate all of it. Everything is of God, or divine in some sense. I think I'm trying to do something similar, which is just to be completely honest about the good and the bad, and the complexities of everything – not just the simplistic binaries we get in most Hollywood cinema, certainly.

 

Q. Are there any directors or films that have been particularly important to you as a movie-maker? Have you seen anything recently that stayed with you after watching it?

 

A. Godard is a big influence. I think he's the most Joycean film-maker, because he really reinvents the language, and re-thinks what's possible in the medium. And he loves Joyce, he actually talks about him in his work. I've also been very influenced by Cassavetes, again because his notion of the human is much more complex or nuanced than in most cinema. I really like Lars Von Trier, just because he's so transgressive, so bold. And I love Tarkovsky because he's so spiritual. Those directors are the ones that I feel most in conversation with.

 

Q. I can see how Cassavetes may have influenced Martin Scorsese, and also newer film-makers like the Safdie brothers. But I think what's notable about your work is that you always seem to be skewering or critiquing the mass, commercial side of the film industry, in a way that those directors aren't. Is that a fair observation?

 

A. Yeah, for sure. I'm basically in opposition to the dominant cultural models, and critical of them. I like the Safdie brothers' work, and I like Scorsese's, but it's true that it doesn't go as far as I think cinema can or should go – in the directions of experiment, and inspiration, and novelty. To me, they all seem to be copying the same models.

 

Q. Related to that, I'd be curious to know what you think of the films of Sean Baker. Your movie I Am a Sex Addict deals with similar themes to some of his work.

 

A. I like his films a lot: I haven't seem them all, but I've seen most of them. I would say that he works in a tradition that I really appreciate and admire, which I would call neorealism. Coming out of the Italian neorealists, there's a whole tradition there that is very beautiful, and very rich. But I'm interested in doing something new. For me, neorealism is great, but it's already been done. I'm interested in what hasn't been done. Sean Baker brings marginalized populations into his style or genre, but for me that's still a little bit cosmetic. I'm more interested in re-thinking the language completely.

 

Q. Speaking of which, could you give us a sense of what you're working on at the moment?

 

A. Well, this Joyce project I'm now working on is 24 one-hour episodes. It's going to take me I don't know how many years – at least ten, maybe twenty. So I'm pretty absorbed with that at the moment, although I do have two other film projects that I'm trying to make. One is about the American artist, Joseph Cornell, and one is about Bertolt Brecht. They're both formally strange. I think of my films as Brechtian, for sure. I came to Brecht through Godard. What Brecht did and said had a lot of applications for cinema that haven't been fully explored. Lars Von Trier tried, and that's part of the reason why I like his work.