Director Kyle Patrick Alvarez on Tackling Legendary ‘Stanford Prison Experiment’

Sandra Miska

Psychological experiments occur on college campuses every day, but few have been as memorable as the famed Stanford Prison Experiment, conducted in the summer of 1970 by Dr. Philip Zimbardo. Although the experiment has inspired multiple films, the upcoming “Stanford Prison Experiment” is the first narrative film to acutely depict Zimbardo and his subjects. Entertainment Voice recently sat down with director Kyle Patrick Alvarez to discuss his process, recreating Zimbardo’s world, and what’s it’s like to make an indie with 25 leads.

Entertainment Voice: Can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you came to directing features?

Kyle Patrick Alvarez: I’m 32.  I’ve lived in L.A. for ten years.  I moved out here to work on films, specifically.  It took a while to get started, sometimes as it does.  I made my first film when I was 25, that was “Easier with Practice.”  Each film’s gotten a little bit bigger.  My second film was “C.O.G.,” which was a couple of years ago, and now this one’s my third.  I’ve always loved film.  I grew up watching a lot of movies, going to Blockbuster and stacking up a wall of cassettes, you know, juggling home with them and watching as many movies as I could.  I wasn’t shooting movies.  You always hear those stories of directors saying, “I was shooting movies with my video camera in the backyard.”  I never really did that.  …I watched everything I could, old cinema and new cinema… I was going to high school at the time, the mid to late-nineties when the indie film world really blew up….  It was really exciting to see filmmakers like Paul Thomas Anderson and Alexander Payne and these guys who are now, like, titans making their first films and just being really blown away by them and Darren Aronofsky and these kinds of people where I wanted to have some part of that.  Not that I’m as good as those guys by any means, but just to aspire to that, to that energy and uniqueness they would bring to film at the time.

Where are you from originally?

I’m originally from Miami.  My parents are Cuban immigrants.  But I grew up moving around a lot because of my dad’s job.  I lived overseas for a while, in Northern California, Chicago, Mexico City – I moved around a lot.  Miami I guess is the closest to a hometown.  Not that I’ve lived in L.A. for ten years, I’ve lived here eight times as long as I’ve lived anywhere else in my life.

What attracted you to this script?  Were you always interested in psychology?

No, actually.  I was familiar with the experiment, but not that much so.  I didn’t know a lot of the details of it.  So, when I read the script – The script was one of those scripts that had been around for a long time; people loved it.  It was considered a great, unproduced script, so I was excited to read it.  I was all the more impressed after I finished it and started to read about the experiment that the script was really true to the events.  It really wasn’t making up a lot of events, it really wasn’t embellishing a lot.  That got me really excited, to try to make a film that had that same feeling, where you’re watching it and you’re like, “This is just too bizarre.  There’s no way this is real.”  Then afterwards you go, “Oh my god, this really was all real.”  So, I liked that and I was really excited about putting together a really exciting young ensemble of kids.  You know, for me I’m really drawn to casting and casting opportunities.  That was really exciting for me, that I was going to work to put together this group of kids that would be hopefully be some of the most exciting and brightest kids working today.  So that was a challenge I was really excited about.  …The movie had a lot of aesthetic challenges that I hadn’t done before, camera moves and things like that I hadn’t done before, so I was really excited about all these things that were coming together and trying to take on a more ambitious project than I had in the past.

You wrote both of your previous films.  How was this process different, directing a script that someone else wrote?

You know, it’s weird, in some ways it’s the same, in some ways it’s really, really different.  …My aim isn’t to be a writer.  I like writing, and I’m glad when I do.  Typically, I find when I’m writing that if I’m adapting something, where I know where I want it to go anyways, or if it’s more personal, my first two films are more personal, even though they’re based on stories, they were coming from some personal experience as well.  In this case, it helped that I didn’t write it.  I was trying to make a movie that was really about more objectiveness, it was more about looking into this as an observer than it was about having an opinion about what was happening.  Was it wrong?  Was it right?  The ethics of it, I wasn’t interested in dealing with those things.  So, in a weird way it helped that I had to look at the script from afar because I didn’t write it.  I was able to look at it objectively, just as I had to as a filmmaker, working with the actors.  In a weird way, the nature of the material sort of helped me out.  But it was weird, it was definitely different, with respect to the writer, as a director you have to get in there sometimes and be like, “Wait, I wouldn’t really put those two scenes together…”  You always want to show respect to the writer, but also show respect to the form of shooting it and editing it too, so it’s a weird balance; it was just new for me.  Fortunately, [screenwriter] Tim [Talbott] is incredibly gracious and collaborative and understood when I wanted to make changes or would push back when he didn’t think I should make those changes.  That’s the kind of relationship I think you want with a writer.

