We recently connected with Kyle Ziton and have shared our conversation below.

Kyle, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Has your work ever been misunderstood or mischaracterized?

When I was taking my short film “Working Title” around the festival circuit, we had one showing where one of the characters of the film, after being chased by a killer with an axe and seeing that one of their friends is dead. He proposes to his love interest girlfriend. Of course when he said this, she was confused and like “Really, right now?”. The audience laughed as I wanted them too. However, on his next line when he talks about how he wanted to say it in case he never got a chance to, in case they died. After the screening of the film I was a in a discussion with some of the audience. I was a little sad that when the scene in question came up, they saw it as just a comedy moment. I was going for tragic/romantic with a little bit of comedy. I never wanted the chanters themselves to be the joke. The lesson I learned from that was is that you can have a scene work for one reason for one person, and entirely something different for someone else.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?

The story of my journey in the career starts out the same as most screenwriters… we love movies. I think most specifically for me was horror, particularly for me were film films like “Assault on Precinct 13”, “Night of the Living Dead”, “Back to the Future”, and “Brick”. This is how this has affected my writing is that I typically go for smaller moments that I can put into a genre film. There has been a lot of talk about roller coaster movies vs “cinema” and it seems like you have to pick a side. However, my argument is that we can have both. In my writing, I try to balance the fun with the moments of pain and sorrow. If I’m not establish who my character is in the first part of the film, and then spend the rest of it tearing it down, pushing them to ask questions they don’t want the answers too, then I’m not a storyteller.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

The most rewarding thing for me is after writing, casting, locations, all the pre production stuff. You get to see the actors you picked, in the costumes you chose, in the location you imagined, saying the words you wrote for characters you made up. For a few minutes it’s like looking into another universe.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

I guess the goal would be to never do the same thing twice. The way I do this is just throw everything I wanna do, and say into one genre. When I made my zombie movie “Last Stand Of The Dead”, I was like, “This is everything I wanna put into this genre. Now it got that all out of my system.

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