LOOK is a movie told entirely from the point of view of surveillance cameras, in mall store dressing rooms, parking lots, offices, convenience stores, schools, etc. It's estimated that the average American is captured on camera 170 times a day. Official website for the film.
MoviesForGuys.com interviewed Adam Rifkin, the writer and director of the film.
Interview with Adam Rifkin, writer/director of LOOK
MFG: How did you come up with this concept?
Adam Rifkin: When I got a ticket from a red light camera. I was driving through Los Angeles and apparently I had gone through a red light and was unaware of it and I got the ticket back in the mail which had a photograph of me in it that was a very very clear picture, singing to the radio, I had an idiotic expression on my face, rather embarrassing. But also very unnerving, that someone could take a picture of me without my knowledge and mail it to my house. That got me thinking what other cameras are out there taking pictures of me without my knowledge. I started paying attention to all the cameras that were around.
Little by little I started to realize they were everywhere. I was in a Target or something and realized that every single aisle there were multiple cameras on me. This is enough footage to cut together, enough coverage, enough angles, as a filmmaker, an interesting way to make a movie.
At the same time I was realizing every story on the news involved some sort of surveillance footage as the cornerstone of their top story, I realized this wasn’t just an interesting way to shoot a movie, but also a very topical issue to explore, and the timing was propitious.
MFG: Did you script it differently than you would a more conventional narrative? More or less ad-libbing by the actors?
Adam Rifkin: There was actually no ad-libbing in the film, I scripted it exactly as I would have scripted a movie I was shooting conventionally, I did that on purpose. I knew if I wasn’t careful it would just be a gimmick that would be interesting for five minutes then the gimmick would only serve to distract you from the story, rather than enhance it. Once I realized I was going to make a movie from the point of view of surveillance cameras, I threw that out of my head, and wrote a script I would have been happy to shoot conventionally. Most important to me was a compelling story, compelling characters, the technique would be the least important aspect of what I was writing and why. Then once the script was at a point where I was excited about it, I figured out ways to shoot it in an alternate fashion.
MFG: How did shooting it differ from a regular film; were the actors at times in an environment without a visible camera and film crew?
Adam Rifkin: It was entirely different from how I or anyone I was working with had ever made a film. We used HD cameras, not actual surveillance cameras, but put them where real surveillance cameras always were, shot the movie on actual location, we attached our cameras right next or under theirs. As a result, in a mall or bank or convenience store, none of the actors saw the cameras, a lot of times they didn’t know where the cameras were. They were wearing radio microphones. There was no crew around. The extras weren’t extras, they were just real people at the mall that day, they didn’t know a movie was being shot. The actors maintained a real natural quality to their performances, because they didn’t have to pretend the crew wasn’t there - they never saw a crew when we were shooting. As far as anyone around them knew, they were just having a conversation.
MFG: Did you watch a lot of surveillance footage in preparing for this?
Adam Rifkin: I watched so much, hours of it, hundreds if not thousands of clips. It all looks pretty different, the quality differs, some is pristine HD quality, and everything in-between, we wanted to make sure the different cameras and security systems accurately reflected the variety of cameras and film and tape quality in real life.
MFG: Are you now hyper-aware of cameras now when you enter a new place?
Adam Rifkin: I’m totally paranoid. I’m now aware of the cameras everywhere, but I still forget that they’re there. We as a culture, for some reason there’s a part of our brain that turns off the knowledge sometimes that these cameras are there, we like to remain numb to it. When we screened the movie in Las Vegas, I was going down in the elevator, I was nervous, doing this really stupid nervous jumping-around-the-elevator dance, completely forgetting that I was in Vegas, the most surveilled city in the country. And I still forgot that there was a camera on me for five minutes.
MFG: In the movie, the people are depicted oblivious, not self-conscious at all. I would expect in some cases, people are paranoid, looking for cameras, or in some cases even downright exhibitionist?
Adam Rifkin: There are people who are exhibitionists, they flash cameras, there are people staring at the camera the whole time they’re in the elevator. But for the most part people are unaware that they’re there, or just ignore that they’re there.
One of the producers of the film used to be a CEO, and had thousands of employees, a number of different buildings, surveillance cameras everywhere, all of them well-marked, blinking red lights on them, and yet every couple of weeks, his head of security would come to him and say, “You gotta check this out!” with another example of people having sex in the copy room, or sex in the loading dock, or doing a strip show in the video conference room for somebody on the other side of the country, it was unbelievable.
