'Creative Control' explores the negative side of personal tech
Benjamin Dickinson has had times in his life when the filmmaker couldn’t escape his smartphone, waking him up in the morning and being a temptation to watch videos and check texts in bed before venturing out into the real world.
There’s a danger to being that tapped into technology, and with the sci-fi cautionary tale Creative Control (in theaters Friday in New York, Los Angeles and Austin, expanding nationwide March 18), Dickinson takes our need to be plugged in constantly to a next unfortunate level.
“It’s like nuclear power,” he says. “We can get energy from it and power our homes, or we can make bombs.”
Dickinson, a veteran of music videos for LCD Soundsystem and Q-Tip, wrote, directed and stars as David, a New York advertising executive working on a campaign for augmented-reality glasses.
Comedian/musician Reggie Watts (as himself) is given free rein to express his creativity with the Augmenta device for marketing potential, but David experiments with it, too, creating a virtual version of his best pal’s girlfriend (Alexia Rasmussen). David grows apart from his own yoga-teaching love interest (Nora Zehetner) as he loses control of reality.
Themes of human nature and its frailty spoke to Watts, says the bandleader for The Late Late Show With James Corden. “I’m always interested in how technology influences the way human beings behave, and also how technology can essentially bring out or amplify the not-optimal attributes in people as well.
“Technology is not a replacement for person-to-person experience. It’s a way to augment your life.”
Dickinson started writing Creative Control — which won a jury award at last year’s South by Southwest Film Festival — around the time that Google Glass was announced in 2012.
He had also just gone through the breakup of a long-term relationship “negotiated largely over text,” he adds, and social media made it stranger and more painful. “It’s very easy to be mean. You could say things over text message that you would never say to somebody’s face.”
Additionally, Dickinson found inspiration in how much of people’s interpersonal lives are run through their devices — one of the first images that occurred to him for the film was of a couple having sex and the man picking up his phone for a selfie.
“That struck me as funny but also very poignant and weird, because sex is already pretty great,” Dickinson says. “When we look at something through our phones, it makes it more real or more salacious or more enjoyable.”
Dickinson acknowledges that he can’t be anti-technology — “That’d be like being against water or gravity” — but after making the movie, he has made some lifestyle changes. There are no devices allowed in his bedroom, he isn't on Facebook, and he bought an alarm clock and a wristwatch so he didn’t have to lean on his phone.
“I’m aware of the addictive quality, so I’m just trying to set up an environment where I can be a creature of habit in a way that’s not making me feel sad,” Dickinson says.