Writing is a totally different brain than directing, at least for me. With writing, you're trying your best to foresee all the problems before they happen. It's more architectural in a weird way.
I would assume that everyone has an experience in their life where they knew something wasn't cool, but even if they sort of removed themselves from it, they didn't totally stop it and become a hero.
The biggest compliments I've gotten have been from people who've seen the film Compliance at festivals and have said, "You know, I fully connected with these people. The movie made me very uncomfortable because I totally can see how this or that situation happened." They're, for lack of a better term, picking up what I was putting down. For me, it's very empowering to feel like we made something interesting.
When I'm directing, I can look at something that I wrote and say, "This doesn't make sense." There's a lot more intuition and gut involved.
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.
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.
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.
