 What we created here might be unique in all of human existence. All the way to top. We created a paradise. The way out here is so incredible. The kids are amazing. They're so small. We can't go to mommy's funeral. We have to do what we're told. We want to see mom. Grandma can't impress us. Hi, I'm Samantha Cox-Para from CalTV Entertainment here with Matt Ross, the director and writer of the film Captain Fantastic. Thank you for being with us here today. Thanks for having me. Why did you focus on creating a film about parenting? Because I am one. I think, you know, I have two kids. My daughter's 13 and my son's nine now. But when I was writing it a couple years ago, they were younger. I was thinking a great deal about my values and what I want to pass on to my kids. I was watching my friends begin to have children and seeing their parenting styles either being inspired by them or being confused by their parenting. I think my wife and I were discussing a great deal. It's something you do on a daily basis if not an hourly basis. And sometimes we fight, you know. I mean, I start thinking what are my values? What do I believe? What are our values? But what do I believe? And what do I want my kids to learn? And what's important to me? And I had a lot of questions and I just put them into the story. Because I like movies that ask a lot of questions and don't necessarily clearly or explicitly answer them. I think the answers are there for you to read. I have my own ideas about what the answers are if there are answers and there are not always answers. There are a lot of questions, mainly. Yeah, definitely. It's definitely about finding a balance, I feel, especially in this movie. And so when Ben is raising these kids in the wilderness and teaching them all of these life skills, they're doing well until they have to reintegrate back into society and they're hit with the social factor they're lacking. What do you think is a good balance for a family now who is struggling with technology and finding that social balance? Personally, I think it's all about balance and moderation. I say that we live in a world with incredible technology. The fact that let alone being able to call someone with this device that you carry around, which is like out of Star Trek, it's amazing, there's so many apps that are incredible tools, our computers are incredible tools, but I think ultimately they're just tools. It's like a knife. You can take a knife and as I say, I've said this before, you can slit someone's throat with it or you could cut an avocado. It's a tool and it depends on how you use the tool and I think that's a silly analogy but it's true in that your phone and your computer and it's all on how you use it and whether you actually are present in the world or if you're constantly in a virtual world, obviously being in nothing but a virtual world I don't think is a healthy thing and you see parents or anyone. Just this morning, I got up really early, I had to do some errand before we started and I was looking around and everyone I saw, everyone was walking around the street. This is in Berkeley right in front of Pete's and everyone was walking around on their phones not even paying attention to what they're doing. I saw this like seven examples of that and people are not connected and some people get hit by cars because they're not connected or I should say they're overly connected, they're not connected to the actual world, they're living virtually. Clearly that's unhealthy, you know, we have to have balance but I don't mean to demonize technology because I think it's just like anything else, it's how you use it. When you went to cast these actors, how did you go about casting the children since they had to be an exceptional, elitist family, you need strong actors? So on paper it's a pretty, it's a challenging task. You have kids who are, as you said, very well spoken, they're very intelligent, they're well read, they're physically fit, they play musical instruments, they can rock climb, they can fight, they can hunt and fish, they can speak many languages. There's a lot on paper. You know what you're ultimately trying to do is on one hand objectively you want to cast a kid who you think is a good actor, clearly that's the guy with the beholder though and it's not really about delivering a performance or delivering a performance in the callback, I'm really trying to match a kid's spirit with the spirit of the character in a way and then hope for them to be able to begin to flesh out that character. As a rhetoric major, I also notice that Ben wants to raise his children to be philosopher kings and making me think of Plato's Republic. What other texts did you have in mind when writing the script? Well, I gave the kids in Vigo a variety of texts. Vigo had read a lot of the books already. I think he had not read. I gave him some books about functional training and kind of contemporary ideas about training elite athletes and he hadn't read those specifically. He'd read all the philosophy in the poetry and the politics. The kids I gave books and some of them really embraced the books and some of them were thought really at summertime and you're giving me more reading to do but I gave them Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States which I think every American should read. I gave them some poetry. I gave them what else did I give them? Chomsky for Beginners. He's six. Now he's eight. Some of them are quite young. They were 14, 15. I was giving them things that I thought they would actually understand and read and I wasn't expecting them to read but I gave them things like as I said Chomsky for Beginners, I gave them Marxism for Beginners, Democracy for Beginners. Some texts that I thought they could understand. I also gave them some work, Jared Diamond, I think it's a book called The World Before Us which is about primitive cultures and how they were not so primitive. I don't think I gave them any play-doh necessarily. That was more I think built into the philosophy of the parents. Great. Okay, well thank you for being with us here today. Thanks for having me. And thank you for watching. Make sure to catch Captain Fantastic in theaters July 22nd.