Bowling scenes tend to pop up in films that fizzle, Mr. Bruzzese, 39, continued. Therefore it is statistically unwise to include one in your script. “A cursed superhero never sells as well as a guardian superhero,” one like Superman who acts as a protector, he added.

In hopes of producing more financially successful movies, studios can now hire Vinny Bruzzese, a former statistics professor, to analyze their scripts from a mathematical perspective.

Is the statistical approach “a pell-mell rush for the middle of the road,” or does it produce “the best notes on a draft” a writer could hope for? The New York Times tries to puzzle it out.

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But there’s so much more than that. He is a writer, actor, comedian, and film producer, and this Saturday, he will make his third appearance at the San Francisco International Film Festival in as many years.

Two years ago, he presented a number of short film works that he was in or created, including several episodes of his popular web series that was recently picked up to air on Comedy Central in July, Drunk History. He also showed a couple of episodes of the work he made with Simon Helberg, such as the unforgettably hilarious The Pity Card, which features Helberg using a young woman’s new-found knowledge of the Holocaust to get dates and Derek’s attempts to weasel his way into a relationship with her friends. Last year, Waters came back to the festival as the producer of the sleeper favorite documentary feature Only the Young. Following the lives of two skateboarding, evangelical Christian pals as they complete their senior year of high school, the film is undeniably winning, positive, and a breath of fresh air for anyone who feels oversaturated with images of youth gone awry.

The film shares one of Waters’s most striking qualities: that he is also relentlessly positive without putting on blinders to the sometimes-unfortunate realities of our shared world. Waters exudes positivity. He is the kind of person that goes out and does things. He makes work. He finishes it. He pursues ideas. He galvanizes others. Who else could convince Jack Black, Eva Mendes, Don Cheadle, Will Ferrell, Danny McBride, Winona Ryder, Crispin Glover, and on and on to reenact drunken storytelling verbatim, really just for the fun of it? And, luckily for us, he is also insightful and funny.

This year, Waters will present a sneak preview of his new series, and also discuss and show work representing one of his favorite obsessions, the double-edged plight of social media immersion. A few years ago, Waters created the “Instagrammys,” an awards show that celebrates the incessantly bizarre quality of posting photos to wherever it is that such photos go. In pursuit of unpacking it all this Saturday night will be Natasha Leggero, a comedian who, in her own right, has a bone or two to pick with the way people present themselves online and in life. The two may have tiny axes to grind, but don’t be confused—this is a program of comedic shorts and standup comedy.

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Human memories and their mercurial, inexact nature also make for high drama in life and story, most especially in film. What if you couldn’t remember your name, or you blacked out during the critical moment of a murder or robbery? What if, as in Rashomon, different players’ POVs of a series of events result in diametric outcomes, onuses, and liabilities? There’s immediate conflict and intrigue, but to make the payoff and to sell the feasibility of it throughout—and often through the eyes of an unreliable narrator—requires work, artistry, and agility. Take Lenny in Christopher Nolan’s mind-bending Memento, or Dr. Edwardes in Hitchcock’s Spellbound. One has short term memory loss, the other amnesia, and what they know in their impaired states of mind is all the audience knows. Their stories build one foggy bread crumb at a time with many false steps and sudden revelations along the way. Each new reveal, true or not, ripples through the audience’s understanding of what has transpired, halting, upending, and enriching it. In Memento, we yearn to know who killed Lenny’s wife, and in Spellbound, the world sits rapt to see if the virtuous Gregory Peck (well, his character, Dr. Edwardes) is actually capable of murder. The gradual reparation of the splintered memories takes the viewer teasingly close to the truth, and then, in the denouement, the final curve masterfully reshapes and cements everything that came before it.

Danny Boyle’s Trance is a continual reshuffle, too, full of spit and vigor even if the artifice isn’t quite as genuine or ingenious as the other two. Like all of Boyle’s films, it’s handsome to behold, driven by a heavy blue composition that radiates with a noir-ish ambiance, but at its core, Trance feels a bit like forced sleight of hand, where the audience can see behind the curtain yet still appreciates the showmanship of a master who may have played on too long. Part of that disappointment may come from Boyle himself. His ability to tap into raw human emotion in the face of insurmountable odds is unparalleled, and with the likes of 127 Hours, Trainspotting, and 28 Days Later to his credit, our expectation is one of near perfection.

That’s not to say that Trance doesn’t bear fruit. It comes out fast and angry as a band of roguish art thieves hit a London auction house midday. Things don’t go quite as planned, as the last person to see the lifted Goya (Witches in the Air) in its frame gets smashed with a rifle butt and can’t remember where he’s stashed it. The job’s ringleader, Franck (the angular Vincent Cassel), an impatient but amiable rogue hopped up on frustration and short on options, sends his forgetful interloper to a hypnotherapist to try to shake out the painting’s locale.

As the sheep caught between the wolves and the shepherd, Simon (James McAvoy) bides his time with the very real prospect he’ll be offed once Franck and his lot have procured the painting. He’s not one of Franck’s regulars, but rather the auction-house insider recruited for access and information. There’s an ingrained wariness between the two men, and Franck, afraid that Simon might be a flight risk and knowing he’ll reveal the painting’s location while under hypnosis, bugs his patsy.

Simon’s aware of the wire too, but when the first session only yields the whereabouts of his mislaid car keys, and he’s sent back for a second session, the hypnotherapist (Rosario Dawson) catches a glimpse of the wire. Instead of going to the police, Dawson’s Elizabeth calls out Franck (through the wire) and lets him know that she’s onto his game but willing to help for a cut of the action. What ensues is a series of hypnotherapy sessions that begin to piece together the events before and during the theft.

Getting that nugget from inside Simon’s cranium proves to be a daunting undertaking, and the sessions begin to reveal more than just what happened during the robbery—like the fact that Simon and Elizabeth have a past (one he can’t remember and one she’s coy about). As part of Elizabeth’s master game plan to make Simon relax so he can remember, she insists that Franck and his flunkies go under as well. The puppetry here, which is always held confidently from the very top by Boyle, changes control among the three leads. One always has the upper hand, and there’s an uneasy sexual tension between them that feels strangely akin to the cloistered edginess that permeated Boyle’s gritty debut, Shallow Grave.

The two writers, Joe Ahearne and John Hodge, are clearly masters of the Rubik’s cube as they twist and rearrange and go in every direction possible without hitting a wall. Most everything that is presumed at the beginning is shot to hell and flipped on its head by the end. There’s even a thread that involves the neatly shaved southern region of a woman’s body presented with a glabrous pucker.

