Days after the release of his latest film Infamous, writer/director Joshua Caldwell spoke with me about his modern-day Bonnie and Clyde story. The film, starring Bella Thorne and Jake Manley, focuses on the crimes which aren’t about the money, but rather the fame that comes with being a social media influencer. In the film, Arielle (Thorne) is consumed with the currency of likes and follows, and brings new boyfriend Dean (Manley) along for the perilous ride.
Caldwell talked to me in depth about his inspiration for the film including the clear elements of satire which are present throughout, and serve as a sort of social commentary about where we are headed. He also spoke about how Thorne, who has her own large social media following, became involved in the project, and the non-traditional love triangle her character develops. Ultimately, he made a fun and stylish film which poses some very interesting questions, and wonders if this were happening in real life, would you be following?
With everything being a little less traditional right now, how did you celebrate its release?
Joshua Caldwell: I live in upstate New York, and actually my wife and I went into Pennsylvania which was the closest drive-in and saw it on a big screen at Circle Drive-In near Scranton, PA. It was fun, it was cool, I had seen it, but its not quite the same as seeing it on a 100-foot screen outdoors which was a treat.
I’ve seen that it has been selling out at a lot of those drive-ins.
Joshua Caldwell: It’s been fascinating, it feels like a good movie for a drive in, but the fact that drive ins are feeling this huge resurgence even in talking to the manager of Circle Drive In, they are super excited man, they have been seeing a lot of people coming out to watch movies which is great.
When did the idea for Infamous first come to you, and was it inspired by anything in particular?
Joshua Caldwell: The idea came to me in the Summer of 2016, a couple things had happened. I had just released a movie called Be Somebody, which was made with this young influencer named Matt Espinosa. I sort of got a little bit of a glimpse into that world of influencers. He was somebody that prior to making the movie I had never heard of, and so then to understand that there are 20 million people following him across multiple channels was interesting. Then you get a glimpse into the psyche of it. I had been wanting to get back to the thriller, action and drama genres, and I was interested in trying to come up with a heist movie.
In the process of researching that, at some point I got tuned into Bonnie and Clyde, and several years prior to that I had seen a photograph posted online of this young woman and her boyfriend who was being led away by the cops. They were a really good-looking couple and she was smiling at him seductively and leaning in for a kiss, and the media at the time dubbed them like this kind of new Bonnie and Clyde, and I sort of tucked that in and forgot about it. Then later, that picture popped back into my head and I thought, obviously there are movies done in this vain and I don’t want to do a Bonnie and Clyde movie, but what is a modern version of that?
Everything sort of swirled together in this idea of social media, and I became kind of interested in the intersection of social media celebrity and its currency of likes and follows and with violence and crime, because America has always been fascinated by crime and criminals. Local news even to this day is full of it, because it sells, and the movie Nightcrawler was a good example of that.
So, it just felt like that was a natural if not inevitable fit with the pursuit of fame at all costs, and with outlaws being the original celebrities. The framework of committing crime in order to get likes and followers and build celebrity was totally ridiculous and I’m aware of that, but also not that far fetched at the same time. It used to be that there were gatekeepers like newspapers and even television producers would be the ones making the decisions on who got press and who didn’t, but that is all gone now.
With nothing more than a phone, anyone and everyone has the ability to create and reach an audience in the tens of millions of people if not more, and that’s evident from so many people that are not actors, musicians, or whatever and yet they have massive followings. In order to do that, they never have to step beyond the phone and they never have to come out from behind it, and so I was really fascinated with that collision of celebrity and crime and I wanted to explore it in the most extreme way, which in some ways doesn’t feel all that extreme anymore.
It’s interesting that, like you said, you are making a heist film but this might be the only one I can think of where money isn’t the motivating factor and there is even a line towards the end where the character Kyle (Michael Sirow) tells them if they had all of their followers give them a dollar they won’t have to rob dispensaries anymore…
Joshua Caldwell: Exactly, and there is the scene where the couple is arguing and Dean is explaining that they have enough money, and Arielle is screaming that its not about the f—–g money Dean, and that’s the thing, it isn’t about the money. I remember reading an article that came out a few years ago about social media influencers, and in the story there was a woman that had 70 thousand followers but there was an issue with her being able to hold and maintain a job right, and now that amount of followers is almost nothing, I mean its way more than I have but not today in the grand scheme of things.
