Orson Oblowitz’s The Five Rules of Success had its first screening at Fantasia last week and was met with fantastic reviews across the board. We gave it the full five stars and described it as oozing visual flair, heart, pain and vitriol, which when all mixed together, makes something very special. The film tells the rather confronting story of X (Santiago Segura), a young man released from prison after having spent the brunt of his youth incarcerated. X dreams of opening his own restaurant, but finds that life on the outside isn’t going to be quite as ‘free’ as he hoped as he is held to unobtainable standards by his parole officer.
We were extremely impressed with writer, director, and cinematographer, Orson Oblowitz‘s, choices; he clearly put a lot of heart and consideration into every frame. Considering our admiration for the film, we were thrilled when we were given the chance to talk about the project with Orson. When we chatted, he was in high spirits, eagerly awaiting the film’s encore Fantasia performance on 1st September, whilst looking after his high-maintenance cat. After we had finished comparing cat-parent war stories, we dived into discussing how The Five Rules of Success came to be, his love of chicken satay, and why Santiago was a man he couldn’t say no to.
You’ve had the first screening of The Five Rules of Success at Fantasia, how’s the reaction been so far?
It’s been good. It’s definitely interesting, the whole virtual side of this. One of the pluses of film festivals is I’ve always been able to actually gauge the reaction to the screening in front of you. Getting to see, ‘oh wow, they get this, they laugh here, they jump here’; not having that, there’s one side of the reaction that I don’t get to see. But on the critical and review side, people seem to have really dug it. I’ve gotten a few messages from people that checked it out that really liked it. Then on the other side, some people have told me it really depressed them. One person was like, ‘I was not in a good mood when I watched this movie and then I watched it and now I’m in a really bad mood’ (chuckles). I apologised because it is pretty heavy material. It’s been good. I know it’s pretty intense and also a very offbeat film stylistically. I’m actually surprised that people are having more of a positive reaction than I first realised.
How did the idea for the film come together?
It came from a few places. One of the main ones was I had a neighbour – I live in Hollywood and I have a friend who grew up on the street here, and he has been in and out of prison his whole life. He’s a really good dude, he has a kid. He just kind of got caught up in the cycle. Every time he would get out we’d hang out, we were good friends and we just talked about what it was like and what he was going through, what it was like to come back. It became so much part of his life – going to prison for dumb [reasons]. it wasn’t like he got out of prison and he went and robbed someone. It was like he got caught smoking pot or he showed up late to probation and they put him back in jail. It was such a stringent series of limitations that would put him back in prison. But every time he got out we would just sit and talk and he’d tell me stories about going in and out. He’s actually back there now, he’s been in for three and a half years now and he gets out in a couple of months. A lot of it was inspired by the stories he would tell me and just seeing the cycle he was in on a first-hand basis. Then researching that kind of world.
Also, just from my own [experiences]. When I was in high-school I got sent away to almost a locked down boarding school where I wasn’t allowed to leave for two years. So I had also had my own experience of being in isolation and having to return back to society, so I drew on that as well.
Given the length of X’s incarceration, when he comes back out into the world it’s almost like he’s an alien visiting for the first time. I’m guessing, given that you were isolated for two years, it helped you get into the that mindset when you were writing?
Totally. I think that idea that you’re saying is very much what was the thesis; he’s an immigrant, he’s an alien, he’s never been here before. This is not his country anymore. It hasn’t been for quite sometime. It’s like he’s seeing it all for the first time and I wanted to accentuate that because of how that feels when you come back and you can open a door and close it a few times on your own accord. I can only imagine what that’s like. So we had the moment where he opens and closes the door, or jumps on the bed. But yet totally like an alien, and through him we get to see what it must be like to get hit with America first hand.
The film raises some important messages about the state of the US judicial system, are you hopeful that it might open some people eyes to what is a really big problem?
Absolutely. I really think one of the things I was going for is in film we show a lot of movies about people getting out of prison, but we don’t really show how personally how difficult that process it, and how they’re held to an impossible standard. If they violate that standard, they are thrown back in prison and they’re not really human for their time on parole. I really do hope that whatever audience this film finds, that it motivates a few people to go out there and write to their senators or their congressmen and advocate for better reform because it’s a real big problem in this country. I live in California, I know that we have the highest incarceration rate in America, but I think we have the highest incarceration rate in the world. It’s unacceptable that we have this. Obviously the disproportionate incarceration of black and brown people is just absurd that minorities make up the majority of the prison system. So I really do hope it does [help]. Right now we’re going through a tumultuous time here where these issues are being thrown in people’s faces and I hope that this film motivates a few people to be active and get out of their mindset of how comfortable our lives are when you’re not a second rate citizen as felons are treated.
I got so angry at X’s treatment in the film. He didn’t need prison, he needed help, but was easier to chuck him in there.
There’s a few times when he speaks to the camera or voice-over from him, and one of the lines he said is, ‘when I was a boy they treated me like a man. Now that I’m a man they treat me like a boy.’ That’s taken from Jack Henry Abbott who was a prisoner who wrote a book called In the Belly of the Beast. Actually, Norman Mailer at the time, jockeyed for him to be released from prison; he was, and he ended up stabbing someone and going back to prison because he had no tools. That was exactly what you’re saying. There are much better systems if we actually cared. If prison wasn’t reaped for profit where it’s private and that there’s a whole industry where people rely on it to make money and commerce, we would have…that kid needed a therapist. He didn’t need to go to jail. He needed people to hold him and say, ‘it’s going to be alright, how we help?’ Instead of punishing him as if he’s a monster. But because of the dehumanising nature of this system, we don’t have that.
