The Try Guys’ Zach Kornfeld Exploring Invisible Illness with Ouch! at Fantasia 2024

Genre films are often a little bit out of left field, and Fantasia Festival in Montreal is the perfect place to launch one. That is exactly what Zach Kornfeld had in mind when he wrote, directed and starred in Ouch!, his short film surrounding his invisible illness, Ankylosing Spondylitis, and what he goes through in his day to day.

People best know Zach Kornfeld as one of The Try Guys, an influential cast of characters dedicated to making viral content on social media. He is also a popular podcaster and author, but during a sitdown with Kornfeld surrounding Fantasia Festival 2024 , we found out that his original love was filmmaking, specifically genre filmmaking.

At this year’s Fantasia, we chatted with Zach Kornfeld about his invisible illness, exposing himself through film and how he plans to move forward with film alongside his Try Guys success. Ouch! will see its premiere in Montreal on July 29, 2024.

First of all, can you tell us a bit about your invisible disease, and what it is you live with in your day to day?

Zach Kornfeld: I have Ankylosing Spondylitis, which is a mouthful to say and a mouthful to live with. It kind of lives between a couple conditions. It’s chronic pain. It’s an autoimmune disease. It’s an inflammatory condition. It’s part of the spondylo-arthritic world. So sometimes people are like, “No, it’s not arthritis. It’s actually an autoimmune disease.”

Basically, what it is is an autoimmune condition where my body wants to eat the ligaments—not eat—wants to attack the ligaments between my bone. And then, as an apology says, “So sorry. Let me grow more bone for you.” So, left untreated, you become one big ol’ bone-body man. There are some pretty gnarly photos of drawings of people in the medieval times. And this actually can still happen to people if they’re not treated, where they’ll kind of hunch into a big question mark and eventually, little spurs off your spine will puncture your organs.

The easiest way to understand it is that it’s spinal arthritis. It’s more or less what it is. So I have partial fusion in my hips, a couple spurs growing off my spine. They literally are like cowboy spurs on a boot but made out of bone. And so I’m treated for it. I take a shot in my tummy once a month that stalls the progression of the disease. So it’s very manageable in that sense.

But what is not manageable is that there are things left over. First of all, there’s no real way to know what medicine is going to be the best for you. It’s it’s sort of a roll of the dice. There are things you can measure, like inflammatory markers, but that doesn’t capture the whole picture. Hence the invisible part of the invisible illness. You can’t see it. Your doctors can’t see it. Your friends and family certainly can’t see it.

And so  I have the treatment that is going to prevent it from being the worst, but you’re still left with inflammation and stiffness and pain. It gets worse when you don’t move. That’s when you’re sleeping. Your body is fighting something inside you that you can’t see. And so that means exerting energy that you’re unaware of. So, some days, you’ll wake up with brain fog, and that is because your body is busy doing something else.

There’s the disease. And then there is the downstream ramifications of the disease, and it’s something that I get to navigate day in and day out.

I’m sorry that you have to deal with that day to day.

Zach Kornfeld: It’s like the shittiest X-Men powers. I guess is the one-line version.

Yeah, you’re regrowing something, just not something you want to regrow. So, what does it feel like to put that all out there with Ouch! ? Not just talking to me, but something for the world to see that has your creative spin on it?

Zach Kornfeld: I think it’s a real privilege and blessing to be able to take something that hurts you and turn it into something positive. It’s something that I’ve tried to do a lot throughout my career. I’ve been able to share my journey and my misadventures with A.S. [Ankylosing Spondylitis] over the last decade, kind of bringing an audience through my diagnosis and my understanding.

But now, coming to this film, Ouch! is so exciting because I get to take the thing I love the most, which is genre filmmaking and the language of cinema and channel decades of frustration into something that is fun and, hopefully, cathartic. Hopefully as cathartic for the audience as it was for me to make.

And how are you feeling about people finally getting to see Ouch! ? Because it’s not premiered yet, right?

Zach Kornfeld: No, we’re we did a crew screening here in LA last night, so that was really fun. But we’re doing the international premiere at Fantasia a week from today [July 29], and I am giddy with excitement. I mean, to be at Fantasia , which is, you know, THE genre festival , is really gratifying and and humbling all the same. I am excited.

“Ouch! is so exciting because I get to take the thing I love the most, which is genre filmmaking and the language of cinema and channel decades of frustration into something that is fun and, hopefully, cathartic.”