One of Boyle’s biggest assets here and in his recent endeavors has been the opulent lens of the talented cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle. The cast is pretty slick as well; all three leads are lean individuals with alluring eyes. Cassel and McAvoy have large clear baby blues that register opposite impressions—one’s capable and confident, while the other’s worried and uncertain. Dawson, who’s never quite gotten enough roles worthy of her talents, bears a deep dark soulfulness that evokes just enough mystery and calculation to keep her paramours and the audience off kilter. She’s the continual spark that keeps the film charged, even when the writers’ circuitous machinations begin to sag from exhaustion.

The near-victorious foray into the inward-folding psycho-thriller puts Boyle in the fine company of Martin Scorsese and Nolan himself. Not even three years ago, Scorsese adapted Denis Lehane’s asylum mystery Shutter Island, and Nolan returned to familiar turf with the sensual feast Inception. All three films, possessors of great texture, depth, and pedigree, are well-crafted odysseys of mind-addled turmoil in which the tormented protagonist’s dilemma invites us in and endears us. We care, we register sympathy as they push for discovery and truth, but in the end when all the arcane circumlocution stops and the cards are laid on the table, what the audience was so invested in turns out to be a device of the plot and not the earnest journey it pretended to be for so long. The plug is pulled from the drain. Like the Salvador Dalí–crafted dream sequences in Spellbound, these films invoke an eerie, hypnotic wonderment, consuming you and transporting you, until inevitably, the fingers snap, the eyes open, and the rapturous trance is broken.

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The shot is technically simple, but builds like a drumroll, and it conveys the seedy energy of the carnival crowd and the cheap, bountiful thrills of summer nights; it captures Luke’s tawdry but undeniable glamour and the small towns where it thrives; and it establishes Luke as a man willing to take chances, a man totally immersed in the strange and specific life he’s built for himself, a man who seems to have a calm, matter-of-fact approach to danger and love and almost everything else.

After the show, Luke discovers that a fling he had the previous year, when he last passed through town, has produced a son. He decides that he, the baby, and the mother, Romina (Eva Mendes), should be a family (“My father was never around me, and look how I turned out,” he warns Romina), and he quits his carnival job to try to win her back from Kofi (Mahershala Ali), her current boyfriend and a committed father to the baby. But when Luke has trouble finding enough work, he takes to robbing banks.

This opening section is one of three related plotlines, and it’s by far the strongest. It’s hard not to wonder what this movie might have been if director and co-writer Derek Cianfranco had limited himself to a smaller-scale study of character and place, instead of reaching for an epic. This section stands out because of Gosling, of course. He does his Gosling thing—the brooding, the easy charm, the torso—but he manages, in his minimalist way, to give Luke nuances that are almost too good for such a sloppily written film: For example, when he’s robbing a bank, Luke’s voice rises into a shriek bordering on panic—he seems distinctly desperate in a way the Kid, his character from Drive, never was. And in the hours after he’s pulled off a job, he’s cocky, self-assured again, he revels in it. Even after he’s gotten away with several robberies and his partner wants to quit, Luke wants to do more; he’s almost frenzied in his insistence. It’s fair to ask where the need to earn money for his baby leaves off and where the thrill of it all takes over, but this tension comes entirely from Gosling, who remains freer from his public persona than his audience may be. We think of him as the coolest guy in any movie, but he’s still willing to exploit the essential strangeness he first showed playing a sociopath in the otherwise forgettable Sandra Bullock thriller Murder By Numbers. The script of Pines is not his equal.

The second section follows the cop who took Luke down, Avery (Bradley Cooper). After his act of heroism, Avery finds himself in the spotlight, a celebrated cop with a bright future, and then before we know it he finds himself pulled into department corruption. Stopping Luke was largely a matter of luck, but exposing the crooked cops around him is more calculated, and Avery, who has a law degree but chose to join the police force out of a sense of idealism, parlays it into a promotion to assistant D.A.

In other words, the second section of Pines boils down to a fairly rote tale of ambition, but it’s a half-built contraption at best. Part of the problem is Cooper, who’s a reliable actor doing a reasonably good job of not becoming the next Matthew McConaughey, but who remains better at nailing single scenes than he is at making those scenes hang together into something larger. He makes Avery earnest, kind, and idealistic almost to naiveté, but he fails to add any note of darkness of ruthlessness that would explain his aggressive career maneuvering and eventual transformation from devoted father and husband to icy political climber and eventual divorcé. He isn’t helped by the script, which lacks a moment when that pivot happens, the moment when Avery has to choose sides, and chooses wrong (Michael Corleone at the hospital with Vito and whispering, “I’m with you, Pop. I’m with you.”).

The third act is where Cianfranco tries to bring it all together, but by then the story’s momentum is long gone. The story flashes forward 15 years, and the two babies are grown and, in a coincidence that almost works, become high school friends. The two actors here are exceptional, especially Emory Cohen, who plays Avery’s son, AJ. Like Gosling, he brings a great deal more to the role than is written, but again, it only serves to underscore the movie’s shortcomings: Cohen’s performance swings between his scenes with friends, when he’s all rich kid bravado and goombah posturing, and a handful of scenes with his absentee father, where the pain of neglect and rejection is written all over his face. But the movie hasn’t taken the pains to explain or even show us that neglect, and because we understand so little about Avery’s decisions and emotions, these scenes lack the punch Cianfranco obviously intended them to have. By the time the pieces have all moved into place for a calamitous reunion of these characters, you’ll be lucky if your interest holds out, never mind your emotional involvement.

Oh, and back to that opening shot: It doesn’t just capture everything that’s good about Pines, it captures all its failings, too. It telegraphs the greatness Cianfranco is striving for, because long tracking shots have been a badge of indie style and credibility ever since Orson Welles pushed his camera through the streets of Venice Beach, CA in 1958 for the electrifying opening shot of Touch of Evil. But if you’re going to announce yourself in that way, if you’re going to put yourself in the company of Welles and Scorsese and Tarkovsky, the audience is going to expect a lot. Ambition is a good thing. Pines simply isn’t up to the task.

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He played an enormous part in the shaping of my life, and, in the days since his death, I’d discovered that I was far far from alone. It’s hard to think of him right now without some sort of hyperbole, so all I can do it proceed and pretend that “that’s what he would’ve wanted.”

Up until recently, societies would employ literary saps who would entertain the folks with tales or books summaries or relevant information. Though these saps were expected to be well-read and articulate, they were treated primarily as entertainers. That is not to say they were not taken seriously; but rather, people flocked to their re-telling of the history or tales or facts not so much to learn, but rather as an escape. In the West, they sometimes took the form of scribes, like the sap from Love in the Time of Cholera. In the Far East, where I grew up (Taiwan, to be precise), they were known as “book-tellers.”

That was Mr. Ebert to me. He was a knowledge siren in the guise of a jolly newspaperman. I was 15 when I discovered him, and had been speaking English for about two years. My family spent every penny we had (and some we didn’t) on a house in Westford, Massachusetts. We now owned a piece of America. Unfortunately, it was one of those pieces that was almost arrogantly bland, which was just what my mother wanted.

