In one of his many interviews, Alfred Hitchcock had famously stated, ‘I enjoy playing the audience like a piano.’ The maestro would have loved the tune composed by the Australian film director Craig Monahan in his debut feature, The Interview (1998).
The film begins with a Kafkaesque nightmarish situation, with Eddie Rodney Fleming (Hugo Weaving, who played Keanu Reeves’ nemesis, Agent Smith, in the path breaking The Matrix, a year later), an out-on-the-dole individual, who has lost both his job and family, is rudely awakened from his slumber at five in the morning, when two armed policemen barge through the door of his unkempt, one-room apartment. Disoriented, dumbfounded, and distraught, Fleming’s repeated pleas of innocence fall into deaf ears as the cops ransack his apartment, physically and verbally humiliate him, and then at gunpoint, against his will, take him to the station for the eponymous interview (the Australian equivalent of a police interrogation, where questions are asked in order to find out the truth about an incident).
One of the cops who forcibly take Fleming into custody is Detective Sergeant John Steele (Tony Martin), who has been called in ‘to get results’. He is an official with a penchant for throwing away the rulebook—a habit, which has led to his having several run-ins with the Ethics Standard Department (the Australian equivalent of the US’ Internal Affairs) over the past few years. His younger aide is Detective Senior Constable Wayne Prior (Aaron Jeffrey, who portrayed the character of Thomas Logan in 2009’s damp squib X-Men Origins: Wolverine), who has a tendency to burst into unprovoked violence.
The clueless Fleming is shoved inside a dank, dingy room filled only with a couple of chairs and a table with a tape recorder on it—a fishbowl scenario portended by the very first shot of the film. As the interview commences, to his utter amazement, he finds he has been charged with stealing a car and forging documents. With Steele frequently interrupting the interview, making the fidgety Fleming sweat even more, the situation looks grimmer with every passing minute. Knowing fully well that the police department are within their rights to detain him for a ‘reasonable time’, which can extend to five to six hours, the famished Fleming pleads, prods, and tries to pursue the two nattily dressed policemen in vain about his lack of knowledge and role in the events he is being accused of.
As the interview proceeds, the allegations start piling up and Fleming finds himself facing questions on crimes much more serious than merely a stolen vehicle. While the two cops fish for answers, playing the ‘good cop bad cop’ routine, a reporter is on the prowl inside the station, brought in by ‘the hierarchy’, supposedly to gather material for a story on crime squads. But Steele is too world-weary to know the real reason behind this presence. As pressure mounts on him to conclude the interview, we, the viewer, find ourselves right in the centre of a cat-and-mouse game, with enough twists, turns, spirals, and snares to make us realise that nothing is quite as it seems.
Of late, the term ‘Hitchcockian’ has been used so copiously that the essence of the term is at the risk of getting diluted. Rarely does a film come along that does justice to the term. This little-known, rarely-seen, hardly talked about film from Australia falls into that miniscule category that goes by the name ‘The best films Hitchcock never made’.
The opening sequence of The Interview, when the police break into Fleming’s apartment, clearly plays on our innate disdain for men in uniform and harks back to the ‘wrong man’ trope, which Hitchcock borrowed from the Scottish author John Buchan, while filming his thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935). Theoretically speaking, the theme of a man accused of a crime he did not commit was present even in one of Hitchcock’s earliest films, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927), and prominently featured in many of his subsequent films like Saboteur (1942), I Confess (1953), The Wrong Man (1956), and North by Northwest (1959).
A solitary incident during Hitchcock’s childhood, when he had to spend a night in jail, had led to a life-long aversion towards the police—an aspect that we find him revisiting time and again by portraying law enforcement officials as incompetent individuals (Young and Innocent, 1937). In The Interview, too, we find that in their eagerness to elicit a confession from Fleming, Steele and Prior made at least one crucial mistake that could jeopardise their entire investigation.
Possibly, one of the foremost examples of audience manipulation (‘playing them like a piano’) occurs during a pivotal scene in Psycho (1960), the film Hitchcock is most famous for. There, during a conversation over dinner, we find our sympathies gradually swaying from Marion Crane towards the bumbling, stuttering Norman Bates. Similarly, in The Interview, when after repeated requests Fleming is granted a meal, Monahan deftly fiddles with our feelings to an extent that we start questioning on whose side we should be on.
One of the biggest gambles Hitchcock took professionally was when he released Rope (1948). An experiment in single-setting, single-shot moviemaking, initially it did not go down well with either the critics or the audience. He did venture into a single-setting endeavour on a previous occasion (Lifeboat, 1944) and would revisit it in Rear Window (1954). What makes Monahan’s efforts—of structuring his film almost completely within the confines of a police station, and, in turn, within the four walls of a room—laudable is the fact that unlike Hitchcock, who had almost two decades of filmmaking experience under his belt before he embarked on this experiment, The Interview was the Aussie’s first feature!
Besides these obvious references, The Interview is also replete with other nods to the ace director. Monahan refers to Hitchcock’s fascination with staircases, which frequently symbolises impending danger (Psycho, 1960) in the opening sequence of his film, when he focuses on the feet of two men climbing up a flight of stairs, guns in hand. In Stage Fright (1950) Hitchcock had taken the element of the unreliable narrator a step further by presenting a flashback as a lie—a decision he later regretted. Here also, we find us facing a narrator whose reliability can be questioned; and a flashback, whose authenticity is in doubt. The leit motif of a platinum blonde, too, makes an appearance in The Interview, in the form of Fleming’s solicitor.
A true disciple of Hitchcock, Monahan knew a tribute to the master would be incomplete without a Mcguffin (an element that drives the plot). In this case, the alleged crime for which Fleming is brought in is the Mcguffin, created with the sole intention of pointing out our propensity towards attaining closure or as Fleming so eloquently states: ‘Just goes to show how the mind works.’
For a film that depends solely on a question-answer format to propel it forward, Monahan’s masterstroke comes in the form of a freeze-frame shot—where via a single gesture, he speaks volumes and initiates conversations and dialogues among viewers that would last long after the lights have dimmed in the theatre.
An ending that reminds us of that of The Birds (1963) but impressive in its ingenuity—Hitchcock would have smiled.
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