Cam’s Daniel Goldhaber and Isa Mazzei talk 21st-century horror

The director and screenwriter of the new horror film Cam chat with Culturess about digital identity, sexism, and making their first film.

Cam is the first film from Daniel Goldhaber and Isa Mazzei, but you’d never know it if you talked to them. The neophyte director and screenwriter, respectively, know their stuff, and they’ve nurtured their first film for the last three years in the hopes of bringing it to the screen. Drawing on Mazzei’s own background as a cam girl, Cam is a film that understands the male gaze and hopes to eradicate it, while frightening audiences with a story aimed squarely at the YouTube generation. Goldhaber and Mazzei took time during this year’s AFI Fest to talk to Culturess about their movie, the need to create boundaries as a woman, and more.

Warning: Spoilers ahead for those who have not seen Cam.

This is your first feature film project. How did this all come together?

Isa Mazzei: [Daniel and I have] known each other for 12 years and we’ve always been creatively involved in each other’s projects. When I was working as a cam girl I had the desire to tell a story where an audience would empathize with a sex worker and work to destigmatize sex work, but I had nothing else except that. That was what I wanted to do. I hired Danny to shoot some porn for me and he flew out and we were working together. I told him about this idea and he was like, “Let’s make a film. We should do a film here.”

We talked about doing a documentary and then we realized that genre, in particular, horror, was actually the better way to do it because documentary you are looking at something from the outside. No matter how much empathy you’re trying to garner you’re still from the outside looking in, and we really wanted to bring someone inside the headspace of a sex worker. We decided to do a horror film and from there we developed everything together. I did the craft of writing, he did the craft of directing, but when it came to developing the story and the script it was a joint effort from day one.

Daniel Goldhaber: It was the kind of thing where as Isa was writing and we were going back-and-forth and doing notes the conversation was going so beyond “here’s notes on the dialogue” to “how are we going to shoot this? How are we going to talk about this? How are we going to crew this up?” The way we talked about it is as a shared vision; it’s co-owned by the both of us because, in terms of that upper-level idea of what is the purpose of this film and how is that going to be expressed through filmmaking, that was something we shared between us.

One of the other things we talked about a lot was film auteurship. Auteurship is almost exclusively seen as a monologue from a singular directing entity, and that’s really not necessarily either the best way to make films or the best way to look at film or film authorship, so we really saw this film as a dialogue between the two of us that’s like “Hey, come listen to this conversation we’ve been having.” That was really exciting to us and something we really hope other people see and maybe rethink their own approach.

Can you talk about writing this from a female perspective? How much came from personal experience?

IM: Absolutely. We wanted this story to be told from the female perspective, from Alice’s perspective. When writing the script something that was really important to me was to depict a protagonist who was not only just a badass but also really driven and ambitious, had this overwhelming passion for her career. I read the screenplay for Whiplash and Black Swan and I took a lot from those two films because they both depict protagonists who are sacrificing everything for the thing that they love. As an audience, we never question that. We see Miles Teller with his hands bleeding, drumming to the furthest point he can and we’re rooting for him. We’re so excited for him. Same thing with Natalie Portman in Black Swan. I wanted to take as much as I could from those scripts and give those qualities to Alice.

For the first 30 minutes of the film I’m simultaneously educating about what the world is but at the same time having them feel the excitement and the thrill and the ambition that she feels in this industry, so when that’s taken away from her, when that agency is stripped away, they can relate to that terror and be rooting for her to get that back.

Photo Credit: Netflix

How did you navigate the dichotomy of a movie about a woman selling herself for male consumption yet at the same time she’s crafting her own mini-empire?

IM: That’s why I think it was so important to have a female author and a male author because camming and the sex industry, conventionally speaking, is an interaction of male and female gaze, and male and female perspectives. It was really nice to have a male collaborator who could look at it from the other side of the screen where I was looking at it as this is the female performer side of it.

