A Slice of New York in the Strangest of Times: Shooting “Sincerely, Erik”

In the fall of 2001, I was a college student, backpacking around Europe. On the day the towers fell, I was getting on an overnight train from Paris to Rome. I didn’t live in New York City at the time. I hadn’t even visited since a day-trip with my family when I was six years old. It was only after I moved here that I realized just how momentous the act of being and staying in this city post-9/11 had been.

I missed the blackout of 2003, too — by just two weeks. I arrived in early September, with a few bags full of clothes, books, and CDs, to an apartment I’d never seen, with roommates I’d never met, on the Southside of Williamsburg.  Even before I arrived, I felt like I’d missed out by missing the blackout. For years after, I was jealous of the stories I heard about how everyone came together and walked from their midtown offices — my friends, assistants, and interns at the time — across the Williamsburg Bridge and then congregated on the north Brooklyn sidewalks with warm beers from the delis. They were all in it together.

When Hurricane Sandy hit our city, I was in Los Angeles, having moved there on a hiatus that I extended, begrudgingly, for four years. I watched on social media as my friends opened up their apartments to displaced strangers and then rallied to clean up The Rockaways. I wished I could do the same. Not being here to help felt like cheating.

Not being here to experience all those catastrophes, to be a part of a community that healed itself and the city in their aftermath, made me feel like a fraudulent New Yorker — like I hadn’t earned it.

So when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and we were ordered to shelter in place, I bought my cans of beans and rolls of toilet paper and hunkered down. I was here and I would stay in it. I would play a part in my city’s survival.

The first few weeks were rough. The difference between the previous disasters and this one was that people could not come together. We had to keep apart. I heard reports that Manhattan was like a set in a post-apocalyptic zombie film. Brooklyn, where I live, was faring a little better. There were people outdoors, in the parks and on their stoops. But melancholy stained everything, especially at night, especially for those like me, single and living alone. When the bodega on my corner closed, I actually cried. New York City corner bodegas never close. Walking my dog at night felt eerie and unsafe. When the city that never sleeps, falls asleep, it’s uncomfortable.

Meanwhile, my friend Erik DuRon, who owns Left Bank Books in Greenwich Village, was carrying on as best he could, taking the train to the city a couple of times a week to ship out orders, hoping his small, legendary business would survive. I looked forward to his dispatches. He described the subway, at first full of homeless folks who had moved in, and then completely empty and the cleanest it’d ever been. He told me about desolate Greenwich Village Streets, the boarded-up shops, and his apocalyptic conversations with the remaining neighbors. We also talked about our loneliness and profound isolation, all the ways in which we were trying to make connections of our own.

I realized that what surrounded me — the energy, the emotions, the space — could be a great film, one that I needed to make.

By late May, things were a little less tense here, restaurants and bars had opened to drinks-to-go, and soon the Black Lives Matter protests would arise. In the last few days that the city was quiet and deserted, I wrote a short script, coaxed Erik into playing the lead (loosely based on a combination of himself and me), asked my friend Alec Cohen to shoot the film (in my excitement, I didn’t even ask if he had equipment … luckily, he did!), and got Monika to meet us on set for a couple of hours to make a cameo with improvised dialogue.

This was my first real film and I was terrified. I had written the script in a day and we were shooting it in just two days the following week. I hadn’t stopped to think about the gravity of the task — the attempt to capture a very specific moment of time in New York City, with its ineffable mood, while telling a compelling story. Add to that the pressure of being a first-time writer/director, and fulfilling every other role from line producer to camera assistant to wardrobe to craft services myself. Possibly the most stressful aspect was the desire not to let down the friends who were helping me. I wanted to give them something they’d be proud of.

I busied myself making shot lists and schedules, talking to Erik about the character and telling Alec about the look I wanted. The night before the first shoot, I lay in bed, trying to calm myself down and then worrying that if I calmed down enough to fall asleep I wouldn’t wake up in time.

At 6:30 a.m. the next day, Alec picked me up. We drove to Erik’s to shoot some morning scenes and then headed to the city. As we entered downtown Manhattan — my first time there in nearly three months — the streets were deserted and the Freedom Tower was encased in a thick low fog. I thought, for an instant, that I might have fallen asleep after all, that I was dreaming. Then I took a photo to remember that moment forever. We passed the Tower, drove up Sixth Avenue, and headed to Perry Street to preserve a slice of our strange city in the strangest of times.

https://vimeo.com/nazriahi/sincerelyerik

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Naz Riahi is a writer and director. Much of her work explores isolation and marginalization, informed by her childhood immigration to the United States from Iran. Her essays and stories have been published in Longreads, Catapult, Atelier Doré, and Guernica, among other publications. She holds an MFA from the New School and can be found on Instagram @nazriahi.