My mother, a preacher, was on an almost singular mission to prevent me from being exposed to anything “secular”, fearing that I would be easily corrupted. This included The Simpsons, school dances, and even Christian rock. That summer I came across a window to the outside world, in the form of a film encyclopedia on a CD-ROM, which led me to summaries of Mr. Ebert’s reviews. I then went down to the local library to check out his books, which I had to smuggle between novels I never read.

And so began the corrupting of my mind. Mr. Ebert was my “book teller”—the titles, histories, theories, and stories that he so effortlessly referenced in any given review amounted to so much more than that; he illuminated all these bright corners of the cinema world, with the casual matter-of-factness of a newspaperman. It was the same journalistic rigor that made Garcia-Marquez’s magical realism so potent. Mr. Ebert’s joy and discipline go hand-in-hand; he takes advantage of his training as a reporter to craft his reviews in such a way that his reactions, no matter how grand, are always justified by the cold hard facts. He talked about Kieslowski’s “anti-comedy” White with the same seriousness as his re-enactment of the gun gag in Jackie Chan’s Mr. Nice Guy. Each work was judged by its own merit, as filtered through his biases, which he has been very honest about. By treating every movie from every region and period equally, Mr. Ebert promised not a world that was better, but one that was bigger. During the time of Blockbusters and American Videos making sure the same 200 movies adorned the walls of every video store in town, Mr. Ebert’s retelling (and he’s a master story re-teller) managed to instill some hope in me.

In ’98, we even had a very brief correspondence over Stephen Soderbergh’s Out of Sight, I was ecstatic. Eventually I moved out of that little town, coupled with the advent of internet, and graduated from a film school. The world was every bit as big as he promised, and I tried getting by via treating every story on its own merit, plus my own biases. Though I was dismayed to discover that, even in a world as big as the one he reported, the likes of him are still very rare. I got a job producing and directing food ads, music videos, and martial arts movies. I have always worked hard to ensuring that each job is taken seriously, on its own merits.

And now that he’s gone, to paraphrase Mr. Ebert’s review of Inframan (a 1976 kungfu monster film that Mr. Ebert has enjoyed so much he changed his rating of the film from 2 stars to 3 stars some 25 years after his review was published), “a little light will go out of the world.”

–Pete Lee, San Francisco filmmaker

*       *       *

Many consider Roger Ebert to be the Garth Brooks of film criticism. Both used exciting fake names (Reinhold Timme and Chris Gaines, respectively) and both are complete masters of their industries. I watched Roger since the first episode of his show and I loved how when I didn’t know if I would like a movie, his thumb would tell me what to think. I would stare at his thumbs while he was talking, waiting for any twitch of indication. Would it go up or down? What if the film he was discussing wasn’t objectively good or bad? Would his thumb break in two? Fortunately he never encountered such a film.

Being a professional movie critic like Ebert is one of my goals in life, so I work my thumb out vigorously each day, making sure it’s capable of making the hand gestures necessary for summing up my thoughts on a film.

I’ve developed an intensive workout routine for my thumb which until now has been a private affair. In tribute to the great Roger Ebert, I opened my exercise program to budding film critics (and people seeking physical therapy).

My class meets three times a day and each student is filled with the vigor of youth. Their thumb skills are getting better by the day, although I have doubts about their tastes in film. They unanimously think The Hangover was funny. Some of them even liked Inception.

None of my students will be able to fill the role of Roger Ebert. One of them, possibly, because he’s chubby and his name is Bert Rogers, which could lead to some confusion in his favor, but definitely none of the others.

It’s a different generation now, no matter how dextrous their thumbs.

–Ted Wilson of The Rumpus

*       *      *

I’m a little too young to have fully appreciated Roger Ebert in the heydays of Siskel and Ebert, though “thumbs up, thumbs down” has, in my lifetime at least, been fairly ubiquitous. However, once a friend of a friend started posting Ebert’s tweets—perfect pearls of pithiness—on her Facebook page, I was inspired to do something I swore I wouldn’t: I joined Twitter.

In between asides like “G.I. Joe Retaliation: Maybe you should just play with your dolls instead” and “Ayn Rand died this day in 1982, inspiring indirectly my review of ‘Atlas Shrugged’ 31 years later,” he was re-tweeting pieces about Steubenville and drone strikes. When he could have coasted on his own name recognition and turned his website into a repository of greatest hits, he championed the work of other writers.

Ebert moved adroitly between forms. His personal essays about alcoholism, cancer, faith, family and his own impending death have an unforced intimacy and a jeweler’s eyes for composition. This big-heartedness found its way into his film reviews—how could it not? Ebert was renown for his deliciously vicious takedowns of films he loathed, but he could be unexpectedly kind to movies that might have proved easy marks.

In his review of The Host, an adaptation of another speculative ‘tween romance by Twilight author Stephanie Meyer, Ebert finds empathy with the teenage protagonist, and with the girls who might relate to her: “When Wanda is about to kiss the boy she loves, for example, the film uses voiceover to warn her: “No … Wrong! No! He’s from another planet. True, in our own lives, we pick up warnings on that frequency: No! You’ll get pregnant! No! He’s from the other side of town! No! He’s your best friend’s boyfriend!”

Ebert was uniquely attuned to, and sympathetic toward, people who were different—often less privileged—than he was. In his essay “How I am a Roman Catholic,” he attributed this quality to lessons imparted by the Dominican nuns who taught him in grade school: “those nuns guided me into supporting Universal Health Care, the rightness of labor unions, fair taxation, prudence in warfare, kindness in peacetime, help for the hungry and homeless, and equal opportunity for the races and genders.”

After his passing, many of his greatest zingers and longform essays have been circulating the Web.  As much as I relish them, what I will carry with me, as a writer and as a human being, is a single line: “I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do.

–Laura Bogart, Rumpus Contributor

*       *      *

When people think of Roger Ebert they probably think of numbers, specifically ten and two. No, Roger Ebert was not a fly fisherman, although I’m suddenly curious to see where he stood in regards to that Brad Pitt river movie.

His numbers were two thumbs up and top-ten lists. Of course, he was one half of a team of two film critics who, as they sat in an empty movie theater each week, summed up which movies were worth seeing and which ones didn’t make the cut.

Like most people, I also think of two-thumbs up and the first row of the mezzanine when I remember our beloved Roger Ebert this week. But I also smell whipped mashed potatoes and sea mist because my remembrance of him is woven with nostalgia from my childhood.

