Aneil Karia and Riz Ahmed on Creating a Cathartic Musical Horror Movie With ‘The Long Goodbye’

Even though I saw it several weeks ago, there are images from Aneil Karia’s short film, The Long Goodbye, that I haven’t forgotten. This is filmmaking that makes a lasting impression, and you will think of it far after the film ends. It doesn’t let you go. The Long Goodbye is a glimpse of radical racism that rocks a South Asian family in the UK. Karia and producer and star Riz Ahmed felt that making this short was a cathartic experience.

The first half of The Long Goodbye lulls you into a sense of security. We think we are just watching a family as they get ready for some wedding festivities, and the camera feels like a family member itself. We are brought in so easily into this dynamic, and Karia explained how it was just as difficult to start the film with that style of improv as it was to film the chaos that would follow.

“Riz and I were acutely aware that in order to pull this energy shift off you needed to be bedded into that family. You had to be part of that home, and you had to buy into it as a real group of people. There’s obviously a mellow bit and then a heightened bit, but they were both a challenge. We had to execute the front half that kept you on the journey with the next part. The process all the way at casting. We had Riz already which was a source of comfort for me, but we worked with Shaheen Baig who is an amazing British casting director. She helped us find British, South Asian actors who were comfortable with this approach. It started with conversations between me and Riz and then we wrote it out as prose essentially in a script form. I turned it into an Excel beat sheet that had a clear sense of parameters of the scenes. This task was being done or these characters were discussing this or that and so on. The idea was to bring in the naturalism with letting the dialogue flow, and it was an approach that I loved to take.

Ahmed sang the praises of his colleague and director, but he pointed out that the film is garnering a surprising reaction for the representation it shows.

“It was improvised, but it wasn’t giftwrapped to Aneil. It was so skillfully edited. I also think that he had some ideas of how specifically mundane he wanted things. A lot of people say they find this film very surprising for what happens in the second half but also because it’s so rare to see brown families depicted with such grounded realism. I remember someone telling me that they were moved to tears by The Long Goodbye, and I assumed it was because of the twist. But they told me it was about the first half with everyone hanging out together. They had never seen that before.”

The Long Goodbye is a companion piece to Ahmed’s 2020 concept album of the same name. While they do share the same thoughts and rage and poeticism, the short is an extension of Ahmed’s previous work. It’s a prime example of how a visual medium can challenge the same viewers who listen to the album on its own.

“This is very much its own thing,” Ahmed said. “The film grew out the album and my conversations with Aneil. The album has a different concept at its heart. It grew from the same seed but the film is its own thing. The film is very cathartic for both of us. You try to find clever ways of sugar coating of your feelings so it’s digestible for people, and Aneil and I pushed each other to unleash what we wanted to say and how we wanted to say it. We wanted to say about our fear and our anger but also our defiance in the face of that. It’s about bringing ourselves to our work. Yes, it starts off with the playful, improv comedy, and then it becomes a musical horror movie. In the last act, it becomes this breaking of the fourth wall, conceptual, poetry performance. What is so different with this is that I could bring all of myself when working with Aneil. I very rarely get to bring all sides to anything I do. That’s why it was so healing because the creative act was a hopeful one. Even if you are making something about a feeling of hopelessness, it’s healing.”

The final moments of The Long Goodbye dare us to say something. Ahmed’s character pulls himself off the ground and spits verses and words in such a painfully intimate way that you can’t help but feel affected by it. Ahmed’s eyes bore right into you as he says the closing line, “So where I’m from is not your problem, bro.”

“That was probably the most exciting and terrifying part of conceptualizing it, Karia said. “Looking back, if we ended the film, it wouldn’t be right if we ended it with Riz being dead. It would still be powerful, but it wouldn’t be the same. Riz talked about defiance, and that exhaustion is palpable when it comes to sugar coating things. I think younger generations are getting better with this but I can only speak for me. It’s exhausting with that tension of being enraged and being scared of the world and how it makes you feel as a minority. The tension between that and constantly telling yourself that you should be quiet and crack on and you’re confusing yourself and it’s not that bad. That rage is born from so many things but that it’s about breaking that tension. What is so thrilling about the end chapter–besides how beautifully written the words are–is this catharsis of being able to say what you can in the moment. A lot of times when you leave an altercation, you think of all the things you could’ve done or said to make it different, and with this it’s all happening. It’s channeled into this beautifully controlled and eloquent passage delivered straight to the lens. There’s no other way we could’ve done it. Riz needed to confront us with this.”

“In some ways, it’s a metaphor for our experience in the most direct way,” Ahmed added. “Not to get too psychoanalytical but what people like me and Aneil–and other POC creatives–are doing is channeling our experience through that pain. Poetry comes from pain. The creative act for us is born out of the feeling of not belonging. You create a home in your work with your words or your film or your sounds.”

One of the most striking images is of the white people that stay in their homes as the violence unfolds in public with the police watching. It’s a moment that is key, because it reminds the audience of how complicit people are and how we only watch and do nothing. Before our conversation ended, Ahmed acknowledged the experience of the viewer and how it needs to reshape conversations to enact change.

“Us making the film is one half of the equation,” he said. “There is a moment in the film where the actor playing my brother looks up at the window and he makes eye contact with the observer. So much of the final speech is directed at the people sat in their homes and not coming out and doing something. It’s only at the very end where we look at the camera. For people watching this, their sharing of it, championing of it, and absorption of that feeling is, to me, when that work is complete.”

The Long Goodbye is available to stream on Riz Ahmed’s YouTube page.