Written by actress Brit Marling and director Zal Batmanglij, “The East" is a brand new indie film starring Brit Marling, Alexander Skarsgard and Ellen Page. Marling plays an FBI agent that goes undercover in order to infiltrate the eco-terrorist/anarchist group, “The East.”
Things begin to get complicated when Marling’s character, Sarah, falls in love with the leader of the group, Benji, played by Skarsgard. The group of anarchists live with an “eye for an eye” policy against corporate America. The drama puts into question the issue of capitalism and how far is too far — a representation of corporate America.
The State Press had the opportunity to sit down with both Batmanglij and Marling about the film and their inspiration behind it.
State Press: “The East” seems to be a twist of “Into the Wild” and an action movie. Was that your intention?
Zal Batmanglij: I love “Into the Wild," but I don’t think we were inspired by that. “Into the Wild” deals with the idea of burning money. We had spent a summer living kind of like the kid from “Into the Wild” who is traveling America.
SP: Both of you did (Marling and Batmanglij). How was that?
Brit Marling: It was intense. I mean, it was exciting and transforming (laughs).
ZB: Life-changing.
SP: There’s a term for that. It’s called "freeganism"? I am not really familiar with it.
BM: I had read a little bit about it, this was the summer of 2009, and Zal was just out of film school, and I was struggling to find a way to act that didn’t involve moral bankruptcy. We were having a difficult time making a sense of the system of film making and more broadly, how things were working in the world, and we were interested in how young people were searching out these alternative lives. We hit the road, and we learned how to train hop, and we lived on organic farms and freegan collectives. The idea of freeganism is basically sort of living off the grain of capitalism. The idea is to take everything that this culture wastes and turn it into the abundance it is; we learned to dumpster dive. We realized that perfectly good apples and bread that is packaged and fine is just behind the store in this blue box, for free, waiting for anyone to come eat it if they know how to get the lock. You learn to do that, and then you share that food with people in your community and families who are having a hard time feeding their kids, and you realize that there are a lot of things that aren’t working really well in the system. A couple years later, we were still trying to make sense of it, and so we tried to write about it and format an espionage movie.
SP: So is that what you brought into the film? The idea that capitalism is a bad thing when taken to extremes?
ZB: It’s murky; when everything becomes about making a profit, and not about kindness, then it gets really dark and gets confusing. I think we live in a really morally great time, so we were interested in how a thriller is a great way to explore the moral murkiness.
SP: How did you make this work with a budget of $6.5 million. The film did not look like an indie; how were you able to make that budget work? It’s mind-boggling.
BM: It’s mind-boggling to me, too, and it’s hard to say. I would look at the call sheet every day, and I would see how many scenes we had to shoot that day and epic things like, surgery, where you’re trying to save someone’s life and the raiding of the first corporation. Zal somehow managed to pull off these miraculous days every day. I knew, of course, since we were making films in college that he’s an amazing filmmaker, but on set, every day my mind was consistently blown. Which is a cool thing when your friend and creative partner just exceeds your wildest expectations. It was miraculous what he would pull off and all the while, insulating the actors from the stress and pressure of shooting a movie that had two months in 25 days. The actors never felt that we were in this bubble of, “We have time, and let’s do it again!”
SP: How did you get into character? Did you find it hard or did you take away from that summer?
BM: I don’t think any of the characters came from that summer. They were all just out of our imagination, but Sarah was hard to figure out. I don’t have that much in common with her, and so it was a new space to try to navigate. She’s very physical, and so I actually used training. One way to enter a character is to enter that character through their body instead of through their brain.
SP: How did you come up with the screenplay idea?
ZB: We just like to tell each other stories, and let’s take a scene for example. There is a scene where she and a bunch of people, freegans, get thrown off a train by the train police and because she defends her friend — a boy wearing lipstick — he gets beat up even more.
ZB: Exactly! We wanted to show espionage, but rather than something big like in the “Bourne Supremacy,” in a small way where we can all be resourceful, where we don’t need giant weapons or electronics and that we need our brains and our minds. I remember filming that thing, where she takes the paperclip off her tongue, and that’s how we write. She does that, and I am impressed by that, and we feed off each other.
SP: I'm wondering about the name “The East.” I read that there is the east-New York and then there is a parallel with the Middle East. That is such a creative idea.
BM: Zal comes up with the best titles. He appeared with it one day and he tells me them and then it sticks. But this one, “The East," I like in particular because of what you said: It’s from New England, and it is seen as a place of power. It is also a reference to the East and the Far East, and its philosophies and ideas in a juxtaposition of the West and it is also the idea of the compass. She sees this compass in someone’s van, and when she sees the compass she knows that the kid driving the van is from the East. It is also a reference to how the film has a lot about the moral gray zone of our time and about how it is hard to navigate that. Sarah is on a journey where she resets her compass and so there is the idea of that changing direction and her morality.
“The East," debuted at the 2013 Sundance film festival. It will debut in select theaters across America on May 31, 2013.
Reach reporter at rlopez20@asu.edu or follow on Twitter @rosielopez14