MFG: Do you think people assume that nobody really looks at the footage?
Adam Rifkin: I think there’s a naiveté about that, they say who’s going to have time to go through all these tapes, but the truth of the matter is, now they’re on hard drives, they’ll last forever. Software is being developed now where you can search through this volume of data quicker and quicker… where you can put in a photograph of someone’s face, and it can search all of the different networked cameras using facial recognition software, find this face going through traffic lights, going through airports. Also they’re developing pattern-recognition software, an unusual change in behavior alerts them.
MFG: Do you think Post-9/11 people just accept that they don’t have privacy?
Adam Rifkin: I think 9/11 opened the floodgates, people are overwhelmingly in support of more cameras, 75% of Americans in one poll, to make a safer society. I think in some instances it does, in some instances it doesn’t. People don’t realize their civil liberties are being compromised. In 37 states it’s legal to have cameras in public bathrooms and public dressing rooms. You wonder, how is watching someone try on pairs of jeans saving the world? The cat’s out of the bag, the cameras ain’t going to go away, what we need to do is figure out how to act accordingly. I didn’t want the film to take a stand on the issue of privacy vs. security, that cameras are all good or cameras are all bad. I wanted to show people the cameras are there, what can be caught on any given day. Make people pay attention to the fact that they’re there.
MFG: Although we could expect a more paranoid society with people aware of the cameras Post-9/11, people are blogging and YouTubing footage of themselves, sometimes doing silly or even questionably legal things. Do you think this is eroding expectations of privacy?
Adam Rifkin: People are innately voyeuristic, and innately exhibitionistic. With the Internet now, you get a global audience for whatever horrific behavior you want to expose yourself doing, and there are other people always eager to see what people are doing. In this YouTube, cellphone camera culture, everyone is providing content for everyone else’s entertainment. People are getting desensitized to the potential repercussions of some of this behavior. As a filmmaker, I think it’s great, I want to see people make fools of themselves, I want to comment on it in my movies; as a private citizen, I want to see people do weird shit. But how is this going to affect these people in their future, affect the culture? Food for thought.
MFG: In the course of getting background footage for this, did you end up with anything unexpected on camera?
Adam Rifkin: It’s funny you should say that, we were hoping for that; catch someone having sex, or giving someone the Heimlich Maneuver, or whatever. But all the shit that went down like that seemed to happen right after we took our cameras down, unfortunately. In some cases we tried to get the real surveillance footage of what we missed, but couldn’t get our hands on it.
Interesting footnote, a lot of us think, whoever’s behind these cameras, whoever’s at the control panel is probably a team of trained professionals, responsible individuals, who take their job seriously. I found that isn’t always the case. One mall in particular, the security office, they have joysticks, they weren’t zooming in on shoplifters, or looking for criminals. They were zooming in on girls’s boobs, girls’s butts. If they saw a hot chick walk into the mall, they followed her from camera to camera to camera all day long. If she bent over and the camera caught a glimpse up her skirt, they would post it on YouTube; I’m not kidding. They weren’t paying attention at all [to what else was happening in the mall].
MFG: Are people assuming if not privacy at least anonymity?
Adam Rifkin: I think a lot of people think, as long as I’m not doing anything illegal, what do I care what’s captured on video. But people do things that aren’t necessarily illegal, but are really embarrassing; in the wrong hands, posted online, could compromise a marriage, a reputation at school. We were thinking of hypothetical situations not illegal but a drag if someone got a hold of the footage. Like an alcoholic who goes to AA meetings who’s captured going into the building that holds AA meetings, a teenage girl who goes to planned parenthood for birth control or an abortion, and her parents end up seeing the footage because it gets posted to YouTube. Cameras affect people in adverse ways that aren’t necessarily illegal.
MFG: We live in an age where, for example, people are posting images of themselves on FaceBook getting drunk.
Adam Rifkin: Anyone who’s up for any kind of job is being Googled as soon as they walk out of the office, so you’re putting yourself out there in situations that might bite you in the ass in a year, two years…
The film opens in New York and Los Angeles December 14th, in Chicago on December 21st, and other cities in early January.
- Tom Luthman for MoviesForGuys.com, 12/14/2007
