Lions in the Spotlight: Anni Spacek — “How to be Seen” documentary director | Audio

Trailer: “Social media is fake. To me, it’s fake, so it’s not necessarily bad.” “This is who you are. It’s not this image in your mind.” “The safest way to become invisible is to be hypervisible in the way that everybody else is hypervisible.” “You can’t take everything that you see as real.” “That identity that you tried on for a moment is forever, and you’re held accountable to that forever.” “Everything needs to be perfect so I can be perceived as perfect.”

Emma Russell (E.R.): Hi. Welcome to “Lions in the Spotlight.” In this series, we sit down with accomplished members of the LMU community who share their lives, impactful work and knowledge with us. My name is Emma Russell, and today I’m interviewing Anni Spacek, director of the documentary “How to be Seen” from Roar Studios in collaboration with the Los Angeles Loyolan. At LMU, Anni has found her love for documentaries and aims to share how creative students on campus are seen. This documentary seeks to answer the question of how authentic a person can truly be through the lens of social media.

Anni …

Anni Spacek (A.S.): Hello.

E.R.: Welcome to the studio.

A.S.: Thank you very much.

E.R.: So, tell me who you are, whatever that means to you. Who is Anni Spacek?

A.S.: Oh, wow. Okay. I’m Anni. I’m originally from Montauk, New York, which is a tiny little town at the very end of Long Island. I study film [and television] production here, but I minor in philosophy, and I find that philosophy is a huge part of my work. I guess I’ve described myself as a creative person, but I think the only reason I’d say that is because I’m interested in like so many things and like doing film is the only way I can kind of like tap into all the things that make me curious. Yeah. Besides making films, I really love surfing and skateboarding …

E.R.: Oh, fun.

A.S.: And, like, doing things outside. Both my parents are artists, so I grew up with that creative mindset. So, I kinda have that, like, yeah. I wanna make documentaries as a career.

E.R.: Yeah. Well, yeah. Off [of] that, when you came to LMU, did you expect to be creating eventually documentaries? Was that something that you were expecting to go into?

A.S.: I started off wanting to direct and be a cinematographer for narrative fiction pieces. And then, when I went abroad last fall, I went to Bonn, Germany for the documentary program, and I fell in love with [documentaries] because I realized, a documentary isn’t just a talking head interview with B-roll. Like, it really can be anything. It’s just a way of looking at reality and telling a story through sound and imagery, and I just loved that. And, I found that I am so much more inspired by the real world and picking out what I find interesting rather than being a screenwriter and doing fiction stuff. So, yeah, I was kind of surprised by how much I love [documentaries] and now it’s kind of all I wanna do.

E.R.: So I wanna move forward and talk about the content of the documentary that is coming out on Oct. 16. So, what was your inspiration for this project? Why is it called “How to be Seen?” Just tell me the general gist of what “How to be Seen” is.

A.S.: Sure. I’ve always been so interested in social media profiles as a concept. When I first got Instagram at 13, I was immediately hooked on this idea of marketing myself, which at the time I had no idea that that was what I was doing. But I just loved the idea of being able to have a sense of control over how people saw me and the type of person that I was. And so, growing up, it was this kind of almost tool for self-experimentation, and not until I got older that I started to think of it as kind of a scary thing and a limiting thing and not necessarily the best. I always thought it’d be a really interesting thing to explore with a film, and I honestly didn’t have the answers to whether or not it was good or bad or what it’s really doing to our generation, so I wanted to raise these questions in a film. And so I pitched “How to be Seen,” which is a 23-minute-long documentary following three main subjects and the different ways that they use Instagram to either affirm an identity, express themselves [or] use it as a career. And it’s just an exploration of what this idea of marketing yourself online is when you still don’t really know, because I was really interested in identity and authenticity. And when you’re 21 [years old] and you don’t know who you are, you have this pressure to always be telling people who you are, and social media just exaggerates that.

E.R.: So, in the film, you spoke with Dr. Adam Fingerhut, [Ph.D.], who is the chair of psychological science at LMU, and he mentioned that people feel this sort of sense of stability and comfort in knowing who they are and who their peers are through a social media lens. What do you make of that?

A.S.: Yeah. I, overall, after talking to him and talking to so many sources, I definitely overall agree that, I think that comfort that you get from posting something on Instagram and being, like, I’m proud of this way that people are gonna perceive me through this. I feel like I can actually control it when perception is something we really have no control over. And so, social media kinda gives you that false feeling of security that you can have some control. And so, I agree with a lot of what Dr. Fingerhut was saying because, yeah, it’s a real thing. We always wanna put ourselves into boxes. And we put other people into boxes because it’s just how we make sense of things and make sense of the world, including ourselves. After filming and talking to all these people, it’s definitely a psychological inclination that we have naturally to categorize. We can’t put someone into an Instagram profile. It’s impossible, but we have a natural desire to do so.