The challenge is, you have all of these followers not giving you any money so is that the worth? It’s that the value is a really weird sort of thing in this day in age, and that’s why I think of it as this new currency because for a lot of people their value and their worth is determined by how many people follow them and how many likes their posts get, so much so that Instagram went in and made a change to adjust for that. It’s a very weird world, but I also didn’t want to make something that was like, let’s sit back objectively and judge them from afar experience. I really wanted to make it a subjective experience, I wanted anybody watching to feel like they were watching Arielle’s Instagram feed, that they were being treated to this subjective experience of what she was going through and they were being treated to it in a way that she wanted them to experience it. So that was also really the challenge, and really the goal was to not make it judgmental from the position of, oh look at how terrible these people are, but just be like, this is just it, and whether you are hate following or you love it, it doesn’t really matter because you have already contributed to the overall metric.
Absolutely, and as you talked about, my viewing experience did seem like it was always crafted by Arielle’s social media stories, and with that it did seem like she was always on the screen, even when Dean was talking with Elle (Amber Riley), you still see that she’s listening just outside of the room. How did that structure how you went about filming?
Joshua Caldwell: She’s always present right. What I wanted to do was to take elements that audiences are familiar with in the world of media, the way that they consume media the way that they are treated to media, so I wanted to make something that was cinematic, but also leant itself a little more to that gonzo journalism sort of feel. I think that we see that in a lot of these day in the life blogs, where you are very much treated to this first-person experience. I didn’t want to have it like she was holding the camera, but I wanted it to feel like she hired someone to shoot it as they went along.
So, a lot of handheld, a lot of movement using super long takes in the way that you would record iPhone stuff, not shooting multiple angles of things on an iPhone, you are shooting from just that one angle and moving around to get it and you just keep rolling. The idea of her addressing the camera, I didn’t want it to be something that happened throughout the movie. I didn’t want it to be too literal, I didn’t want to set up a framework where you are being told this story by her, and that you are seeing it from her, so it induced for us a sense of subjective.
I operated the camera for 99% of it, so I could channel my inner 17 year old girl so that I could feel what she was feeling but I wanted it to feel grounded to her experience, but that also allowed us find uses for a lot of the cell phone footage which we actually shot on iPhones. I didn’t want to do the thing where you shoot on a really good camera and then make it look like a cell phone camera, because that always looks so fake. I wanted it to be actual iPhone stuff. Now the secret to that is that it allowed us from a filmmaking perspective to really expand the amount of material that we had to work with.
We gave Bella a phone every day, the phone that she’s using in the movie, I just told her take as many selfies, take as many videos, take whatever you want and just fill that with stuff. Then I’d do the same thing driving to and from set, just filming out of my car window and getting sunsets and bridges and highways, because all that stuff you are never going to be able to shoot that on a traditional camera with the time that we had but it allowed us to capture a lot of material that felt like a natural fit within the film and broadens the scope of the movie because it is a road movie, and so often those types of movies feel like you shot it all in the same area, which we kind of did but we did want to give it an expansive feeling of movement and energy throughout the movie.
The other aspect of that, in my discussion with Eve [Cohen] my cinematographer, was not wanting to make some kind of dark, everything is blue or orange type of movie. From the beginning this was about saturation, bright color and really infusing this idea that everything is being seen through a filter the audience is so familiar with. What gets attention online is that stuff that is really bright, really poppy and catches your eye, and since this is Arielle’s world, I really wanted the visuals to compliment that, and feel saccharine and bubble gummy because I think this is how she would see it. That then extends into everything else, it extends to the production design, the wardrobe and you can see it all the way through the color sections in post.
There are certainly elements of satire present throughout, with characters that are heading to Hollywood when traditionally they should be trying to flee the country and with the ending of the film especially…
Joshua Caldwell: It’s total satire, this film doesn’t work if it’s not satire. I didn’t want to make something like, this is serious, this is Heat but with social media right, because it just doesn’t work, it never would have worked. The notion is that, to your point its not so much here is a realistic portrayal of this, it’s more like a really whacky bat shit crazy version of this which is trying to sort of say, “where are we going” which by the way just recently there was an influencer charged for filming while looking was going on inside a mall.
We are not far from this, and I frankly with everything going on in the world, with politicians using social media, when we live in a fantasy land where everyone is entitled to their own little world, the idea that this might occur, I don’t think is so far fetched because you can imagine these social media companies which already do it with some of the content being put online, are saying we aren’t going to police this and who are we to say what a crime is, we aren’t law enforcement, who are we to say that this is a crime? We are going to leave it up, because people are watching it, and I think people would be into it.
