My Chat with Director Shervin Kermani

A couple of weeks ago, I was at a Filmable party and I ended up meeting Shervin Kermani, a director whose short film, Ramón Who Speaks to Ghosts, was screening at the Vancouver International Film Festival. We exchanged contacts and, a few days later, Shervin was gracious enough to allow me to interview him. In our Zoom call, we discussed his experience working with Werner Herzog, how location can inform a story, and making a movie in a foreign language. Here is an edited transcript of our chat.

Lucas: What inspired you to create this short film?

Shervin: This short is kind of unusual. It wasn't created totally independently, you know, brainstorming an idea on my own. It was created during a workshop that was hosted by La Selva, a company that does workshops with renowned directors like Herzog or Lucrecia Martel or Abbas Kiarostami before he passed away. One of the preconditions of the workshop was that Herzog didn't want us to come to the island with preconceived ideas. He wanted us to respond to the environment and to respond to a theme that he would give us on the first day. When we got to the island and he gave us the theme, it was "after the fire," and I thought that theme was broad enough that I could have come with preconceived ideas without risking being off theme. I regretted that choice of listening to Herzog.

L: I mean, when Herzog speaks, you listen. He's a legend.

S: Well, I was trying to, I was trying to listen. I think maybe I shouldn't have. In terms of this specific idea, it was while we were location scouting, I was coming up with many, many ideas. This one idea about this guy with a boom microphone wandering the island kept nagging at me as an interesting image that could unlock the larger themes of the volcanic catastrophe.

L: What was the experience like of actually being in the room with such a renowned film director?

S: It was great. He really took his responsibility seriously. For him, he sees these workshops as part of his duty to cinema. He was there every single day. He really tried to impart value to us on a daily basis. I thought he was also really good at inspiring us to take risks. He would say constantly, "We are not journalists. We are not doing reportage." He kept inspiring us to go out there and invent, and not be tied to the facts, which I took to heart, because my initial instinct was trepidation at the idea of bending the facts of this catastrophe. Obviously, you don't want to offend people who've lived through a horrific event, and you want to respect the spirit of their experience, but I do think that taking an unconventional approach helped convey that spirit more effectively than if I took a traditional documentary approach to the subject. That was definitely inspired by Herzog's daily admonitions to not be too pedantic.

L: After watching your film, I did a little bit of research on La Palma, the island where you filmed, and about the volcanic eruption that happened there in 2021. That was all new information to me, but it helped inform your movie. So I went back and I watched it again. How many days were you in La Palma? I assume that it was your first time going to that island.

S: I'd never been there before. I had vaguely heard of this volcanic eruption, but I didn't get into the details until I got accepted to this program. It was 11 days on the island, of which we were supposed to shoot for four, and I used all the shoot days and one extra day in the end.

L: Sometimes, when you make a movie, you'll use locations that you're familiar with, that you know you have access to. In your case, you went to this island that you'd never been to before. You didn't even have a concept before you got there. What was it like having to not just come up with a whole new story in so many days, but also using a whole new setting?

S: I definitely tried to let the setting inform the film. I feel like the idea of ghosts actually emerged organically out of these ghostly landscapes. You're in these spaces where that haunting feeling is very vivid. To me, the ghost metaphor seemed like a back door into these settings. We went location scouting with Herzog and the organizers and the other filmmakers, and walked these spaces, but I've never been to these places before. It's totally new. I'm not sitting on this idea for months and months and months and letting it flow organically out of these spaces. It's a highly pressurized experience that was a huge challenge, but I think the location definitely informed the film. The film is a synthesis of Pedro, who plays Ramón, and the location.

L: I read that you didn't speak any Spanish before you got to La Palma. So not only did you not have a story when you got to an island you had never been to, but you also didn't even speak the language.