DG: In many ways, we see the movie as about two characters. It’s about Alice and her performed identity, Lola. Even at the beginning, before that identity has been stripped away from her, just looking from a shot-by-shot basis it’s about a juxtaposition of those two people. Ultimately, going back to what Isa was saying about our use of genre, she has this agency at the beginning of the movie and we almost reinforce that she had that agency at the beginning — the empire building that you’re talking about — by stripping it away from her and then the audience can say, “Oh, wait, I really liked the first 25 minutes. I liked what she had there and I want her to get that back” because that’s how conventional narrative structure works.

It is definitely a really complicated thing that she’s doing, but all art forms are complicated. As filmmakers, we have to deal with tons of horrible, especially Isa, things in our business, but we don’t ask for filmmakers to have the uniformly positive experience; we don’t ask for any given worker in any given labor field to have a universally positive and empowered experience. But we do have that expectation of sex work, and what we really wanted to talk about in Cam was showing the audience a character who is totally embracing everything about her industry and is fully aware of all the benefits and all the drawbacks.

IM: The other thing is, if you think about it, people often say, “Oh, there are two men in this film and they impact Alice negatively.” But actually there are hundreds of men in this film that I wrote that are scripted characters with personalities that are in these chats, and those are the men that are respectful and obeying Alice’s boundaries. The only two men that come off negatively are the two that cross these boundaries. They are the only two men in the film because they’re the only two men that disobey the rules that Alice has built for herself. So when you look at this industry, if men are respectful and respecting the boundaries and the prices and the rules set by the women providing the services, then you can actually have a symbiotic relationship and that’s what most of the men that watch Alice are engaging in. That’s why we don’t see them, because they’re respecting her boundaries.

Can you explain more about creating all these different men online that we don’t see?

IM: It was so fun! Coming up with all their usernames was the most hilarious part.

DG: Lot of in-jokes.

IM: There are so many in-jokes! Even Danny’s poor dead dog.

DG: My childhood dog died during production. Her username is DeadPepper.

IM: And she only posts dog emojis. That was Danny’s idea.

DG: A professor I hate.

IM: Coming up with their names was funny but it would have been much easier to just do filler chats in the background. I was very aware that Tinker and Barney were these characters who were crossing boundaries with Alice and those do exist. Men like that have existed in my cam world, but for the most part, most of my viewers were so wonderful. They were my best friends, honestly! I love them and I miss them. I wanted to get as much of that in there as possible by trying to treat them as respectfully as possible because, just like sex workers are stigmatized, consumers of sex work are stigmatized and I think that’s just as negative because we’re just perpetuating this shame culture where we’re shaming both sides of an industry that are actually there to help each other.

It’s 98 pages of chats that I scripted and each of the characters has his own jokes, his own way of talking, some of them use bad grammar, some of them use perfect grammar, some of them post a lot of pictures, some of them don’t post pictures, they all have relationships with each other. If you actually track them through the film you can see someone will say, “I have a date this weekend” and then a few days later someone will say, “Oh, how did your date go?” There’s these through stories and in-jokes they have with each other. It’s a little hidden shout-out to my viewers to say, “Hey, I see you and you guys are great.”

There are a lot of parallels with YouTube in terms of Alice creating a persona that’s always online. Can you comment on that?

DG: We really wanted the movie to feel like it could have been about a Twitch star or a YouTube or an Instagram celebrity. Fundamentally, the movie takes place in the world of webcam pornography but it’s about digital identity, and the fragility of digital identity and how corruptible it is and how addictive it is. And how, in many ways, we see the digital avatars of ourselves that we’re creating as more real than ourselves. The crystallized moment of that is when Barney comes into the bathroom and is so convinced that this real flesh and blood person in front of him is the fraudulent one, but the person who just logged on, she’s the real one.

