Emily the Criminal
Courtesy: John Patton Ford
In the brand new film “Emily the Criminal,” the title character, played by actress Aubrey Plaza, is nearly all the time in a state of fear.
There are moments where Emily’s dread lifts: after one in every of her successful heists, when she’s painting in her apartment to classical music or when she’s falling in love with Youcef (Theo Rossi), who has introduced her to the world of bank card fraud. But these reprieves are all the time transient, and shortly the fear is back. That is largely due to one other constant in Emily’s life: her $70,000 in student debt.
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The paltry wages from her food delivery job barely allow her to maintain up with the interest accumulating on her student debt every month. So Emily reinvents herself as a criminal, purchasing pricey electronics with stolen bank cards, in pursuit of a less predictable life.
“I feel fear is the nice motivator of human beings,” said John Patton Ford, 40, the film’s screenwriter and director. “We do nearly every thing out of fear. The one reason anyone would do what she does is because they’re horribly afraid of the results of not doing them.”
I spoke with Ford — whose film was a critic’s pick of The Latest York Times and has received awards on the Annapolis Film Festival and the Deauville American Film Festival in Deauville, France, this 12 months — about his interest in the coed loan crisis and his decision to make his first feature film concerning the subject.
The film debuted in theaters in August, just days before President Joe Biden revealed his highly anticipated plan to forgive a big share of Americans’ student loan debt. Even when the plan survives Republican challenges, outstanding student loan debt will still exceed $1 trillion, and each 12 months an extra 5 million Americans borrow for his or her education.
For many who have not yet seen the film, the discussion below — which has been edited and condensed for clarity — includes spoilers.
Annie Nova: From the beginning of the film, Emily is in a very desperate financial situation. Why did you make her student debt such a giant a part of her panic?
John Patton Ford: Personal experience. I went to the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, and graduated in 2009 with around $93,000 in debt. Every decision got here all the way down to it: Can I fly home to go to my family over the vacations? Can I afford to get coffee with a friend? It just about ran my whole life. And I knew I wasn’t alone on this crisis. There are tens of thousands and thousands of Americans who’re coping with the identical thing, but I’d never seen a movie about it.
AN: Have you ever paid off the debt by now?
JPF: I haven’t got the debt any longer, but it surely took a miracle. Getting a screenwriting profession is an absolute miracle. I feel there are concerning the same amount of individuals within the Writers Guild of America as there are Major League Baseball players. And even then, I wasn’t in a position to pay the debt off. It took becoming a director and getting a primary movie made, which is astronomically difficult. My sister went to medical school — she’s an anesthesiologist — and he or she’s been working for like 15 years now, and he or she’s still paying off her student debt.
‘No other country would tolerate this’
AN: Did you research the coed loan crisis for the film? What did you learn?
JPF: It really began in 1980 with Ronald Reagan deregulating the economy in order that major corporations could determine a way to not pay their taxes. And now, 40 years later, the web consequence is that the federal government now not makes the tax revenues that they used to. They are not in a position to subsidize education, and so we hand off the expenses to people who find themselves now going into massive amounts of debt to go to high school.
This happened so slowly that we have not really reckoned with the undeniable fact that we are the only country within the Western world that has this method. No other country would tolerate this. If this happened for sooner or later in France, there can be mass protests. They’d set buildings on fire.
AN: I discovered it really interesting that you simply made Emily a painter — and a talented one, too. But her lifestyle leaves little room for her to make art. What’s the film attempting to say concerning the impacts of student debt on artists?
JPF: We have arrange a society that does not make it easy for artists. So many artistic innovations which have happened throughout the years happened because artists were in a society that supported or enabled them. Would the Beatles have existed without the robust social programs in England within the Nineteen Fifties that allowed them to not work full time or that made it so inexpensive to go to school? They got to take classes, then go home and practice as a band. But when the Beatles had $100,000 in student debt, they’d be working in a coal mine. The quantity of talent that will not be being developed today and that we’ll never get to take advantage of as a society is tragic.
AN: There are such a lot of things you can have made Emily do to attempt to repay her student debt. Why did you’ve her get into bank card fraud?
JPF: I feel the more disenfranchised you turn out to be with the way in which things work, the more nihilistic you’re feeling, and you’ll be able to turn out to be like, ‘Well in the event that they’re ripping me off, I’ll rip another person off.’ The minute you lose faith in things, you type of turn out to be just as bad because the system.
AN: I actually liked the scene where Youcef is talking concerning the type of house he desires to live in sooner or later, with an open kitchen. After which later, he’s excited to introduce Emily to his mother. Why make this person, involved in all these financial crimes, even have these very strange desires and dreams?
JPF: It says something about our vision of what’s realistic nowadays. As someone who lives in L.A., I can inform you, you’ll be able to’t own a house here unless you are a millionaire or a type of criminal. You begin doing the mathematics, and also you suddenly go, ‘Yeah. I’m willing to commit bank card fraud as a way to throw a grenade into the system so I can actually own something.’ That just gave the impression of a more relatable, down-to-earth reason for doing things.
AN: At the tip of the film, Emily is running her own bank card scheme in South America. It appears like a victory in that she hasn’t been caught and he or she’s still alive, but she’s also still locked on this dangerous and precarious cycle.
JPF: The story is ultimately a personality study; it’s about someone determining what they’re good at, and what they wish to do and what they’ll probably proceed doing. It is a coming-of-age story lower than a thriller. Emily gets this chance to go to a foreign country and possibly concentrate on art, but then subsequently realizes that it’s just not enough. I desired to end it where Emily finally gets what she thinks she wants: She really likes being the boss of things, and art never enabled her to try this but this recent lifetime of crime does. I even have that last scene to indicate her full progression as a personality.
AN: How can movies shine a light-weight on the coed loan crisis in a way that other mediums cannot?
JPF: Near the tip of his life, someone asked Roger Ebert to define a movie. And he said, “A machine that creates empathy.” I all the time thought that is a fairly good answer. Movies have a superpower that is hard to match with other mediums. They really quickly get the audience to empathize with the central character and to feel what that person is feeling.