Focus on short films: Off the Face of the Earth (with Michael Pantozzi) | Short films in brief

Michael Pantozzi’s “Off The Face of the Earth” opens with a lonely photographer, Tim (Pantozzi), struggling to find the courage to delete his social media account. Once he does this, will he truly be alone and perhaps freer? Or is it trying to take a stand against being a product that exists solely to feed robots and algorithms? Either way, it’s a monumental choice, and his mother (Kimmy Robertson of “Twin Peaks”) can’t imagine how he’ll exist in a world without friends, especially when she relies on social media to stay in touch with her family, given that her physical limitations keep her confined to the house.

Then something weird happens. Tim takes the dog for a walk on the beach and, as he tries to take a photo for work, he spots a woman about to jump to her death. The strange thing is that he can only see her through his phone camera and not in real life. He eventually learns that she might be a long-missing person, but that doesn’t explain why he can only see her on her phone. Did she also “delete” herself somehow?

Pantozzi’s premise remains intriguing throughout, even if we don’t really root for Tim in any capacity. He is not always sympathetic or charitable, and the way he treats his mother will turn off some viewers. Still, Pantozzi builds tension well and knows how to slowly reveal the inner workings of the mystery at hand. Robertson is particularly good as his poor mother, who has only the best intentions for her son and cannot understand his depression. His final moment in the film is truly heartbreaking.

Ultimately, viewers will come away thinking about, among other things, their own social media presence and what it says about them, and the need to keep adding to it. What if you disappeared from all this? Most people of a certain age reading this remember a time before Facebook and the like, but could you bring yourself to return to that existence if you had to? If you are already there, congratulations to you. Tim, for some reason, has the same need. Maybe, just maybe, his ending is actually happy.

Q&A with director Michael Pantozzi

How did this happen?

At a glacial pace. I had the initial idea for it maybe 10 years ago. One day, my now-wife (Kathleen Littlefield, who plays Ellen in the film) and I were trying to find each other after running some errands and we couldn’t find each other, even though we were on the phone and able to determine from our surroundings that we were in the same place at the same time. It was a kind of unsettling, strange feeling that later struck me as a good starting point for a high-level short film.

During the pandemic, I decided to leave social media completely. I did this for all the reasons that social media can be so horrible, but there was also an impulse to remove myself from everything and no longer participate in this often very painful world. I think this is something many of us still feel these days. Like, why am I trying so hard to occupy a meaningful place in this nightmare society? I can just stay home and do very little with the people I really know and love, and no one will know the difference.

But the feelings that followed were somewhat unexpected. The first thing I realized was that it was the main way I had crossed into other people’s minds, and without it I felt like I was hiding. As if no one knew I was there anymore. I also suddenly felt much more in control of who had access to the time and energy I preferred to spend at home with my wife. My next thought was: wait a minute, I think I might want that.

But then it finally delivered what I needed to finish the script. Making art is, ideally, an act of communication, I think, and my inability to resist the urge to try to accomplish that led me to realize that simply disappearing wasn’t going to work for me.

Tell me about the casting. Many “Twin Peaks” fans are excited to see Kimmy Robertson again.

One of my first and fondest memories of moving to Los Angeles from the New York area, where I grew up, is watching “Twin Peaks” for the first time. I was living in a two-bedroom in Park La Brea with three other people and living on dollar deli meats and Trader Joe’s Simpler Times beer, and I remember feeling, of course, the same way many of us felt about it. It was so educational and foundational. I had seen all of Lynch’s films in college, and it seemed like a major missing piece of the spiritual puzzle of the artist I hoped to one day become. It’s going to sound like that, but it’s true.

And so, when I decided to cast Margo, my own character’s mother in the script, that’s where I started from, the place on screen that I perhaps loved the most. Kimmy is by far the one that makes the most sense, given that my own mother inspires the character. What she looks like, what she looks like, how she behaves. So I felt incredibly lucky when I sent the script to her manager and heard she was interested.