One of the other things that was really important to us in making it was we both grew up with the internet. We’ve had social media accounts since elementary school. We were both on Neopets. It’s one of those things that, as a result, my digital life is an extension of myself, is a part of myself. It is a place where I’ve felt like I’m able to express myself and, at the end of the day, it’s why Alice goes back. I also know the inherent risks of being online to my mental health and to our global conversation, and the health of that, and yet I log on every day; most of us log on every day. That’s why Alice goes back because this is the thing she absolutely loves doing and, yes, there are drawbacks to being online, but we, as a culture, have said, “Well, that’s worth it because this is a place where we’re all able to connect with each other.”

Photo Credit: Netflix

I also saw a bit of cynicism too because this is a space where, in the world of sexual harassment, there is an attractive aspect to camming that we, as a society, have created.

IM: It was a balance between wanting to demonstrate that Alice is pretty successful. She has a nice house, but it’s a lot of work. We see her with her calendar. We see her when she’s saying, “Go away, I’m studying.” That’s Alice’s experience as a cam girl. Another misconception of sex work is that there is a lot of money in it. There is a lot of money in it, but it’s not easy money. Often it can be glamorized and that’s almost just as dangerous as stigmatizing it because when I was a cam girl [and told people], some girls would be like “Oh, God, I wish I could take my clothes off and make millions of dollars.” And I’d say, “No, no, no. You don’t understand. This is the hardest job I’ve ever had to do. This is the most time-consuming, stressful, crazy thing that I’ve put myself into.” That’s often ignored in the media is the minutiae of the day-to-day, of the labor of sex work, because it is such a job.

Another thing that’s misconceived about sex work is that women who engage in it somehow need to be saved or are somehow damaged or are opening themselves up to more risks than we have as women in general. What’s actually really cool about sex work, as someone who is a sexual assault survivor, who gets harassed and catcalled, is when I’m engaged in sex work I actually feel, maybe for the first time, full agency and ownership over my body. Because I’m saying exactly what you have to do in order to look at me, or in order to touch me, or in order to engage with me in a sexual manner. And there is so much power there. For me, it was a process of reclaiming control of my body because you can’t even look at me unless you’re doing exactly what I tell you to do, and there’s something really healing about that. It’s important to show that narrative as well because that’s something that is sometimes not understood about women who choose to engage in sex work.

DG: That was something we were also trying to demonstrate in the film with the cop scene. One of the biggest safety threats to Alice is a lack of institutional support, and in fact an antagonistic institution of support. Sex workers rights are labor rights. What is really important is that we’re not only thinking about legalization or decriminalization of sex work, especially in an age of FOSTA-SESTA (Fight Online Trafficking Sex Act). SESTA/FOSTA, in the sex work community, sex workers have said this has made us drastically less safe because they’ve gutted our own abilities to protect ourselves. But it’s also really important that we’re looking at destigmatization of sex work because I have friends in Montreal and Berlin who are sex workers in places where the legality is…honestly I don’t remember where it is criminal. There are places where it’s allowed and yet, because of the social stigma attached, it’s very hard to get the protections that you need. One of the things we’re also hoping to do with this film is by bringing an audience into that experience, you erase stigma that has been built up.

How did you work on the mother/daughter relationship with Alice and her mom?

IM: That was a big collaboration with Melora [Walters]. She’s incredible and she’s so smart. She brought a lot of herself into that role and she had conversations with us where she said, “Okay, how would I feel if my daughter were doing this?” She wrote a lot of her own lines. She’d come in having rewritten her lines and she was absolutely right. We don’t have kids. I don’t have a child so I don’t have that perspective, but I did want it to be a nuanced experience for Lynn, Alice’s mom. I didn’t want to jump to these two stereotypes of her mother who just completely disowns her or her mother goes “rah, rah, feminism.” At the end of the day it is a hard thing for people to accept, even for my friends of my same generation it could be a hard thing to accept. Showing that nuance and showing her processing of it over the course of the film was really important, and I wanted it to feel subtle and complicated. Melora really helped us achieve that.

Was her casting intentional that she was in Boogie Nights?