That’s the same conversation we’re having about the police in America right now. The idea of ‘defund the police’ is not we don’t need help, it’s that a lot of these instances we don’t need people with guns arresting people and throwing them in prison. We need people to deescalate situations. We need people that give actual mental health to our homeless and our unhoused people in this country. We don’t need to lock them up. That’s a big problem we have, especially in America. We treat people with punitive punishment rather than with care and love and with an idea of bettering people.
Santiago Segura is incredible as X, at what point did you know he had what it takes to convey such a complex character?
The casting of this film was really surreal and not something that I had done before. We only saw one other person and then my producer, Christian de Gallegos, who also came up with elements of the story with me… he knew Santiago from a whole different film, like a film you would never imagine the same person auditioning for. We were sitting and he was like, ‘dude, I know who the star of this film is.’ I asked him who and he showed me a picture. I said ‘no way’, then Santiago came in. My office is X’s apartment. That’s my little office that I wrote the whole film and did everything in. So he came to read and he had shaved his head and he was just smoking cigarettes. I said he did a good job, but I was also ready to see other people. But then he was, ‘what else do you want?’ I said I wanted him to leave and he said, ‘no, no, no, how shall we work on the character? What shall we do? I mean we’re making this film together right?!’ He wouldn’t leave. He just was this character. He showed up like this character with the attitude, ‘I’m gonna walk out of here as X. I’m gonna be him and you’re not going to get to not give me this opportunity’. It was wild. I loved the attitude that he was bringing and had no clue where he began, but whatever. I shook his hand and brought him back a couple of days later. I just filmed a little one minute video. I just said, ‘let’s see how you look when I shoot you’. I just saw it and was like, ‘he is everything that I want’.
We weren’t even necessarily… we were trying to cast it without too much care for race, we just wanted to give the best person the option. He was perfect. He just came in and just embodied this character and then we shot and was like, ‘you got this man’. I think he would have shown up everyday if I had hired someone else and just done the role. He would have like kidnapped whoever I cast and would just turn up like, ‘I’m here!’
The Five Rules of Success has a very definite visual style, one that reflects the conflicts that X is experiencing. Can you talk a little bit about your thought process to approaching the look of the film?
I just wanted to make the whole world much bigger than him. So I used a big wide. From the beginning, I saw it as a film with a big wide angled lens. Then at times, as he began to grow into himself, I started shooting him from below so he looked bigger and other characters from above so they started looking smaller, so there would be there would be this effect of the world warping towards his acclimation you’d say. I really wanted this in-your-face visual style. The lens I used for most of the film, I called the violence lens, because it was so in your face. When I was operating, I was about six inches away from the actors. We were so close to each other it was almost like a dance between myself and the characters of the film. I really wanted to create this world that you couldn’t escape from through a lot of the tricks of cinema. Then also at times, slowing down and using a zoom, or using a longer lens to show moments of peace and tranquillity. I dubbed one lens the peace lens, which was the zoom, and the wide-angled one was the violence lens.
There’s also a lot of food featured, are you a secret frustrated chef?
(Laughs) no, but I’m a food lover. I’m a terrible cook, but I love different cuisine, and I love the Los Angeles food scene. I really like different ethnic food and honestly having a chicken satay in my film is like a dream come true to me. I wrote an Instagram post on my story about chicken satay and my composer actually took a screenshot and posted it saying, ‘this is the most heart-felt thing I’ve ever seen from Orson’. Like I love chicken satay, and my friends make jokes about me owning a satay restaurant one day. So for me to have the opportunity to put it into a film was a beautiful moment.
Sadly, the restaurant, the Olympus Greek Restaurant that is the one that he worked at… it had been there for thirty years, but due to Covid, it closed down. So it’s really sad to loose that institution. It was a really special place. I went to lunch with a friend the first week I started writing the script. I looked around this place – it was the middle of the valley, middle of nowhere – and I was just looking at the clouds and said, ‘I’m gonna shoot my film here’, and sure enough we shot the film there. They catered it and they were super cool and it was just a great vibe, so it’s sad to lose that place to the current state of economic affairs.
At least it has posterity by being in the film.
Absolutely, and I’m proud to document places that are not popular, you know. I think it’s nice because a film kind of becomes an artefact of a time and place.
Have you been using your lockdown time wisely? Have you started thinking about what might come next?
I’ll be honest, it’s been a very creative time the last five months for me here. I think the lack of distraction and just having to save myself from insanity, I’ve been writing a lot. I’ve written two scripts since this started. I actually spent a lot of the time documenting the protests. I’ve been out in the streets a lot with the people, documenting and shooting photos. That’s been a really amazing moment. I’ve been raising money for the Marshall Project and the Innocence Project, which are two organisations that do amazing work for incarcerated people. So I was trading my photographic prints for donations to them. We raised like $1500, which was cool. That’s probably the thing I’m most proud of during this time because those organisations..the Marshall Project, is run by an ex-felon and he just has a team of amazing journalists trying to expose what’s going on in prison and the hardships of prisoners after prison. And the Innocence Project works super hard to get people out of jail who are wrongfully accused and are on death row. So it was nice to raise some money for them through documenting these protects.
It’s been quite creative because I can’t look away from what is going on, you know. America right now is at such a tipping point, and I feel it’s my duty as an artist to document that and somehow help in anyway I can. There are so many activists and people out here who are doing the real work, so if I can be just a little helpful during this time and document it, and show their work and what they’re doing… that’s what I’ve been really proud of during these last couple of months.
The Five Rules of Success screens at Fantasia on 1st September.