Eventually, I will put this online. I know that I have an audience that is excited to see it, but it was important for me to try. I wanted this to stand on its own. And so to be able to bring it to a festival of such acclaim and see it with an audience, an audience that knows their stuff when it comes to genre filmmaking, is a real treat. I’m so excited to get to see it with people.

It’s interesting that you say “stand on its own.” Obviously, you have quite a following between The Try Guys, plus you’re an author and a host. So why the jump to film now with Ouch! and how are you balancing that? Do you want it to be something that’s on its own, or do you want it to be a part of your overall career?

Zach Kornfeld: I would love for it to be part of my career. When I started my career, it was with the intention of doing this: directing and writing. I stumbled into viral video during its nascent days, and that exploded and took on a life of its own. And so it’s been a long journey of trying to figure out how to marry those two.

Honestly, this film [ Ouch! ] doesn’t exist without my learnings from the internet, right? I took something that I knew worked within the context of the internet, which is sharing about your personal self. Then I figured out a way to take my scripted passion and genre passion and funnel it into that. Or rather, I guess an easier way to say that is that I took what I knew that audience would want to see, which is sharing a deeper part about myself, and then translated it through the lens of cinematic storytelling.

As far as how those two paths continue to converge, time will tell. A project like this is hard to make within the context of the internet. There is a somewhat relentless pace, uh, that that online institutions demand of creative people. Um, but I’m hoping that as my career continues, I’m able to take more swings like this and that the audience, uh, continues to support them

What is the creative process like in terms of the difference between The Try Guys and your social media viral video side and now the film festival side with Ouch! ?

Zach Kornfeld: Yeah, there are a lot of similarities and obviously a ton of differences. The biggest is just the time afforded to make a project like this. I tinkered with the script for a year. I spent a couple months on and off meticulously storyboarding, typed up a 40-page document with references for costume and set design and what colours we were going to use, where and what colours we were not going to use, which is totally gratuitous and unrequired for a project like this. But it was fun.

And watching references with my DP and talking about what we liked him or we didn’t like. Oftentimes with online video, you plan a lot, but there’s a lot that you just go by instinct. That said, I don’t want to undersell the creative process of creating for the internet. We have been able to carve out something that I think is a lot more akin to traditional than people would expect.

The try guys, you know, we have very in-depth pre-production meetings where we are, if not scripting out, at least thinking about what is the three-act journey of each character, still leaving ourselves open to then rewrite it once the magic of reality takes over. I think that I learned more about screenwriting and story structure from making and editing unscripted videos than I did from my own writing.

When you make unscripted videos, you are left with this hodgepodge of footage, and you need to make decisions as to what moves the plot and character forward and what doesn’t. What are we going to include to make a coherent story arc, and what are we not? All of those things and how you structure it most efficiently actually really impacted my abilities as a scripted storyteller.

“We’re talking about Fantasia Fest. We’re talking about the fantastic as a type of storytelling and a subgenre of cinema.”

Ouch! is a bit of a fantastical look at what you struggle with daily, even though there are some very real moments—I laughed and cried. Why did you choose that route rather than going strictly dramatic with something that is serious to you? Or do you think this is just more true to who you are?

Zach Kornfeld: There was no choice. I’m not a very serious person. We’re talking about Fantasia Fest. We’re talking about the fantastic as a type of storytelling and a subgenre of cinema. Movies are great because they elicit big emotions from you. My joy of going to a movie theatre is being in a room with a lot of people and feeling things in a big way, whether it’s laughing or crying or screaming. I want to amp up those emotions. And so, as a filmmaker, that’s just where the most fun is.

I think that by playing in the realm of the fantastic, you can tap through to a deeper truth. It’s also, by virtue of the topic I was trying to explore. I’m trying to visualize something that is inherently invisible. There’s no way to tell that story in a realistic, giant air quotes way because you can’t see it. I can’t see it. I look healthy, but I am a disabled person, right? So, I needed to borrow that cinematic language to tap into a deeper truth. Otherwise, the film would be nothing.

How did you decide how to visualize all of that in Ouch! , especially when it comes to the final scene, and we see “it,” if you will? I don’t want to spoil it.

