Ben Epstein

The through-line

Ben Epstein's work keeps circling one idea, and he did not name it himself: his wife, also a writer, told him that "a lot of your work has the theme of oh you think you know me but you don't really know me," and his reaction was that he supposed it did, since he writes across genres and formats and that core element survives all of them [11]. He can trace it back to his NYU thesis short The Reunion, made almost twenty years earlier and built on the past coming back to find someone, though he is careful not to claim it was deliberate: it may be something "subconsciously you find interesting" [11]. The emotional seed of Who Are You People is the same recognition arriving from the other direction, the moment at about sixteen when you realise "your parents weren't these omniscient all-knowing beings who just sort of existed to parent me but they were complex people with their own stuff and their own histories" [9][10].

The second constant is a refusal to tell an audience what to conclude. He wants stories that generate argument rather than settle it, and over decades of rewriting he moved steadily away from judgment and towards deliberate ambiguity [11]. "I love movies that ask questions and don't give answers," he says, because "life doesn't always give you easy answers and most people in the world fall into some sort of gray" [9].

On refusing the morality play

The earliest drafts of Who Are You People were, by his own account, "much more of a morality play where a character gets a comeuppance for a misdeed," and he is glad that version never got made [11]. What replaced it is a sharp distinction: about what Carl did, "there's nothing to debate," and the film offers no excuse for it; the live question is "what you do after," once judgment has been passed and people are left with "convenient puzzle pieces that don't always fit in our lives" [11]. He is firm that the director must stay out of it. "When the filmmaker tips their hand it becomes a morality play and I was fairly adamant that this shouldn't be that" [9]. That extends to how he writes even the minor antagonists: Carl's father Beau, painted with a fairly broad brush, still has "his own story and his own reason for being the way he is and his own fears and vulnerabilities" [9]. As a private person he would side with one particular character, but "as a the writer director you can't say that about any of your characters you have to you have to love all of them regardless of what they've done" [11].

The ambiguity is targeted rather than blanket, because he thinks pure open-endedness is cheap: "it can be somewhat of a cop-out to end on ambiguity and just be like well that's life" [11]. Most threads resolve. Alex and her Portland family end up demonstrably better off, with the lines of communication more open, and Carl has let himself out of "this sort of cage of punishment that he thinks he belongs in whether or not he deserves to" [9][11]. What stays undecided is the relationship between the two of them, and the final beat is engineered to hold the contradiction: he says he will let her go, and she does not hang up. "She might hang up one second after the film ends or she might stay on and they might talk for another hour" [9]. He cites the Before Sunrise and Before Sunset films as examples of the device working [9].

On handing the story to the audience

He treats the split reactions the film produces as the point, not a side effect. On set, two crew members came to him separately on the same day, one hoping Alex and Carl would have a relationship afterwards, one unable to see how she could ever get past it, and he agreed with both. "It's a debate but it's not about it's not a moral thing it's an emotional debate" [11]. He is agnostic about the outcome because settling it is not his job [9]. He puts it more strongly still: "I'm not really any more qualified to say what happens to Alex and Carl than anyone watching the movie" [11]. Once characters that have been living in your head take hold in someone else's, "you don't have jurisdiction or control over it anymore," and he regards that loss of control as the whole reward of writing [11]. He wants the film to be a conversation piece and accepts that it may get under people's skin, while insisting "I'm not looking to be deliberately provocative" [9]; his taste runs to "some questions that I'm not qualified to answer" and to films that leave you debating "rather than making points and telling you what to think" [11].

On writing from emotional truth rather than autobiography

The story arrived in a single burst, written out at a coffee shop in New York decades before it was shot, and he set it aside not knowing where it had come from [10]. What made him return to it was the sixteen-year-old recognition about parents, which he judged "a very interesting and Universal feeling" and married to the plot that had appeared from nowhere [10]. He is emphatic that the film is not about his life: "my own biography has absolutely nothing to do with the characters," and his parents are nothing like the ones on screen, but the emotional reality is his [9][10]. Structurally he worked backwards from the twist that lands about two thirds in, and he wanted the whole film anchored in Alex's subjective experience, so that "a literal mystery" informs "your emotional one" [9]. He places it firmly in the small character-driven drama tradition alongside Ordinary People, You Can Count on Me and Lady Bird, allowing that having written mysteries and thrillers he drew on some of those tools, but "this is pretty much playing in the uh Coming of Age drama box" [9].

On carrying a script for twenty years

Who Are You People is the project he "carried around with me hoping to get it made," and he thinks it improved because it went unmade for so long: comparing the first draft to the shooting script, it is "the same shape the same like spine same voice" but not a scene is quite unchanged [10]. He borrows an analogy from a singer friend who still performs songs he wrote at twenty-one and says he has grown into them: "it's the same with me in the story I felt like I kind of grew into this story," and he is grateful the earlier version was not the one shot, even though at the time he was impatient to be on set [10]. He is honest that the hit rate is low. When you write, "you hope that what you write feels true and sometimes it doesn't," and he has written plenty since that did not stick with him the way this did [10]. The road to production was a series of near misses: actors attached to Carl and to Alex who dropped off, money that came and went, a movie "almost about to get made for a while and then kind of kept falling apart" [11].