My family was religious about our Sunday traditions. We went to the beach, came home for dinner and never missed an episode of Siskel and Ebert at 6:30 on PBS. I can still smell my Mom’s cooking when I think of that show. There was never one without the other. Just like there is never a movie without a talking point, one of the many lessons I learned from Roger Ebert. In fact, if ever there was a teacher to whom I could attribute my film education, it would be him. He taught me that you could both love a film and still be critical of it. And inversely, that no matter how bad a movie is, there is still something to talk about.

Even though Roger Ebert lost his voice in 2006, he continued to talk about film. And even though we won’t be seeing him at the movies anymore, the conversation he began years ago continues today over long walks on the beach, during Sunday night dinners, and for all of us who love movies.

As for the Brad Pitt river movie? Thumbs up.

–Meg Taylor is a writer living in San Francisco. She is the sales and marketing manager at Small Press Distribution and writes about food for Wilder Quarterly.

***

Image by Ethan Miller/Getty Images.

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Ebert writes, in the introduction to his 2006 anthology of his work, “Awake in the Dark,” of seeing “three movies during a routine workday,” and, according to Douglas Martin’s obituary in the Times, Ebert “said he saw 500 films a year and reviewed half of them.” Some movies elicit passionate exultation; others, passionate revulsion. Those movies that repel you are the hardest to write about, and, for many critics, that’s the majority of movies. That’s where Ebert’s unique temperament, his humanistic world view, comes into play.

For many of us, Ebert’s essays and film reviews influenced how we watched movies as well as what movies were worth watching. Ebert’s “Two Thumbs Up” could send us rushing to the theater while a film marked thumbs down could probably wait to be seen on DVD.

Thank you Roger Ebert for your countless contributions to cinema. You will be missed.

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The opening montage of this romp is filled with budding tatas, American-colored popsicles-as-dicks, and girls who don’t look old enough to drive doing bong rips. But what looks right out of MTV’s Spring Break quickly devolves into a nightmarish echo of capitalist culture.

It’s no surprise, and quite a delightful choice, that Disney’s darlings are culled to play demon teenage girls who cruise through the film in bikinis and ski masks, holding up people at first with squirt guns and moving quickly along to blasting people to death Natural Born Killers style. While the obvious subversion of casting Disney stars as soulless gun-toters could have fallen flat, it was repeatedly met with delight.

The trailer for the film prepared me for what I anticipated to be a whole truckload of misogyny. It’s clear that only in a male fantasy would college girls spend their time in class drawing hearts that say ‘I love penis’ inside of them, drink out of squirt guns, and do handstands in their underwear. But suprisingly, just when the audience is positioned in an exploitative stance as we watch the four teenage girls in bikinis shotgunning weed and stroking each other’s hair in a faux-lesbionic fashion, Korine turns the trope on his head, making the four youngsters base and nihilistic. These aren’t girls gone wild, they’re girls gone wrong. They seem to care about nothing (save for Selena Gomez who turns in the only emotional performance of the film as a born-again Christian roped in with the wrong crowd), and proceed to blindly rob, steal and kill anything in sight.

After holding up a chicken shack, wearing short shorts and powder blue hoodies, they have enough money to go to Florida for spring break, where they meet a gangster rapper named Alien, played with panache and eerie conviction by James Franco. Franco sips through his silver grill, and his corn rows shake around like a wild lawn sprinkler as he ushers the girls into the world of St. Petersburg, Florida.

He takes the girls round in his Camaro (license plate BALLR), and introduces them to his life of hustling, though to his surprise they seem to need no introduction. In a gripping scene two of the girls turn the gun on him, and make him fellate his own hardware. There’s also a very Korine-esque scene where Franco’s character Alien plays Britney Spears’ “Everytime” on a white grand piano situated on the deck of his pool, while the girls stand around holding machine guns, wearing pink ski masks and sweat pants that say DTF (down to fuck), even though the girls in this film have very little fucking on their minds. And that brings us a central problem with Spring Breakers: the protagonists of the film seem to have no real desire. Can you have characters without desire? The lineage of art seems to say no, though Korine seems to be asserting that desirelessness is our cultural inheritance.

When Alien says, “Big booties and money is what life’s all about”, for a second I had to reconsider what life is all about. Had I gotten it wrong this whole time? Was my belief that life is about truth and beauty just a dreamer’s fantasy? Have I become un-American?

If nothing else, Spring Breakers seems to be just another way of saying what we’ve known for a long time: consumerism is eating us alive. In fact, our real desires have been wholly replaced by manufactured ones. The girls in the film, when presented with buckets of cash, reply, “Seeing all this money makes my tits look bigger.” And the insidiousness of subliminal advertising plays a role via Alien’s repetition of the phrase “spring break” which he whispers over and over throughout the film, even when he’s not on screen, like a narrative mantra lulling us into a capitalist-induced coma.

It’s this base need to be a cog in the money-making machine that is the nexus of Spring Breakers message, if there is one. The girls tell each other affirmations in the form of, “just pretend like you’re in a video game” and “act like you’re in a movie or something” – could not those phrases be instructive for anyone dealing with modern life?

When one of the girls hesitates, the others get firm and say, “you have to be hard”. Welcome to the new economy ladies! There seems to be no time to develop ethics when struggling to get by financially. How do you get to Florida for spring break and eventually pay for your student loans? By dealing drugs and robbing people (duh!). It’s not a sad statement of where we’re at; it’s a damning one.

And aside from all that, the there’s the issue of race. The one time we see the girls in school, the topic at hand is the civil rights movement, but instead of paying attention to Emmett Till on the screen, they’re busy doodling testicles in their notebooks. While many students went south in support of equal rights for African Americans during the civil rights movement, the young stars of Spring Breakers return South to rob and then eventually kill a party full of black men. That’s quite a portrait of how little we’ve come, if we’ve come anywhere at all.

The film’s characters of color only exist on screen to remind us just how much white culture has stolen from them. The character of Alien, faux-rapper, middling gangster, is meant to be an apex of appropriation. The fact that Franco’s character learns everything he knows from fellow Black ganster Archie (played by Gucci Mane), and then has him killed is an obvious metaphor for white suburban consumption of hip hop culture. Additionally, to have two white girls in bikinis blow up an entire party of Archie’s crew, without suffering one scratch, seems gratuitous and sick, though that seems to be the film’s point. While Korine doesn’t seem to have the intellectual chops to fully deal with the issue of race, his film at least nods to the fact that he’s aware. Every artist has their limitations and Spring Breakers is more reflection of racial tension than analysis.

In the end Spring Breakers is much like having sex with a praying mantis—an experience that seduces at first then spits you out headless, and thus brainless. Which is not to say that the film is dumb, but rather that it’s mind-numbing. It’s a testament to the fact that we’re easily seduced by bright lights and hypnotic base lines. The film’s success can largely be attributed to the flashy neon cinematography courtesy of Benoît Debie and the trance-like editing of Douglas Crise. Throughout the film I was repeatedly reminded of the pulp-nod of Drive, so it came as no surprise to learn that the video-pumped soundtrack was created by Cliff Martinez (who scored Drive) and Skrillex.

