Life & Work with Gianna Cavarozzi of Agoura Hills

Today we’d like to introduce you to Gianna Cavarozzi.

Hi Gianna, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
The summer before my co-writer/director Lyanna Zammas and I began attending college, we sparked a friendship online over book recommendations and a shared affinity for the genre of dark academia. During our first semester, we were lucky enough to end up in the same freshman year seminar, Love and Eroticism in Western Society. It was there that the two of us began consuming the same literature and watching films together, engaging in discussions about the two. We were particularly drawn in by Plato’s Symposium which we read during and were immediately inspired by the Ancient Greek tradition of the symposium, and all these other spaces that women were traditionally excluded from. One night in our freshman dorm, I came up with the idea of writing a TV show to pitch to our school’s club. After some convincing (as I was a Film major and Lyanna majoring in Writing, Literature, and Publishing), the two of us began developing a story of our own around these interests and ideas; insular environments full of wealth; masculinity and cult mentality; the glorification of debauchery.

We first pitched Glory & Gore to our school’s production club as a pilot episode for a TV series, which was greenlit. The following summer, we went into production on an extremely small budget of $500. On our very first day of filming, we casually posted a behind-the-scenes TikTok, the very first video on our account, and it went insanely viral, reaching over twenty million views across social media. It was completely unexpected. By the next day on set, the energy had shifted entirely. Overnight, thousands of strangers on the internet had become invested in our story and our characters. What started as a small student production had suddenly grown into something much bigger than us.

Lyanna and I had always envisioned more for the story, and now we finally had the means to pursue it. After wrapping the pilot, we realized there was far more we wanted to do with these characters than a ten-minute episode with no guaranteed future. So, somewhat reluctantly but ultimately for the best, we decided to scrap the pilot and independently produce a feature film/proof of concept version of the story. We expanded our team (still made up entirely of students), reworked the script, and went back into pre-production. Five months later, we filmed the feature you see now over the course of just eight days – It was during finals week, so we still had to accommodate for classes and projects.

That December, we premiered the film to a sold-out audience at the historic Coolidge Corner Theatre. Our cast, crew, and loved ones were there, but so were strangers who had been following our journey online. It was an incredibly humbling night, and the response since has been just as moving and humbling. Lyanna and I originally created Glory & Gore simply as fans of stories we loved, so watching it develop a fandom of its own has been overwhelming in the best way. We cherish interacting with our audience online. Since we’re all students and not celebrities by any means, we have a uniquely personal relationship with our fandom. Just recently, our actors have begun to be noticed out and about! Which is a crazy experience given these used to just be our friends at school!

Currently, we are in the process of developing the story to be a limited series and pitching to studios. We’re still very young and new to the industry, so it’s a very daunting task. But Lyanna and I cannot wait to see where this story takes us, and we know for sure we’re not done with this world and these characters just yet. It’s been three years since the idea for Glory & Gore first came about and it’s been strange, though equally fulfilling, to know so many strangers are invested in a story we came up with in our dorm room at eighteen.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Glory & Gore was both Lyanna’s and my first time writing, directing, and producing a short film, especially one of this scale and with so many eyes on it. As a film student, I had made small projects for class or with friends, but nothing remotely close to this level. Imposter syndrome was very real. It’s not often that your very first film receives this much attention. The pressure was intense. But the people we surrounded ourselves with made all the difference. Lyanna and I had been best friends long before beginning this project, and our visions were always strongly aligned. We did everything together and bounced off each other effortlessly. At the same time, we had the support of our friends Nikki Emma and Dailey Newcomb who joined us as producers. Unlike most professional sets, since it was a student film, Glory & Gore’s cast and crew consisted entirely of friends, which created such a warm environment. We’d be on set and then run into everyone at a party a few hours later or have a class with them the next morning. Working alongside people we trusted personally as well as professionally made the process incredibly special. Another important element for us was building a woman-led crew. We made a deliberate effort to bring as many non-men behind the camera as possible and carve out a space where their voices were prioritized. I love collaborating with women in film, and everyone meshed beautifully. That closeness carried over to our work with the actors. Because we knew them so well on and off screen, we were able to adapt the script with their personalities and strengths in mind. It’s much easier to rework a script with the actors in mind, both in voice and visuals. They always felt comfortable coming to us with their own ideas. That trust made the collaboration very easy.

