Ep24 Jeff Zwart

was born. My dad, he was a sharpshooter in the Navy. When I was born and came home, he took his rifle down the street and traded it for a dog. Every boy, he and his mind needed to have a dog. And so I from that point on, we've always had a dog. But so dogs and animals and everything were so part of my life and so naturally the veterinary part was very interesting.

It's like, you know right now, you know, we live in Colorado, and it's just wonderful to just watch the dogs go out and be dog every day, no fences, no anything, and you just sit there and you kind of look at that dog and go, what's going through his mind or her mind or whatever. I just I don't know, I really like that. So the veterinary side was really kind of to help dogs, you know, that's a whole other level and to be able to do that, and I love the fact that, again, the dog doesn't

come in and tell you what its problems are. You know, you need to look at it, you need to spend time with it. And even in the days of when I was involved in veterinary medicine, it was you know, there weren't even a lot of testing, and there weren't MRIs, and there weren't all the things that we do for our dogs now. It was really more of just like looking and listening to the owners and you know, feeling things on the dog and just seeing where are the problems,

what can we do? And it kind of really very spiritual to kind of get in the head and the body of the dog to decide what to do with it. But anyway, my plan was to go to veterinary school in the United States, but then all of a sudden it looked like, oh, maybe it would be a little easier to get in the ventory school in Europe. So I went to Germany. Got oh that's a huge Yes, yeah it was. It was a bit. It was a big deal.

going to do do that. I flew to Frankfurt, took a train to Munich, got off the train in Munich, I stayed in the youth hostel, and I went around Munich going to all the veterinarians showing up and they're saying, do you need an assistant? Because I decided that for the first year I needed to go there learn the language. Really could and the only thing I really knew how to do was to be a veterinary assistant because that's

what I done in the US. Ultimately, somebody knew another veterinarian that needed help, and it was a large animal vetinary, and I started working for a large, large animal veterinarian outside of Munich. But the thing that simultaneously kind of happened once I got settled into that was, as you can in Europe. On Friday nights, I would get on a train and take the train to somewhere else in Europe and go to a race because I loved racing, and here I was in Europe to get to see

racing from Formula one, sports car racing to whatever. And so I would spend Saturday and Sunday at the races and figure out ways to sit, sneak into the pits, and do all those kind of things that you could do then.

I was allowed to be around cars, the people that were closest to the action were the photographers. So I wrote my parents a letter from Europe after being there for about nine ten months, and I said, you know, I don't think I want to be a Venteroran anymore. I want to be a photographer. And you know, you

have to wait for that to come back now. So then the letter comes back, and I opened the letter and said, well, you know, that's going to be a really difficult life because my parents knew nothing about photography. You know, as a career, I really didn't know anything about photography. But they just said, we'll support you. But you know, if you're a veterinarian, you've got it kind of made. You know, you will be a doctor and

all that stuff. But if you want to be a photographer, you need to come back to the United States and you need to figure out where you're going to go to school, because we can't help you in that. And so that was my life change. And it was not because I love photography, but because photography was the way to be around cars. So that was really it. And as it turned out, you know, I did eventually really

love photography. I did all that. I just in my head the driving force was this is my way to be around cars.

every month. Well, of course, when I got out of Art Center, I thought, you know, if I could just do something. So the offices for Road and Track were in Newport Beach and I went down to those offices and my first assignment was a cover with them, So

it just it took off from there. But also I started covering Formula one for Road and Track magazine, and I'd go to the Brazilian Grand Prix and shoot the Formula one spotters, guide and do all these things, but it was always about motion and action and blurred backgrounds and kind of creating it maybe more artful and funny enough.

I mean, who would have ever thought that somebody was reading Road and Track magazine and they're at a company that builds fighter planes and they call me up and say, could you come up to our offices for a meeting? And I come up there and they have all my Formula one work from Road and Track magazine. They're saying, we would like you to shoot our fighter planes like you shoot Formula one, And I'm like, how do I

get in this situation? Ultimately it led to me being Martin Baker ejection seat certified, went through all the training that you do basically to be a pilot, and I flew back seat with this little card I carried with me in F eighteen's and almost everything that way, and photographed fighter planes the way I did F one And it was just kind of a magical moment. But it came from Road and Track, came from shooting the Formula one cars.

we just have a breakfast one day? And so I go down and I'm sitting there and I didn't know what he was working on, but I'm sitting there with Ron Howard and then to get his perspective that says, this is about James Hunt and Nikki Lauda, and I go back to I'm a veterinary working for veterinarian in Europe in the pits at Dutch Grand Prix and song for it shooting Nikki l Loud and James Hung.

you know, then the movie comes along. But you know, it's like I was living four years with a group of kids that basically had qualified by gaming, and then we'd put them literally on day one in a GTR you know, on Silverstone, and it was to watch the mental load, the physical load, the the racecraft developed, all these things that would have to kind of all come together to succeed in that. It was a fascinating process.