That said, I didn’t realize how lucky I really was until the day she showed up on set. It was 105 degrees in September in that house in Glendale, the first of two days we filmed there with her, and it was just nothing for her. “I’m a California girl, I’ve shot 125 degrees in the desert before,” she said. She was also an extremely intelligent, sophisticated and generous actress. I couldn’t believe I was starring alongside this person who played such an iconic character, and needless to say, she is as responsible for the success of the film as anyone.

The film addresses a wide range of issues related to today’s climate of social interaction, or lack thereof. What do you think is at the heart of the loneliness that Tim feels and wants to embrace?

Tim is in his mid-30s, which I think is a time when a lot of people are starting to feel like they see the writing on the wall about what the rest of their life is or isn’t going to include. I was hoping it would be pretty easy to infer from Tim’s behavior that he probably didn’t come away from most interactions with other people throughout his life feeling terribly good about them. I think in Tim’s head it’s, “OK, something about me doesn’t really work for other people, and to be honest the feeling is usually mutual, so I’m going to stop torturing myself and letting other people torture me. It’s a lot easier.”

The fact that we can never truly know what is in each other’s heads and that we are essentially trapped in our own, even though life is this unique and incredible thing that we all experience, is perhaps a fundamental tragedy of humanity. Some of us are better at it than others, but Tim is definitely not one of those people. That said, especially today, I don’t think anyone is immune to the feeling that if we’re not widely observed, we might as well not exist. The tree in the forest that makes no sound when it falls. And Tim is no different: “Hell is other people” will always give way to “Hey, where is everyone and what are they doing without me?” especially when the answer to that question is as intriguing as his experience with Ellen.

There are many ways to interpret the film’s ending and its relationship to digital erasure. Have you thought of any other ideas for the ending?

The last-minute disappearance was the very last revision of the story, made in post-production after filming. I showed my parents a rough first assembly in which the final shot shows them both sitting on the bench. Tim has managed to make his way from the larger physical world to this strange liminal pocket that Ellen has slipped into, and we know that they are together now and that they are going to have to deal with each other, so we are in the same boat with them and are able to perceive them as they perceive themselves and themselves. Then my dad said something like, “Oh, huh, I thought they were both going to disappear from our view of them now after this.” So I really have to say thank you for that last shot there.

But the story has always been this: he searches for it, then he finds it…which I guess one interpretation might be that digital erasure is not death, even though it may seem that way. I’ve heard quite a few responses that equate what ultimately happens to some sort of suicide, which I found interesting. But I also think that perhaps there is an implicit hope that we can still find ourselves outside of all of this.

Have you had any other interesting reactions to the film in terms of how it resonates with people?

Yes, one thing that excited me, in terms of intention and outcome, was the space I wanted to leave for the viewers’ own stories as they experience the film. There was a surprising amount of personal history shared that, at first glance, didn’t seem to have much to do with what I was thinking when writing it. But the unifying pattern has been this feeling: Relating to others—let alone the rest of the world via the Internet—can seem so unnatural and difficult. For some more than others, and what about those of us who are among those few?

I was also very pleased (but not surprised) by the vocal appreciation not only for Kimmy’s performance, but also for the work of our Emmy-winning cinematographer Laela Kilbourn and our production designer Jenny Melendez. They are also among the authors of this film.

What’s next for you?

Everything else I do is in the writing stage. I’m writing a feature film with the editor and associate producer of this short, Josh Bernhard, who is not the director of this short. However, I also started on something that could be a proof of concept for a feature. Anyway, I’m still very slow, so it will probably take a while, but hopefully not that much. Finally, I am also helping Renée Taylor (the star of “The Nanny”) continue her work on her play “Dying Is No Excuse”. I appeared there as an actor at Berkshire Theater Group over the summer and had the extraordinary opportunity to participate in its earlier development under the direction of Elaine May. He is now moving on to the next stage of his life.