Zach Kornfeld: Oh my God. Well, first of all, the joy of, you know, you talk about the difference between this and digital, the joy of working with such talented creators, creatives, rather. My costume designer, Athena Lawton , and I, we talked about specifics that we knew wouldn’t mean anything to the audience but would mean something to us, and therefore, it would mean something to the way that you felt.

So even the way that the teeth look, we said, “Okay, no one will know this, but this is a metaphor for the way that the layers of teeth are a metaphor for the way that pain grabs you in and then doesn’t let you out.” It’s something that you can never truly know. You can’t ever get your hands around it. The days that I think I have everything under control are the days that I’m going to wake up with a flare-up for no coherent reason.

And so the monster needs to have incoherent borders. But you talk about the litany of visual metaphors throughout the piece. The script began as a process of catharsis, just an exercise and coming up with every visual metaphor I could to think, how would I communicate this to someone? And then comes in the practicality of actually making a film, which is what can we afford, what locations can we get and access to? We only have so much time to film this.

“I will say some of the most deeply impactful movies to me are ones that have poor Rotten Tomatoes scores.”

So, can we find a unicorn location that we can turn into multiple things? Okay, this scene was intended as a bar, but we have a place where we can do a barbecue. It’s little things like that. I guess the long, short answer is I let my imagination run wild and then, from there, reined it into what was possible. The first script I’ve been telling people it was 25 pages. It may have been longer. Not a word, not an image, not a shot is in the final script,

I wrote it. I threw it away. I wrote it again, I threw it away. I stripped all the dialogue to see what could stand on its own visually. It was a real process of trial and error and discovery and experimentation. And eventually you end up with something that you hope people like.

I guess that’s one of the benefits of writing about something that you want to express. However, it turns out is how you wanted to express yourself.

Zach Kornfeld: Yeah..

Do you have any favourite moments from Ouch! , whether it’s how things turned out or metaphors or a day of shooting you enjoyed?

Zach Kornfeld: Oh my God. Well, yeah, I have a lot of I have incredibly talented friends, and I got to include many of them as performers in this piece.

I noticed some of them!

Zach Kornfeld: Yeah!. And I don’t know if it’s both my love for them as performers as well as my self-hatred that any time the camera’s on any of them, I think the movie is so much better. Jimmy Wong —who is the sweetest human who’s ever existed—allowing me to torture him and drag him into the dark abyss was a real treat. Marissa Rivera , I think, gives the the funniest performance.

And then, Miles Bonsignore , who I co-host a podcast with and is a dear friend of mine, actually played the monster as well as the alien because he’s freakishly tall but also has a background as an interpretive dancer. So, who knew? So, getting to work with him on the physicality of the monster was so unbelievably exciting because I tried on the costume—of course I did. Everyone wants to try on a monster costume. It was like, “Okay, this is scary.” And then you put it into his hands, and it’s like, “Okay, maybe Doug Jones is going to have a run for his money here,” because you’re cooking with something.

It was so such a treat. T the crew, my DP, Topher Osborne , achieved so many looks on such a tight schedule. And so, you know, watching through the film [ Ouch! ], it feels like we we shot for a week. It’s that that was the most fun, having that day where we just were like, “Okay, we’re in a Chernobyl factory that’s having a reaction or having a meltdown. And now we’re in this basement with a monster. And now we’re in this creepy hallway,” and it was just go, go, go. It felt—it was very healing to my inner child to get to live all of these out in such quick succession.

How long was the whole shooting process for Ouch! ?

Zach Kornfeld: Three days, but really two and change.

And my last question before I let you go. I know you’re busy. “ Visitors From Out There. ” Is that a real film? And is it really the worst film ever made?

Zach Kornfeld: It is not a real film. It is a fake DVD that I made in Photoshop two nights before filming. I felt it was better to not disparage any actual movie out there.

No shots fired, then. All right.

Zach Kornfeld: That said, I will say some of the most deeply impactful movies to me are ones that have poor Rotten Tomatoes scores.

Absolutely. Some of our favourite movies from the 80s and 90s have to be the worst movies. Thank you very much. Ouch! is an awesome film, and I really enjoyed it. And I can’t wait for all your fans to see it at Fantasia Festival and online.

Zach Kornfeld: Thank you. It means a lot. You’re you’re one of the first people that have gotten to see it. I’m glad you liked it. Its really gratifying, and thank you for the care of your questions and your time. It means a lot.