S: Yeah, that was one of the big challenges. I think the best way to learn a language is to direct in that language, because the stakes are so high. I'm spending a lot of mental effort to try and translate what he's saying in my brain, and cross referencing all the languages I know — a little bit of French, a little bit of Italian, English, the Latin roots of words — to be like, "Okay, I think that's what he's saying here." And a lot of gut feeling as well, to know like, "Okay, I think he's rambling now. I think it's safe to cut." I was lucky that I was also paired with a native Spanish speaker, Karla Reyes, who was a cinematographer, who I would look at sometimes in the middle of a take to be like, "Is it safe to cut?"

L: When you started filming, did you have a working script, or was it more like you had these ideas and you went with the actor and shot more in an improv style?

S: It was more improv style. We didn't have a script. We took a hybrid fiction-documentary approach. Some of what happens is documentary. For instance, that scene where he breaks down thinking about someone he actually lost. Some elements were fictional that I would throw out while we were shooting. It was really an iterative process on the fly. We would test certain things out, then I would go and edit them, and then, based on the edit, be like, "Oh, I think we need this." I did that until the film came together.

L: I like that style of experimentation. Kind of like a run-and-gun style where you go, you shoot, you check it out at the end of the day, see what you have, then make the corrections the next day, and do that over and over. When the film started, I thought that it was a documentary about this guy who believes he can speak to ghosts, but then as it goes on, you can't help but sense the fiction, through a little bit of humour that you throw in there, like when he's watching volleyball, and you have the volleyball sound effects.

S: The volleyball was my way of playing my hand, like I'm not trying to deceive you. You know, that's not completely real, but there's a truth to it.

L: It reminded me of a Werner Herzog film called Incident at Loch Ness. Have you ever seen that?

S: I haven't seen it, no.

L: It's a mockumentary where Herzog plays himself going to film the Loch Ness monster. It turns into this comedy, but it has that element where it's hard to decipher what's documentary and what's fiction. I think your movie is a more interesting blend of the serious tone of documentary mixed with this humorous, fictional style. Was there an artistic intention behind using this comic relief to undercut or to help soothe Ramón's grieving process?

S: The comedy is intentional. For me, the reason for it narratively is that, if you start a movie with a guy saying, "I lost all my possessions in the fire," even though that's factually accurate, you're not allowing the audience to fall in love with the character before you're asked to empathize with them. I thought, if you present his lovable personality to the audience, you give them a chance to just love him on his own terms before you understand this tragic reason for a strange obsession. As the film unfolds, I wanted it to recontextualize the things that were humorous before and to uncover the metaphorical value of those anecdotes.

L: As I did more research on the La Palma volcanic eruption, I read about one of the towns that was completely engulfed in the volcano and is now a ghost town.

S: Another thing that inspired the film is these conversations I would have with the main character or other people on the island. When I asked Pedro to share his experiences about the eruption, he talked about this café that he would go to every morning to have his morning coffee. He talked about the sounds of the conversations he would have, the clinking of the coffee mugs, the specific, everyday details of that space that are lost. That really informed the ending of the film. To me, it's like, you don't know that you're in Eden until you're banished from it. That was the feeling I had in talking to a lot of people. Those very simple experiences that they had are the ones that felt most painful to them, not necessarily all their possessions, not necessarily all the houses and property that went under the lava, but the little human experiences that they had in those spaces. The film uses the ghost metaphor to get at that. The sounds that he is trying to record are a reference to those kinds of conversations.

L: The things that he misses are the little things, the intangibles. It's not so much going and having coffee; it's the ambience of the coffee shop. You can't get that back because the coffee shop is gone, right?

S: Yes, it's the intangibles that he missed. That really struck me.

L: That helps, like you say, explain the ending. The sound of children playing gives it this eerie sense, but at the same time, kind of bittersweet or heartfelt, because it's the small background noises that get lost and get replaced with dead silence, which is devastating.

S: It is super eerie when you're in that lava field, knowing these were just residential streets with kids playing soccer and here we are and it's just like nothing.

L: Are you a believer in ghosts?

S: I don't believe in ghosts literally, but I like them for their metaphorical value. I think the same thing of religion and mythology. I'm not a believer, but I think religion and myth have huge metaphorical value and insight into the human experience. I like them as poetry.

Ramón Who Speaks to Ghosts2025