Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC studios in SoHo. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. I'm really grateful that you're here. A new documentary, Sally, explores the career and life of Sally Ride, the first American woman to travel to space. We'll talk about the intersection of feminism and space exploration with the film's director. Somebody Somewhere stars Jeff Hiller. He discusses his new memoir, Actress of a Certain Age: My Twenty-Year Trail to Overnight Success. That's part of our plan, so let's get this started with our Tribeca film coverage with actor Riz Ahmed and director Dave Mackenzie. The film Relay features actor Riz Ahmed, but he doesn't speak for the first half hour of the movie. Instead, he communicates via body language, eye contact, and a telecommunication relay service, something that allows a person to type out their messages and have them read by a third person. The service is designed to allow people who are deaf or hard of hearing or have speech disabilities. It allows them to make phone calls, but in Relay, Ahmed's character, Ash, uses it for anonymity. He works as a fixer, and his clients are people who have obtained useful information and need an intermediary.

His latest client is Sarah, who who worked for a biotech company that is about to do bad things, and she has the docs proving those things, but now she's being followed, her phones are being tapped, and she just wants her life to return to normal. IndieWire calls Relay a fun, twisty, supremely confident homage to classic paranoid thrillers. It's screening at the Tribeca Film Festival this week. It releases in theaters on August 22nd. I'm joined now by Riz Ahmed. Nice to meet you.

Riz Ahmed: Nice to meet you, too.

Alison Stewart: Also, the film's director, Dave Mackenzie. Hi, Dave.

Dave Mackenzie: Hi.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about this relay system. It's really cool, it allows people to type what they're thinking for people who are hard of hearing or who are deaf. First of all, Dave, why do you think that would make such a good anchor for a thriller?

Dave Mackenzie: What's really interesting about it is, as it says, the Americans with Disabilities Act prevents the relay operators from disclosing any information. They're saying the calls are not recorded. There are no records, so it's very untraceable. It's old analog technology. It's now being replaced by new stuff, but it still exists. The relay services do still exist, but that technology is what Riz's character, Ash, uses to try and stay ahead of people who are able to track his digital footprint.

It's a cat and mouse game between what he's trying to do, trying to protect whistleblowers and the people, the kind of corporate henchmen who are trying to kind of intimidate and trying to get that information back and trying to silence those people. He has to be one step ahead of them and they have all the technology ahead of them to use, and he's able to defeat them by using methods which they no longer even know about, which is pretty interesting.

Alison Stewart: Riz, when you read the script, you realized the first chunk of the movie you don't speak. You have a lot to do, but you don't speak. What did you think of that?

Riz Ahmed: I thought it's like my family's dream come true. I just shut up and I don't have a phone. I'm offline, I'm disconnected. It's my dream as well, actually. No, honestly, it's such a page-turner, even in script form. I knew David's hands. David's someone I wanted to work with for a long time. I love his movies like Hell or High Water, Starred Up. I just knew in his hands it would be so gripping. It actually just felt very intriguing to me. I was wondering who is this character? What is motivating him? What is his backstory? I think that's the effect it has on audience members as well.

I think in the absence of being spoon fed exposition and being spoon fed information, audience has no choice but to lean in to watch a bit more closely, to watch almost at the edge of their seat. Then, of course, the story is doing the same thing. It's full of twists and turns and intrigue and mystery. I think it's a really fun watch. Honestly, my experience reading on the page is mirroring what I think audience members are saying. It just keeps you guessing and keeps you gripped.

Alison Stewart: I know you can't decide, is he a good guy, is he a bad guy? What's he doing exactly in the first part of the film?

Riz Ahmed: No comment.

Alison Stewart: So our listeners can understand what we're talking about, I want to play a clip from. This is Ash calling the team that's telling Sarah the communications assistant is speaking on his behalf. The other speaker is the head of the team, played by Sam Worthington, so people can catch up and understand we're talking about this Relay Service. This is from Relay.

[part of Relay movie playing]

Speaker 1: We've left word at the office of [unintelligible 00:05:14] CEO, Mr. Franklin. We await his response.

Speaker 2: Mr. Franklin passed on your message, and he's authorized us to speak on his behalf. Go ahead.

Speaker 1: Who am I speaking to and what is your position?

Speaker 2: Well, my name is Steve Dawson. Don't look it up, t's not real, and my team is tasked with returning the documents. Go ahead.

Speaker 1: We wish to return them as soon as possible, but in order to protect our client, we are ready to send them simultaneously to all appropriate law enforcement agencies as well as every major media outlet if you don't fully cooperate with our requests.

