Interview: Julian Castronovo speaks about authenticity and art

Julian Castronovo’s Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued, makes its Australian debut as part of First Films festival. Filmed almost entirely in his bedroom on a small budget over the course of two years, Castronovo explores the concept of forgery, authenticity, and identity, in what feels like an intimately personal confrontation of one’s limitations, artistic or otherwise. 

‘I had no money and I felt I was not particularly capable of advocating for myself or mobilizing the resources necessary to produce a film. I was, however, drawn to the idea that I could make a film by pretending to make a film.’ 

Addy Fong had a chat with Julian about his film Debut, the practice of pretending, of performance, and the peculiarities that surround it.

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Hi Julian, the first thing about your film that intrigued me before I watched it, was that it was made on a $900 budget. I did a bit of research and you said that budget was to pay your narrator? Was that a way to market your film’s DIY low budget aesthetic and show people how you can make a film with limited resources and with limitations?

You’re correct, I did make it for that amount of money. The majority of that went to paying the actor who recorded the narration. I think the film is sincerely a response to that limitation. It wasn’t like a necessary challenge I set out for myself. I wanted to use that as a way to rethink how to make images in a cinematic context. I think at least in the United States for independent cinema, it’s a matter of scaling down. Like you have this much money, so your film looks a certain way, if you have less money, your film is going to look that same way but on a smaller scale or with less stuff. I was drawn to like an extreme limitation that would force me not just to make a smaller film but to rethink how I could use images in perhaps a new way or in a way that resonated with other existing forms that maybe are less cinematic. I think I knew after I’d finished the film that that tagline would perhaps work as a marketing thing. I don’t know, but at the same time, I think I am grateful most people who see the film don’t really think about that, it’s not something that has become a focus.

I wanted to ask about your practice because a lot of stuff you did yourself with a small crew, you even acted in the film. Debut’s themes of art forgery, museum and art curation, is very different to what most mainstream audiences think of films. I’m thinking about the difference between curated films like yours playing in a museum or gallery spaces compared to big budget popcorn movies. What practice do you generally follow as an artist in the films that you usually make?

I don’t really have a good answer because I don’t have much of a practice to speak of. Debut was the first long form piece I’ve made, so in a way it was about inventing the practice, or coming up with a practice that I felt would be fulfilling and fun. I don’t know, when I have worked in a live action context, which, I hope to do in the future, I felt a certain degree of pressure or like a certain degree that it wasn’t the same feeling that I would sometimes feel when I would write or when I would work on other stuff where it was kind of a solitary endeavor. I like being an artist and I don’t know if I’m like the best leader, so I was trying to invent a form of filmmaking, not invent because people work independently all the time, but find a practice where filmmaking could resemble a studio practice or a writing practice in a way. 

Perhaps certain parts of filmmaking are like scriptwriting and film editing, leans into this independent, solitary practice. In my mind Debut presents this paradox between a filmmaker or creative who wants to create a message or art for audiences to receive, to show themselves to the public, but also the desire to guard themselves from vulnerability and isolate or be alone.

I think you’re right. I was thinking about this the other day. I started writing Debut when I was 23 or 24. I think to a certain sense, we’re all drawn to a bearable amount of loneliness and pain, insofar as we feel that to be evidence of, of caring about things and caring about your own work and taking it seriously and having a meaningful life that moves you. So in a way, this film was an artificial mode of locking myself away. It’s a little bit of a delusion or a fantasy of, ‘oh, I want to be an artist who was in my bedroom for three years working obsessively on this thing’. I don’t know, you have to commit to that delusion a little bit so I think the film lent itself to that.

This is gonna sound a bit stalkerish, but I searched your name up and besides the interviews you’ve done, and you don’t seem to have much of a social media presence. I was wondering about the person you present online compared to the character you play in the film which shares your name? I think about the idea of social media creation and curation of the online persona because people, I don’t do this, nuke their social media presence every couple of years and reinvent themselves. Was that something you considered or are you generally just someone who doesn’t really use social media except to promote this film? As creatives there’s this idea that as filmmakers or artists you need to have a brand or an identity which is linked to this feeling of performance? 

