Sneaky Sex, Spooky Scenes: Flick Eyes Voyeuristic Surveillance

Sneaky Sex, Spooky Scenes: Flick Eyes Voyeuristic Surveillance

Writer-director Adam Rifkin's new film touches on the creepy culture of security cameras.
Courtesy of Captured Films

Sneaky Sex, Spooky Scenes: Flick Eyes Voyeuristic Surveillance

Courtesy of Captured Films

Adam Rifkin is best known in Hollywood circles for writing family-friendly comedies like Mousehunt and this year's Underdog. But when his new movie Look opens Friday in New York and Los Angeles, the writer-director gets a chance to channel his inner Peeping Tom.

Prefaced by a factoid asserting that 30 million surveillance cameras in the United States capture images of the average American 200 times a day, Look dramatizes a week in the life of department-store sex addicts, a high school seductress, a pedophile, a "straight" family man who's having an affair with a gay lawyer, convenience-store slackers and thieves who've stashed a body in the trunk of their car. The gimmick: Everything is filmed from the perspective of security cameras.

Wired News caught up with Rifkin in Los Angeles to learn more about his crafty experiment in surveillance cinema.


Adam Rifkin: I got a traffic ticket in the mail from the police department. I didn't know it even happened, but they sent me this picture of myself going through a red light, and you could see my face clear as day, singing to the radio, making a horrible expression. The idea that a photograph could be taken of me without my knowledge and then sent to my home address freaked me out a little bit. I started to think, "What other cameras are out there, taking shots of me that I'm not aware of?" For me, that's when the whole thing started

WN: How did you research Look?

Rifkin: I went to a bunch of security offices in malls and department stores and banks and interviewed the people who watch the surveillance monitors. I just assumed they'd be trained, professional, responsible individuals, right? Not always the case. In some instances, the guys behind the cameras are high school kids in baggy pants who use cameras with joysticks to zoom in on girls' boobs. They weren't looking for shoplifters. If a hot girl walked into the mall, they tracked her from camera to camera to camera, all day long. Let's say the camera caught under her skirt as the wind blew, they'd take that footage and post it on YouTube. They showed me their highlight reel!

Scenes in Look are shot to appear as if they were ripped from a store surveillance camera.

Screenshot: Courtesy of Captured Films__WN:__ It must have been tricky getting permission to film all this weird behavior in shopping malls, high schools, convenience stores, parking lots and hotel lobbies.

Rifkin: We didn't break any laws, but we weren't entirely forthcoming. In some instances we said we were making a reality show. We told other people we were making a documentary about surveillance cameras or shooting a segment on surveillance cameras for the news. We learned pretty quick if we told people we were making a movie and planned to do all these things at their location they'd say, "No way are we going to allow this." So we had to get creative.

WN: With the different time codes and grainy video quality that varies from scene to scene, the footage in your movie really looks like it was captured by actual security cameras. Did you in fact use the cameras installed at each location?

Rifkin: No, but every location you see in the movie did have real surveillance cameras. We then placed our cameras exactly where the actual security cams were and shot the scenes in HD using Sony F-900s and F-950s – the same cameras they used on movies like Sin City. When we finished shooting, the movie looked beautiful. Then we spent an enormous amount of time and enormous amount of money making it look like shit.

WN: You were trying to make it look artfully crappy.

Rifkin: Exactly.

Video: Although Look appears to be shot entirely on security cams, capturing the behavior of clueless citizens, Adam Rifkin's new movie features professional actors performing fully scripted scenes.

WN: When you shot in these real locations, did the people who wandered into the scene know they were being filmed for a movie?

Rifkin: No. Our actors who play the department-store employees would be wearing their radio mikes, having scripted conversations, and customers would walk up to them and ask, "Where are the blue jeans?" In the food court where the character is freaking out because she couldn't find her daughter, those people reacting to the actress are real – there's no acting on their part. It was spooky.

WN: The actors in Look seem pretty talented, but there's not a famous face in the bunch. Did you deliberately cast unknowns?

Rifkin: Yeah. If you're watching something that's supposed to be cobbled together from real surveillance footage and you recognize some movie star playing the high school teacher or a defense lawyer, then the conceit is blown. We sent agencies the script and said, "We don't want anybody audiences would recognize readily. We want all your best actors who always lose the role. This is a movie for them!"

WN: Look seems to takes place in this sort of generic, anonymous strip-mall world. Where did you shoot it?

Rifkin: We shot most of Look in the San Fernando Valley. I wanted it to seem like suburbia USA because the truth is, these cameras are everywhere. You walk down the aisle of a rural Wal-Mart in Iowa and you are on camera.

WN: And if Iowa is one of those 37 states that allows cameras in dressing rooms and bathrooms, they could be watching you change clothes.

Rifkin: That's the scariest part. Who's watching this shit, and how do we know that it isn't that incorrigible high school kid I met who's uploading it onto YouTube?

WN: Two of your characters have sex in a high school parking lot, and you've got a character who keeps shagging other employees in the storage room of the department store. Did you have a closed set for those sequences?

Rifkin: We actually didn't close anything down. For those scenes in the department-store warehouse, we found a dark corner where we hoped the store manager wouldn't wander in.

WN: Guerilla filmmaking?

Rifkin: Totally.

WN: How did you direct scenes in the midst of these real-world scenarios?

Rifkin: At the convenience store, for example, we set up a monitor behind the store. The actors had walkie-talkies, or sometimes I'd just call them on their cell phone to give them direction.

WN: Most movies try to draw us into the characters' world so we forget we're watching a film. Look is the opposite – you constantly remind us that we're basically spying on people, and we can't turn away, even though what they're doing is none of our business.

Rifkin: Exactly. And hey, listen, I'm the same way. That's what's fascinating about the culture that we live in now. The internet, which is literally this window into everything, has kind of forced us to admit: "Yep, we're all a bunch of voyeurs."