I think if this were to happen in real life, everyone would be watching it, and the reason I think that is because it’s already happened. When the entire world is tuning into social media to find out if a woman is going to be fired when her plane lands for a tweet that she made, that’s the world that this movie exists in, and I think that it has to be satire, and its intentionally ridiculous. The idea that they won’t get caught or sought out at some point, I think that made a much broader comment on the way in which we anoint people on this platform and give them a voice, whether that’s through hate following, retweeting something that’s stupid or inflammatory or whatever, all you are doing is contributing to the overall value of that persons account, because its not a qualitative thing, its quantitative. 80 million followers means 80 million followers even if half of those are fake, that’s irrelevant. That’s the world that I wanted to address and I just wanted to do it in an extreme and batshit crazy way that isn’t about subtlety, it’s not about having a sympathetic understanding of who these people are, because you don’t do that in real life.
The people we follow online, we couldn’t care less what their backstory is, we want to see what they are doing, how they are doing it, and demand that they do it more to justify our engagement with them. So that was really interesting to me, to take that side of it and say I’m going to throw you in with this woman, she’s going to go nuts and you may hate the experience of watching this, you might love the experience of watching this, but at the end of the day I’m going to take you through her journey and by the end you will have come full circle into the illusion of what it means to have value in this world anymore, and that is incapsulated by the ending which I am fully aware is insane and ridiculous, but the idea is that she wins and what she gains from it is what I wanted you to come out of it with. This is what it would be, and she doesn’t care who she’s killed and what she’s done because that doesn’t factor in to the end result. She’s an extreme character, a very extreme character and that’s intentional.
There are two love stories that are happening on screen, Dean’s love for Arielle which seems real, but then her love of fame. Did you set out to stray from a traditional love story for the couple, since it doesn’t seem like it is mutual?
Joshua Caldwell: It’s absolutely a love triangle between Dean, her and her followers, and as we went into production we intentionally explored that with her and her phone and having the phone interrupt what’s going on with them, because that’s what is happening in relationships all the time. Studies have shown that even the act of having a phone on the table can impact the relationship and engagement with the person you are sitting across from, and so its absolutely intentional and the explanation of it is really interesting because she is sort of feeding off of both because at the end of the day ***SPOILER ALERT*** when Dean dies, I was like, she’s going to go right to her phone. She’s going to go to the thing that ultimately, she cares about and wins out at the end. You needed to feel like there was something between them, but that over time the audience and the fuel that she was getting from that, was going to be the thing that takes over, and it’s nice to see that some people have picked up on that.
While there may not be many redeeming qualities for the couple in the send half of the film, at least early on so much depends on the chemistry that they have, so I’m curious how Bella Thorne and Jake Manley came to the project? Is it purely coincidence that someone like Bella has such a huge social media presence?
Joshua Caldwell: It wasn’t so much a coincidence, as she was someone that I thought of very early on in the process when I was writing it. I was writing an extremely unsympathetic character, because I was interested in exploring that, but I knew that was going to be a challenge for people. So many people are worried about their image, about the roles they are playing, but with Bella I had seen her play roles that really went against what you may think of someone trying to be protective of their image and so I thought of her as someone that might embrace it. We got her involved through my Producer (Scott Levenson) who knew her manager and at the time she was looking for projects from a young writer/director and wanted to do stuff that was really aggressive and different and fun, and she read the script and she loved it and we hopped on the phone and she came on board after we talked.
She came on about a year before we actually started shooting, so the advantage to that was that we got to spend a lot of time really developing this character and really understanding each other, and also I said to her, “you know this world,” she’s a writer, she’s a director, she’s a performer, she’s a creative artist, so I wanted her input from the beginning, on this character, on the world, I wanted to make it a collaboration, and it really was. Even the idea of the way that we took the comment element from the social media aspect of the movie, I didn’t want to show them the way that you normally would see them from an Instagram post, because I thought it would be boring and also they would never let us do it. She actually suggested the full screen, in your face, running through, bright color aspect to them because she said that’s what it feels like. When you are looking at comments on your social media, it feels aggressive whether it is positive or negative, and it fills your vision.
So, we wanted to treat the audience to the same psychological aspect of it and engage with them and make them feel something about it that they wouldn’t feel if you were just seeing the comments. So that collaboration really let to some fun stuff and of course I think she’s fantastic in the movie. She’s psycho and delusional and she walks that line of making you fall in love with her in one scene and then hating her guts in the next scene, and I don’t think that’s easy to do. Jake came on closer to production, and he really came in saying, “I’ve never played a role like this before and I’m all in” and that really extended to both of them into not only the development of the character but also with the gun training, getting them on a range and getting them used to using automatic rifles, handguns and having them familiar with that, and Jake bought into that from the beginning. It was a really great experience in that they saw what they needed to see on the page and then after that it was just about letting them play, and in the case of Bella always letting her go as far as she wanted to because I thought there was never a bad version of that to me.
