How did the story of Middletown come onto your radars?

Fred has patiently kept the flame alive of the story.

He has a wonderful blog called, I think it's garbagegangstersandgreed.com. And a great journalist that we know, Jeff Manoff, stumbled on Fred's blog and was like, "What is this?" And wrote a profile of Fred, which we then read, and were like, similarly like, "What is this? What an incredible story hiding in plain sight." And I think we are of the same generation as these kids.

We're a little bit older, and I think we could connect with sort of the youthful experiment of the camcorder and growing up in the early '90s and finding our voice.

And when we met Fred online, just to talk about the project, like, he was just incandescent, and we loved his fighting spirit, and felt like something we, we wanted to invite into our lives in, in a kinda dark time, and give, it gave us hope to hear from him and to, to learn about this story, even though it deals with some heavy stuff, as you say, like environmental pollution and crime and corruption.

I think it was just feeling like this is one of those stories that the world needs to know.

They, there was a blip of attention in the early '90s around the project, but, like, Fred and these kids, they could be an inspiration to so many people.

The first pass on all this archival was, like, just grabbing every instance of them that, where they appear in the footage, right? And that didn't yield enough of process, right? What did the classroom as a whole look like? Who was working camera when was, someone was on stage? That kind of, on the soundstage, right? So out of necessity for helping people understand the space, the sort of the womb of that classroom, we needed to recreate it for the audience as much as we needed to recreate it for the subjects in the film to recall, have recall on their high school experiences, which were much more impressionistic than Fred's memory of that time, which, because he was in his, whatever, 30s, 40s, could remember details.

Well, Jesse, just in terms of as you're beginning the process of documenting what happened within this class, Where did you go? Did you go to Fred first? How did you sort of get into their world?

Yeah, we went to Fred and earned, I think, his trust.

He looked at our work.

He did his due diligence and saw that there was an alignment of spirit.

And he shared with us this incredible archive.

And so the first thing we did was just kind of take it all in.

It was hundreds of hours of teenage student investigation on camera and everything and anything that was of interest to them.

At least that's how it came across to me.

How did you guys approach this? I know they, they also worked on it from the script end and the directing end with your director, but how did you guys as actors approach it to make them seem, you know, not cliche and characters on their own?

Mm.

Well, I, I think what they set out to do was to make the ultimate alien film.

You know, the, all the, what an audience wants to see when you watch an alien movie.

And so our characters are, are based in that mythology and that kind of, like, stereotypical characters, but then it was our job to make them not that way, to make them based in reality, make them kind of stand out, right?

Yeah.

So, you know, it was definitely, it was tough.

But it also, it, it bonded us all together.