Slamdance 2024 Interview: Filmmakers Joe Gallagher, Daniel Robbins, and Zack Weiner Talk ‘Citizen Weiner’

In a riveting project titled Citizen Weiner, filmmakers Joe Gallagher, Daniel Robbins, and Zack Weiner skillfully breathe life into Harvey Milk’s profound declaration that “Politics is theater.” This compelling endeavor unfolds as a captivating fusion of documentary and kayfabe, a term borrowed from wrestling, where staged performances are seamlessly presented as genuine, adding a unique layer of intrigue to their storytelling.

Soon to be the talk of the 2024 Slamdance Film Festival, Citizen Weiner follows Zack Weiner, an actor residing in New York City. When the film industry shuts down in 2020, Zack and his friend Joe embark on a unique project: to make a film about running for city council while actually running for city council.

Zack and his campaign work with their community on a local level, attempting to improve the lives of their fellow West Siders, but the campaign struggles to garner any attention. Then, through some unconventional tactics, Zack’s team propels his underdog campaign to the heights of NYC politics.

Pop Culturalist had the privilege of speaking with Joe, Daniel, and Zack, delving into the creative inception of this project. We discussed the film’s emphasis on community, the remarkable team that brought it to life, and how Citizen Weiner ingeniously plays the ultimate jest on the realms of media and politics.

PC: Joe, this is one of the most unique and brilliant projects that I’ve ever seen. It’s going to be such an unexpected gem of Slamdance 2024. How did you and Zack even conceive this idea?
Joe: We were both coming from a place of extreme frustration in terms of where we were in the entertainment industry and career-wise. The day that I got laid off from my sales job, I was taking the train home at 1:00 in the afternoon. Zack texted me and was like, “What’s up?” I was like, “Dude, I just got fired.” He was like, “Want to hang out?” So he came over, and we were talking about politics a lot because it was everywhere in the news. Bernie Sanders was on TV at the time, campaigning for president. Trump was on TV as president. Everyone was on social media yelling at each other. Everything felt so bleak.

Zack was like, “Climate change is coming. We’re going to die.” It was the world-ending type of thing. We settled on the fact that the only thing that you could really do is laugh. We were like, “It all kind of feels ridiculous.” The reality is that the people you’re interacting with every day aren’t that hostile. It isn’t that violent. It isn’t that charged. So we started laughing about it. Zack talked about an idea that he had been workshopping with Daniel about a politician who benefits from a scandal of some sort. He was trying to figure out how that would work. Then I said, “Why don’t you just run when we really do it?” [laughs] It’s one of those things where we were instantly like, “Oh my God. This seems like something people would find really interesting.” It’s the kind of thing that forces revelations about the world to happen because we’re interacting with the real world. It was one of those things where it was friends hanging out and making each other laugh. Then it sprung into something, more and more people got involved and got excited about it and it turned into what you saw.

PC: Daniel, what was your initial reaction when Zack and Joe approached you about doing a project like this? Were there any apprehensions about being involved in that? What ultimately made you say yes?
Daniel: I saw the vision immediately because we worked together on Pledge. They were like, “We’re going to run for city council and film it. No one’s going to care.” We kept talking, and then they mentioned a scandal. My eyes lit up like, “Whoa.” I was like, “If we could pull something off and get attention in a meaningful way off of a local campaign that could be lightning in a bottle.” So that idea mixed with what we were feeling led to the longest shoot that you could imagine because we had to film the whole campaign from September all the way to June. You see all the seasons of the year. The scandal itself didn’t hit until June, so we had to film for seven months hoping we would hit a climax, which is a big gamble, but it was COVID, so there was nothing else to do. [laughs]

PC: Zack, there’s a level of commitment that’s required from everybody that’s involved. How much of what we see is improvised versus scripted?
Zack: Almost all of it was improvised. But sometimes we would be staging scenes and trying to arrange it in a way where we thought it would be as funny as possible, so it was definitely a blend.

PC: Daniel, as you were saying, there’s a component of Citizen Weiner that is a documentary and there’s so much you can’t account for in that type of filmmaking. As a director, how did you plan for all the various outcomes and ways that this story could have unfolded as well as the different people that you encountered along this journey?
Daniel: It was chaos. Zack and Joe had a great term for a project like this, which is a reality movie where the people we interact with are all real, but it’s being guided throughout. A decision we made early on that was important to us was that we didn’t want to write the script of what’s going to happen because comedy needs a static electricity for lightning to strike. If we planned it too much, it would lose some of its edge. But we also didn’t want the pranks in the movie to be on the people. Anyone that we interacted with was genuine, true, and earnest. The prank was more on the media and politics.

What helped us is that our whole team were writers and filmmakers. Along the way, as scenes would happen, you’d meet characters like Dan Bright (the campaign lawyer) who Joe met. Once we found him, we were like, “We’re going to include him throughout and he ended up coming in and out over the course of months. So it was about always talking and developing as we got closer to the election.

PC: Joe and Zack, you both have experiences in front of and behind the camera. How have those different facets of your talent lent themselves to one another, especially throughout this process?
Joe: This was a unique process. In some ways, we were forced to do this because during COVID, you couldn’t get a production together and do it traditionally. So I would say it was more of a learning experience. It was one that I was really excited about because we had all worked together on Pledge, and that’s been the best thing that I’ve been in to date by far. I’m so proud of that movie and so happy to have been a part of it because I felt like it brought me into this community of New York filmmakers who are incredible. They’re all people who take risks and make daring projects. I considered it a learning experience so I was grateful to get a chance to do it.

Zack: It was definitely a new approach. We’d only worked with scripted films before. So doing this much improvisation and having such dynamic scenes was definitely challenging. But we found that given enough time and enough prodding, people tend to get pretty performative either way. We got into the groove as actors after a little while where we were able to inhabit characters and exaggerate versions of ourselves. It was a fun, challenging campaign.

Daniel: The other actors too, Aaron [Dalla Villa], Sarah [Coffey], James [D. Watson], were committed to the seven-month shoot. We needed A-plus actors, and they delivered such authentic performances on the fly, interacting with people. It’s the highest level of difficulty possible. Everyone killed it. Zack’s mom, Cherie [Vogelstein], is a renowned playwright. The fact that she can generate lines in her head that are as funny as possible while just existing led to a lot of good laughs.

PC: She’s a star. This feels like such a breakout moment for all three of you. What was the most surprising part about this experience?
Zack: For me, it was a lot of the encounters that I had with people in local politics. I expected a lot more apathy, but there’s tons of passion. They’re an extremely passionate group and quirk, but it was a lot more intense than I expected.

Joe: I agree with what Zack said earlier that if someone gets in front of the camera, they’re going to start performing. How many people do that? That totally shocked me. I imagined like we’ll maybe get lucky and someone will do something crazy and it’ll be happenstance, but then you put the camera on someone like Dan, and he’s like, “Are you ready for this?” Then he was just firing off. It made me really happy. It made me appreciate people in a new way. Everybody wanted to be an entertainer and bring that smile and light up people’s days. It was pretty cool.

Daniel: I would say the extent of how far the scandal went. We had this plan, but our ambition was a lot smaller than what ended up happening. Also, throughout, Zack and Joe did a lot of good in the community. We wanted to bring as much attention to the community and that, and when we saw how far that didn’t go, we didn’t think the scandal would go past an article. But when seeing where it was picked up was wild.

Make sure to follow Joe (Instagram), Daniel (Instagram), and Zack (Instagram). For screening details at Slamdance, visit the festival’s official website.