Strange as it sounds, writer/director Zal Batmanglij and writer/actress Brit Marling (Sound of My Voice) actually lived like the nomads portrayed in their latest collaboration – including foraging food from trash cans – but not as preparation for The East. They did it before they had any idea one of their upcoming films would be about a group of environmental anarchists who attempt to strike back at corporations abusing the environment. And in our exclusive interview in support of Fox Searchlight’s The East opening in theaters on May 31, 2013, Batmanglij gives us a look behind-the-scenes at the captivating thriller which explores important, timely issues:
You and Brit went off the grid before you even wanted to do this film. Why did you do that?
Zal Batmanglij: “Well, we’d hit a wall. We’d moved out to Los Angeles so that I could go to film school and so that Brit could pursue an acting career. I graduated with an MFA [Master of Fine Art] in directing, but no gives you a directing job.
Brit had been pounding the pavement trying to break into acting but that didn’t work either. We felt that we were broke. We didn’t know what we were going to do with our lives and we thought, ‘Let’s just go out and have an adventure. Let’s go live a little bit – stop trying so hard and start living.”
But going completely off the grid isn’t just going out and having an adventure. That’s putting everything about your life on hold or abandoning it.
Zal Batmanglij: “Well we didn’t have any money so we couldn’t go somewhere fancy. We couldn’t even go backpack in Asia or Europe or anything. I guess the hardest part was I was probably 28, and taking 28 years of what you know as normal – which is that food in a dumpster is waste, right? – then the hard part is just changing the perception. All you have to do is to tell yourself it’s not waste and that it’s bounty.”
Wow.
Zal Batmanglij: “I know, that was my reaction too.”
What does it take to get into that mindset? I can’t imagine physically going into a trashcan and digging out food.
Zal Batmanglij: “Yeah, but once you learn how to go into it, you realize a dumpster in a grocery store is not filled with rotten eggs or anything, right? It’s filled with packaged food that has to be thrown out; it’s got a date on it. But that packaged food, there’s all this bread, there’s produce, there’s all this bounty. You learn how to pick the lock and then you throw it open.
Of course, we didn’t do this by ourselves. We did this with people who had been doing this for years and had been trained themselves by people older than them and now we were being trained. You go in there and you get that food. You bring the food back in garbage bags or in crates, or whatever, back to the house. We were staying in a squat. Another group of people makes a meal – usually a vegan meal – out of this food and all of a sudden you have lunch. And you know what? A lot of these squats were in bad parts of town. There were kids living in those communities who either their parents were missing or working or were not of sound minds, so the kids were going hungry. All these groups, almost every group we were with invited the local community in and when you see a kid like that eat even the simplest thing, even like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich made from the dumpster, you can no longer roll your eyes. I could no longer roll my eyes.”
How do you go back to what we call ‘normal’ life after that?
Zal Batmanglij: “It actually took much longer to re-acclimate then it did to acclimate. It was hard. For months it was hard.”
Why did you give that up?
Zal Batmanglij: “Well, we felt that we wanted to come back and make movies. We didn’t fully give it up. A part of it lives inside of you, but we also wanted to come back and share with people our experiences.”
You didn’t do it in in the first place for a script?
Zal Batmanglij: “No, no, no. No.”
So how much of that, what you actually did off the grid, wound up in the script? Are there people you met that are incorporated into The East?
Zal Batmanglij: “No. I think it’s more the color, the texture… The spin the bottle scene is, but I think it’s more color and texture, and the world. I mean, we wrote Sound Of My Voice first and then wrote The East because we couldn’t shake that experience.”
It seems like The East would be the first one that you would do because you were right there in that world. It’s so immediate.
Zal Batmanglij: “No, we came to make another movie first.”
How does the collaboration work with you and Brit, who’s the co-writer and also the star?
Zal Batmanglij: “Now I think we have it nicely oiled. We are in the trenches together when we are writing. We’re literally partners. There’s nobody else. It’s just us, and we’re very much in it together. Then the next phase, phase two, is trying to get the movie financed, which is a very hard phase. That’s like pushing a boulder up hill, so we’re really using a physicality to try to get this thing made. Then, we’ve been lucky there. We’ve twice had the boulder over the hill and start going down and our movies have been greenlit. At that point Brit goes to do the considerable homework of preparing to play Maggie or Sarah, and I go to work on my crew to prepare to direct the movie – you know, with the production design, and the DP, and all the great people on this movie. And we meet back up on set, but we meet as very different positions. She’s an actress and I’m the director and so we never talk about writing when we’re on set.”
Does she change her lines when she’s on set?
Zal Batmanglij: “I always tell all the actors to change their own lines.”
How flexible are you?
Zal Batmanglij: “Very. I like what Woody Allen says, which is, ‘Make it just sound real.’ I don’t care.”
How tough was getting financing on this because of the subject matter?
Zal Batmanglij: “This was incredibly easy, because Fox bought Sound Of My Voice and they read The East and wanted to make it. We just had to decide that it was okay to make it with them.”
So how difficult was the decision to make the deal with Fox?
Zal Batmanglij: “When you look at it from a macro lens it seems like strange bed fellows, but when you meet the people who work at Searchlight…and that’s the important thing to remember about corporations is that they are actual groups of people, real people… and when you meet those people and they’re so passionate about the material, it’s hard not to be seduced.”
Did they have any input? Did they say, “No you can’t push it this far. You can’t do that.”
Zal Batmanglij: “Sure, I mean we made it together. It’s what happens when you make a movie with a studio. It would be naive to say they weren’t involved in it. It was a solid collaboration. I learned a lot.”
Brit and Alexander Skarsgard have terrific chemistry onscreen. Did you know it as soon as you saw them together?
Zal Batmanglij: “No, and I wish I’d taken more advantage of it when we were shooting because I didn’t realize they have such chemistry. If you see them in real life, they have such chemistry.”
Calling on your own experience off the grid, is there anything you knew absolutely had to get in front of the audience while realizing you couldn’t hammer home your point?
Zal Batmanglij: “That’s a very intellectual approach and I wish I thought like that, I just went with what was my experience of traveling and experiencing different groups and also just once you get the pieces moving, they kind of move their own way. You can’t really move them. It’s like, it was so clear Sarah didn’t know what to do with the spoons and the soup – and that’s just that. I wish that she hadn’t been so selfish but she just is, that’s who she is.”
Was that dinner scene with the soup based on a true event?
Zal Batmanglij: “That’s based on a parable that heaven and hell are the same thing. They’re both banquets with people chained. There are long spoons and in hell everybody is reaching for the food but they can’t reach it and they’re suffering and they’re starving, and in heaven everybody’s feeding each other.”
What do you hope audiences are going to walk away thinking?
Zal Batmanglij: “I don’t know. I just hope that they just walk away thinking. You know, I think this movie is a thriller and it’s entertaining and a lot of people say that it keeps them at the edge of their seat, which I’m really glad about. But can it be that and also spark conversations? Get people to talk to each other about things? Just me talking to you about food waste in a dumpster, I can see that you were seeing a new perspective now.”
I do see that differently. I’m not going to try it, but I could see myself doing it. I love the fact that you impacted the people in the community that needed the help. I hadn’t thought about that aspect of it.
Zal Batmanglij: “Yeah, there’s a lot of waste.”
-By Rebecca Murray
Follow Us On:
