Daniel_Norton_INTV_A

Well, this is an incredibly timely subject. Everyone is talking about cyber crime, and it was just an opportunity to do something really intriguing to me and something really timely. Everyone's kind of clued into cyber crime now because it now affects all of us. It was also an opportunity to do something stylistically different than I've done and to work with a great DP and make this as stylistic as possible. So it was an exciting endeavor for me. Yeah, I've made a lot of films, and this one, arguably, is maybe the most difficult film I've ever made. And that's for a variety of reasons. First of all, logistically, it was just crazy. We shot like seven countries in ten days, and we were all over the place. That was crazy. But moreover, because this film is about making the virtual world real and making virtual problems tangible -- that's the conceit of the film is to not just understand these virtual problems, but to go and to see the places and meet the people that are involved in this whole virtual landscape. And as a filmmaker who's normally dealt in the real and the tangible, it was a real challenge to make these ideas -- to bring them to life. I think the most interesting commonality we found while shooting is the idea of privacy. We knew that privacy was going to be a theme in this film, and we think of privacy as being diametrically opposed to security. I thought we were going to have a tennis match between privacy and security in this film. The reality was that everyone across the spectrum, from criminals to cops, all told us they believed in privacy and all seemed pretty fervent about the idea of privacy. I think that's interesting, and maybe the most remarkable is a couple of the cops that we interviewed were probably the most passionate. Says, no, no, no, we can't cross these boundaries. We need privacy. We want to try to do our job, but we all believe in privacy. And that was interesting to me, but it was also just encouraging as well. I want viewers to have their own takeaway, but mine is, both in making it and now watching the film, is that the virtual world reflects the complicated landscape which is - - really which is the human condition. And that is that there's always a conflict between what we want as individuals and what we need to live in as a community. And as individuals, we want privacy, we want the ability to do what we want to do, we want our personal freedoms. But as a community, we realize that people take advantage of those and that we have to make certain sacrifices to live in a community. And the online world is that same reflection of that human condition. So we're always making decisions between what we want as individuals and what we want as a community. And hopefully the film reflects that. A little bit of knowledge can actually instill quite a bit of fear in you because I think I was pretty naïve before making this film, how vulnerable we all are as individuals and how real some of the threats are in the virtual world. So, yeah, I've come out of this -- I'm going to try to protect myself better, which I think we all have to do, but I'm also just aware that there's a certain fragility to our lives in the virtual world. It's a tough question and one that I think viewers will have to wrestle with on their own. For me, I vacillated between the idea that these ultra secure hosting facilities do need to exist and that privacy and anonymity is important, but also at times thinking that there should be some sort of control on those so that people don't take advantage of that kind of situation. The reality is I don't think that there's a lot that we can do as a community. And so I think James Ball says it best in the film, that it really is the responsibility of the hosters, that we're asking hosters to take on what really is a responsibility, an important responsibility, in our society, to decide what to host and what not to host. Well, I hesitate to say that this or any of my films is important. I'll leave that to the viewer. But I do know that it's timely and that anyone who is connected to the Internet right now in any fashion is connected to these issues and these problems. And so I think it's very timely. And I think that a film like this that can help somehow make those issues tangible or real is, if not important, I think it's timely. There were a lot of crazy moments making this film, but I think for me, the one that stands out the most is when we met the new owners of CyberBunker and there was all this intrigue built up with us because we were trying to get in there and only seeing it from the outside and of course knew that there was some kind of mysterious, maybe nefarious, individuals associated with this place. And then we finally get connected to the new owners and show up, and it's like these two very slick, practically male models who greeted us and -- with this incredibly savvy business plan. And it just made us reconsider what some of these ultra secure hosting, what, you know, that it's a really complicated landscape and a lot of different kinds of people are inhabiting it.