To celebrate the release of the excellent faux-documentary, The Dirties, THN caught up with the film’s star/writer/director Matt Johnson.
The Dirties tells the story of two friends making a film about getting revenge on school bullies. Do you think bullying in schools is something that’s not been properly addresses in cinema before?
It’s very in vogue now to talk about bullying, in North America anyway. For at least the last three years, it’s been a huge talking point, but nobody has any solutions to it yet. I think what we were trying to do was show bullying from the perspective of someone who’s at least closer to it than 40 or 50-year-old journalists and filmmakers. Their perspective is valid, but it’s an example of a situation where the people affected by it don’t have a voice. Although we weren’t being bullied at the time we made the film, we were at least close to it.
The film takes a dark twist as their revenge plot goes to another whole level, yet it’s still pitched like a bittersweet indie comedy. Was it hard to balance the tone?
My character Matt doesn’t change, from the beginning to the end. His opinion never really shifts – he thinks the same things are funny at end of the film that he thought were funny at the beginning. He never has some moment where he thinks, “oh man, what I’m doing is really bad”, or, “this is really crazy, we really shouldn’t do this”. He never turns, because I think he doesn’t, but the scope of what he‘s trying to do does. That registers with the audience and it’s very scary, when it all of a sudden dawns on them that this joke might actually be real. So for us, it wasn’t a question of handling the tone, or juggling the seriousness and levity of the film, it was more about deciding how much information the audience should have about Matt’s plan. The more information we gave them, the darker the film got, but the plot or character never really changed.
Tell us about the cameraperson – the guy who films the whole thing and follows Matt through his revenge plot.
I didn’t like having a strong answer for who this cameraperson was, because it forces the audience to ask that question instead. I know it turns people off, and a lot of people are like, “What? That cameraperson followed him? That’s crazy!” But I think that’s very much the point of the movie. Why did he follow Matt? Why didn’t he say anything? Because this guy thinks it’s so cool. This guy filming it, much like everybody who lionizes school shooters or people who do crazy things, they think it’s cool. They want to see this stuff happen, which is a very difficult message to give people – that you are the enablers of anyone who does these things, which I believe to be true, but it’s very easy for people to reject that idea.
THE DIRTIES is out now in selected cinemas. Read our review here.
