Aaron Moorhead: What’s also kind of funny is when you think about a movie that involves so many conspiracies, you imagine that famous meme of Charlie Day in front of the giant collage of information with the connecting read threads—that’s what our hallway actually looked like to keep the movie together in our heads [laughs].
Yes! I was actually going to bring that up because the meme itself might be a perfect shortcut to describing its tone. Can you speak to that a little bit, the things in the world you were drawing from that seemed to plant the seeds of the conspiracies throughout? When you see this movie, you can’t help but think of Qanon, the idea of goalposts shifting, or the term galaxy brain for the biggest of mental reaches.
Justin Benson: It’s weird. There’s not that much inspiration from current events, honestly, but there are some unexpected sources of inspiration from other media, Alan Moore books, Jerusalem or, From Hell, and the idea of sort of putting a mostly fictionalized mystical mythology on top of a city that you think you know, in our case, Los Angeles.
Aaron Moorhead: There’s also House of Leaves, a book about a book, about a documentary, about a house; it’s got all these meta-textural layers. So, with the conspiratorial thinking thing, when we shot in 2020 for us, that was oddly not really on our radar as a political or socio-political thing so much.
Justin Benson: What’s overlooked a lot is that many people probably describe our current time as being defined by conspiratorial thinking, which is pretty universal; everyone mistrusts everyone. But you know, there was perhaps more conspiratorial thinking in medieval times when people didn’t know anything. If you put it in the context of like evolutionary psychology when homo sapiens came about—roughly 250,000 to 300,000 years ago—you could assume that it was an advantage to being suspicious of other people, organizations, and things. And that it would be a protective mechanism.
But now, it’s kind of like sugar. Now we have too much access, and people get diabetes. And now it’s like conspiratorial thinking used to be advantageous to survival. But not we just have too much access to information. It used to be fun to dig down into those rabbit holes, like “The X-Files” of it all.
Yeah, “The X-Files” is definitely an excellent example of conspiracies in a more innocent time when overthinking that stuff could be fun. Like you’re suggesting. We had way less info then.
David Lawson Jr.: Yeah, now it’s not so fun with people taking this stuff very seriously, and it becomes their way of thinking and becomes dangerous.
That’s maybe what I love so much about this movie; you bring back the fun to it. I found this movie hysterical. It’s almost like a Reddit thread within a Reddit thread written by massive stoners or something.
David Lawson Jr.: So that was the best compliment you could give us [laughs]
Aaron Moorhead: Yeah, there’s a real personal character drama within that didn’t want to sacrifice at all. It’s extremely important to us. And yet, if it were a severe deadly movie about conspiracy theories, then we would be causing the problem that we are trying to point the finger at or shine a light on. We directed an episode of Jordan Peele’s “Twilight Zone,” and the writer of the episode was one of the primary writers on “The X-Files “over all eleven seasons. It was fascinating talking to him about writing that show, and how he could have never anticipated the world we’d be living in now, and what that show could potentially mean to someone that was never intended.
Justin Benson: As huge fans of the show, many conversations we’ve been having in the last few years were like, “could we do “The X-Files today? And how would you do it and not have unintended messaging behind it? And we landed on, well, if you can laugh, not only with the characters, but at the characters, and still preserve their humanity and not just be mocking them, maybe we’d be okay. You still laugh at them, but you also recognize things in yourself. And we all get a little dopamine hit from UFO news. It doesn’t mean you believe it, it doesn’t mean you immediately jump to these elaborate conclusions, but like, it’s why we love it [laughs].
Your framing there definitely puts the film in a good context. It’s also just basic human curiosity. Like you get a taste of some stuff too, and it can be, like you said, some dopamine sugar for the brain.
Aaron Moorhead: We hope the film inspires enormous discussions around this. We hope nobody thinks the moral is, “Hey, you should stop thinking critically because rabbit hole, that’s pretty dangerous.” Almost everything is an exercise in moderation, right? Figuring out what a source is, are they good sources. My dad had this quote written on his workshop wall that read, “be mindful of whose lyrics you craft your life by.” And it’s just that. You have to actually figure out what to believe because that’s pretty important. Figure out your worldview.
One of the things I love in the writing, which also feels like mirrors today, is the barrage of information and then the vagueness around it, which is really darkly funny and clever. Like there’s a moment where one of the characters suggests, “Like, yeah, I’m maybe a registered sex offender,” and you’re like, “LOL, wtf, what?” but the acceleration of dialogue and information means you kind or whiz off to the next thing without addressing it. And I feel like the movie does that a lot with these odd and perplexing clues as to who these guys are, but its volume and speed just pave right over things. It’s very purposefully and bizarrely funny.
Justin Benson: That’s an excellent question, man. Part of it is just the process of what we do, and part of that process is notes and feedback. And sometimes there’s a note that reads, “I’m not sure who the hero is,” and you know, with notes, you have to decode them. Like, the note is helpful, but it also suggests that there is something in the material we never intended. Because, in that instance, we never intended there to be a hero in a traditional sense. And all our favorite movies don’t have classic heroes. In “There Will Be Blood,” Daniel Plainview is a lead character but obviously not a hero.
So, it can be weird. Some of the conceptions of these characters were how do you head that off? We landed on how interesting it would be to have a story where your cons, the perception of who is a threat, who the bad guy is, who is the more flawed human being, is constantly shifting, given the information you have at any one given time. And if you do that successfully, it will be much harder to tell if this will be a tragedy or have a happy ending. You’re delivering on the unexpected in a way enhanced by the fact that this story doesn’t have a hero, and that hero’s not going to win in the end.
David Lawson Jr.: And in our own lives, we all play the hero and villain in our own story. And that also depends on POV and how it’s being told. Because I could be the hero in one story, and we could have the same story, and I’m the villain in yours. So, we found shifting POV very interesting.
Justin Benson: To add to that, you land on the ultimate goal: we’ve told a story about humanity, not about heroes and villains.
Aaron Moorhead: There’s a line near the end where Levi says, “It’s just really unlikely that we’re just inherently bad people,” and the conversation continues, and one of them might be, but we’re not going to land there. Our personal feeling is that there are no bad people, there are just people that do really bad things, but they’re not rotten to the core. You can always chase the trauma down to some other source. I know it’s tough to say that nowadays and hold onto that belief, but we still do so, so there’s a little bit of that idea in there too.
You guys do this DIY work; it’s very singular, it’s very idiosyncratic, it’s very you guys, and then you go work for Netflix, Disney, Marvel, etc. That feels like a radical shift, but maybe it’s just all filmmaking in the end.
Justin Benson: Yeah, well, they really complement each other. They fulfill different things for you creatively and are also incredibly similar. When you go onto a gigantic set, the craft is the same once you walk past all the trailers, giant trucks, and everything. You have cameras and actors; you have to tell people what to do. The phone also isn’t ringing for us to do “Two And A Half Men,” “Archive 81” definitely shares DNA with the “Endless” and “Resolution,” and you’ll see with “Moon Knight” some more similar DNA to what we do.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. For more of this conversation centered around Marvel, “Moon Knight,” Netflix, and more, check out this earlier portion of the interview published around Sundance.
“Something In The Dirt” is open now in limited release via XYZ Films.