DG: Totally conscious! The other thing that was really important was coming back to this question of craft in sex work and Alice’s craft. Alice’s mom feels betrayed that she was lied to. She is also trying to process what’s happening, but more than anything she’s embracing the craft of Alice’s show, even though we know that ultimately she’s talking about this thing and identity that Alice has created through a lot of hard work. We just really wanted to drive the point home that this is a creation of Alice’s; this is a creative project, she’s a working professional.

Photo Credit: Netflix

Can you talk a bit about finding Madeline Brewer, your Alice?

DG: It was pretty tough. I was a first-time screenwriter, a first-time male director with this subject matter.

IM: We were 24 and 25, so we were children. We’re still children.

DG: Normally, when you make a movie like this, you send a script out to agencies and they pitch clients. So we sent it out to agencies and didn’t get any clients pitched. Then we’d build lists of actresses and try to go out and get them the script directly and they all passed. Later I’d meet some of these actresses at parties and tell people about the movie. They’d be like “That sounds great!” I’d be like, “Oh, you passed on it” and they’d never heard of the project because reps were just passing on it for their clients. The thought was it’s very risky [for] no discernible reward. We really had to find people that we knew were at a level where we could directly access them while having them be a great fit for the movie.

We were in my basement, digging through actors, and my dad walks in. My dad’s a physicist and by no means a filmmaker, who loves to insert himself into the creative process, usually annoyingly. He walks through the basement and he’s like “I found your lead.” We were like “Uh huh, Dad. Sure.” He’s like “No, no, no. I saw her in this Black Mirror episode. Her name is Madeline Brewer. She’s perfect.” We went “Uh huh. Sure.” Then we looked her up and saw her stuff in Orange is the New Black.

IM: Handmaid’s [Tale] hadn’t come out yet. That came out while we were shooting.

DG: We needed somebody who not only had that naturalism that you need as a cam girl, but also had an extraordinary technical ability. From watching her for five minutes in Orange is the New Black we were like “That’s it! That’s what we’ve been looking for.” Luckily, somebody on our team knew her manager and got her to meet with me and Isa before she even wrote the script. She came in and read for us and we cast her 30 minutes later.

IM: She was perfect.

DG: She’s really incredible.

How did you handle the aesthetic of the film?

IM: We had a lot of discussions overall about the aesthetic. We wanted to find a way to make a film about the internet that would age well. People often ask what year this is set because the clothes are kinda early-2000s and the internet is dated.

DG: Yet they’re using modern smartphones.

IM: This is something we think Cronenberg does really well that we took a lot of inspiration from. We wanted it to feel set outside of time so that it would exist in its own hyper-specific world.

DG: Like Videodrome. Even though it’s about VHS tapes, it doesn’t feel dated.

Filming the ending seems either incredibly complex or incredibly simple. What was that like?

DG: No, it was very hard. In general, getting the tech in the film to work — all the screens and all the cut-ins to the screens — was immensely time-consuming; it took us a year to edit the film. The climax was about three months of that year. The shooting of the climax was relatively simple because once we had figured out all of the assets we needed to gather, the hardest thing about that was that our coverage was going to be coherent. We had a lot of issues shooting the cam scenes in the Pink Room because Kate [cinematographer Katelin Arizmendi] and I had planned a huge shot list for all of the Pink Room camming scenes and it fell apart when we actually went into the space because it was really hard. We were feeling our way through that, so when we came back to the climax, we had to spend the whole week shot listing and making sure we were able to get all the spatial relationships, and that they made sense.

What was hard about it was when we did take it into post, you get these really weird things with this movie in general where you need to add lag between all the different webcams. But how do you do that? And we were on such a shoestring budget that every frame of rotoscoping, which is when they cut somebody out from the background, was like a knife in the stomach. Figuring out ways to make that really complex thing happen on a budget was the biggest struggle.

Photo Credit: Netflix

Were there elements you wanted to include or was the movie filmed as written?

IM: It didn’t end up as written, but that’s for the best. There’s nothing we wanted to include that we didn’t get in there.

DG: We didn’t cut anything for budget. Just some special effects shots. “Oh, God, I hate the way the blood’s pooling on the vanity. Can I cut it out?” “You can do that on  two of these three shots.” That kind of thing.

