“The East”: How Two Filmmakers’ Freegan Summer Road Trip Became a New Political Thriller Starring a “True Blood” Vampire

Brit Marling (left), Alexander Skarsgård (center), and Ellen Page.Courtesy of Fox Searchlight Pictures

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

The East
Fox Searchlight Pictures
116 minutes

The East, a new thriller directed by relative newcomer Zal Batmanglij, follows an eco-terrorist collective that finds elaborate ways to punish CEOs and pharmaceutical companies for committing “worldwide terrorism.” The eco-terrorists, who call themselves The East, are infiltrated by Sarah Moss (played by Brit Marling), a former fed who works as an undercover operative for a private intel firm that looks out for rich polluters. A morally conflicted Sarah quickly comes to sympathize with East members including Izzy (Ellen Page), and grows increasingly attracted to their ringleader Benji (Alexander Skarsgård, of True Blood vamp fame). Bullets fly, sex in the woods occurs, and alliances are tested.

This political thriller is technically based on a true story. But the real-world inspiration for the script didn’t involve any shoot-out or corporate espionage; it started with a rather unusual summer road trip.

Marling and Batmanglij wrote the screenplay, drawing from their experience of traveling with an anarchist collective for two months in 2009. They spent the summer with barely any money in their pockets, and engaged in full-on freeganism, the practice of eating food others have tossed into the garbage or dumpster. This was all just for the hell of it, and it was only years later that they thought to put their story to cinematic use. “We couldn’t shake the feeling of that summer,” Marling tells Mother Jones. “We started writing about it really as a way of making sense of…what that summer had opened in us that we couldn’t close.”

Batmanglij notes that although people were interested in hearing about their anarcho-freegan exploits, they were “very resistant” to the idea of a movie that was all about “sleeping on rooftops,” dumpster-diving, train-hopping, and this wholesale rejection of materialism. That’s when they decided, according to Batmanglij, to fold their anecdotes into a fictional “thriller packaging in order to smuggle a lot of these ideas across the border, and make them more entertaining so people would not automatically get turned off to it.”

Glenn Beck declared that The East was helping to push American culture in the direction of “flat-out evil.”

As they filtered their tales through the prism of the action/thriller genre (taking cues from films like the chase-filled Bourne movies and the award-winning drama Michael Clayton), the cast and crew also dug into some of their favorite progressive literature and online journalism for ideas and inspiration. To get in the right mood to make this movie, Marling consulted news site Truthdig, the progressive wiki SourceWatch, and the work of environmental activist Derrick Jensen, who she praises as a “really eloquent writer.” Ellen Page, who plays a particularly dedicated and hardline eco-guerilla, turned to AlterNet and especially Democracy Now! because, in Page’s words, “Amy Goodman‘s amazing.”

But to set the tone for portraying an extremist collective, Batmanglij sent the actors copies of The Coming Insurrection (which Page jokingly referred to as the “Communist Manifesto” during the interview), a French anarcho/commie treatise from 2007 that was labeled a terrorist manual by the French government. The book was made famous on Fox News in July 2009 (the same time Marling and Batmanglij were out on their freegan adventures) by then host Glenn Beck, who railed against The Coming Insurrection as, “the most evil book I’ve read in a long, long time.” The airtime Beck dedicated to this immediately helped the book sell better.

As you could’ve probably guessed, the former Fox News host is not a fan of The East, either. In May, Beck commented on the trailer for The East (he had not seen the movie), and declared that the film was helping to push American culture in the direction of “flat-out evil.”

Now, here’s the flat-out evil trailer:

The East gets a wider release on Friday, June 7. The film is rated PG-13 for thematic elements, violence, some disturbing images, sexual content, partial nudity and flat-out evil, apparently. Click here for local showtimes and tickets.

Click here for more movie and TV coverage from Mother Jones.

To read more of Asawin’s reviews, click here.

To listen to the movie and pop-culture podcast that Asawin co-hosts with ThinkProgress critic Alyssa Rosenberg, click here.


If you buy a book using a Bookshop link on this page, a small share of the proceeds supports our journalism.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate