There aren't many truly visceral films anymore – that is, it's rare to leave the theatre nowadays with a gnawing feeling in your gut, knowing that the movie you just saw is going to haunt you for days. Blockbusters are churned out with moneymaking factors in mind: Get butts in the seats, have lots of special effects, use top-name actors.

Winnipeg filmmaker Sean Garrity uses the exact opposite approach in his latest creation, 'Zooey & Adam'. With a technique he's coined 'solo cinema', where the crew is made up of one person -- him -- the actors have no idea what the script is, and every reaction they have on-camera is authentic, often jarring, and undeniably real.

'Zooey & Adam' follows a young married couple as they attempt to become pregnant. They head off into the country, but things go horribly wrong as they're attacked by a group of drunken men who rape Zooey in front of a traumatized Adam. Things get understandably complicated, and the viewer is put through the emotional wringer as the couple tries to deal with the fallout.

Moviefone chatted with Garrity about his technique, the controversy surrounding the film, and why he doesn't want to make the next 'Avatar'.

There aren't many truly visceral films anymore – that is, it's rare to leave the theatre nowadays with a gnawing feeling in your gut, knowing that the movie you just saw is going to haunt you for days. Blockbusters are churned out with moneymaking factors in mind: Get butts in the seats, have lots of special effects, use top-name actors.

Winnipeg filmmaker Sean Garrity uses the exact opposite approach in his latest creation, 'Zooey & Adam'. With a technique he's coined 'solo cinema', where the crew is made up of one person -- him -- the actors have no idea what the script is, and every reaction they have on-camera is authentic, often jarring, and undeniably real.

'Zooey & Adam' follows a young married couple as they attempt to become pregnant. They head off into the country, but things go horribly wrong as they're attacked by a group of drunken men who rape Zooey in front of a traumatized Adam. Things get understandably complicated, and the viewer is put through the emotional wringer as the couple tries to deal with the fallout.

Moviefone chatted with Garrity about his technique, the controversy surrounding the film, and why he doesn't want to make the next 'Avatar'.

It was a very intense movie. I didn't know whether to recommend it or not!

[Laughs] I'm glad to hear that, in a way.

Tell me more about your 'solo cinema' technique.

The approach is precisely to elicit that sort of response – something real and visceral. My wife and I went out to see 'Avatar' last week, and when we got in the car afterwards, we were like, 'Do we still have time to go get some food?' The movie was over and instantly gone from our heads. That's not the kind of movie I'm trying to make.



I like to get under people's skin. One of the things with modern technology, and I don't think that people are fully exploiting this, is that you can get a lot more intimate with actors. You can get a lot closer to more emotionally-intense stuff when it's just me and a couple of actors in a room of a house. There's no set, no lights, no 70 people standing around, no grips with saggy jeans, that's all gone.

Another thing I liked about your film were the sharp cuts and edits from scene to scene. Is that a technique you normally use?

I haven't used it before, but one of my previous film editors introduced me to that style of cutting. I feel like the audience gets it – the main characters are arguing, they're entrenched in their positions, and then you can skip to the next event and the audience follows. As people get more media-savvy, especially with Twitter and YouTube, all those things, storytellers don't have to tell as much. People get it more quickly.

This movie was different. It stuck with me for at least a couple days afterwards.

There is a sense that people connect with this film. When you leave little blank spaces in a film, in terms of character motivation or chronological activity or whatever, people tend to fill it in with bits from their own lives. When I speak with people who've seen this movie, their reactions are usually similar, and it's something like 'Because I have a certain experience with childbirth or a former partner, I really felt that I personally connected with this film, and no one else feels what I felt.' Along those lines.

There's also a noticeable gender divide in the film. That was intentional, I assume.

Yes. Usually women side with Adam and find the actions of Zooey to be unforgivable, and men take Zooey's side. It's really interesting to watch people discuss it when the movie's over.

To keep or not to keep a child of a rape? That's an almost impossible question.

I did a lot of research, since I wanted the film to be accurate, especially in that regard. From the last reported year – which I think was 2006 – something like 36,000 women were pregnant as the result of rape, and about 50 percent kept the pregnancy.

Wow. That's quite a high percentage.

There are so many factors at play, like how long the couple has been trying to get pregnant, infertility issues, that sort of thing. For a lot of people, it involved previous experiences with abortion...it's all very complicated.

Has the film stirred up any controversy?

Yeah – the film did all the usual festivals in Canada, except for TIFF [Toronto International Film Festival]. A man from the festival called me and said, 'We argued for a long time about your film, the jury was split largely along gender lines. Half of us loved it, half of us were against it. We can't program it on the grounds that it's too controversial.' I think he felt it was a divisive gender politics debate.

Unreal. What about any controversy on an audience level?

People are really affected by the intimacy of the movie. For some people, it's a little too intense. We've had some people walk out of screenings, and a good friend of mine had to turn it off and go for a walk. For those it strikes too close to home, it can be quite an experience.

'Zooey & Adam' opens at the Royal in Toronto on March 5, 2010. Be on the lookout from more work from Sean in the next year.