Speaker 2: Well, we'll do our best to cooperate. Go ahead.

Speaker 1: There will be no more threats to our client. No more surveillance, including phone taps. Once we are satisfied with our client's security, we'll return the original. We will keep a single, secure copy as insurance for our client's protection.

Speaker 2: How do we know to trust you? Because you could be anyone. Yes, go ahead.

Speaker 1: You will be our client, too. You will be required to pay a fee. We work for both parties to ensure that the job is done with no loose ends. It is in all our interests for it to run smoothly.

Speaker 2: That's very kind of you. How much is the fee? Go ahead.

Speaker 1: Half a million dollars, cash.

Speaker 2: Well, that's a lot of money. How do we trust your client's intentions? Go ahead.

Speaker 1: You were tapping our clients first calls. You know as much about their intentions as we do.

Alison Stewart: All right, so people got the vibe of what's going on. How did you direct the communications assistants, the intermediaries, when you were making the film? Because they kind of were dispassionate, delivering this intense information.

Dave Mackenzie: It was a really interesting thing because we only had one day to shoot them, and effectively, they had 25 pages of dialogue to do, but it was really about casting them. I wanted to cast people who all very different. I had a pack of cards of the people that I wanted to try and work out which people would be appropriate to deliver which information. Some people delivering information on the nose carefully, and sounding nice about it. The guy in that scene was absolutely brilliant because he was ice cold, but really, really connected to the material.

When we were shooting it, I didn't give them the script, so they didn't know what they-- They were reading it directly. There was a sense of them reading it, and they're convey the message, but they're also themselves. I was just really interested in that idea that you don't know who you're going to get, and the person leaving the message has no idea the tone of the voice, the gender, or anything of the person delivering the message, and how that interacts with the information being told, and particularly Lily and Sam and everyone else, how they have to deal with these dislocated voices.

Alison Stewart: Riz, you're typing messages for the first part of the film. What are you channeling into your performance when you can't rely on words?

Riz Ahmed: Well, it's really interesting because acting, a large part of it at least is about listening and just being present. I think David's, not with Justin, the writer, they've conceived of a story that is all about listening, and my character is, by the nature of his job and the nature of his personality, very much a watchful individual, somebody who's always got his ears and eyes open.

In that sense, it was a very pure experience of what acting often is, which is about remaining open to your environment, to your scene partner. If you can remain open to that, it works on you. Someone once said, I think it's an old saying, it's like, you don't act, you react. Actually, it was a real gift to be able to be in a place where so much work was being done for me, because I could listen in, I could absorb, could simply be present. There was something really, really liberating about that. Something very, as I said, pure about it.

I think what's interesting, from an audience point of view at least, what I found is that every conversation in this film is really tense. There are no casual conversations. It's not me and Lily James and Sam Worthington sitting in a room arguing with each other, or even getting on the phone. Every single interaction has baked into its DNA a sense of drama, tension, intrigue, something unusual about it.

As David was saying, these disembodied voices conveying this kind of very intense information reminds me of how in 2001: A Space Odyssey or things like that, there's a cold, slightly creepy quality to that. For an actor, I think it was actually, strangely, a gift. I think often the gift and the curse is the same thing. You don't get to say anything, but guess what? You don't have to say anything. For audiences, I think it actually draws them in even further.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting because there is one casual conversations, but it's done through ASL, which I'm curious, did you retain that from Sound of Metal?

Riz Ahmed: I wish I could say I kept up my fluency in ASL, but like any language, if you don't practice, it kind of fades away. We were using this piece of technology, this relay service, which is very much connected to people are deaf and hearing impaired, and so we felt it was right, actually, to involve members of the deaf community and bring that element into the film. I was really pleased to be able to bring in my sign language instructor and my mentor within that community, Jeremy Stone, JLS, as he's known. He was there. He was on board. He was helping oversee some of that element. Personally, for me, I think it's really important to have communities like the deaf community or different minorities or underrepresented characters in movies where it's not about that.

Alison Stewart: No, he's about, like, trying to fix your passport or something.

Riz Ahmed: [00:11:43] Speaker B: Yes, he's just a dodgy guy in the back room who I'm trying to negotiate and haggle with in ASL [unintelligible 00:11:49]

Dave Mackenzie: What I really love about that scene is the way that it communicates. We didn't need to put subtitles on because it's completely clear what they're doing. Riz is echoing what the conversation is. I was really proud that it just works. No one ever said, oh, you need to explain exactly what's being said," because it comes across so clearly.