How long did it take to shoot the film?

We only had, like, 22 shooting days, which is kinda normal for an indie film, but this one was different, because the script was quite long.  I think we were shooting a 135-page script, and we had such a big cast of 25 leads, so normally you’d have 20 days in your budget for a small movie about two characters going on a trip together or something like that.  That’s way easier than 25 people in the 1970s that are locked in a hallway.  It had its challenges.  It wasn’t particularly easy to pull off.

And you filmed in L.A.?

Half of it, all the stuff in the hallway, we used a soundstage because we rebuilt that hallway as it was.  The other half of it we shot at an old building downtown and then some exteriors were at a college here.

Some of the exteriors looked like they might’ve been Stanford, but it was another school?

Yeah, it was another school.  We wanted to shoot at Stanford but it was one of the last things we didn’t have the budget for.  To bring our whole crew up there, to shoot there on campus had a lot of fees associated with it.  We pushed for it, but it was one of the last big cuts we made.  It was tough, because I really wanted to, but we scouted out here and found little corners of campuses and little places out here for the few scenes we had outdoors that looked enough like Stanford that I didn’t think it would take you out of the film.

There was one exterior where Zimbardo and his girlfriend are outside and the exterior looked similar to an exterior in the movie “Orange County,” which also takes place at Stanford.

You know, that’s so funny, I forgot they went to Stanford in that movie.  It was at USC, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were also at USC.  I’ll have to go back and watch that movie and see because that would be really funny.  “…It was never sorta about the setting, if we had spent all that money to go up to Stanford we probably would’ve been like, “We should really get a long-shot of this, we should really get a wide-shot of that.”  It would’ve worked against the movie.”

Were there any scenes that were hard to shoot?  It’s such an intense film.

The hardest stuff to shoot – I mean hard in a good way because everyone was really engaged and everyone was working really intensely – Was all the stuff at the end, when Chris was doing the pushups and all the guys were sitting on his back, that kind of stuff you really want to get through it, for the actors’ sake, for your sake, because there was a lot to shoot.

Did you ever feel like Dr. Zimbardo at any point when you were directing all these guys and telling them what to do?

No, I never did.  I think maybe if we shot for longer I might’ve, but it was fast enough that it never got too involved.  There were a couple days where you are like, “Oh, this would not have been an easy experiment to sit through,” you know, to have been a part of, but no, I sorta take a lot of pride in keeping up good relationships with the actors I work with, and trying to make things very friendly.  There’s something really antagonistic about making movies, right?  You’re bringing together a bunch of people who have never worked together, actors of different mediums, whatever it is, and suddenly you’re expected to all work together at an incredibly proficient level, without any history or work experience.  No businesses run that way but film.  And so, I try to work against that and make it as peaceful as possible, because it’s never going to be peaceful, but you strive for it to be and hope that you can get through all that work.  So, it was actually a pretty joyful set, in some ways.

That’s what some of the actors said during the Q&A [following a screening], that they were laughing in between takes.

Those guys had a blast.  I wish I had as much fun as they did.  [Laughs].  I always had to worry about the next scene.  For them, their job was just to worry about the moment they’re in.  They all had a really good time, I think.

What’s next for you?

I’m working on a couple of things.  One was announced; it’s this YA adaptation; it’s a thriller; it’s this suspense book.  It’s a teen thriller, and I’m really excited about it.  It has got some action in it, it’s got some romance in it; it’s a great combination.  It’s not YA like it’s some post-apocalyptic story, not “Hunger Games” or anything like that.

So no vampires?

No, no.  It’s kinda like a murder-mystery but it’s with teenagers.

The “Stanford Prison Experiment” opens July 10 in select theaters.