IFC News: An "Odd Couple" for the post-9/11 US: Jeff Stanzler on "Sorry, Haters"
Throw people from opposing walks of life together and you get movies as varied as "It Happened One Night," "Something Wild" and "The Odd Couple." With different backgrounds, personalities and outlooks zinging around them, two people slammed against one another by circumstance are likely to argue a lot, learn something profound, evolve, perhaps fall in love. Jeff Stanzler's "Sorry, Haters" begins with Phoebe (Robin Wright Penn), a New York yuppie, getting into the backseat of Ashade's (Abdellatif Kechicke) New York taxicab. She can't decide where to go. She cries outside a house in New Jersey. She takes an unusually compassionate interest in his life. If viewers think they know where this scenario is headed, they're in for a shock — Stanzler's first feature pulls the rug out from under our expectations, sending narrative elements flying wildly before letting them land with frightening precision in a psychological thriller that offers a terrifying take on life in post-9/11 America. IFC News' Andrea Meyer asked the director six questions.


What in your life inspired you to write this particular story?
I had a friend who had a different response to September 11th than most people. In a strange way I felt like he got a comfort out of the panic. He talked about how he felt there were inevitably going to be more attacks and that this was going to mess up the entire power structure of our country, and he thought of it on some level as leveling the playing field. It made an impression on me. And I thought it would be very important to have an Arab Muslim as the lead in an American film and not selling newspapers or planning a terrorist strike. Those were the twin towers that went into writing the script.

How did you research Ashade's story?
I went to a mosque down on the Lower East Side and I literally walked in the door and said I was writing a film and wanted to get it right, and they said, "What's it about?" and I said, "It's about a cab driver and this woman," and they got this guy who was actually Egyptian, but just like in the film he had a PhD in chemistry. Probably the most alarming thing he said to me was, "Everyone gets in my cab, and they're not nice like you, Jeff. Since September 11th, I feel a prejudice." He said something like 80-85% [of his customers], and he was a very soft-spoken, very gentle guy, and that was really alarming to me.

Is Phoebe insane?
She's as insane as the rest of us, but a little further advanced in her insanity. I myself have had periods of time when I'd feel underappreciated and passed over and underutilized, when I sat around thinking, "Why is that motherfucker getting this or that when I should be getting this and that?" and getting pretty self-destructive with it. And luckily I met my wife and had a happy ending, but this is in some ways recognizing that on a certain level in our culture if you're not somebody you're a nobody and it's getting more and more so everyday.

How did you seduce Robin Wright Penn to do your film?
She read the script and called, and my first conversation was, "We're going to do this with very little money and very little time and no trailer, no nothing," and she said, "And?"

What are the films that inspired you in making this one?
I don't know if there was any specific root. I love some of the early Polanski. I'm attracted to political films from the 70s and Buñuel, in some of his more realistic

Jeff Stanzler with Robin Wright Penn at the Toronto Film Festival 2005
films, like "Los Olivados," where he dealt with people being persecuted who did not have angelic responses to it. The great quote I love from Buñuel is: "If poor people in films are always so great, why would anyone ever want to be rich?"

Can you explain the title?
I have a certain fascination with hip hop culture and I was introduced to the word "hater" a couple years ago and I realized it's a term for someone who hates you for what you have. What's interesting is in our culture it seems you're not successful unless somebody hates you for what you have. So that's a bit of a double entendre, but hopefully not too cute.

"Sorry, Haters" opens in select cities on March 1. For more on the film, see the official site.