Ben Shapiro on Making "Confession"

Same sort of thing, right? You're taking people and putting them in unwinnable situations and what should they do? What is the right thing to do? And these are real questions. I wanted everybody's argument to be good. I didn't want anybody to sort of get steamrolled in the argument they're making. I mean, James's argument for Marxist materialism is a very strong argument. Richard Brake's argument in the film, his character Bogdan's argument for a sort of materialistic view of the universe is a very strong argument. I wanted all that to be there and then the fun of it is watching the characters interact. So, you know, know, I speak of that as though I'm not writing the characters. But. But that, that is sort of the way that you write a character is that you think about who are these characters? How would they interact in real life? What would they be saying to each other? And that's the fun of it. And then you derive a plot from that. And I'm pretty classical in the way that I frame my script plots, right? You want a plot point of page 10, you want a plot point of page 30, you want a plot point of Page 60, right? Like you want all those things to take place because they work and they have worked historically in film. I've seen every Oscar nominated film since 1930, and so I'm really a film buff. The script took me, I believe, four days to write total. And so once I sit down and I'm just in it, I'm in it and I stay in it until I'm done. And that's fairly typical for when I write a script. This isn't the first script that I've written. It's just the first one that we've taken the time to produce. I think I could speak for everybody when I say four days is absolutely insane. It's incredible. Speaking of the actors in the movie, you know, everyone was so excited to see the James Franco reveal. Rob Lowe looks amazing and unrecognizable. And then a slew of amazing Oscar nominated actors filling out the rest of the cast. What was your role in bringing each of these actors on board and how involved were you? Yeah, so the order of sort of operations was that before we had anybody involved in the film, I called up Rob because I knew Rob sort of peripherally. We'd been in the same social circles a couple of times. So the first thing I asked Rob was, is there somebody who would work with us? And Rob said, well, you know, why don't I take a look. And I said Rob, you're totally wrong for the main part. You're too good looking. Rob is famously handsome and the main part is this drunk old KGB informer who hasn't been, you know, himself for decades. And I said to Rob you're way too good looking. And he said well let me just read it. He called me about halfway through the script legitimately moved, like truly moved asking to play the part saying I really, really want to play this. I think I said if you like the first half of the script wait till you read the second half of the script. And he read it and he just fell in absolute love with the script. He saw it as sort of a mission to be part of the film, to be a producer on the film obviously. And once we had Rob signed up we had another actor, a very well known actor who also loved the script and wanted to play Vladimir and so we went with the.