Movie Spotlight: Rocketball

A thief checks into a Zen monastery. She’s there to case the place, run a scam on a wealthy family, and leave. What she doesn’t account for is that Zen monasteries are specifically designed to make people like her impossible.

Alex Glaros wrote and directed Rocketball, a drama about a con artist named Maya Cruz who enters a world of enforced silence, radical honesty, and mindfulness with a target in mind. Glaros has been playing racquetball for decades. He noticed the connection between the total presence a fast court demands and the total presence meditation requires. Both found their way into the film.

The Scam and the Setup

Maya Cruz, played by Jessica Parrilla, is sharp and armored. Characters with a lot of armor, Glaros says, make the best subjects for transformation “because the cracks in that armor are so dramatic when they finally appear.” She goes in with a clear purpose: find a mark, run the play, get out. Crime comes from desperation and scarcity. Glaros treats it that way. The monastery is equally real. He didn’t want either world functioning as backdrop for the other.

What “Rocketball” Actually Means

Forty years ago, Glaros introduced a kid from the neighborhood to racquetball while attending UMass Boston. The kid loved it but couldn’t say the word — called it “rocketball” instead. Four decades later that mispronunciation became a scene in Act I, and eventually the title of a feature film. The racquetball court appears again in the film’s final scene, framed the way a temple might be.

Shot in Winters, Built on Trust

The first half of the shoot was in Winters, California. Glaros used his own house. The cast slept on the floor. Low budget, close quarters, and the opposite of chaotic. The team bonded and never stopped caring for each other. Many of the supporting characters came directly from his racquetball community. After a while, he says, the story started generating from the people around him.

The Tightrope

The hardest beat to get right was the pivot point where the scam begins to fall away and genuine feeling takes over. “Tapering the cynicism of a criminal character and introducing sincerity without falling into melodrama is always a delicate tightrope,” Glaros says. The con Maya was running, it turns out, was mostly on herself. She believed material security was all she needed to be whole. Interacting with people who operate on radical honesty forced her to confront who she was when nobody was watching.

What to know before you press play

Glaros is direct: “Expect the unexpected. Expect to learn how to meditate.” This isn’t a sports film, though a racquetball court carries a lot of the film’s meaning. It isn’t a heist film, though a scam drives the first act. What it is is a film about what happens when someone built entirely on reading and manipulating external variables gets placed in a room with no exits, no distractions, and nowhere to hide from herself.

Drama

---

Streaming now on Relay.