That’s interesting and that’s actually what I was going to ask about, with you being the writer and director of this, how important was it for you to try and film what you had on the page originally versus finding yourself making changes on the fly and encouraging your actors to try things as well?
Joshua Caldwell: I’m not that protective of dialogue and those kinds of things, you know there will be certain times where a line its conveying a point, but the advantage to this was that I’m able to instill the DNA of the movie the way in which I was ultimately going to shoot it, and so that was in there and the presence of that was in there. The result though, and what I’m trying to lay the groundwork for is something as a jumping off point. This is the foundation, and the point of the scene is this, how we get there though can be played with.
I always think that the goal with me with an actor is to always try and spend as much time ahead of shooting as possible with them, to figure out who the character is and then that way on the day hopefully they know the character so well that they are going to have instinctual responses in the moment that you never could have written, and never could have planned and you can’t even fully direct because it wouldn’t exist in the same framework as if it was, they are this character and the moment that is coming out of them, the way they are saying a line, the smile the look, its just coming out of existing as that character. I love to encourage that because you get stuff that you never could have planned for, and you get there through collaboration with everybody. If you’ve done the right work before you start shooting, then shooting becomes a breeze because you aren’t trying to find the character on the day, instead they just exist, and then in my opinion there is no wrong that they can do.
If they decide to laugh on a line, then that’s not wrong if it’s coming from a place of knowing the character and feeling like that might happen in the moment. Of course you always do a take where maybe they don’t, and then you sort it out in the editing room, but I want that collaboration on a character and I fully expect them to do the work and come to set having engrained the DNA of the person and when we are shooting I’m trying to ensure there isn’t too much in the environment that’s stopping them from performing. So I’m trying to light a space and get the camera to move when they move and give them a lot of freedom in the moment to exist and not think about hitting a light or hitting a mark or making the right move or anything like that, and then that leads to a lot better stuff.
I think that really comes though, especially with Bella it seems like a lot of her own personality is coming through and is engrained in the character she’s playing…
Joshua Caldwell: Right, I think in a weird way it’s the most Bella of any of her roles but at the same time its not Bella, but its hard for me to picture anyone else playing it because the role because she just knows the world and she’s in your face about it and she’s who she is which I really respect about her because she puts herself out there, its not an act and I think that translates into what and how she played Arielle because there was no filter. There was no actor thing about checking herself like, am I in the right light or am I in the right position, she just dove in and existed and let me capture that.
Lastly, what do you hope an audience gets out of watching your film? Is there a particular feeling or lasting impression that you hope it conveys?
Joshua Caldwell: My hope would be that it provokes a reaction. I think I’ve made movies in the past that just didn’t do that, so this time I really just wanted to provoke the audience even if its negatively. I always say that even if people hate the movie, I hope they hate it so much that they tell all their friends to watch it and hate it to. I just wanted to pick the audience up, take them for a ride and spit them out at the end and have them say I don’t know what I experienced and I don’t know if I liked it, or I loved that and I want to do it again. Then maybe, I didn’t want to be too on the nose about it but have people sort of stop for a minute and think, as a society are, we really so far from this, and if it happened would I support it? Not in terms of positively support it, but would I support it by following whether I hate it or not.
I think we are seeing a very dangerous sort of intersection between fact and fiction and social media and all the stuff going on in the world that is really having everybody step back and say wait, maybe social media isn’t the utopia that we thought it might be and instead its more of a dumpster fire of filth and everyone’s unfiltered opinions. If anything it makes them stop and think about that for a second, and people may come out of it loving or hating it but even if you hate it maybe you stop and ask yourself if there is a real life equivalent that I’m participating in, and maybe it makes you think you shouldn’t be.
Well I think that’s a pretty good assessment of social media in general and at least in my regard I did love it and so I really appreciate you…
Joshua Caldwell: Even when you guys just posted the trailer reaction and sort of immediately targeted some questions, I just though oh they get it even from the trailer and then I felt like with the review you did fully get it in the sense that the connection and the framework of it is not some traditional movie. You are not supposed to be rooting for these people you know; I don’t care how sympathetic you make them. You make Bonnie and Clyde sympathetic; I mean they are killers, they killed cops without even thinking about it right.
The myth of Bonnie and Clyde has been romanticized for so many years, but they were awful people. They did it just to get money and buy new clothes and their lives were terrible, so I think that’s kind of where this world lives. This is not some romanticized version of this, these are some delusional nasty people doing something for what we as a society have deemed to have value. By following them we have created value in the world of social media right and it is ripe for someone to take advantage of it and I think people already are.
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