Premiered at the Sundance Film Festival January 26,2015
Winner of the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the Sundance Film Festival
Based on a true story
Plot(Spoiler Alert)
In 1971, a Stanford University Professor, Dr. Phillip Zimbardo, developed an experiment to examine the source of abusive behavior in the prison system. 24 college students volunteered for this experiment. Half of them had to be prisoners, while the other half were guards. The experiment was supposed to last 2 weeks, but because it went too far after 6 days it was terminated.
Blaine: In the early 70s after this experiment happened, people have been trying to make it into a movie. It took decades for “The Stanford Experiment” to get made into a film. Screenwriter Tim Talbott started developing a script during the Summer of 2004 and by 2005 he had a 260 page script. The producers felt there was too much in it and they wanted to narrow it down a bit. Dr. Phillip Zimbardo wanted to be involved with the project and have people see what happened during this experiment. Director Kyle Patrick Alvarez read the script and thought this was a perfect opportunity to put together an ensemble of young actors he had been wanting to work with for a while. He also thought it was the perfect opportunity to work with Billy Crudup.
“The Stanford Prison Experiment" has a lot of young actors who are the future, Ezra Miller, Tye Sheridan, Johnny Simmons, Michael Angarano, Logan Miller, Nicholas Braun, Thomas Mann, Ki Hong Lee and they just bring so much into their performances. I’m so impressed with how powerful these performances are. There’s a lot of hate for the boys pretending to be prison guards because they are acting like real ass holes and they’re treating these other kids like shit, like they mean nothing. It just makes you want to smack them on the face. But it was all apart of the experiment and they weren’t really jerks, they were good people. Michael Angarano, who plays one of the guards, Christopher Archer, said this was an interesting role for him to take on because his character is giving a performance. Christopher is a good boy, but when he puts on the uniform he acts like someone else.
Kyle Patrick Alvarez wanted to shoot some of the movie at the real Stanford University. Problem was the University was charging too much even though they were ok with them shooting a movie there. So instead they shot at U.S.C. University of Southern California. Kyle and production designer Gary Barbosa were able to go through the Stanford University to see what they could use to rebuild as a set like the hallway where the experiment happened. They measured the hallway and looked at all the original photos in order to rebuild it. It was a 6 foot wide hallway. It was very tricky to shoot in a space that small with the camera. Kyle wanted wide shots, but that was difficult too.
Kyle is also the editor of “The Stanford Prison Experiment” and it was going to be a 3 hour movie, but he didn’t want it to be a minute over 2 hours. Kyle tried to narrow it down to the scenes he really felt needed to be in the film. Kyle also wanted to make sure that he didn’t cut it down too short because he did that with his first film and regretted it. Oliva Thirlby is the only female presence in “The Stanford Prison Experiment”. What Olivia liked about her character, Dr. Christina Maslach, was that she has the ability to know or understand things without any proof or evidence and she knows this experiment is messing with the boys who are playing the prisoners. Olivia had to wear a wig during production of “The Stanford Prison Experiment” because her hair was short and dyed pink when they cast her.
My rating on “The Stanford Prison Experiment” is four out of five stars.
