Guest post: Deliverance

A film by Zachary Coffin

Sep 17, 2021

A rushing young river threaded its way through the densely forested hills. A fluty whistle floated through the trees. A flock of sparrows looked around, mystified, wondering if it was bird or human. A shining blue and black bird flew out of the forest and perched on a big rock in the middle of the river and cocked its head. Then again the same fluty whistle rose into the air as the bird sat, gleaming in the early morning sun. One of the sparrows remarked, “Ahh! A whistling thrush, let’s go and say hello.”

The friendly sparrows flew over to the whistling thrush. “Lucky we have wings to cross this river. It’s in full spate today.”

“Yes, that’s true. I saw some people having quite a time, crossing over the other day.”

And this is the tale the whistling thrush told.

DELIVERANCE: A film by Zachary Coffin

Our guest this week is Zachary Coffin, the American/Canadian actor, writer, and filmmaker. He has travelled, lived and worked in over thirty-five countries around the world. For the past ten years has made his home in Mumbai. Deliverance is his debut film as a director in India.

He has graciously agreed to share this film here.

The sparrows shook their heads sadly. “Poor creatures. I can’t imagine living without wings, must be so difficult,” said one.

“Nor can I,” agreed the whistling thrush, and began preening his feathers in preparation for the day.

We hope you enjoyed that experience! We did, and we also had some questions for our guest, which he very kindly answered…

The Story Birds: Where did you first come across this story? Why did you choose to film it?

Zack: I read the story when I was a kid, maybe a little over five years old. It was included in a wonderful book called The People’s Almanac. It made such an impression on my young mind that I never forgot it! And occasionally, over the decades, I would stumble upon it again, appearing here and there, and each time I thought to myself, this is a perfect little movie. I chose to film it finally because I saw a photograph of a location—a waterfall in Coorg, Karnataka, in India—and immediately said to myself, “If I don’t make this film now, I’m not worthy!” And so I did. Quite impulsive. But decades in the simmering.

TSB: Your working title for the film was ‘River God’. Why did you choose this title, and why did you change it?

Z: Oh gosh, you’ve done your research, haha! The little secret of the film, perhaps known only to me (but that was enough to get me going), is that in my view the meeting of the two monks and the woman and the river, was no accident. Let's call it a divine intervention. I didn’t want to specify which of the characters (the senior monk, the woman, or the river) secretly represents God, but rather, wanted to imply the presence through the title. If nothing else, I felt, the title might get people thinking.

But there was a very mundane, decidedly human problem I faced with the word “God”: in Hindi, river is a feminine word, and corresponding to this, nearly all deities associated with rivers in India are specifically goddesses (devi). But I didn’t want to imply gods or goddesses in the gender-depicted form; in fact, gender-specifying the god/goddess was exactly counter to the message of the movie itself. I wanted simply ‘God’ with the ambiguity of the non-gendered English. Ultimately, the connotations of River God/god/goddess/devi were too complicated to untangle, and I searched for another approach to summarize what this film was about. ‘Deliverance’ is an old fashioned word, but comes close to ‘mukti’— and that was important because of the chant, ‘Ram naam satya hai, satya bolo mukti hai’.

TSB: What were some of the choices you made while filming, and why?

Z: The basic story is very simple—hardly a few sentences. It could have even been a 45-second short film! But I wanted the film to have some substance. That’s not always achieved by adding things, but in my case, it meant adding some layers, e.g., making use of the waterfall, giving the monks a mission, incorporating music via the singing. None of these really affects the story, but they do affect the storytelling. The old saying is, “A good story well told.” And I think that’s the heart of directing, and especially directing an adaptation. My goal for the story was to be true to the profound feeling I experienced when I first read the story. But my goal for the storytelling was to create something as timeless as possible, such that someone twenty years from now could watch the film and not feel it was dated. My technique to try to achieve this timelessness was to make the whole thing feel like a dream. Every choice in the filming and in the editing and in the sound, was made to create a dream-like trance, if at all possible. It worked for some viewers—others thought it was just a little slow!

TSB: When we spoke to you earlier, we understood that the members of your team were very special to you. Would you like to tell us a little bit about them?

Z: The cast and crew were a small unit. Very small. And when that happens, it’s sure to be an intense and bond-forming experience. In this case, we were filming in the jungle, way past phone network coverage, the kind of place where leeches are biting and that’s no joke. But the real opponent was simply time. We shot the whole thing in a single day. So when you have a trying location, extremely limited time, and a small squad to get things done, it just naturally becomes a memorable experience. This is the kind of experience that is the very opposite of ‘doing a job’— nobody had to be there. And even when we talk about the post-production phase, people kept working on it till they reached a kind of personal level of perfection.

You know, when it’s a short film, any flaw appears just all the more obvious—and bigger. I guess it’s like working on a short poem. If you ask Ezra Pound how long it took him to do a short poem like In a Station of the Metro you might be surprised to learn it was nearly a year in the making! His first draft was thirty lines long, and here is the final version, just two lines:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

With only fourteen words, imagine if even a single word wasn’t right— it would stand out more than a wrong word in a novel. That’s a lot of work on his part, but you’ll never see it. And so, in a weird way, this similar kind of dedication from the team—their dedication to perfectionism, as much as we could muster within constraints—is what made the making of Deliverance so special for me. It reminds me, if you’ll forgive me for quoting again, of that observation from Margaret Mead: ‘Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.’ With a small but mighty little film crew, you just feel you can achieve more than your weight! I think they know how grateful I am to each of them.

TSB: Is there anything else you would like to share with our readers?

Z: Did I mention the leeches?? No, I think at this point I may have just used up more of the reader’s time than if they would have spent watching the film! I’ll just end with my hope that it resonates with viewers. And if it does, I would be delighted and grateful if they might share it with their friends…and maybe even with a curious kid—a little over five years old!

The Malabar whistling thrush lives in mountain forests, close to streams and rivers in hilly terrain. It is a ground-dweller that feeds on insects, crabs, earthworms and berries. It is found mostly along the Western Ghats and in hilly regions across peninsular India.

Share The Story Birds

EDITORS’ NOTE

Zack tells us that he is an avid bicyclist on the pot-holed streets of his adopted city of Mumbai, and though he has broken his wrist and hand and has been hit more times than he can count, he finds the sheer delight of gliding through traffic worth it. Always.

More about Zack here: Zachary Coffin

Did you like our story? Tell us what you think!

The Story Birds