Ever since I saw Craig Zobel’s film Compliance, about employees at a fast-food restaurant who were talked into an abusing a co-worker, at Sundance, I’ve been eager to see it reach a wider audience. The movie follows a day in the life of Sandra (Ann Dowd), a manager at the restaurant for whom nothing seems to be going right, who receives a phone call from a man claiming to be a police officer, who tells her that Becky (Dreama Walker), a junior employee at the restaurant, has stolen from a customer. Over the course of the day, the man talks Sandra into detaining Becky, having her searched, and ultimately, another man into assaulting her.

Compliance is a powerful movie about our desire to gain police approval and our willingness, or lack thereof, to intervene when things are going terribly wrong around us. And it seemed to me to be misunderstood at the festival, where audiences complained that its depiction of what happened to Becky, which is based on a series of true events, was exploitative, or insisted that they couldn’t relate to characters who worked in the service industry. I talked to Zobel about art that makes people uncomfortable, what it means that we seek approval from the police, and feminist filmmaking. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I wanted to start by asking how you came to the source material. I’ve seen the Law & Order episode that’s based on these real events, so it’s floating around in the pop culture ether, but I was curious how you became interested in it.

It’s funny, I’m from Georgia, and one of the events took place in Georgia, so I kind of knew about it from that, but I hadn’t remembered exactly what the deal was. And I was reading about Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments when I stumbled upon it, so it was after the pop culture moment had happened.

I know Dreama Walker from her more comedic work, but she has been bubbling along in Gran Torino and everything else, so how did you come to work with her?

She read the script and was really interested, and it resonated with her. She was familiar with the original story as well. She came in, and we were casting, the casting for that role was delicate in a way. We had to up front lay everything out. This is what this movie’s about. She was interested and came in and auditioned, which was great. And than she and I sat down and had coffee, which I think quickly turned into beer because we were talking about some heavy stuff really fast. She just had the same questions that I did about the story and what it was all about…They just wouldn’t come in. It was a voluntary thing. Acting is a voluntary thing. Most of hte people I was seeing were people who were already fascinated by it in some sense. But Dreama and I talked a lot…She just was the right person. it made sense to me for a lot of reasons…She was kind of identifying certain things as the more interesting way to play this or that beat, or the way that was compelling though it was somewhat frustrating. We were talking about these things and kind of landing in the same places. When we started working together, it was very specific. These are the shots. This is what you’re going to do. Talking about that stuff before we were ever on set so there weren’t any surprises…

I first encountered this story and was very much, kind of what a lot of people’s reactions are, “Well, that’s fascinating, but I would never do that.” Truly a very condescending point of view, when you really think about it. Which has been interesting, to have the movie keep going, to listen to some people who very much distance themselves from the movie at Q&As and things like that, who point out how dumb the people were, how they’re from a different class, and all these things that I was not comfortable. I think my bullshit detector went off inside of myself when I was so condescending about how I would never do it. I think that’s what made me want to do the movie. It was “Why did I just act like that?”

That was one of the things I wanted to ask you about, because in one of the Q&As you did at Sundance, one of the members of the audience said “Well, I just couldn’t identify with these people because they were too dumb.” And it seemed like people, who normally wouldn’t fall back on class prejudice or gender prejudice had been scrambling to do that to avoid any suggestion that they could ever be complicit.

Or putting it back on me that it’s painted that way. I would feel like I fucked up if that’s what you really think, that these people are dumb. I would feel like I failed. I tried hard. I tried hard to avoid that. That was the one thing to avoid in my opinion. It’s condescending. Especially when it’s multiple people over a ten year period, and it’s these seventy cases you can look at, and it keeps happening. It’s like, man, it’s not that. There’s no way it could have been all the dumb people that got called. People do fall back on, I’m reading it the way your’e reading it, people are trying to distance themselves from the movie and don’t want to go there and want to put these people into boxes so they can be safe. We had a screening the other day where that came up, and it was funny, because it came from the very back of the stadium seating, and it was just the perfect place for it to come from. You’re truly looking down your nose at me and the people who made the movie. You’re actually physically looking down your nose at us.
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Compliance, Craig Zobel’s terrific movie about a real series of events, in which fast-food restaurant employees were convinced by a prank caller posing as a police officer to detain and strip-search their coworkers, on the grounds that they’ve been accused of theft, is rooted in things like the Milgram experiment, which tested the extent to which group morality could drive individuals to do heinous things to other people:

But the movie, which comes out in August, is also subtly and importantly about how that desire to comply with a prevailing sense of what’s right is heightened when the police are involved (or people believe the police to be involved). In Compliance, the man on the phone takes Sandra, a supervisor at a fast food restaurant, someone who doesn’t have very much authority, and asks her to take on some of his. He tells her that Becky (Dreama Walker), one of her employees, has stolen money from a customer’s purse. It’s a small accusation, but it’s a weightier matter than the day-to-day operation of a restaurant. Until that point in the day, the biggest problem Sandra’s faced has been who left a freezer open, spoiling food. Even if she finds the culprit in that case, it’s a no-win situation for her: Sandra’s still going to be held responsible. The call from the man who says he’s a police officer, and his request for her help in detaining Becky, gives Sandra an opportunity to do something for which she’ll earn credit, even acclaim. Helping the police gives Sandra the opportunity, or so she thinks, to be not just a good employee, but a good citizen.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to see the law enforced and for justice to be done. But that’s not actually exactly the same thing as doing what the police ask, all of the time, without question. Compliance is about the danger of giving someone else the ability to validate your goodness and to ask you to collaborate with them without asking them to meet high standards of responsibility and ethics or verifying that they’re following the law and that their requests are in accordance with it. The mere assertion by the man on the phone that he’s a police officer is enough to get Sandra to follow his directions. And even if the man on the phone had been able to verify that he was a police officer, there’s something frightening about the implication that Sandra wouldn’t have questioned his orders even as they get more baroque and invasive. She values the promise of approval too much to verify or consider any of the steps she’s told she has to perform to receive it. There’s a lot of cultural conditioning behind Sandra’s values and her assumptions, whether it’s the way police procedurals regularly treat brutality as a way of communicating the stress of the job rather than a sign of rot, or the idea, presented even in a forthcoming episode of a wannabe-skeptical show like The Newsroom, that the police almost always arrest the right person and prosecutors almost always secure convictions. But trusting that a job title or a badge suddenly removes the possibility of fallibility, weakness, or evil from a person is a dangerous thing. Compliance will probably be read and reviewed as the story of a bizarre one-off incident. But that string of incidents couldn’t have happened outside a larger cultural context.

Over the past week or so, I’ve gotten more and more irritated by the indiscriminate use of the word “controversial” to describe art and pop culture. It’s a classic case of a word not meaning what the people who use it seem to mean. And in some cases, deploying it can be actively unhelpful in communicating to an audience what’s actually interesting or moving about a piece of art.

Take Compliance, one of my favorite feature films out of Sundance. The subject of the movie, the detention and sexual assault of a young fast-food restaurant worker named Becky, is undoubtedly uncomfortable viewing for some people. The first time it aired at the festival, some members of the audience by images of star Dreama Walker underdressed or nude and being mistreate (and in proof that being a rich progressive doesn’t make you classy, some creep decided to shout things about how hot Walker is in the midst of that discussion). But the subject matter of the movie isn’t actually controversial: nobody thinks that the things that happen to Becky should have happened, and the movie makes it clear that they’re awful. And the making of the movie itself doesn’t seem to be the source of the controversy. As director Craig Zobel told me, he worked with Walker both to make sure she felt she wasn’t being exploited as an actress, and to make sure she felt like the movie would be something audiences would walk away from having absorbed the messages that Zobel intended to send. There may be a controversy over whether artists should portray bad things happening to women at all, but our culture seems to have settled on an agreement that it’s generally fine as long as you’re not making snuff pornography. Compliance is challenging, uncomfortable, and deeply moving. It is not controversial.

The Los Angeles Times does a nice job of fisking another occurrence of the phenomenon, this time NPR describing the long-dead and long-canonized artist Jackson Pollock’s work as controversial. There are controversies adjacent to Pollock, of course: if a toddler does the same thing, but without intention, is it art? Is the painting authenticator Paul Biro claims to have verified as the work Pollockreal or part of a scheme by Biro to pass off fakes? But Pollock’s work itself is not the subject of a genuine controversy: describing it that way is just a way to gin up pageviews.

Or worse, alleging controversy where there is none is a way of indicating false equivalence in an attempt to avoid charges of bias. The claim of false equivalency is one of the biggest debates in journalism right now, the source of the debate over whether the New York Times should “fact-check” (probably the wrong term for it) politicians’ claims. But art, even more so than politics, is an arena where writers should feel comfortable making judgements and refusing to pretend there’s an equal debate, or a debate at all, where there isn’t. Labeling something controversial or treating it as dangerous when it’s merely challenging is a way of keeping people away from art rather than getting them to engage with it.