I don’t know. I think I’m perfectly normal and I use the internet and social media a completely normal and healthy amount. In my personal life I get frustrated at myself for spending too much time looking at my phone. I think that some of the obsessiveness and the idea of having the quality of performance derived from social media be a part of your actual personhood is something in the film that I would like to attribute to myself in real life. I think in a way, the thing I was interested in was that social media or presenting yourself on the internet to me, it’s not a novel phenomenon. I feel that, and this is what I was trying to explore with the film, that just being a person is kind of like playing the character that you want to be. That’s why I’m playing myself in the film because I felt like it would enable me to grow into a version of myself that was closer to someone I wanted to be. I’m not so interested in social media as a thing that’s very different from any human experience that precedes it, I’m interested in something that’s continuous with what it means to be a person or what that has always meant.

I think one thing that’s often exciting yet limiting for a lot of filmmakers is that their first feature becomes their brand of who they are. Is that something you were concerned about or did you just want to make a film because it’s so hard to do logistically, financially, emotionally, all that energy needed to create? 

Yeah, I guess I feel that pressure now that people have seen it and it’s been in the world and played in a bunch of places. But when I was making it, I didn’t feel that pressure at all because I didn’t think about that because it was this small thing that I was kind of doing alone, I felt a certain freedom in knowing that if it was really bad and no one saw it, then no one would see it and I could just do something else, do another one. So I  felt no pressure in a way or felt no sense of defining myself with the first film because I had no expectation for it to be received in any way. Certainly now I have established a sensibility and I felt like there were aspects of it that are unique and compelling and I want to continue to work with those in a way that also feels like I’m going somewhere new or evolving in my own thinking.

I was wondering if the opening and closing scenes with the red laser string, influenced by Chinese folklore of soulmates, the Red Thread of Fate? Is that something related to the idea of connectedness?

I don’t know what that is but it sounds very resonant. So I’ll say no, it wasn’t drawn from any specific tradition I think. I don’t know, I was making up performance art pieces and I certainly have references I’ve mentioned a bunch of times like Yoko Ono and Sophie Calle, but in a way, I was trying to invent artworks that were really different or the opposite of any artworks that I, Julian Castronovo, was capable of making. Just in the way I’ve been trained to think, or trained to work with images and stuff in a structuralist way, which is about decoding, analysis, and trying to get beneath the surface of things. I wanted to make art, I wanted to make Fawn’s art be the opposite of that where it was simple and emotional and did not necessarily require analysis to be felt. 

Let’s talk about the film’s use of additional media like gameplay footage. Silly question, I noticed you used Sims gameplay footage…Was it the Sims 4? [laughs]

I believe it was. You know, I had never played The Sims.

You haven’t?!

No, I never had before. I did it only for those images. Some people have expected me to have much more to say about The Sims than I do. Basically, I was just trying to think like, what are more modes of having an avatar or having a kind of proxy version of yourself that you project yourself into and play out different lives and stuff, that was one of them.

There’s that coin game as well, Subway Surfers? People talk about this idea of this new generation and brain rot and short attention spans like Subway Surfers playing in the background of the content we consume. Is that something you’re aware of in relation to your practice? Debut is an interesting film but my brain was like this is a highly intellectual and philosophical film and I contrast that with the brainrot culture we’re currently in where we’ve kind of grown up online with the internet.

I think what I was trying to do was I was seeking to collapse everything, collapse the high and low and all of these forms of images because I wanted to have them all on an equal plain. I didn’t want any form of image making to be elevated over another and I felt it was important to me, and perhaps this is my experience of the world, is that all these things are going by and there’s kind of a surplus of them, and it’s kind of this difficult experience sensorially to know what you’re looking at or what’s important or there’s simply too much. But I think that’s also beautiful in a way, I wanted to work with things that maybe are meaningful or resonant thematically or formally or aesthetically with other things in the film. Some of them have a secret logic about why I would select some brain rot images over others. Like the Subway Surfers one, for example, I had already established this as I was editing, an interest in playing two things at once because the film was about duplication and copying. So I was like, what does that look like for moving images, to have two images of the same thing or very close to the same thing play at once? Because I had established that in certain parts of the edit of two things on the screen, it was very obvious to me that a lot of times I’m seeing two things on the screen.  The other thing is Subway Surfers, I wanted to have it at some point where it was the only thing on the screen as like an inversion of what I was seeing. I don’t know, it was kind of a thing where some things are meaningful and have a designed resonance with the content of the film and some things don’t. I think the thing that also has been really beautiful to me is people are finding meaning that I didn’t anticipate like what you said earlier about the red thread, something that I hadn’t known and I like that the work can take on meanings I don’t know about.

