Interview

Antonio Campos's debut feature, Afterschool, takes place at  an elite boarding school coping with the aftermath of the deaths of two popular sisters. Robert (Ezra Miller), an awkward underclassman who spends much of his time in his dorm room combing the internet for "little clips of things that seem real," is the first to find the aforementioned classmates, who overdose in a stairwell (his discovery is captured by the school's video-production club) and is subsequently tasked with putting together a memorial video in their honor. The film, which opens with a shot of Robert watching rough pornography online, is both a bleak coming-of-age story and an exploration of a generation of voyeurs. We talked to Campos about filmmaking in the age of Youtube:

INTERVIEW: There's a lot of death-at-boarding school literature. What is it about that specific environment that lends itself to that? What about it attracted you?

ANTONIO CAMPOS: I'm not sure why. There is definitely an entire sub-genre of films and books about boarding schools. Maybe because it is such a unique, isolating experience in some ways for an adolescent to have. In my case, I wanted to set the story in a very contained, isolated, and idyllic environment, and a boarding school was perfect for that.

INTERVIEW: What role did you intend for technology to play in the film? Could you have told the same story without it?

CAMPOS: In some ways, I look at Afterschool as a present-day sci-fi film. I couldn't have made Afterschool without the technology that's used in the film–the cell phone cameras, the DV cameras, the computers, the video sharing sites, et cetera. It's key to the story, it really ties everything together, and it's also key to understanding who the main character, Rob, is. In my recent shorts, and in Afterschool, I was interested in how people imbue technology with a certain humanity. We're always trying to find something personal, something human in the way we interact with computers, whether it be social networking, online dating, or video sharing/watching.

INTERVIEW: Are you a big Youtube person?

CAMPOS: I do watch a lot of videos online and, during the process writing this script, I was watching a lot more. A bit obsessively, actually.

INTERVIEW: What sort of videos do you watch?

CAMPOS: The range of what I watch is broad from found footage and home movies, to whatever the viral video du jour is, to clips from old shows or news. I'm always fascinated by the clips you see where people don't realize they're being taped, or forget there's a camera on them. I'm equally fascinated by the pieces that seem real and turn out to be fake. It's so easy to trick people into believing something is real nowadays. For the videos in the film, the crappier the footage looked, the more believable it was. And in this way, I'm drawn to some of the same kinds of videos that Rob is drawn to in the film.

INTERVIEW: Do you feel it's had any effect on the way you make film?

CAMPOS: In terms of what you can do in film versus what can be done on YouTube, I feel like people's attention span for what they consume online is getting greater, but still not quite there. In Afterschool, I wanted to let shots linger, to take in the environment, to let things play out as organically as possible, as opposed to how most clips that are supposedly "real" play out online, where it's trimmed down to the two minutes where something is happening. How we get there and what follows is more interesting to me.

INTERVIEW: Do you think it influences the way people watch things now? What can be done on Youtube that can't be done on television or on a movie screen? What, if anything, can't?

CAMPOS: The experience of watching things online is becoming more and more attractive as bandwidth gets larger and you can watch more HD on better monitors. What you can do online is tell stories that only need to be a few minutes long that, if they were on television or on a movie screen, would have to be longer, and maybe unnecessarily so. It's often you see a show on TV that is clearly an idea that has been stretched to fit a thirty minute sitcom format that could easily and more successfully been a webisode. Still, the experience of seeing a film in a theater, for me, is a much more satisfying experience.

Afterschool is available on IFC On Demand.