Eva Orner wants you to be shocked by the footage in her latest documentary, but she doesn't want you to judge – because if you did, she'd be in the dock as well.
It's People Like Us uses dashboard cameras to capture the driving behaviour of five young motorists, all of whom willingly signed up to the project, and each of whom is revealed as a serial offender when it comes to using their mobile phones while driving.
"Before they saw footage of themselves driving, they all looked me in the eye and said, 'I only use my phone when I'm at a traffic light, I never use it when the car is moving'," says Orner. "And then we cut to the opposite, on steroids, times 1000."
There they are scrolling through text messages, reading their Facebook feeds, turning around and snapping pictures of their kids in the back seat. Most shockingly, one young woman takes a series of selfies while driving. At night. It's truly horrifying, and a minor miracle that none of them has yet been involved in a major accident.
The funny thing is, Orner is convinced none of her subjects was deliberately lying to her about their behaviour. "It's just that they've grown up with these extensions in their hands, and they don't even realise when they're using them."
The ubiquity of the mobile phone, and its incursion into the car, is "this weird social thing that's happened to us all," says Orner, who confesses that about 18 months ago she was herself caught texting while driving. "And I was a complete arsehole about it," she admits. "When I was pulled over, I threw the phone on the passenger side floor, I told the police I wasn't using it – I lied to the police! – I got angry, and when they fined me $400 and gave me four demerit points I was furious."
Watching the footage she captured was a real wake-up call, she says. "I saw myself mirrored in their behaviour, and I didn't like what I was seeing, and I changed my behaviour."
That of course is the hope of It's People Like Us, ads for which played before every feature at the recent Melbourne International Film Festival. This is a TAC-funded project that aims to do for the millennial set what the "Drink. Drive. Bloody idiot" campaign did for an earlier generation.
The project is a startling change of pace for Orner, the Melbourne-raised, LA-based producer-turned director who won an Oscar in 2008, with director and co-producer Alex Gibney, for Taxi to the Dark Side(she also has two Emmys). Most of her work has been self-generated, and much of it has focused on the darker and more dangerous corners of the world: the US's use of torture in Afghanistan (Taxi to the Dark Side), the challenges of covering the news in that same war-scarred country (The Network), an unlikely gay love affair between a US soldier and a translator (Out of Iraq), Australia's shameful treatment of refugees on Manus Island (Chasing Asylum).
This time around, she was a gun for hire. The funding was already in place. What happened once the job was done was somebody else's concern, not hers.
"Funding is always hard, no matter how many silly awards you have. It's never money for jam," she says. "There was something very nice about a film that was all done in 10 weeks, that was back in my home town, that didn't involve gunfire, war, breaking laws, potentially going to jail, relying on whistleblowers."
That said, she wouldn't have done it had it not been a project she felt she could get behind.
"It's a campaign promoting road safety, better social behaviour, it's focused on young people," she says. "What's not to like about that?"
