The Reality of ‘Catfish’
Posted September 26, 2010 12:15 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Catfish is a documentary about not believing everything you see or read on the Internet. It’s also being promoted as a thriller rather than a documentary, making people wonder if the audience is being duped by the filmmakers the way Joaquin Phoenix and Casey Affleck recently pulled one over in their “documentary” I’m Still Here.
CityNews.ca spoke with directors Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost, and star of the film Nev Schulman, to get to the bottom of the reality of Catfish. Read our Q&A below.
Brian McKechnie: How did you come to make ‘Catfish’?
Ariel: We’ve been filming each other for years. There’s no story too small or instance too banal.
Nev: I’m always getting into weird, crazy situations.
Ariel: Yeah, he’s sort of our muse. We film him and we film each other and then just file it away.
BM: Do you plan what to shoot or just shoot whenever you feel like it?
Ariel: We’ve shared an office for three years so we’ve spent a lot of time together. We’re professional filmmakers and [Nev] is a professional photographer so there are cameras everywhere. As soon as something goofy starts happening, someone is rolling. We’re all comfortable and we all understand that it’s our need to film.
BM: Nev, as a photographer is it weird being filmed all the time?
Nev: A lot of it has to do with the fact that these are my best friends, but on-camera, I like the encouragement that being filmed offers. I enjoy the challenge of someone saying ‘let’s do something’, and when the camera’s rolling there’s a sense of hey, if I did something right now it would be captured and that could potentially go on and be funny and interesting somewhere down the line. Turning the camera on me raises the stakes a little bit and I like that.
BM: When you guys started, there wasn’t a plan to turn this into the film that it is. What was the key moment that you knew this was the direction you wanted to go?
Ariel: Well the film was never a feature film until a very specific moment when Henry and I turned to each other and said ‘I think we have the arc of a feature film here.’ Beyond that, we had hoped to make a feature film at some point in our careers but it was not in our immediate plans.
BM: Was funding ever an issue?
Ariel: We had enough money to fund this process. All in all, it cost less than a small used car.
BM: Without giving too much away, was there no other time before that particular part in the film that you thought these people could not be who they said they were?
Henry: We definitely had doubts at different points. The thing about the relationship is that it took eight and half months so in real life it was a much slower build than it is in the movie. And the correspondence and the characters were so complicated that anytime we had doubt it would either be explained away by Nev or by some kind of evidence. When you really want something to be true, you don’t see the red flags. That happens to people all the time in a relationship. If you’re in an abusive relationship you don’t see that stuff.
BM: A lot of marketing and articles for the film refer to it as a mystery or a thriller and not a lot of people call it a documentary. Is it a documentary?
Ariel: The distributors are purposely not calling it a documentary, they’re calling it a reality-thriller. That’s not because it’s not a documentary because it’s 100 per cent true and it is what happened to us as you see it. I don’t mind keeping that under wraps if the word documentary means less people would be interested in seeing it. It’s an important film for a younger generation, and if teenagers are scared of the word documentary and that’s going to stop them from seeing this movie, then let’s not call it a documentary.
BM: Obviously the film speaks to the dangers of the Internet. Have you been hearing stories from people at screenings about their own situations?
Ariel: From the first screening, people have come up to us and said, ‘Thank you for telling your story because something just like that has happened to me.’ These kinds of things are happening all over the place. This one just happens to be a guy who shares his life with two documentary filmmakers.
Henry: I think it’s the nature of these stories that’s a little bit embarrassing so people aren’t talking about them as much as they are happening.
Ariel: In order to tell the story you need to admit that you were vulnerable.
Nev: I think there’s also a really important element and it’s a little uncomfortable to bring it up. We’ve done a lot of research about other stories like this. The natural reaction that most people would have is ‘you lied to me, you misled me, I don’t want to have anything to do with you’. In our story we got there, clearly saw that we had been duped, but chose to start new and show understanding and compassion and find out what their story was because that’s what’s interesting. Anger doesn’t get you anywhere.
BM: Can any of you trust people who contact you via the Internet now?
Nev: I wouldn’t trust them unless I knew who they were or knew someone who I trusted who knew who they were.
BM: Do all of you feel you’re more exposed to being targets of an Internet scam now because of the movie?
Henry: It’s important to remain open to that kind of thing happening. The film we made before this led into this film, and I have a feeling this is going to lead into our next. And that’s just a result of being open to chance and pursuing things when they present themselves.
BM: Were you ever truly scared while making this film?
Nev: Out of the three of us at the time, I was not actually scared. I was so blinded by the intense desire to find this girl that only now, while watching the film and thinking about it more clearly, [do I see that] it was extremely dangerous.
BM: What do you hope audiences get out of the film?
Henry: Two things. One is being a little more considerate and taking a moment to think about the things you’re putting online and the way you’re sharing photos and how nothing ever disappears on the Internet. And on the same note, to keep yourself open to meeting new people and new opportunities because you never know what’s going to happen or who you’re going to meet, and it could be someone who changes your life. We don’t see this as a negative experience even though Nev really went through the ringer emotionally and we watch our friend get hurt. On the other side of that, we all came out stronger people and ended up understanding someone we may never have met.
Catfish is now playing in theatres.
brian.mckechnie@citynews.rogers.com