Korine is nearing 40, (how long can you be referred to as an enfant terrible?) and I suspect Spring Breakers is more likely to appeal to aging film critics, middle-aged men, and women who never got a spring break (see:me) than the completely non-existent demographic of 18-year-old nihilist girls in neon bikinis. If that demographic actually existed, we’d all be doomed. Let’s be grateful, this once, for the pulp and fantasy, but not forget that the reflection comes right from the other end of the looking glass.

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The details of the film have faded from Georges’s memory, but he remembers vividly his youthful reaction to it: he was so emotional that it took him a long time to calm down. When he returned home from the cinema, he ran into an older boy who lived next door. This was a boy that Georges looked up to and had always been trying to impress, yet he couldn’t stop himself from crying as he described to him the film he’d just seen. “Telling him the story made all my feelings and tears come back,” Georges tells Anne, “maybe even stronger than when I was actually watching the film.”

In another film, this scene might be a testament to the power of cinema; in Amour, inserted between scenes of Georges struggling to move Anne’s broken body, it feels like a comment on how laughably trivial movies can be. It also sheds light on writer/director Michael Haneke’s most defining quirk: an intense aversion to banality. When one considers that Haneke’s output is among the most dour and least cathartic in all cinema, one can’t help but think that the idea of someone having a benignly positive reaction to Amour is the director’s worst nightmare.

Haneke is a polarizing figure. While it’s hard to deny his brilliance as a director, his films’ preoccupation with the fact that they are films and not real life – and what a very, very terrible thing that is – can feel condescending at times. There tends to be a certain amount of frustration that comes up when talking about Haneke. Even critics who praise his work tend to do so as one praises an unusually well-designed mausoleum.

You don’t need to hear this director compare Pulp Fiction to Nazi war propaganda to know that he fundamentally distrusts the medium in which he works. This distrust is evident in every facet of his work: the stubbornly stationary camera angles, the near absence of music, the way in which we are denied the violent images we expect, only to be ambushed by a sudden, brutal act of violence when we least expect it. The aim of all of this, according to the director himself, is to force us to question what we are being shown.

When I heard that Haneke’s new film would be called Amour, I actually thought the title might be sarcastic. After all, this is the guy who made the most disturbing home invasion film of all time and called it Funny Games. Thankfully, this film really is a love story. Yet it’s such a ruthlessly unsentimental one that the title still feels like a provocation.

This is a film about love where the word love is seldom uttered – perhaps never mentioned by the two main characters – and where all the cinematic shorthand for love has been removed. What we are left with are the quiet presences of two people, their physical bodies, their conversations, the everyday moments they spend with each other. Moments eating, moments meeting friends, moments worrying, and increasingly, moments of Georges caring for Anne. The latter scenes are long, slow, and mostly wordless, and I suspect that it is this film’s willingness to show in detail just how punishing old age can be that is winning it praise even from those normally turned off by Haneke’s grim agenda.

In most films about love it is a choice, a monologue, a letter, or a shedding of tears that “proves” to the audience that two people are really in love. The most beautiful thing about this film, to me, is how much love comes through in the (crazily good) performances of Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, even as the director takes great pains to avoid providing us with any conventional cinematic signifiers of love.

Yet even though we can feel love suffusing this couple’s apartment, it’s a love that’s as slippery as a ghost, and much scarier. In 2000’s Code Unknown, which is still Haneke’s most gentle film, the failure of words to communicate feelings was symbolized by a classroom of deaf students playing a game of charades. As a girl crouches by a wall, seemingly shielding herself from something, the other kids make guesses with sign language – “Alone?”, “Hiding Place?”, “Sad?” – to which the girl shakes her head; a poetic reminder that all language is a physical process that can approach but never reach the heart.

This is echoed in Amour in perhaps its most memorable scene, a scene that begins with Georges telling Anne another story from his childhood: a holiday camp that he had hoped would be fun but turned out to be torture. His mother and he had made a deal that if he was enjoying the camp he would draw flowers on his postcard to her, and if he was suffering he would draw stars. Georges drew stars all over his postcard. That’s the best that language has to offer, Haneke seems to be saying.

Yet the shock for longtime viewers of Haneke is how Amour goes one step further. Rather than merely pointing out the inefficacy of language, here we have a powerful emphasis on our moral imperative to listen to words and to act on them – to take communication seriously, despite its failures. At a certain point in the film, Anne has deteriorated to the point where all she says is “mal”, the French word for pain, bad, hurt. In a fascinating moment, one of Anne’s nurses tells Georges that the repetition of the word is just a physical reflex with no meaning – Anne might as well be saying “maman, maman, maman”. But what argument could ever convince someone to ignore their lover repeating the word “pain” day and night? The film shows us Georges tormented by Anne’s words, and his inability to dismiss them might be the greatest testament to his love for her. Words may never be able to adequately describe feelings, but they can point the way, and love requires that we respect them and follow them.

On the surface, Haneke’s modus operandi hasn’t changed at all. The camera still barely moves, the characters still barely smile, the editing is still so phenomenally frugal that every cut feels like it’s accompanied by the Law & Order “shunk-shunk” sound. But two things have changed. One is that the director’s finger-wagging takes a backseat to the moral imperatives of the characters. The second is the inclusion of two highly sympathetic lead characters. Haneke’s films have always been a showcase for mind-blowing acting, but usually it’s of the sadistic, cold, deranged variety. The Georges and Anne in this film might be the first Georges and Anne (the names recur in almost all of Haneke’s films) that I wouldn’t be bummed to know in real life.

Now that Amour has received Oscar nominations not only for Best Foreign Film but for Best Picture, it is probably destined to be the best known and most watched of Haneke’s films in the States. Why is it receiving so many more accolades than his previous work? It might be more philosophically well-rounded, but it’s not any easier to watch. Maybe it’s simply that in portraying the slow deterioration of a spouse, Haneke has finally chosen a subject that frightens us as much as it frightens him. Unlike television, childhood, fascism, war, and cinema itself, aging is something that we are ready to believe is truly horrific.

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Yet there is a brutal symmetry between the film’s opening moments—a black screen, just the sounds of 911 calls from the smoking towers—and its denouement: the raid against the architect of their deaths, the killing that was meant to avenge them. These cinematic stanzas are punctuated with last gasps and desperate pleas. An office worker sobs to a 911 operator who can only advise her to calm down; just before the line cuts out, her voice gets impossibly small: “I’m going to die, aren’t I?” A decade later, in Abbottabad, a young girl cries “Daddy” through a volley of gunshots; her brothers and sisters weep and scream as combat boots thunder up stairwells.

