The Iris’ Larry Heath took some time with screenwriter Adam Hirsch at the SXSW film festival to talk about the motives for his new film The Trust and the origins of his partnership with the film’s directors Ben and Alex Brewer.
Larry: Congratulations on the film, tell me a little about how you and Ben (Brewer) started working together?
Adam Hirsch: Well I produced a couple of music videos for them way back in the day.
Which artists did you work with?
Purity Ring and Alt-J, we did some crazy videos together … The Something Good, bull-fighter video (for Alt-J) – that was a hellish day of shooting I’ll be honest with you because, believe it or not, queuing up a bull to safely perform a bull fight is harder than you might think – but we met that way and realized we had a bunch of films we appreciated in common and we liked the same books, so we decided we wanted to write something together.
We had a bunch of different ideas then kind of stumbled upon the idea of a crooked cop thriller in the vein of a 70’s crime thriller. We got together over a couple nights and started thinking through some plot lines then started getting out the legal pad and thinking you know what, this is a pretty good movie. So we started making more of them and (thought) we got something here, then over the course of about two months we wrote the film together then kind of revised and before we knew it we had something that we were really proud of.
So what do you think sets it apart from other movies in that genre?
We have tried to approach it in an original way where it has both comedic and dramatic elements and also approached cops in an original way where it doesn’t have that shameful factor. They don’t have slicked back cool hair, they’re not driving cool cars, they don’t have cool clothes and cool girlfriends, they’re vastly underpaid, driving crappy cars, really unhappy in their jobs and using that as motivation for three-dimensional characters in a way you wouldn’t normally see that in a film such as this.
Can’t wait to see it, thanks!
The Trust will be hitting cinemas sometime in mid-May and will star Elijah Wood, Nicholas Cage and Sky Ferreira. For more information on The Trust and remaining screenings at SXSW click HERE.
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