IM: It was pretty minor stuff, but at the end of the day we both made exactly what we set out to make. And that’s what’s so cool about working with Blumhouse is they gave us so much creative freedom. They didn’t finance the film but they helped us develop the story from the beginning and they encouraged us to stand with our vision and make the exact film we wanted. And once we were working with Divide and Conquer, our producer Adam Hendrix, same thing; they just let us make the film we wanted to make and really trusted that we were gonna be able to pull it off, and that’s incredibly rare to find in Hollywood. We’re so thankful to Blumhouse and to Divide and Conquer for seeing that, and for trusting us, and for believing in us because it gave us a lot of confidence to go forward and try to pull off this crazy movie.

DG: With this film, the technical success and the ability that we had to do what we did…it’s not just mine and Isa’s first film, it’s our producer Isabelle Link-Levy’s first film, our editor’s first film, our cinematographer’s first film, our composer, sound designer. It was a lot of people just excited and who are brilliantly talented but had never had the opportunity to put their stamp on something. Everybody was willing to put in 110 percent to make sure it was as big and good as it could possibly be. Working with your friends is a gift, especially when they’re insanely talented.

How did you navigate the use of nudity in the film? Because I felt that there is nudity here, but not a lot.

IM: We decided from the get-go we didn’t want any nudity to feel gratuitous. We wanted to strip the male gaze from this film as much as possible. We did a couple things to be really conscientiousness of that. Madeline decided, day of, how nude she was. She had full control over that. Sometimes she wanted to be more naked than written and sometimes she wanted to be less naked than written. But what was so cool about it was she engaged in these discussions with us to address is the nudity coming from a place of character? Would Alice be naked in this scene? Because all the nudity comes from Alice, and not from the audience watching Alice, it doesn’t invite the audience to objectify her and I think that’s pretty powerful.

There’s also a culture in Hollywood of having these nudity riders and trying to force actresses to be more naked than they’re comfortable with, and I think not only is that deplorable from an ethical standpoint [but] it’s not going to make the best film because the nudity is coming from the view of the director, not from the view of the character. Your actress knows your character, and if you give her control she’s going to be able to engage thoughtfully in those discussions on how nude her character will be.

The other thing that was really important to us was we went into this knowing we were engaging with this legacy of the male gaze in cinema. We had to be very conscious of every shot and self-correct when we were catering to that. I can think of two examples. The most obvious one is in the Vibritron scene. Maddie is topless, and she took off her top and the call went up on-set for ice for her nipples. Everyone was like “ice, ice.” A PA ran to get ice. It took all of us a second and I was like, “Woah, why are we getting ice?” We all looked at each other and everyone almost laughed. It was absurd. We all had this unified vision but we were still falling prey to these expectations in filmmaking. We all laughed and were like, “Of course we aren’t going to ice her nipples. Duh.”

DG: It goes beyond explicit nudity when you’re talking about the male gaze, and in fact more insidious shots that you don’t even realize. There was another moment on-set that was a huge lesson to me. There’s a moment where Alice is tying a bow-tie right before the dinner show.

IM: She’s wearing a top.

DG: She’s got a corset on. Kate and I wanted this sensory shot of the bow tie being tied. Bow tie center frame. We’re shooting this. We’ve got the whole shot lined up and Isa runs on-set and goes “Woah, the shot is so problematic.” We’re like, “Why?” She’s like, “All I’m seeing is the top of Maddie’s cleavage and there’s no head.” We’re like “But it’s the best shot for the bow tie. We’re not objectifying her.” And Isa’s like “Even if you’re not intending to, this is an incidental moment of objectification.” So we had to stop and take the lens off the camera, rebalance the Steadicam and tilt up. Had that shot been in the finished film it would have been really problematic because the movie is told from Alice’s point-of-view. That’s how Alice sees herself, so the movie needs to be better filmmaking. It needs to be better storytelling.

