Director takes a 'Look' at surveillance
— -- The seeds of Adam Rifkin's movie, Look, were planted a few years ago when a surveillance camera caught him running a red light.
"When the picture came back to me in the mail, I was stunned by the clarity," says Rifkin, who wrote and directed the new movie about loss of privacy in the digital age. "I was making a very embarrassing expression, singing along to the radio. I felt violated that I had been photographed in a private moment without my knowledge."
That picture did more than ensure him a ticket; it opened his eyes to the growing number of cameras all around him.
"Little by little I started to become aware that everywhere I went, everything I did, I was being videotaped," he says. "I was walking down different aisles of Target, and there were cameras down every aisle. At the ATM, in the grocery store, at the bank, on the street — just everywhere."
The movie — a selection of fictional vignettes shot on high-definition film and edited to look like footage from surveillance cameras — opened last week in Los Angeles and New York and will be opening across the country in the next two months.
Rifkin says his research found that only 13 states have laws explicitly limiting cameras in private places such as dressing rooms and bathrooms. "I refused to put a camera anywhere there wasn't already a surveillance camera or where there wouldn't actually be a surveillance camera," Rifkin says.
Co-producer Barry Schuler, former CEO of AOL and now a venture capitalist, says he understands the intrusiveness of technology.
"Most people are not aware of the level at which their life is being tracked. You have a click stream on the Internet. You have credit-card swipes with locations. You have FasTrak tolls. You have GPS now showing up on your phones and your cars. If you use any of the systems like OnStar, you have satellite data. There's just an enormous amount of data.
Privacy vs. security
Schuler says he and Rifkin "wanted to start a dialogue and create awareness of how pervasive this surveillance is."
Popular Reads
ABC News Live