Will Crouse brings his life experience to his latest short film, The Coder. We had the pleasure of interviewing him at the NYC edition of Dances With Films.
Will Crouse, a filmmaker and software engineer, returns to the film festival circuit for the third time to share his thrilling story. He wrote and directed The Coder, which made its world premiere as one of the short films selected for the Dances With Films NYC edition. Abbey Toot stars as Mary, a computer programmer whose mental health spirals out of control as she works at a crypto startup company. The pressure is on her as she deals with a disastrous software crisis and attempts to save the company from collapsing while working for an obnoxious CEO, Thad (Mikey O’Sullivan). We connected with Crouse to discuss the short film, which explores mental health in the crypto world.
Kristin Ciliberto: Why did you want to explore crypto and incorporate mental health?
Will Crouse: I think crypto is one of those things that is kind of like mental health and our brain activity. It’s sort of like, I don’t know… some parts of it seem very stable, and many people seem to believe in it. It’s such a unique thing. I think there’s a trillion dollars in market cap right now. It’s an enormous part of the world’s financial activity and has new technology with the blockchain—real futuristic technology is employed here. It’s not just all vaporware. Then other people see it, and they just see it as a big casino. They’re just thinking it’s a get-rich-quick scheme. There’s a third group of people who see it and think it’s a Ponzi scheme and there’s nothing here. I don’t know what the answer is. Is it a casino? Is it a Ponzi scheme? Is it the future of the internet?
In the same way, I feel like our brains—and I had a friend who once said that our bodies and brains are sometimes like buggy software. I feel like we don’t know. Sometimes, you know what sort of voice is competing in your head to listen to. We’re often ambiguous, and it’s like… those kinds of unstable sands of us just navigating being people in the world. Our mental health and how the world is affecting our mental health—there’s something about those same shifting sands that feels right to me about crypto.
KC: I love how the film explores mental health because that’s a big and important topic. I think exploring mental health is important nowadays, whether you see it in a documentary, a big narrative piece, or even in a short film like yours. But going into the crypto aspect of the film, did you do any research going into this project?
WC: Oh, yeah, yeah. I am a software engineer. I’ve been freelance for 10 years now, working with a slew of different clients, some of them startups. I have a lot of friends who’ve worked at startups and in the crypto space. And you know, even beyond crypto, there is such a wildness in the startup life. It can put a lot of pressure on someone’s mental health because you have to break through the noise. If you’re working at Apple, it’s much more bureaucratic. You’re trying to get something out, but it might not be the company’s end if your little thing doesn’t work.
If you’re working at a startup, there are maybe five engineers. Maybe one of them, like in my film, Mary, is the lead. It can feel like it’s all on your shoulders. Millions of dollars might ride on the line of this poor engineer’s code. I have, you know, felt and seen that. My friends have felt and seen that, and I know it’s in the air. I talked to different friends in the crypto space, and I realized that I hadn’t seen a story about that engineer. You get stories about the CEO, the visionary, the person who starts the company, but you don’t get the story of the person who—many times—the weight of the success is on their shoulders as they do a lot of the in-the-mud work to make it happen. Of course, so are the CEOs and founders. They’re working very hard, but there’s something about the engineer’s work and the pressure put on them that I thought was interesting and hadn’t seen.