And then here you are coming off the movie. It was just again a really fun, you know, circle moment of watching that evolve into something that was bigger than we ever imagined in the beginning.

interest stories of guys that are just living, breathing. Everything about it was, you know, basically in the hands of this one week long event, and the problem in the not the problem because the game prepared them so well, but there was no consequence in the game for them to get there. And I couldn't believe how fast the competitors would ramp up. They would go quick right away

because they'd race with no consequence to get there. And then the other side of it, too, was is that they would they would be able to manage the cars

so often because some of this part of this. I would ride with them sometimes in film and do thing and you just, you know, knowing what I knew, their car control was so good, and a lot of times it would come back to saying, well, I have so little physical feedback in the game, but now that I'm in a car, that extra feedback I have actually really helps,

you know, I really understand it. It's it's obviously something you have to adapt to, but the ability to kind of ramp up and go quickly right away was always surprising to me because I remember in some of the beginnings, you know, some of these guys had never even driven a manual transmission. You know, they qualified in the game, but they never had driven a manual transmission, and the things that they'd have to deal with was really fascinating.

And and it was interesting because it became more entertainment in this as we went through the seasons, rather than pure racecraft and everything that you needed to do to be a racing driver. It needed to be a little more entertaining season after season, and I think that.

money in the stock market. Wow. And it was just kind of like you know, in retrospect, I gets just teaching you to be conscious of your money and not just like you every month getting my little paycheck from my paper out, I was spending it. So it also allowed you to kind of research and what would I be interested in investing in and things like that. And then when I graduated my school, deal was I could

buy my first car. And my dad had a early nine to eleven and which is kind of a fairly well known story, but it was actually chassis number thirty five, nine eleven. It was a nine oh one, So like this would be a revered amazing car to own today. It just for my dad happened to be the oldest, most affordable nine to eleven. He could buy at the time, which was also a used car at the time when he bought it, And so I love the sound of

a six cylinder motor and a nine to eleven. I couldn't get a very new nine to eleven at the time for the same amount of money, but I could get an almost brand new nine fourteen six, and so that's what I bought. So I bought a nine fourteen six and I still have it to this day. It's on display at the Peterson Museum. But the cool things too, is that that car. You know, who would have ever thought that car kind of provided so many life experiences along the way because I went off to college in it.

You know, people who went to Art Center College Design where I went to college, they still remember, oh, you drove that yellow nine fourteen six in those days.

and I met my wife. She was one of the girls giving rides back up the mountain after we'd skate down. And you know, I was driving the nine fourteen six then, and then if you kind of go years later in nineteen already been rallying and doing things in the us POR Rally Championship and racing at Pike, speaking different things.

But I had the opportunity to do a long distance event FI Marathon Rally, which was twenty five days, ten thousand miles from Panama to Alaska, and trying to decide what car to do that in and everything it was such a big deal. Well, I decided to build my nine fourteen six into that rally car that I could do it because that particular event had to be nineteen seventy three. In earlier cars, that car being in nineteen seventy worked for that. But I entered that car in Panama.

But the cool thing is you had a service group and there were two people in my service crew, a guy who we had known from Vasik PULLUK in the early days of working with Porsche with my dad of having his car being serviced there. He was Spanish speaking and English speaking, so it's perfect for an event that went through Central America and my dad was in the

service vehicle. So can you imagine, like the guy who made me invest money at thirteen years old with the deal I could eventually spend the money when I graduated from high school. Here he is following me for twenty five days in the car that I had bought with that money that I got to invest. It was just like it was so cool. And my dad wasn't one of those guys who had done a lot of things worldly and had done it. He was passionate with cars, yes,

but he just hadn't done anything like that. He's immersed in this full on international event chasing his kid driving this car that he'd you know, motivated to invest in the stock market, and we finished second overall and had an amazing race and everything, and you know, it was probably if my dad could share it now, it would probably be one of his great moments in life of doing that. And so you know, you just don't get that opportunity very often, and it was really something special.