Anyone who enters the theater expecting “Call of Duty: We Got Bin Laden” will be gravely disappointed with the somber, meditative film that unfurls in front of them. Zero Dark Thirty doesn’t indulge in breathless reveling; it’s a brooding, muscular piece about obsession and vengeance. There are certainly very real, very vital questions about whether torture (we’re way past kidding ourselves with terms like “enhanced interrogation techniques”) should ever be employed; however, these are not questions that the movie’s characters—analysts and operatives, soldiers and guards—ever debate on-screen (or even internally). Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal treat torture through the vantage point of their protagonist, a young CIA agent named Maya (Jessica Chastain): It is a means to an end. Detainees are water-boarded and rammed into hot boxes, but we’re standing on the side of the men and women holding the hoses, clicking the dog collars shut. And for them, it’s positively quotidian, par for the course. Dan, the agent who first schools Maya in “enhanced interrogation techniques,” downs an ice cream cone before setting to work (A guard quips, “You agency guys are twisted.”).

Various be-suited higher-ups pound their fists on conference tables and yell about protecting the homeland, yet the very first interrogation scene—the first real scene in the movie—immediately follows that black screen, the cries of doomed Americans. What we see next—a suspected al-Qaeda financier strung up from the ceiling—is about “gathering intelligence,” but it is also about punishment. “This,” Dan tells the financier, “is what defeat looks like.”

Though we are, as a nation, ostensibly engaged in a “war on terror,” we don’t often, as individuals (or, at least, civilians) feel particularly embattled (or even inconvenienced). Still, our history has, by and large, been divided into a before and after. Simone de Beauvoir, writing from a freshly-liberated, still-tattered France, wondered if vengeance could ever serve as restitution: “All of us have more or less felt it: the need to punish, to avenge ourselves … Is it well-founded? Can it be satisfied?”

These are clearly not questions that Maya, a feminine exemplar of Eastwoodian grit, loses sleep over. At one point, then-CIA director Leon Panetta (a rumpled, weary James Gandolfini) asks her if, in her twelve years with the agency, she’s done anything other than search for bin Laden. “No,” she says, simply, forcefully. She is singular in her pursuit, an arrow shot from a taut bow. But Maya is no hero; she is, as she tells Panetta, “the motherfucker” who found bin Laden’s compound, and it is this identity—not the “God and country” invoked by the Navy Seal who calls in bin Laden’s death—that compels her. When a suicide bomber murders her only real friend, a slow-talking Southerner who bakes a birthday cake for an al-Qaeda operative she hopes to flip as an asset, Maya vows to “smoke everyone involved in this op, and then I’m going to kill bin Laden.” 

A national grievance is writ small, making the partisan hoopla over Zero Dark Thirty’s original pre-election release date particularly insipid. President Obama only appears as a talking head on a TV screen, promising that, “America doesn’t torture” with what seems, in hindsight, to be a willful naiveté. We all know that Gitmo doesn’t close. We all know about the drones.

However, the film’s amended December-January release situates it in an oddly appropriate cultural moment, one in which a spate of very public crimes—a murder that Indian authorities didn’t prosecute until the country exploded in protest; the gang-rape of a sixteen-year-old that Ohio authorities simply buried until Anonymous intervened—has challenged us to decide if we can sleep at night knowing that our peace of mind was delivered “by any means necessary.”

The street rioting in India and online vigilantism of Anonymous has, arguably, yielded results: arrests have been made and conspirators have been shamed. Zero Dark Thirty’s Maya might say that her interrogations serve a similar purpose. She’d also likely agree with de Beauvoir’s assertion that, “one hates only men, not because they are material causes of material damage, but because they are conscious authors of genuine evil.” Or, as a commenter on a Huffington Post piece condemning the film, succinctly put it: “I have no sympathy for torture. Then again, I have no sympathy for the people being tortured.”

Though it’s structured like a traditional procedural, Zero Dark Thirty is a shifting inkblot of a film: A myriad of meanings float up from its white spaces. A battered detainee refuses to yield information about an attack in London: Days later, on July 7, 2005, a series of coordinated suicide bombings will kill fifty-two people. Just before we’re able to knit a tidy conclusion about the ineffectiveness of such brutality, the filmmakers pivot: Once ninety-six hours of sleep deprivation has weakened the detainee, Maya is able to trick him into giving up the name of bin Laden’s courier; this is the lead that pitches her down the rabbit hole, until she emerges again on a desert air field, watching twin helicopters rise toward Pakistan.

Those of us who might not normally support violence or vigilantism have, perhaps, felt a moment of pause, a slowness to condemn the Indian rioters or Anonymous; perhaps this is because they’re striking out against laws and cultures that have, so oppressively, so systematically, denied so many vulnerable people any semblance of justice, or hope. But Maya and her cohorts aren’t shattering any paradigms—they’re cogs in a government wheelhouse. “I want targets,” bellows one of the top brass. “Do your fucking jobs. Bring me people to kill.” Yet the movie’s most chilling line of dialogue isn’t a threat, it’s a bit of banter between co-workers: “You don’t want to be the last one holding a dog collar when the oversight committee comes.”

Maya may or may not be the last one holding a dog collar, but she is, above all else, a woman alone. Chastain endows her with an artic reserve that is compelling, not inscrutable. She is, at times, astoundingly arrogant: screaming in the face of a section chief who asks her to redirect her energies toward preventing another attack, not hunting bin Laden; haranguing another higher-up who can’t get the White House to okay a raid fast enough for her liking; telling the Navy Seal squad leader that she’d have preferred to bomb the compound, but that he and his team will have to “kill bin Laden for me.” Yet she is still very much a young twentysomething with a photo of her and her friend as her screensaver; there is underbelly beneath the brittleness. Hours before her fellow citizens will swarm the streets, singing “God Bless America,” Maya sits alone, crying. Her tears are not of exhaustion, or even relief; her face breaks open with loss.

De Beauvoir cautioned her countrymen against believing that they could ever find succor in vengeance. The common refrain of the aggrieved, “they must pay,” betrays a desire for a “balancing of wrongs,” to see their aggressors suffer a comparable horror. This is a truth born out in Bigelow’s bravura staging of that May raid, especially the claustrophobic effect of shooting in night vision. The sickening intimacy of the sequences—tight huddles of men charging narrow stairways, narrow rooms—makes the whole endeavor seem small. There’s no grand, cathartic showdown, no real firefight. There is only a man poking his head out of a room before he’s shot between the eyes. There is nothing that could conjure back 3,000 lives and bring them, like Lazarus, out of the rubble.