Riz Ahmed: It makes sense of where his affiliation to this piece of technology comes from, this pal of his, this fixer that he uses.

Dave Mackenzie: It's also the first time he probably really uses his own accent as a character as well, because he's putting on so many disguises and voices and all that, because the character is a hall of mirrors in so many ways that it feels like the most honest-

Riz Ahmed: The most communicative, yes.

Dave Mackenzie: -of all the interactions that happen in the whole film.

Riz Ahmed: It's non verbal. His most comfortable form of communication using someone who is a verbal person is non-verbal. I think it speaks volumes about the characters. It's a wonderful piece of writing and wonderful moment for David and Justin to place in there.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about the film Relay. I'm speaking with actor Riz Ahmed and Director Dave McKenzie. It's part of our Tribeca Film coverage. It'll also be released in theaters on August 22nd. Because there's a lot of action in this movie-- there is a lot of action, but there's also a lot of non-action. There's a lot of phone calls, there's a lot of waiting, tense times, but slower in the way that they evolve. How do you find that balance, Dave, between the action, running, going, and the calm waiting?

Dave Mackenzie: Well, I've always felt it was a slow burn movie. The idea really is that the characters, Liz and-- sorry, Riz and Lily's characters, I could have got that really badly, are not in the same space together until, really, the third act of the film. I think there's something-- you're building up to something's, and you know there's a slow fuse burning and you know something's going to explode at some point.

I really like the shape of that. I really like movies that don't start off how they end, that take you along a winding road and then reveal some things and you get pushed into a place that you weren't expecting. I think this film is very much aiming to do that.

Alison Stewart: When we meet Ash, where is he in life? What's going on with him? Is he just doing the job, getting things done? Is there something else going on with him?

Dave Mackenzie: I don't want to say too much about him as a character, but something that is an element of the film that isn't a secret is that he's somebody who's in recovery. He's someone who's definitely had to pick up the pieces in his life. I think that speaks to why he is off grid, so to speak, why he is this lone wolf of an operator, and why he's quite emotionally guarded now. As I said, the gift and the curse are always the same. That's difficult way to live in a way that's quite lonely, but it also speaks to his tremendous superpower, which is to not need human connection, or at least so he thinks, in the way that others do, and enables him to do his job, enables him to move in the shadows and not leave a trace.

I think he's a character who has built up walls, who has built up a kind of protective isolation for himself and for his clients that he works with as a fixer, but I think these walls, they come crumbling down a little bit when he meets Lily.

Alison Stewart: Yes. Why is she able to get behind those walls or find the little tiny window that's slightly open in that wall?

Riz Ahmed: I think as human beings, we all want to connect, don't we? We all want to connect. I think that it's something about where my character is at in his recovery journey and the importance of needing to trust and be open and share who you are in order to fully heal. I think that coincides with meeting Lily, who's tremendously vulnerable and brave as a person. I think that connection is forged between two lonely people in a vulnerable place in their life who are in situations where they can't trust anyone, but they badly need someone to trust. I think that's how that bond is formed.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting because you use the postal service as a way to get ahead of the people who are trailing Sarah. I kept thinking of the film. This is like this really interesting mix between what is possible with technology and how you can get around it by using old school methods. I want to talk about that a little bit.

Riz Ahmed: I think that, as we said, so the analog world is the way to get around being tracked. The old institute, like the relay institution and the postal service-

Alison Stewart: They're very old school.

Riz Ahmed: -they're old school. They're trustworthy, they're designed for all or for the needs of anyone. He needs to use them. There's something decent about those kind of things, and it's quite interesting to be able to lean on that old school kind of decent-- It feels really nice. Certainly, with the postal service are these labyrinthine things with, forwarding and tracking your mail and-

Alison Stewart: General Delivery. When was the last time you got something in General Delivery?

Riz Ahmed: You want to lose somebody or lose something just post it.

Alison Stewart: It's so true. When you were thinking about your character Ash, why do you think Ash takes Sarah's case?

Dave Mackenzie: Well, it's interesting because the film starts with him ending on this character Hoffman's case and sending him off out of town to a life where he will be, in some way, undercover. Before he takes Sarah's case, there's the strong sense where he's trying to work out where she's from, and also whether he really wants to take it on or not. There's a little scene where he has a almost like a layer where he's protected, where he keeps his important documents, things like that, and he's just deciding whether he wants to do it and goes, "Okay, no, I think I'm tired. I don't want to do it, but I'm going to do it." It's just a little moment, but it seems like duty calls.

