Director Craig Zobel on Compliance

After feeling like his creative vision was being worn down by the politics and omnipotent powers of Hollywood, Atlanta-born filmmaker Craig Zobel became fascinated with the idea of deference to authority, in spite of personal ideals or morals. His research led him to reports of a strip-search scam that occurred over seventy times across America.

Compliance is a fictionalised account of one of the incidents, where restaurant employee Becky (Dreama Walker) is strip-searched and sexually abused by her manager (Ann Dowd), all because a man claiming to be a police officer instructs her to over the phone.
The film is a hugely disturbing examination of power, conformity and obedience. However, one the most interesting aspects of Compliance has been the extreme reactions the film has received. Despite its almost complete accuracy, there have been highly publicised walk-outs at screenings, with audience members dismissing it as unbelievable or exploitative. Zobel believes that for many, this reaction is a defence mechanism.
“A certain segment of society just reject it, they don’t even want to think about that,” he acknowledges. “They automatically assume it’s not something they would ever do, and say ‘Oh well, those particular people are just stupid.’ But it happened so many times that it had to be bigger than that, and you can see ripple effects of this aspect of human psychology throughout history. I believe that the truth is that the people who are the most resistant to it are the ones who might be more susceptible to it. Acknowledging that things aren’t black and white and opening yourself up to the possibility that you can be influenced and have maybe gone that direction – not to this extreme, but in a certain way – actually puts it into your mind to examine and be sensitive to that. Whereas I find this immediate dismissal of the possibility is dangerous – refusing to acknowledge this aspect of human psychology doesn’t mean it’s not there.”
Zobel has found that another common dismissal of the events is to make the event a class issue, as people say this would only ever happen in fast food restaurants, as if employees there are less intelligent than other people, as if power and authority don’t affect everyone.
“I’m so fascinated by that reaction. To me, that’s the reaction of people who are wealthy, it feels very disconnected from the experiences of my life. I think people are just trying to distance themselves from the possibility that they could do something that wrong by turning it into a class issue, because then it can be explained away.”
But education or class is clearly no protection from being manipulated, as we now know from last year’s highly publicised “Royal Prank.” In December, two DJs from Sydney 2Day FM easily convinced nurses in the UK to release confidential medical details about Kate Middleton, by very badly (and not at all amusingly) impersonating Queen Elizabeth II. Though the case was shrouded by the tragic suicide by one of the hospital workers involved, it did show how automatically and unquestioningly people defer to authority, without any evidence of its validity.
“Yeah, there was actually a more recent study in a series of hospitals. The nurses would get a call from a fake doctor whose name didn’t sound like any doctor who had worked on that floor or in that hospital. He would tell them to assign this dosage of a specific medicine to a patient. The medicine would be a placebo, but the label would say that this amount of the drug is lethal. When the fake doctor would call, he would say, “Please give patient so-and-so in Room Seven X or Y amount of this drug.” It would be double the amount that the label said was lethal. All but one of the women did it without question, and they were people who were all different classes who had gone to college for six years or whatever.”
Zobel so effectively creates such a disturbing atmosphere of vulnerability and exploitation that the scenes of nudity and sexual abuse feel far more graphic than they actually are. But some viewers have been projecting their feelings of discomfort onto Zobel, comparing his directorial decision to have Dreama Walker appear topless in the film to the caller’s sexual exploitation of young women. While Zobel is extremely articulate about problems surrounding the media’s representation of women, he strongly objects to the automatic and assigned victimisation of female actresses in general; and Walker in particular.
“I don’t know what that is, if it came out of second wave feminism where there was a huge difference, and people were making really bad exploitational movies, but I feel like the political correctness has now eaten itself. It robs female actresses of any sense of agency, but also doesn’t let exploitation even be a conversation. Dreama is an actress and wanted to do it, and saw the film as an exploration of men abusing authority over women. In her mind that was the reason to make the movie. So saying that I exploited her isn’t giving her any credit for being a thoughtful, intelligent person, because you’re assuming she wasn’t actively trying to make that statement as well. It’s frustrating for her and me.”

Compliance is in cinemas now.