By Todd Garbarini
Pasha Roberts is the director of the
new film Silver
Circle. He obtained his masters in financial
engineering, which he describes as “hedge fund math,†roughly ten years ago. His interest was in financial digitalization
and how to apply modern computer graphics to high finance. His thesis subject
consisted of applying a game-like graphics engine to doing equity trading in
finance so that a reasonably intelligent 13-year-old gamer could use it to learn
this type of trading. Upon doing this,
he realized that what was missing from financial communications was a way of
describing complicated concepts from a Ph.D level and bringing it down to a
Masters level, essentially reducing the complexity and making it accessible; he
did this by working with banks, corporations and think tanks.
Beginning around 2006, he began moving towards
more economic-type concepts, and felt that it was important to describe things
on more of an economic level rather than a financial level. When the housing and financial crash occurred
in 2008, he decided that Silver Circle
should really be about a crash and the intrigue around that crash.
Todd Garbarini: Your animation company,
Two Lanterns Media, produced a series entitled Save Sonny which concerns a young adult entering the workforce who
becomes perturbed to find that some of his paycheck is being deducted by a
mysterious entity known as FICA (laughs). Does Sonny personify the average young
American in your mind?
Pasha Roberts: At that point, we kind
of did that, yeah. That was kind of a South
Park-level of humor, there are some farts jokes in there as well. The goal at
the time was to take the subject and make it interesting and acceptable for
somebody who, when they get their first job, suddenly realizes that they don't
get all of their money. They want to know where it goes to, specifically FICA,
and why. That was a whole, completely
different other style and was not as serious as (our new film) Silver Circle, but kind of
tongue-in-cheek and somewhat educational.
TG: The series reminds me of Schoolhouse Rock which endeavored to educate children
on science, economics, history, etc. Do
you see yourself as an educator for social change and personal financial
responsibility through animation?
PR: Yeah, you could say it that way. We
were focusing on the story first and therefore tried to make it fun and
interesting without trying to be too pedantic about it. That's why Silver Circle isn't full of speeches, although it has one or two
that are kind of mixed in. We were interested in working with people who wanted
to make a movie with a backbone and a spine and ideas in it. The audience can
certainly enjoy it on an intellectual level in that regard, but otherwise they
can also enjoy themselves from the movie perspective as we do have some action
sequences and a car chase.
TG: Silver
Circle posits the financial collapse of the United States economic system
roughly six years from now. It is
animated in the style of a contemporary video game. Was this your decision from the get-go?
PR: We were actually looking at A Scanner Darkly, actually we did use Maya,
we didn't really use cel shading
for this but we did look a lot at that. We really wanted to make the characters
look less realistic and keep them from looking kind of spooky, and even so I
think we could have done more with that. It's kind of a crossover thing, you don't see
a lot of animated movies that are not comedies or fantasies, so people aren’t
used to seeing this type of animation with something serious.
TG: How long did the process of making the film take, from conception to
final product?
PR: Four years. We basically started
brainstorming about it the day after Lehman Brothers went down because it was
such a big dramatic moment, and I thought this could be a real interesting theme.
The screenwriting itself took about a year as there was a completely different
concept at first and it took a little while to burn through a couple of
screenwriters until we finally settled on Stephen (Schwartz). Then we spent three years on production. The overall
budget was roughly $2M. One of the really interesting things about the movie is
that the end credits contain the names of about ten core people who really
worked on it, compared to an army of animators.
TG: In the film, the Federal Reserve
has been tasked with stabilizing the economy, but all attempts have failed and
the Rebels illegally mint silver coins hoping to stabilize the financial health
of the country. How do you feel this
mirrors the current economic situation in the U.S. today?
PR: I think that we are currently heading in the direction that is depicted
in the film, although I don't think that it will be as bad. There were a couple of things that are in the
movie and were even in the script but hadn't happened yet but actually came
true as we progressed through making the movie. For example, there is a guy by the name of Bernard von Nothaus who is currently in prison for making money out of silver,
and that’s his crime. His sentencing
judge basically called him a domestic terrorist for trying to make money out of
silver. So, that was not going on. Then,
the Federal Reserve was actually talking about taking over neighborhoods and
basically calling them “land banks,†which is of course essential part of Silver Circle’s plot. So, there are
angles going on in that direction already and I do believe that marijuana is on
its way to being legalized, and this also occurs in the movie. I hope that the
movie obviously isn't prescient in terms of being completely true. We looked at a lot of the history of
Argentina and Zimbabwe and what happens when a currency begins to die and how
people behave as a result of that.
TG: What do you hope audiences will
take away from the film?
PR: First off, I hope that they enjoy
the story. Obviously, I want them to have a great time. I want it to be a fun,
good story for the audience. After that, I hope that people are not only
entertained, and but there are also a lot of embedded things in the movie for
the so-called armchair economists and conspiracy theorists. I really do hope
that it gets people to start to think about money and know that there is this
thing out there called the Federal Reserve that is very real and they are not murderous
bastards (laughs). I want the
audience to not take the concepts of money for granted. Most other countries
understand that and the changing of European currency and so on and so forth -
things abroad do not appear to be as well-established or as stable as things
appear to be here. So, hopefully the
audience will think about that. The angle that we're taking is that we really
can make an animated movie with a spine of ideas that people will actually
appreciate instead of just offering up a whitewashed movie.
Silver
Circle Theater
Schedule:
4/05 Laemmle’s NoHo – Los Angeles, CA (Buy your tickets here)
4/11 Pollack Tempe Cinema – Tempe, AZ (Buy your tickets here)
4/12 Regal Cinema – Ballston –
Arlington, VA (Tickets on sale soon)
4/18 Flix Brewhouse – Round Rock, TX (Buy your tickets here)
Silver
Circle’s official
website is here.
Click here to read Todd Garbarini's review of Silver Circle