Alison Stewart: Yes. You look her up on LinkedIn, you make sure she is who she says she's going to be, supposedly. Why do you think he takes her case?

Riz Ahmed: I think it's because he recognizes a part of himself in her. I think that often our attraction to people, our ability to relate to people is a projection. It's about us projecting a fellow feeling or a shared experience or a shared sense of identity onto Lily. I think as a fixer, Ash is someone who's going up against the big dogs, going up against the powers that be, and he's a lone ranger, in a way, in doing that.

I think he really sees that in Lily's character and Sarah Grant. I think he sees somebody who's possibly about to lose it all because she wants to speak truth to power. I think he really recognizes himself in that, and I dare say also, he's a lonely individual, and I think part of him is attracted to her, although he would never allow himself to act on that as a consummate professional. Yes, I think it's about solitude, and projection can really be a powerful recipe for bringing people together.

Alison Stewart: Ash gets a call from a former client who is regretting working with him and wants the truth to get out there. He's upset about hiding it. What does this do to Ash? Does it create guilt in him? Does it create a sense that he wants to do more with the next client? What do you think?

Riz Ahmed: Well, there's this trade off between saving individuals and saving the world, isn't there? That's something that's in that gray area, is where Ash operates. I'll just speak to that in a bit more detail. A lot of time what Ash is doing is whistleblowers are contacting him, and they're not saying, "Help me get these terrible state secrets, these terrible corporate lies in the news." They're saying, "Hey, I thought I was going to be a whistleblower, but the harassment is too great. I don't want to lose my whole life. I don't have to live off-grid. Can you just put the toothpaste back in the tube? Can you get these secrets back to the corporation? Can you be a middleman? Can you make this all go away? I thought I was going to be a do-good-at-Ash, but I can't. I can't go through this, it's too much."

What Ash is doing is he's protecting the vulnerable individual, but in trying to re-bury these secrets that these whistleblowers thought they would expose, he is walking away from maybe the bigger battle of exposing corporate greed or government lies. There is that tremendous trade off, and I think that that's something that Ash is having to contend with. What is doing the right thing? Is it taking care of people or is it taking care of the principal? He's someone who's constantly thinking about this.

Yes, I think the film deals with a lot of these really interesting gray areas, but I think in a way that is gripping and twisty and exciting and engaging. You spoke about it as a slow burn. I think burn is the operative word rather than slow. I think from the beginning of this film, even though it doesn't bang you over the head with lots of explanations and lots of explosions, I think it pulls you in because it's unique and because of David's direction.

Alison Stewart: David, was there any place in New York that you wanted to shoot? We saw a lot of New York.

Dave Mackenzie: We shot in some great place. Our first day of shooting was Times Square and it's got A crazy kind of--

Alison Stewart: Your first day?

Dave Mackenzie: Yes. It was a completely wild location. We had a tiny corner where we put a newsstand that we controlled, but the rest of it was open to anyone there. There was a lovely kind of quality to it. It was a thing that as a filmmaker, I'm always interested in things-- in how to make all this material come alive. Shooting on live streets is something I've always liked doing, even if people are looking at you, the camera or whatever. Things are happening in a very organic way. It's great for the actors to work against that live feeling and just makes everything crisp and exciting, and so that was great.

All of the street stuff in New York I really, really enjoyed doing. We had to do it very, very quickly. We did like 35 scenes in three days. It was a lot of fast-paced [unintelligible 00:24:03]

Riz Ahmed: It was really incredible, actually. I've never quite worked at such a pace, and it's so incredible because David's films are so studied and they're so well structured and paced, and the experience of them is free falling, it is just so fast. It's so confident, so assured. It's slightly chaotic, but in a way that's by design, as David's saying, so shooting in Times Square, shooting Grand Central Station, shooting in Jackson Heights in Queens, shooting in the back of a yellow taxi. All these kind of things, as David said, that texture, that specificity allows a story to come alive. For us as actors, we're in it.

We mainly night shoots in this movie. So nighttime in New York, interesting people come out, interesting stuff happens, so you're almost kind of, by design, putting yourself in a situation that you can't control, and that is so that life can force its way onto the screen. I think people really responded to that.

Alison Stewart: [00:24:59] Speaker A: The name of the film is Relay. It will be in theaters August 22nd. It is screening at the Tribeca Film Festival. My guests have been Riz Ahmed and director David McKenzie. Thank you for coming to the studio.

Dave Mackenzie: Thanks very much.

Riz Ahmed: Thank you.