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We were at Escuela Caribe, an Evangelical Christian reform school in the Dominican Republic. The man was our housefather; the girl had been asking his permission to go to the bathroom for hours. I remember wanting to protest the mistreatment, but being too scared. As the stream of urine pooled at her feet, I stared, slack-jawed, wondering what about Escuela Caribe compelled the staff to mistreat us. A horrified expression briefly flashed across my housefather’s face. I’d like to believe it wasn’t just disgust, that he didn’t mean to take the abuse that far.

All that confusion rushed back as I watched Compliance, writer and director Craig Zobel’s most recent film. In Compliance, a man posing as a police officer calls a fast food restaurant and asks to speak to the assistant manager, Sandra, who is stressed from the Friday night slam. The “officer” accuses a female employee, Becky, of theft, and coaxes Sandra to isolate Becky in a back room, where, still on the telephone, he coerces Sandra to strip-search the accused. To prove her innocence, Becky agrees, only to be subjected to numerous sexual humiliations over the next several hours. None of her co-workers intervene, even though they are aware something is wrong.

Compliance is a fictionalized account of a true story, a strip-search scam that occurred at least sixty-eight times in thirty-two states. Zobel stumbled across reports of the scandal that rocked the fast food industry while reading about Stanley Milgram, the Jewish psychologist who conducted a series of experiments studying why humans blindly obey authority figures (which Milgram undertook in part to understand how the Nazis could justify killing the Jews). In the study, subjects were told to administer a series of increasingly powerful electrical shocks on individuals in another room. Milgram discovered that even though the subjects could hear the person purportedly receiving the shocks screaming and eventually becoming ominously silent, two out of three individuals would administer the maximum voltage if ordered to do so by a person perceived as having more power.

Zobel and I met in the early nineties in Athens, Georgia, when he skipped his senior dance to attend the punk rock prom annually hosted by my art school roommates—an act which endeared him to us all. The next fall, he joined us at the University of Georgia, co-founding the cult internet comic Homestar Runner, before leaving to study film at the North Carolina School of the Arts. Zobel and I spoke a few nights after Compliance’s premiere.

*** 

The Rumpus: I’ve read that the idea for this film germinated when you were reading about Milgram’s experiments. Were there any relevant cultural events that led you to read about power, conformity, and obedience?

Craig Zobel: I was reading about the financial crash in 2009. It sort of bled into the Milgram experiments… Alex Gibney made a documentary (in 2006) called The Human Behavior Experiments. There was this book by Robert Cialdini called Influence. It was a New York Times bestseller for Wall Street types, kind of “how to succeed in business” power to the people reading it. But the actual book isn’t like that; it talks about influence and how people can be influenced. He talks about the Milgram experiments and others that are more current.

There was one experiment about nurses. In a series of hospitals, the nurses would get a call from a fake doctor whose name didn’t sound like any doctor who had worked on that floor or in that hospital.  He would tell them to assign this dosage of a specific medicine to a patient that they could find in the dispensary. When they would go into the dispensary, they would find an artificial drug that was just for this experiment—it was a placebo, but the label would say that this amount of the drug is lethal. When the fake doctor would call, he would say, “Please give patient so-and-so in Room Seven X or Y amount of this drug.” It would be double the amount that the label said was lethal.

Rumpus: Whoa!

Zobel: Out of ninety-five percent of the nurses—really smart, trained people—only one said no.

Rumpus: That ties into another question. People express disbelief that the strip-search scam perpetrated in Compliance happened. They seem to make it a class issue: “This would only happen in a fast food restaurant.”

Zobel: Like it would never happen in an institution where there are smarter people?

Rumpus: Right!

Zobel: Yeah, that’s not quite a class issue. If it’s a class issue, it would be, “Do people in power exploit the lower class?” I’m not a Marxist but, come on, there are millions of examples of that happening in the world—that’s a class issue!

But what I hate about that argument is that it’s actually not even the correct usage of the word. You’re actually making this even weirder and more fucked up statement that people in lower classes are dumber than you.

Rumpus: Exactly. And missing that whole point about the power that situations and social forces have on you.

Zobel: They’re completely ignoring that. That’s been one of the weirder things to have been hearing.

Rumpus: So you didn’t expect that to happen?

Zobel: No. I really went into this very much concerned that I didn’t try to paint the people as stupid. The fact that people went there has been kind of frustrating.

I think it’s more about people being, “I have to distance myself from this somehow, and maybe I can distance myself from blaming you, the maker of the film, for casting the people of the lower classes as stupid.” I tried to make a lot of decisions that hopefully don’t do that.

Rumpus: I felt like you had empathy for the people involved, particularly with Sandra’s character. My husband worked in fast food in high school, and, as soon as we finished watching Compliance, he sent this text to his friend who’d seen the trailer, and asked, “Who does that lady remind you of?” They were both like, “Barb!”

Zobel: You mean he recognized Ann Dowd’s character as someone he’d worked with?

Rumpus: She seemed like a real person. You felt for her—at least I did.

Zobel: For me, that’s the whole crux of the movie—I identify with something that’s going on there. She’s complicated. She’s actually doing something that you can’t not say is bad, but I’m hesitant to blame her at the same time.

Rumpus: Your debut feature, The Great World of Sound, explores the phenomenon of song sharking, a record industry swindle where amateur musicians pay record companies to be produced. Your dad was actually involved with [a song-sharking operation] in the seventies, and, like the characters in The Great World of Sound, at first he thought the operation was legit, only to realize that later he was being conned. Do you think that that family history impacts the topics that you explore?

Zobel: I’m not a hundred percent sure that it’s something that my father experienced impacting me, but I think there is a lot of interesting newness in telling a story like that. I do have a lot of empathy for people on both sides. I think most people come toward things assuming everybody is going to be a good person. When you have an interaction where it doesn’t go that way, it’s very problematic and interesting and weird.

On the other side, it’s interesting that people who can perpetrate cons have talked themselves into believing that they’re not doing anything bad. That they tell themselves that there is nothing wrong with what they’re doing is the crazy thing about human behavior.

In terms of drawing a one-to-one connection to The Great World of Sound and to Compliance—both are about rationalization. I’m interested in looking at that from different angles. I feel like Ann Dowd’s character is not far from the characters in The Great World of Sound, who were doing things that some part of them knows that they shouldn’t be doing.

Rumpus: Did you read the Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Phillip Zimbardo?

Zobel: That was one of the books I was reading.

Rumpus: In that book they talk about the strip-search scam, using it to illustrate people being exploited by anonymous yet important figures. I reread that section yesterday. Much of the abuse in the original cases was actually more graphic than what you had onscreen. How did you draw the line in what you were going to portray?

Zobel: I felt like it was going to be a challenging movie in certain ways; specifically, I didn’t need to see the actual sexual violence happen onscreen. I decided not to show anything in that realm but I also didn’t want it to be so left up to the viewer’s imagination that you couldn’t know what the deal was. And if you watch the film, you don’t see the spanking happen.