On casting, and on directing as handing over ownership

He chased Devon Sawa personally. Told the actor liked the script and then that he was passing over availability, his reaction was that this was "not acceptable," so he sent a direct message on Instagram asking to plead his case, got a FaceTime, and talked about his vision of the character until the answer turned to yes [11]. What he wanted from that performance was courage rather than sympathy: Sawa "allows a character who most actors wouldn't deem worthy of being likable" to have "dignity and humanity," which is what makes the audience feel Alex's love and then her betrayal [11][9]. On Ema Horvath, who is in almost every scene, he wanted an actress the audience stays with even when Alex is behaving badly, and describes her as technically superb and electrifying, with a theatre background rather than a dabbler's approach; her read on the character was that "she's very smart intellectually but emotionally I think she has some growing up to do," which is why Alex keeps pushing where a more reasonable person would back off [9]. Alyssa Milano, who is also an executive producer, brought instincts he trusted immediately, flagging a line about Judith that was bugging her and being "completely right"; having started as a child, "her instincts are just so sharp" [9]. He found little difference between directing the younger and the veteran actors on this film, since the younger ones were themselves experienced, though he notes that has not been true on other projects [9].

His account of the job itself is about transfer of ownership. The director's primary task is to communicate what the film should look and feel like and what kind of performances he wants, but with actors "you're handing ownership of the character to that actor," so the shared understanding has to be established first [10]. Get that right and they surprise you, bringing aspects he did not know were there and making scenes pop in ways he did not know they could [10]. Peter's suggestion about the choreography of the fight at the end changed the scene for the better, and he is glad the actor spoke up [10].

On prep, intention and working without money

His practical method is to arrive knowing the answer to one question. "What's the intention of the scene what's the intention of the moment what's the intention of the shot," because if that is settled you can absorb an impossible camera angle or an actor who wants to play anger where you imagined quiet [10]. Having lived with the material for so long meant that when an actor asked what they were doing in a scene, "I never had to search for an answer" [10]. On a small independent film with three takes and no rain machine, he argues that the crew's care and attention is "more important on some level than the money," because everyone present chose to be there on the strength of the script or the people [10]. The daily reality was cold and wet: the climax in the scrapyard was shot at the end of the first week, late and freezing, with rain he had cut from the script arriving anyway, which he took as a gift on camera and a misery on the ground [10]. The compensating pleasure is craft trickery, like the early dinner scene shot at three in the afternoon with the blinds shut, Carl shrouded and Alex in the spotlight, a longer lens and a faster camera move making it land: "that's the kind of the magic of the process" [10].

On what to leave off screen, and on cutting

He made an early decision not to shoot flashbacks to the backstory, and his stated model is The Silence of the Lambs, where the lamb monologue is never visualised because the telling of it is stronger [10]. Devon Sawa telling the story of the night everything happened, with the camera slowly pushing in, was meant to work the same way, and there was a practical argument too, since de-aging the actors seventeen or eighteen years would have cost a location he did not have [10]. In the edit his principle was to lose connective tissue rather than substance. The first assembly ran two hours and two minutes; the finished film is one hour and forty-three, and what went was "shoe leather," including a driving scene that "feels cheap" once cut down, and scenes replaced by a single line of ADR to convey information [10]. He is clear that "we didn't cut out anything that was essential," and that the shortened film neither drags nor rushes [10].

On religion without preaching

He describes himself as Jewish, culturally very in touch with that part of himself, going to synagogue sometimes, but not a particularly religious person [11]. That makes his handling of faith in the film deliberate: it is "obviously not a faith-based movie," and he was conscious of "trying to be respectful of it without acting like an advertisement" [11]. He reads Carl's line about the Puritans convincing themselves they were saved as self-description, a man who was to some degree trying to fake belief until he had it, which is why Alex tells Sarah he just wants to believe it [11]. He also refused to condescend to Sarah, whose faith he thinks informs everything she does, including taking Carl in and trying to help him, while probably also filling a hole in her life that is a little sad [11].

On moving between features and television

He works in both and treats the switching as normal. He created and ran two seasons of In the Vault for Crackle and directed some episodes, a college-set murder mystery he calls a thriller and suspense piece, deliberately a different genre from Who Are You People [10][11]. He then worked on a Netflix series based on existing IP that he was not allowed to discuss [9][11]. Beyond that he keeps several projects at different stages at once, screenplays finished and unfinished, one a producer is circling, a pilot going out, and describes the state of play frankly as things he cannot talk about yet [9][11]. He had a baby around the film's release and called it the first real breather of his professional life, with his immediate future given over to changing diapers before getting a next feature moving [9][11]. His enthusiasm as a viewer runs to television as well: he has recommended The Leftovers [2], and Happyland, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics [7].

Takeaways

• He rewrote Who Are You People away from being "much more of a morality play where a character gets a comeuppance" and towards deliberate ambiguity, because the interesting question is not the misdeed but "what you do after" judgment has been passed [11].
• He keeps his own view out of the film on principle: "when the filmmaker tips their hand it becomes a morality play" [9], and as a writer director "you have to love all of them regardless of what they've done" [11].
• Ambiguity has limits for him; most story threads resolve, and only the future of the central relationship is left open, because ending on pure open-endedness "can be somewhat of a cop-out" [11].
• The film's emotional source is the realisation at sixteen that parents are "complex people with their own stuff," a universal feeling he insists is nothing to do with his own biography [9][10].
• Two decades of unmade drafts improved the script: same shape, spine and voice, every scene different, and "I felt like I kind of grew into this story" [10].
• He got Devon Sawa by direct-messaging him on Instagram after a pass, and values the performance for giving "dignity and humanity" to a character most actors would not deem worthy of being likable [11].
• On set his single organising question is intention, scene by scene and shot by shot, which is what lets a low-budget shoot adapt when an angle or a performance choice changes [10].
• He cut the film from a two-hour assembly to 1:43 by removing "shoe leather" and replacing whole scenes with lines of ADR, and shot no backstory flashbacks on the Silence of the Lambs principle that the telling beats the showing [10].