I went to a different school every year till I was a junior in high school. It wasn't always because we were changing houses and moving and things. But my dad was in the plastics business, which was like an emerging big business and so he was always getting offers to do things elsewhere and things like that. But that kind of having to do things for yourself and adapt to environments and to be kind of very aware of you're on your own and you got to do this,

and my parents were very supportive. It wasn't like I was, you know, in my own in that way. But you know, you as a kid, you know there's a generation you want to be taking command of it. You know, you didn't have a lot of friends because you weren't dropping into you weren't living a life where you know, you had lifetime friends and things like that. I was having to constantly make new friends.

went to a new high school every single year. And the traits that you're talking about of like I fortunately have the childhood friends who I'm still in touch with today, but constantly having to meet new people, almost growing up on your own terms in a way, and there's just a certain element that at the time I didn't understand, but looking back at it really gave me this grounding that it sounds like we share.

So I ended up being I think, more motivated to be creative and be self self motivated to make something on your own because you didn't have that reliance. And in a lot of ways, you know, if you look at going into ultimately photography and then directing, is that it kind of comes back on you. You have to own it. Yes, in filmmaking, we have an amazing support system and all these departments that work for you, but it still comes back to it's got to be your signature.

It's got to be your vision. Otherwise, you know, your your shelf life in the business probably isn't that great. And I do remember the first time when I started visiting production companies that wanted me to direct, they told me flat out, you know this is you know, you've got about a seven year shelf life in this world of advertising directing because you know, it's a very much an on to the next the new guys, the new views,

things like that. But you know, I'm in my thirty fifth year of doing that and it's still just as fun and as exciting as it was in the beginning. And I think that, like I told you at the beginning of this, it's kind of like you know, like I said, the good news is I've I've been doing this for a long time. Bad news, I've been doing it for a long time because I also want to always have things evolve, always have things changed, because that's what stimulates me the most.

like I don't care what anybody else is doing. I'm doing this. I really wanted to know what was going on. And it's almost like, you know, in the creative process, almost like a flip book, like you want to go through a whole bunch of images really quickly and take what you think you saw, not open up and study a picture and say I'm going to do something just like that, but like flip through something and see these things all flashed by anything. I think I saw something

kind of cool, and then where's your mind taken? You know, it's great so that you don't end up like just copying somebody. You know, you don't want to do that. I think, you know, one of my greatest compliments from my kids a few years ago was she said to me, how do you stay so relevant? And I thought, well, that's pretty cool, But the reality is, if I am relevant, you know, it's from people like you guys, from people like you know, the race service guys or the whatever.

You know, there's so many people in our business that I love watching evolve. You know. I think that one of the single important things that leaves for me is leaving room to be in awe of others beautiful. That's to me. I wish so many people, filmmakers and people that I see knew how in awe I am of what they do. You know, because my crews are sixty

to eighty people. I mean you've been on features, you guys, and you've seen all this, and I mean like when you're on a feature, it's one hundred and twenty, one hundred and thirty people whatever. But I'm in all of the guys that go out with two or three people and just do wonderful film. And I take that influence into my own life all the time, every day virtually. But leaving that room to be in awe is so

important as opposed to I'm just this. I'm that I'm going to go out every day now, you know, got to leave that window open. You know, it's like bad weather. You know, we're in a business of filmmaking. You got to have great weather. You gotta have this. But Honestly, bad weather has given me more opportunity than it's taken away. You know, the amount of times I've been filming in a wall of blacks coming this way and everybody's worried

that we're going to have this or whatever. The scenes it's created, and the opportunities and even the motivation to move quicker and get things done, it's all it's just cool. You know. It's like, as a director, you want to control everything, but you have to respect the fact that there's so many elements as you don't have control over.

of like opportunities. And what you just said is like it rings like I mean, it's just great words of wisdom that I'll you know, walk away with and it's like, okay, being a roof for the younger people, right, And it's like I think about it and I'm like, hey, the fact that you know I was there early on and you can kind of like you know, pave the way, and then you see all of these great opportunities that other you know, people of color are having, or Asian

American men are having. It's like being all yeah, right, and it's such a beautiful positive way to be present, right and still and and and it's not about you anymore. It's about like the whole.

twenty years there, I've done well there. I understand the place, the place is home. But it's still so definitive. And it's one run on race day. It's a finish line that is at fourteen and fifteen feet, it's there's no

pit stops, smiling. I want to do that so bad, but yet all those same variables we have in filmmaking of weather and crew and you know, budgets and all this management goes into you know, I'm under ten minutes racing there, one of the few people are under ten minutes, and it's like you got to put all into that little package in the same way. But it's definitive. Again, You've got to get to the summit no matter what.

And there's no second chances. There's not like you can't bring it back in the way in filmmaking, and we don't. In my entire career, I've never gotten to a sunset and said, you know, we didn't get everything. We need to come back tomorrow. That doesn't happen. That's in my world. That's a two hundred thousand dollars vault. You know, you don't just say, oh, didn't get it all. I gotta

come back tomorrow. That sunset, that thing the day that's managed through your assistant directors and crew and everything else. It's all for that moment of being done at sunset. You know, we don't just start bringing out the lights when the sun goes down. We don't have the chance of bringing the sun back up all of things. And I love that pressure, and I think that's why my racing paralleling with my filmmaking. There is so many things in the process that I approach in the same way.

best people to finish these things. But it's it's hanging over you. But in general, you want to be in a proactive position, not a reaction of position. Your experience is going to give you the opportunity to be reactive. But the more you can plan and be proactive, it

creativity comes out. Creativity is in two areas. Creative pure creativity is being aware of the moments you're filming and working on to enhance it in the best possible way to tell the story, both visual and from an editorial standpoint. But there's also creative to the solution. You know, your experience of I can creatively make this scene work even though I don't have all the right elements there. So it's a it's a balance, I guess in that way. But I guess to your point, I, you know, fear

of failure. If you're fearing things in the process, creativity has a hard time coming out. It really does. It's like a blocker, you know, when you all of a sudden have to just be reactive, reactive, reactive, you're kind of on your heels, you know, and you want to be on your toes. You want to be able to move forward and have the big picture of the way things go.

Of like that pushing the bar for action sequences with cars.

and I just love doing that. And my first road and track cover was actually a camera rig on a car going down a road, and so it was like this time tunnel blurry. Look, it really kind of showed action and I love that. And you know, now we're in the GoPro and all things. Everything's gotten smaller, everything's gotten more usable. And you know, there was a moment in time too where changing over from film to digital,

I shot with a different camera system every job. You know, it was evolving so quickly, and the way things are evolving, it's an opportunity, but in some ways it stands in the way. And I was very much a person that I felt like I needed to be genuine to filmmaking

and genuine to the car. I was in an area where I was a high action specialist, so generally I'd be shooting cool cars, you know, that were truly capable of that, and I always felt like if they needed to go into special effects and different things at that time, it was kind of taking away from the you know, believability that that car could really do it. So my goal was by working with people like Rees and Tanner and pulled all on back these guys as it could

put a car anywhere and do everything. I wanted to really show the real action. I really wanted to be part of that. So that if you ever pulled back on the curtain on it, you actually saw it happen. You know, there was a genuine nature to it. I was fortunate to be shooting a car that was genuinely capable. Let's film it in a way that it's really doing those things. And so again it's up to you as a filmmaker to put cameras in places. I wanted to

not just watch a car. I wanted to make you blink, to feel like it was going to hit you, or defy logic or do things like that. You know. It's like, like you said, as a filmmaker, I want to be on my toes. As a viewer, I want to be on my heels like whoa, you know, this is it? You know, so I look at what's happening now, And obviously AI is going to be a whole nother category things.

But there was a moment in time where effects and plates that we would shoot and all these kind of tedious parts of filming ultimately didn't add up to as pure experience of watching a car as I wanted, And so my goal was always to put that car on the edge. And as a director, I've spent twenty years of my life racing up the side of a mountain, putting wheels, half the tread on the pavement, half the

tread touching the edge of the road. You know, putting those moments in precision on a mountain with huge consequence. You know that perspective plays out in my own filmmaking because I'm already looking at things that way. I have a funny handoff, like I run the Colorado Hill Climb Championship, which is dirt roads up the side of a mountain and a Gt. Three Cup car. It's raw, it's pure. It's a bunch of old timers who quit racing at Pike's Peak because it got paved. They just all want

to be on the dirt and side. I will pitch a car in the corner, rotate the car, drive on the throttle. I'll feel that right front wheel just bound a little bit over a rock or something corner and I feel it go light. I feel it touched back down and the attitude is just right. The wheels are set. You just can feel the outside wheels tearing at the earth.

All this stuff's happening, my head will go, oh, I hope somebody is out there with a two hundred millimeter frames that be right shot, you know, and then I do it. And it's funny because lately at Pike's Peak, I think about what it looks like on the outside. That funny, and I try to put the car exactly in those moments, you know, and my perspective is already at the edge of the mountain. My perspective is already taking something to the ragged edge limit that sort of thing.