It’s funny because maybe you, subconsciously were like, I’m going to make this way and audiences like myself watch and ‘go, oh, the moon in the film is blue. That must mean he has an internal sadness and loneliness as a man in a dark world.’ You know, that kind of performative bullshit that feels inauthentic, the idea of how we present ourselves online as artists in a world that craves authenticity. Authenticity is sometimes limited to how much we want to show people, like how we mask, even socially, not just on the internet, but with people in real life when we go to new settings and stuff. I just see parallels between your film’s exploration of art forgery, online YouTube culture, and presentation of evidence as credibility of who a person is. 

I think in some way what I was trying to do is take evidence of who I was because some of the things in the film are real and then situate that in the same inventory of evidence of who I would want to be, I think, or a different version of myself, so I was drawn to that idea of material evidence. This is also why I think it had to be my own name and my own face because I had evidence of those things, it was real. I wanted to use that as a starting point to like invent or make things. I also agree with what you were saying about authenticity. I think there’s a broader cultural value about authenticity and I felt especially frustrated by that in an independent film context where you’re supposed to be working on something that’s personal about your identity. I feel like that’s boring to me and perhaps is not the point of art. I don’t know. Basically I feel there’s pleasure and a potential of artifice more than authenticity. I wanted to lean into pretending and lean into performing and in a way I think they come back around because when you perform something then it begins to feel true. There’s a very simple vernacular phrase for this when you live in Los Angeles. People say ‘fake it till you make it’. It’s kind of true of where you just can kind of pretend to be the person you want to be until you are and I think that’s really freeing.

It’s interesting how people ask for authenticity and you said you find that boring. I read in a bio somewhere that you’re a Chinese-American filmmaker. I wanted to ask in relation to filmmaking, when you apply for funding or grants, do people often ask about your cultural identity as a filmmaker? Is that something you’ve had to lean into looking for support or funding for grants in America? Personally it’s something that sometimes when I’m applying for things I state that I’m a Chinese-Australian filmmaker from Western Sydney which is cool but it doesn’t encompass all of my identity, who I am. Is that something you can speak about in relation to having to go down those avenues or do you want to run away from that and just make stuff for the purpose of making stuff?

Yeah it’s been sort of frustrating to me. I find it to be kind of humiliating. Sometimes it’s sort of obvious what people want to hear and then you have to tell it to them. I find that to be a sort of humiliating experience to feel, as you were just saying, that your own experience and then your own work and practice is somehow richer and more complex than a thing that you’re trying to fit into. I also feel, I assume this is probably true in Australia, your work, cinematic work, literary work, artistic work, that deals with identity and deals with race, to me often has a certain style or quality that I find frustrating. It’s kind of slow and sentimental and I don’t know I’ve never felt that to be useful or meaningful or good art. It was also my experience as a viewer, especially as an Asian-American for some reason. In the United States, there’s a big preoccupation with Asian-American representation because I guess there aren’t enough Asian actors in Hollywood. I think especially when I was in college four or five years ago there was like all this stuff about the Oscars. I had grown up believing that you know, there should be this, especially because I’m Asian. I don’t know, you feel and think that seeing someone like you, seeing your story on screen is somehow affirming or a political act or it makes the world better. Growing up or in college I would see stuff that would resemble my family’s experience and I’d be like, I don’t really care about this movie, am I supposed to? I remember I saw this film that was hyper-specific to the experience of my family living in the deep south of the United States, which had been no movies about. I went into this movie expecting to be like, oh my God, and I don’t know, it didn’t move me, I didn’t care about it. I was frustrated with that kind of notion and that type of sentimentality because I think what movies can do and what is a lot more fun is reveal the way that identity isn’t about a super authentic experience, it’s about invention and artifice and misunderstanding and all these things are compelling and you can be playful about. 

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First Films returns for its 4th edition 5 – 9 November at Golden Age Cinema and Bar in Sydney, showcasing emerging directors’ debut features alongside bold and explosive retrospective debuts. Find out more here: First Films 2025 – Golden Age Cinema and Bar

Interview by Addy Fong.