I’ve had multiple people ask me if I re-edited or re-cut the movie since the Sundance screening…I think that people are stressed out by the movie, and that even with the amount that I restrained showing specific things, people are filling in the gaps to the degree that they think that they saw.

Rumpus: Oh please, I didn’t want to see any more! But it has been interesting to see that you’ve gotten criticism for what was onscreen when there was a lot more violence, in actuality, than what people are criticizing you for.

Zobel: What’s interesting to me is that I only showed a girl who was topless…you don’t even see her bare buttocks or anything like that, but the nudity is titillating the audience. It’s the big question that people are excited to mull over.

I could have made a whole different version of this movie. If I had wanted to do titillation, I would have done it in a different style. And it’s that funny thing where people ask, “Don’t you think having a naked person onscreen [is exploitative]?” I think we’re not going far enough with the conversation. I want people to talk more. I mean, I watch Game of Thrones and there’s all sorts of crazy nudity in it…and very little of which I can justify, except that it’s in a titillating and somewhat exploitational manner, but I don’t really feel like that’s a subject that people are interested in because it’s the same news story. What are they going to say? “As predicted, Game of Thrones really is titillating.” It’s like, “This is the way we like our sexual exploitation of women to happen, like Game of Thrones, and that’s fine,” but instead [in discussing Compliance the response is], “You made me feel gross and showed me boobs.”

Rumpus: Right. In Game of Thrones there’s tons of gratuitous exploitation but they never try to make you explore the context of why it’s happening.

Zobel: It makes us incredibly uncomfortable. And if the end of the conversation is, I ended up shooting a movie that was exploitative, I really was trying my damndest to be thinking about the whole thing. And if the view is that I didn’t pull it off, I was thinking about it more than a lot of people who are just straight up doing exploitive filmmaking now.

Rumpus: I read where somebody said, “You shouldn’t have used as pretty an actress (as Dreama Walker)” but then I watched one of the original interviews yesterday, and the girl that it happened to, she was an attractive girl. So then I wondered, are we not supposed to acknowledge that pretty girls get exploited?

Zobel: And maybe more often?

Rumpus: Exactly.

Zobel: And that that is the reason they get exploited? And then it’s like, okay, if I’d used a non-pretty actress that would have made it more comfortable for you, and then what does that mean? That you have a bias against unattractive women?

Rumpus: Right.

Zobel: It’s funny when discussing exploitation—which is what the movie is about, men assuming authority and using it to abuse women—when discussing that there are so few conversations that are actually about that kind of thing, that people don’t know how to parse that from, “Wait, are you abusing women?” I’ve had people ask, “Don’t you think you’re like the caller, in what you made that actress do?” Then I’m like, “The actress volunteered to do it.” I didn’t force her to do anything. We were all talking, and then we’d call action and then shoot… I think people are confused because we don’t have enough of these conversations.

Rumpus: I definitely feel that over the past decade, the portrayal of women in the media has gotten worse, and a lot of it has to do with corporate structure being controlled by men. You don’t have women involved in decision-making about programming or about what goes onscreen, so then what you get are these two dimensional-characters.

In the Lucifer Effect, Zimbardo suggests that instead of distancing ourselves from individuals, we need to understand how we can be seduced to commit evil in order that we might resist being coerced. Is that some of what you were trying to accomplish with this film?

Zobel: This is where my head was when I first read the story [upon which Compliance is based]. My first reaction was, “I would never do that.” It was a clear and definite reaction. A few days later, my bullshit meter went off—and then I thought to myself, Well I can see how people can let this happen. I can see the type of thing that leads there just with interactions with bosses…

But what I think is interesting about some people’s reactions [to Compliance], is that when some people say, “I would never do it,” they actually are accurate… There are all these studies with that percentage of people who can resist. They’re not statistically the majority of people but there are people who can.

And the people that are really strongly saying, “No, I would never do that,” aren’t they leaving their armor open just by not acknowledging that’s possible in their nature? I think that’s what I was curious about in making the movie.

Rumpus: Zimbardo says we need to realize that we’re all susceptible to hoaxes like this.

Zobel: I also think we need to be careful with the amount of shame that we put onto people in that situation. Honestly, this is an extreme case in which acts of violence towards other people happened, but the simplicity here is people can be duped—it’s part of life.

Rumpus: At the end of the movie, you give the impression that the perpetrator gets busted.

Zobel: Part of me wanted to find him guilty. Some people have called me out, saying that was a wimpy choice, but I wanted that guy to get arrested.

Rumpus: What’s really sad about the actual case is that the people who are convicted and whose lives are impacted…

Zobel: …Are the people in that room, is that what you mean?

Rumpus: Do you want to discuss that?

Zobel:  I was interested in specifically Sandra, the character, and how almost  every day she has to talk about [what happened] in some way shape or form… It’s a really interesting punishment for not listening to your inner voice…I’m not talking about the actual crime part—I’m talking about the fact that she did something that I totally am sympathetic for, that technically was wrong, and then has to suffer through having to talk about it all the time. For me, that was heartbreaking.

Rumpus: Did you interview any of the actual people?

Zobel: I didn’t. I had little interest in talking to the people, because that story is something that I’m sure they’d rather not talk about. If I was going to do it right, I was going to figure out how it went inside of me, based on my beliefs and my personal experience. It was about looking inside myself more than it was about being journalistic.

Rumpus: You captured the florescent, sterile-yet-grimy atmosphere of a fast food joint. All the details were right with the stress of the Friday night slam, “drops,” the regional manager, the mystery shopper. Who worked in fast food?

Zobel: Me.

Rumpus: Where?

Zobel: I worked at a TCBY in Dunwoody, Georgia for a few years. At some point I became the assistant manager because nobody had worked there as long.

Rumpus: You’ve got two critically acclaimed films, but it didn’t happen overnight.  What do you think has helped you become successful?

Zobel: One thing that has generated success for Compliance is because I made that movie from a place of curiosity, and of testing myself instead of being confident that I could make the movie… That might not be the way that everybody works, but it’s been useful to me to find things that make me uncomfortable, that seem hard, and that there is a possibility of failure.

Rumpus: This summer, I was at the Tin House Writer’s Workshop, and in a lecture, Steve Almond pretty much said that if something makes you feel sick inside, you know you’re on your way there.

Zobel: Yeah, it’s like fear does rule the way. It’s also like I learned how to make a movie in one way and now [with upcoming project, Z Is for Zachariah], I’m going to learn how to make a movie in a different way, working with an established actor, and that will be all different.

Rumpus: Right. Fear guides you not just on an emotional level but across so many disciplines.

Zobel: Basically, you know a project is important as long as you still have shit to learn.

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