The Many Meanings of Chris Smith’s “Collapse”

The director of "American Movie" tackles an even scarier subject with his latest doc.

There’s no voiceover or title cards to clue the audience in on how to feel, but as a result, was it ever a consideration that the audience might confuse Ruppert’s ideology with your own?

One of the things we were most excited about coming out of Toronto is that the reaction we got from critics and audiences alike — whether they agreed with Michael wholeheartedly or didn’t agree with him at all, everyone we talked to enjoyed the film because they enjoyed learning about Michael and his mission in his life. Initially, it was our concern that we didn’t want to make a film that exclusively promoted Mike’s ideas, but it was something that gave an audience the information to make up their own minds and to just get into his world for the length of the film and see who he is and how he’s come to this point in his life.

The film’s visual style is quite striking and there’s an obvious challenge in having a film based around a single interview. How did you come up with a way to keep things interesting?

We [tried] to come up with a look and feel that felt appropriate [by] picking a location that would sustain a film of this sort. So we shot in this abandoned meat packing plant in downtown Los Angeles because it felt like somewhere you would get secret information and we wanted to play off of Michael’s history and the nature of the things that he’s saying.

Then from there, once we got the material, it was really looking at how do we make this into something that feels cohesive and complete. We did a lot of animation with graphics and text and then we spent months and months pulling B-roll. We tried to find stuff that wasn’t typical and didn’t feel just like news footage or strictly educational shots that felt like you hadn’t seen a hundred times. We wanted to get the audience to feel what it must be like being inside Michael’s head, which are all of these thoughts coming at you and all this random imagery that support these thoughts.

Knowing that you had to temporarily abandon your CIA project to make this film, do you think you’ll go back to it now?

I have no idea. Right now, I have an animated film — a script that I had worked on — that I’m close to finishing, and then we just thought of this horror film idea the other day that seemed really good. I work on intuition and what seems most exciting to me at the time that I become free to work on another project, so I think at this point, I’m excited to get this done. But I think I’ll take a break from [the doc] world for a bit and I wouldn’t mind doing something that’s purely fiction or just something different. We’ve been in this cloak and dagger sort of world for a while and it seems exciting to try something that’s very different and that’s what keeps me motivated in terms of wanting to move onto new projects.

“Collapse” will open in New York and will be available simultaneously on VOD on FilmBuff starting November 6th; it will open in Los Angeles on November 13th.

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