IM: That’s something that was so cool to watch. I was working with people who listened to that, and not only listened to that but were thankful for that. Danny thanked me for that.

DG: There was still conflict.

IM: I was like “Just pan the camera up” and they were like “You don’t understand. We have to change the lens. We have to relight the shot.” But at the end of the day, we got a non-problematic shot and it worked. You can make a film without the male gaze, but you have to be willing to engage in those discussions. You have to make time and space for that. And you have to really listen to each other and deconstruct these ingrained defaults.

DG: The incidental things.

IM: Where you’re falling on “this is how you make a good shot,” but because there’s a legacy of the male gaze in film sometimes the way you’re making “the best shot” is problematic and does cater to the male gaze.

DG: It’s very flattering to me to hear you say there’s not much nudity in it because there’s actually a tremendous amount of nudity. It’s wild you’re saying that about a movie in which the main character rides a sex machine completely naked for 2 1/2 minutes. It makes me and Isa feel as if we’ve succeeded because that’s a testament to how you can have nudity and bodies in films and it doesn’t have to feel exploitative.

Photo Credit: Netflix

There’s no leering or lecherous intention.

DG: My impetus, personally, for wanting to make this film, and this was over three years ago, was I reached a point in my life where I had to reckon with the relationship I had with women and the ways it was problematic, and the way I had been socialized to behave around women and I was like “I really want to correct this in myself. I really don’t like this about myself.” What was really cool was the film was an opportunity to learn from Isa and work through these things. As much as we’re saying we want people to empathize with a sex worker that’s a process that I had to go through.

IM: We made him cam!

DG: I cammed for a week. It was just a fraction of the experience that any other sex worker has, but immediately I’m there. I’m vulnerable on-camera.

IM: He was naked.

DG: And I’m very bad at it. When I’m talking about craft, I have none of that craft. I have no sexual charisma. And people just wanted to get me to do things for free. Immediately I’m not only feeling that vulnerability but I’m feeling the pressure to give up my body for free. There was a certain thing that Isa said immediately after I said that — “welcome to being a woman.” When it comes back to that dialogue question, a lot of that dialogue was me learning from Isa, talking about her experience and saying, “Okay, that thing you just said. That registered for me. Let’s put it in the movie.” Being willing to rewire my own brain and making this film about performative gender allowed me to reckon with my own dysphoria around my own gender, and my own sexuality, and recognize my own performative masculinity that I really had grown up having violently enforced on me but I wanted to abandon.

IM: More than that, we were told a lot while trying to make this film that we needed to have a different ending. People wanted it to be the morality story, and I wanted to tell the story about myself and my friends in the industry. Their experience is, for the most part, they like their job and it’s just their job. Hopefully, the success of this film that we’ve had can point to the fact that people want more authentic representation. They want stories told from different points of view. They want stories from different voices. They’re tired of stereotypes and they’re tired of having stories from this single perspective which is usually a white man from one of the coasts. It’s really encouraging that we’re having these conversations now. I think the success of this film and films like Get Out have been incredibly encouraging. Just seeing how many incredible female filmmakers there are at all these festivals that we’re attending has been encouraging. I hope that we continue on this trajectory of trying to include more underrepresented voices in the film industry.

How has it felt showing this at AFI considering 48 percent of their directing slate is women?

IM: It’s an honor. It’s absolutely incredible.

DG: Her face is on a building.

IM: My face is on the side of a building with all these incredible female filmmakers and it blows my mind! It’s so incredibly moving. I feel really inspired coming out of this festival. I feel really inspired and really hopeful.

Can you share your next project?

DG: We’re doing our next film with Blumhouse.

IM: Together. It’s gonna be the same co-authorship.

DG: Writer, director, producer.

IM: Film by us.

DG: They don’t want us to say anything more than we’re doing our next film with Blumhouse. The hope is it’ll be a bigger film.

IM: And I have a book coming out next year. It’ll be out November 2019 and it’s a memoir. It’s fun and it’s funny and I hope it does something real and continues some of this work I’m trying to do.