So I almost pick up in filmmaking at that point rather than build up to it. So it's it's that kind of perspective that I bring to it. And I actually think that my racing has fed the longevity to my career because if I sit in a client meeting and somebody's got some new hot carry about, I can put it in perspective of what that car can feel like, look like, and be emotional about it. This isn't just a job for me. This is a quest to share my passion with the rest of the world through filmmaking.

coined this phrase. I don't know if he coined it or he borrowed it or maybe even looked stolen from you, but he has he has a phrase called honest angle, right, and he's like, and we were talking about because I was I always ask people, what do you think the problem with fast like action sequences from the Fast and Furious, And it's like it's not honest.

I'm so opposed to Oh that's a special effect, right, and it kind of just you just kind.

or whatever. And Ken was so good at putting a car on the edge and doing all that. So naturally, when this project came up and I always asked to direct with with Brian, I was just like, wow, this is so cool, and I learned so much in it to your point of like, you know, this style and look and feel of filming, and you know Ken, I'd actually I think I'd even raced with him at one point or things. But we'd been, you know, certainly been around each other and seen all the Jim Kannas and

everything at that point. But what was super cool was Ken would have his opinions about the way we needed to film, and you know, it's kind of like in your mind, you have a routine and the way you film, and this is your process and stuff. And I started to understand why things were different in a lot of ways with the way Scotto had approached it and the way their teams had film Ken and then Ken's ideals.

And one of the things was interesting because I always my office is a Cayenne armed camera car, the arm on the roof, and you know, I go, you know, that's my world and always tracking and doing moves and things, and King goes, I don't like those. I don't like camera cars. And I thought, well, you know, this is the way I work. You know, we'll have camera cars. But you started to realize that the moment the camera was traveling with his car, it slowed his car down.

You know, as soon as you start matching speeds, things start to slow down. And I kind of knew that, I did know it, but I hadn't really applied it. And it wasn't until Ken kind of said, I don't like camera cars. I started to put the whole thing together and stylistically, that's what I really liked about Timkana. And we always have conversations about what was the best one,

Which is the best one. We all look at different ones of which the best, But the first one that I ever saw, and this is when I'm well into my filmmaking career, I felt like I'd climbed over the fence and gotten into something that I shouldn't be there for such a way and got to record it and see something that like, let's just put that away before anybody catches us. You know, is that kind of that tension and everything of like I'm in here, I'm going to get this, and then I got to get out

of here because somebody's gonna bust me. You know that moment and spontaneity and the way that played out in front of you with them just ripping it up at El Toro Marine Base, you know, it was like, yeah,

that was cool. And you know there were times where it maybe got too polished or times where it got, you know, a little bit of away from that purity, but then it kept coming back to that and and Ken also just developing as a driver everything about it was such a great franchise and without it really you know,

consciously affecting me. I just know that so much of their work played out in influencing me and on a you know a little over a year ago, when I got the phone call that Can had passed, it was when that really kind of all rained down on me. This guy was a huge part of my life, even though we weren't directly hanging out best buddy friends. The effect of my life, my industry, everything about it will it really came to me at that moment and still affects me in that way.

surprises within the family. I've certainly lost race driver your friends along the way, because that's you know, what happens in the decades that I've been involved in racing, and I've started losing some friends who you know, we grew up with together and just lately, and I think that's part of it. I you know, having the perspective of what you've been able to do in your life and be part of and like I said before, being in awe of others and being inspired of others and kind

of keeping that going. I you know, Ken was one of the more difficult ones because it was almost like you just realized you hadn't spent enough time, you hadn't taken it as seriously as maybe you should have of what that guy provided, not just for you, but for the whole car culture all that sort of thing. So it is difficult, but I also savor so much and I feel it's so important not to have regrets and feel like you've been pure to yourself and chased your

passions and been able to be constantly invigorated. You know, it's like perpetual motion when things feed something and it just keeps it going. That's the way I look at my career. You know, it's always been interesting. Every element has been interesting. Every day of a life has been interesting. I love going against the elements, you know. I love being provided challenges, even at this age. You know, I'm not looking for the easy path. You know, the worst

day is bright and sunny and perfect conditions. You know, that's not the worst day. But you know what I mean. I like the challenge. I love that fact that you are just going against life and succeeding, you know. And I love to see that in other people. And I love the underdogs. I love the people that have looked at life differently. Those kinds of moments just make such a dynamic, engaging world. Because elements in life, whether it be life or death, or health or weather or anything,

it's part of our life. And you love to see people succeed in that. And that's the part that really kind of motivates me and other people is watching that. I love watching new filmmakers and people that haven't even been educated in school, you know, they've just done it on their own. I love that kind of vibrancy of because the only reason for success in that environment is passion. It's it.

It's like, you know, you guys are my inspiration. It's a new generation of inspiration, and I just leave those doors open to be inspired by others. But you guys are great. Love it.