E.R.: So when it comes to social media curation and curating your own posts so that people perceive you in a particular way, you touched upon that curation pretty deeply in your documentary. And some people who curate their social media recognize that some kind of curation might seem sort of “fake,” like a fake version of themselves. In your mind, do you see that as necessarily a bad thing?

A.S.: In my opinion, I don’t think so because it’s inevitable. If we’re using something like social media or an Instagram profile, it will inevitably be a curation. Like, even if you’re trying to be as raw as possible. So, I don’t think it’s a bad thing. Like, there’s definitely a lot of consequences that we’re all experiencing of seeing these perfect lives curated online. But at the same time, I do not blame our generation or anyone for being that way because how can we not? Like, of course we want to show our best selves and I think that even applies to just everyday reality. The way that we interact with people when we run into someone on campus. Like, you’re gonna be your best self, most of the time because we wanna be that person. We don’t wanna not show our best selves. So I think it’s, of course, we all know the downsides of not showing reality. But at the same time, I think one thing that the documentary does explore is this idea of — it’s inevitable no matter how we choose to use it.

E.R.: You featured Kylie Clifton [UI/UX coordinator] who has a very sincere and profound story surrounding her social media presence, and you also featured [Raymond] RJ Jorgensen [a film,TV and media studies major]. Both of these very real people that you featured like to curate their social medias more creatively, which is really interesting. To me, this creative expression sort of shows who they are in a different way as opposed to what your normal feed might look like, like a person who posts pictures of their friends or a fancy place that they went to. So now for you, does this time and effort to make something creative and different — does that make these people seem more genuine and authentic? Or is it still kind of not necessarily fake, but is it curated to seem more of a creative person? Which side of that is more true?

A.S.: Yeah. That’s an interesting question. I think for the case of Kylie and RJ, they both use their Instagrams almost in a way separate from themselves where it’s them expressing their creativity. But at the same time, like, for Kylie, she described it as a magazine. And so it’s almost like she takes to this professional level of, she is an artist and she’s expressing herself in that way. And it’s not necessarily like, “I’m trying to prove to you something about myself.” It’s rather, “this is what excites me. This is what I love, and I’m gonna share it.” And it almost has this level of seriousness, which I think RJ also articulates. Like, he does a daily vlog, and he’s committed to doing it every single day. And so there’s this level of commitment and “almost” like treating it as a job — which I think when it comes to authenticity — sometimes can be argued as more authentic because it’s not as much involved in thinking about how other people are gonna perceive what they’re posting and more so about what makes them happy and what is creatively exciting to them. I love that approach with social media. I think that’s a really healthy way to go about it. But it has yeah, its pros and cons. Or it’s still, like, when you take social media so seriously, it will always be not quite you. And that’s inevitable again.

E.R.: So, there was mention of people’s authentic selves and how someone might be able to see right through others and how they’re, you know, pretending or those people put their humility aside for this perfect presentation of themselves. So, you talked about the idea of sort of abandoning yourself for this kind of perfection. Can you tell me more about that?

A.S.: Yeah. Authenticity is something that still perplexes me. I started making this documentary hoping to get some answers on if authenticity is a helpful concept because I’ve I heard a lot of different perspectives through my interviews on how when we’re constantly putting pressure on ourselves to be authentic, we actually are limiting ourselves — like our awkward kind of imperfect selves pretending to be a certain person because [what] we think we should be is actually kind of intrinsically authentic because we’re telling ourselves that we should change. It’s kind of this idea of, being so raw is almost limiting and worse for our journey of finding ourselves because it’s this additional pressure when part of growing up is maybe not always being yourself because you don’t know how to quite be yourself. So I don’t honestly have a ton of wisdom on that because I’m still personally figuring that out. Like, being authentic, I think is a lifelong struggle or journey, and I think that’s the the best answer I have.

E.R.: I think my last question for you today is, do you have anything you’d like to share? Anything that we didn’t cover? Is there anything that you wanna promote maybe?

A.S.: So “How to be Seen” will be screened on Oct. 16 at 4 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. It’s a Wednesday. So, if anyone’s available, please come. It’s gonna be a really fun time. We’re gonna have at the 8:30 screening all the subjects there for Q&A. And it’s gonna be, for a lot of them, the first time seeing the film. So, it’s gonna be really interesting. I’ll be there, hosting. And, yeah, I I feel really proud of it. I’m so, grateful to have had the opportunity to make it and to work with such incredible people, and that’s about it. Thank you so much.

E.R.: Amazing. Thank you so much, Anni.

This has been “Lions in the Spotlight,” brought to you by the Los Angeles Loyolan. Opinions and ideas expressed in this podcast are those of individual student content creators, and are not those of Loyola Marymount University, its board of trustees or its student body. You can listen to all of the Loyolan’s podcasts at laloyolan.com and on Spotify. This episode was produced and edited by Emma Russell, audio producer, with special thanks to Anni Spacek. Watch her documentary as it debuts Oct. 16 in North Hall. Feedback about this episode can be submitted to editor at theloyolan.com. Thanks for listening.