On our very first go-around of the pilot, we were told in the middle of the shoot that our entire project was a failure. As first-time directors, we took it hard. In that moment, it felt like all the life and passion had been sucked out of us from a single offhand comment. Thankfully, we were on a break, which gave us time to regroup, and push through the rest of the day. Lyanna and I had a very long talk. Looking back, that moment became an important turning point. We grew so much from it. We held onto confidence in our vision, the passion and commitment we had to the project. By the time we went into our second round of production, we were so dedicated that it would take far more than one person’s negativity to dissuade us from our work.

Ultimately, Glory & Gore was a passion project created by a group of friends. Everyone supported one another and lifted each other up, and at the end of the day, we were all still students with so much to learn. Everytime we felt like we weren’t meant to be in this position, we’d remind ourselves that this is in fact still a student film made entirely by amateurs who are also doing this for the first time. In the end, we just had to trust ourselves and keep moving forward.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I am still a student, working to build toward a career as a writer and director. In just a few months, I’ll be graduating with a BFA in Visual Media Arts. Glory & Gore is my very first project released into the world, but I have a few short films under my belt currently in post-production that will begin their festival runs next year. I have grown so much as a creative in the time since creating Glory & Gore, so I am very excited for my upcoming projects. I additionally work as a social media marketing director. Though, so far, only on my own projects and the role has somewhat fallen into my lap (if anyone wants to hire me, I’d be more than happy!). I’ve overseen marketing for Glory & Gore since its conception, in addition to running an unrelated editing account that has unexpectedly also developed a niche cult following online. For the past three years, I’ve also worked as an Intimacy Coordinator and am eager to continue pursuing. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of Intimacy Coordinators on set, and I’m deeply grateful for their recent unionization with SAG-AFTRA. You kind of have to be a jack of all trades when trying to enter the industry.

From an early age, I was taught, like so many women, that desire was to be repressed, it was shameful. Women are conditioned to believe that wanting is improper. Shame and desire have long been intertwined for women, with sexual feelings often treated as something to be hidden. Showcasing female desire without apology is a major theme among my work. Shedding this light on women, as well as sexuality in general, is something I have long been passionate about. I love to push boundaries, drawing inspiration from directors like Emerald Fennell and Luca Guadagnino. While Glory & Gore doesn’t explicitly explore these themes like my other projects do, I see it as the other side of the same coin: flipping the script on traditional portrayals of women in media as well as critiquing a group of male characters brought to life by an all-women crew. Our marketing plays into this as well.

Any big plans?
As I mentioned before, we are currently in the process of adapting Glory & Gore into a TV series and actively pitching it. It’s exciting and absolutely terrifying. It’s the same characters, same setting, same themes. We’d consider it like taking this story and these characters and just placing them in slightly different circumstances. We’re upping the stakes. Adding more dimension, more depth.

When we first wrote the script, we had to keep in mind that this was a student production. The “gore” in Glory & Gore was limited simply because we couldn’t afford the time or budget for many of the SFX-heavy scenes. For example, the infamous “presidential initiation” sequence was the most time-consuming, simply because of the SFX makeup it required. The original script ran over fifty pages, but we cut it down to forty out of respect for our unpaid cast and crew, who were balancing their dedication to the project with their own classes and commitments, as well as the very limited budget we had.

Now, Lyanna and I finally have the opportunity to give ourselves eight hours of content to play with. It’s been liberating to write and brainstorm without the restrictions of a student film. The world of Kingsbridge College has grown into something much richer. We’re so grateful to be able to spend more time with these characters and bring them fully to life. During production of the short, we wrote extensive character backstories of around seven pages per character to give to our actors. However, in a forty-minute film with such a large ensemble cast, we could only barely scratch the surface of this background. It’s strange, these fully fleshed out versions of these characters have always lived in our heads, beyond the forty minutes of runtime, and now they may finally be seen in all their glory – no pun intended.

Many of my favorite scenes and plot points exist in this new, “secret” version of the story that lives in our pitch packet. It’s darker, more mature, and expands on themes we only began to touch on in the original, but at its core, it’s still the same Glory & Gore. We think fans of the short will be excited to see where we take this world and these characters, though I’d warn them not to get too attached to anyone.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gloryandgoretv/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iu2XgDSQF3g&t=1s
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@gloryandgoretv?lang=en

Image Credits
Hannah Miller, Zubin Stillings