Whose side are you on?
That’s the essential question in director Zal Batmanglij and co-writer/star Brit Marling’s new film The East. But in a story where corporations are creating environmental and inhumane disasters and the anarcho/eco-warriors banded against them aren’t exactly playing fair either, it’s increasingly hard to figure out who are the “good guys” and the “bad guys.” No one is right. The drama lives in the gray areas. So, too, did the making of the film.
Back in the summer of 2009 Marling and Batmanglij, both aspiring filmmakers fairly recently graduated from Georgetown University, decided to test their boundaries by going on a cross-country journey. But instead of riding Greyhound and staying in hotels, they slept in reclaimed urban spaces, learned to train-hop and ride-share to get around, fell in with anarchist and freegan circles, and – perhaps the hardest hurdle for them to clear – learned to feed themselves by dumpster-diving.
“Everything starts out very ‘other’ – when somebody starts talking about dumpster-diving or when you even watch it happen you’re like, ‘Ugh, do I really want to be in a dumpster?’ And then you do it and you realize that there’s all this good food that’s just being thrown away,” Marling said in an interview with Wired. “Dumpster-diving becomes a metaphor for everything, for these glitches in the system where it becomes very obvious that parts of it are broken or not working well.”
The pair returned to Los Angeles knowing that they wanted to continue pursuing filmmaking, but they’d have to do it by what Marling calls “scavenger filmmaking.” Eventually, their dumpster-diving, train-riding and experiences living off the grid would all find their way into The East but it would take almost four years for that to happen. First, Marling made the sci-fi drama Another Earth with their friend director Mike Cahill and the pair wrote and made the time-travel tinged cult thriller Sound of My Voice, which got picked up by Fox Searchlight – the studio that would eventually back The East‘s $6.5 million budget and allow them to make their suspense-thriller set in the world of anarchist collectives.
Within The East, opening Friday, there is an eco-activist group called The East that takes on a series of actions – they call them “jams” – against pharmaceutical and oil corporations that they feel are ruining the Earth. Sarah (played by Marling) is tasked by her private intelligence firm with infiltrating the group in an attempt to end its actions but slowly finds herself growing sympathetic to their cause. Throughout the film who is “right” or “wrong” is constantly up for debate – is threatening the health of the head of a big pharma company with a dangerous drug any better or worse than being the head of a big pharma company? – and, smartly, no real answer is given.
To complicate the issue, there are also two of the members of the fictional East – Benji (Alexander Skarsgård) and Izzy (Ellen Page) – who come from wealthy families and whose sense of entitlement about their revolution underscore what it means to have privilege and what it means to give it up. The filmmakers say this last point wasn’t intentional, but in an interview prior to a recent screening of the film in Berkeley, Batmanglij does note, “No one dives a dumpster like a rich kid dives a dumpster, because there’s no shame.”
The East stars Ellen Page and Alexander Skarsgård as members of an anarchist collective. Photo: Myles Aronowitz/Fox SearchlightEven though the film was inspired by events that happened almost four years ago, it couldn’t feel more prescient to the current political landscape, largely because the messes the U.S. is cleaning up now – the Gulf oil spill, the financial crisis that began in 2007 – were very much happening while Batmanglij and Marling were working on their script. And the Anonymous-eque internet activism the East does is still very much going on. Going into production on the film, Marling noted during a Q&A following the film’s showing at South By Southwest, the filmmakers very much “felt like we were sort of catching the tiger’s tail” politically-speaking.
“This was all before Occupy Wall Street, too,” Marling told Wired. “We were writing the script when we wrote that oil spill jam that opens the film and then a week or two later the BP oil spill happened and we were like, ‘Oh yeah, we’ve gotta write this film and get it out, we’re onto something.'”
However, being onto something and writing a good suspense-thriller about current events can be two very different things. For the most part – despite the fact that its protagonists clearly have anti-corporate agendas – The East avoids getting too preachy by keeping the action focused on whether or not Sarah is actually getting sucked into the group she’s supposed to be infiltrating or simply doing a very good job of going undercover. It also doesn’t portray its activists as saints or people who aren’t just out to grind a personal axe, something Batmanglij said has lead to frustration from some activists. “But for me personal is political and the political is personal. For me, I like that part of it,” he said.
“When I saw Zal and Brit they said, ‘We want to do both. We want to make a movie that’s about something and that’s entertaining and a lot of people want to see it,” said Michael Costigan, the man who met the pair at Sundance and subsequently helped produced their next project. “To kind of subvert from within is the most radical way to do it.”
Considering it was financed by 20th Century Fox, the film manages to subvert from within in more ways than one, and if you ask Batmanglij about getting funding from the parent company of Fox News to make a political activist thriller, his answer is swift. “If you want to make an anarchist film, make it with a corporation,” he said. “[If] you want experience collectivism – go into the corporate system.” Case in point: the film’s product placement. Throughout the movie there are many shout outs to specific products like Dunkin’ Donuts and McDonald’s, but it was getting a news clip from Fox that took some creative work.
“Fox News has a policy – even for Fox movies – that they will never give [permission],” Batmanglij said. “Then I had this epiphany. I grew up watching Fox local news long before Fox News the cable network. I was like, ‘What if we just call D.C. and we call a local affiliate and say, ‘Can we use your thing?’ And they said, ‘yes.’ The beauty of corporate filmmaking is once the legal work had been done – the truth is it should probably go high up the News Corp. chain but it didn’t have to – once we had permission we were in.”
In then end, for all of its disrupt-from-within ideology and The Bourne Identity-amongst-the-99-percent storyline, The East offers no answers. Even as the final credits roll, it’s hard to determine who, if anyone, comes out looking good. Or which side viewers are expected to take. But for the filmmakers, that was essential.
“I think we were interested in using the film to discuss a lot of things,” Batmanglij said. “Like in Sound of My Voice we were discussing faith and reason. Whether I’m a believer or a skeptic doesn’t really matter. What matters is I’m very fascinated by those to things and I wanted to explore them. It’s the same thing in The East.”
