Cam’s opening titles welcome us to "A Film by Isa Mazzei & Daniel Goldhaber." It's unusual to credit the screenwriter (Mazzei) and director (Goldhaber) in the same breath, but Cam does not play by many conventional movie rules, so why not start right away?

Streaming on Netflix today, Cam is a new kind of horror movie about a cam girl (Madeline Brewer in a career-best role) who suddenly finds herself locked out of her account, with a doppelgänger taking over her shows and rocketing her up the "FreeGirls.Live" ranking. Mazzei, herself a former cam girl, has written a remarkable horror allegory in her feature screenwriting debut, subverting ideas about sex work through the lens of a genre that famously, gleefully punishes sex and those who enjoy it (women, more often than not, naturally).

Friends and collaborators for more than a decade, Mazzei and Goldhaber take shared ownership of the techno-Hitchcockian film and often have, if not the same answers to questions, complementary views. It's a testament to their creative partnership, one that seems destined to flourish (they already have their next project lined up at Blumhouse, in fact). They took the time to talk with GQ via Skype about conceiving the movie, the alternate reality of the Internet, and Mazzei's predictably horrible experience of pitching a film in Hollywood as a former sex worker.

GQ: Isa, tell me a bit about the early ideas for Cam.

Isa Mazzei: I was actually working as a cam girl for a while. I was really proud of it, and I couldn't really share it with anyone in my life. Danny was one of the first people I told, and he was supportive. But I wanted to show him, and he wouldn't do it, he wouldn't do it, he wouldn't do it, and then finally he did and he was like, “Oh, this is kind of interesting.” Around that time I knew that I also wanted to shoot some videos to sell, so I actually hired him and flew him out to shoot the videos for me. That was really our first collaboration in this world. Now we've been collaborating for 12 years.

Cam just became a logical extension. I really wanted to tell a story in this world. [Daniel and I] had a lot of conversations about it, and initially we thought about doing a documentary, but we realized because our primary goal was to get an audience to empathize with a sex worker and to root for a sex worker to actually go back to sex work, it was really important that we use genre. Genre is this incredible vehicle to hide these subversive ideas in and bring them to a more mainstream audience. From there, we just sat down and had conversations for hours and hours about our own paranoia online and my experiences as a cam girl. We were a team from day one.

The camming world is such a fascinating subculture, but I was also affected on a very personal level by the sheer modern horror of getting locked out of an Internet account.

Daniel Goldhaber: I have so many graveyard e-mail accounts, man. Since the goal was to make this movie about an audience empathizing with a sex worker, thing number one was that the negative stakes of the film could not be derived from the protagonist's decision to be a sex worker, or from the sex work itself. That it needed to come from another place.

It was easy to derive the horror stakes from Alice's loss of agency because she gets locked out of her account, which is something everybody can relate to. But that only works if the audience recognizes that in the first 25 minutes of the movie, she had agency to begin with.

Mazzei: You could very easily make this movie not about a cam girl. It still works if it's a Twitch streamer, it works if it's a YouTube star or an Instagram celebrity. That's why it's so universal. It speaks to everyone because most of us engage with social media or the Internet in a way of having a curated digital life.

Daniel Goldhaber and Isa Mazzei.

Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images

Something that struck me early on in the film is, in the portrayal of sex work, it really is just presented simply, as work.

Mazzei: Right. There are parts of it that are empowering and parts of it that are not empowering, the same as literally any other job. Some days you hate your work, some days you love it. I think that is really important to show, because representation in media really affects how people view the world. I think people need to recognize that sex work is just work.

Daniel, tell me a little bit about directing this story. What gave you the confidence to tell this story with Isa?

Goldhaber: I started this work with Isa at a time in my life when I was really having to reckon with the fact that, like, maybe I don't have the healthiest attitudes or relationships with women in my life. Some of that is my fault, some of that is the way that I was socialized, some of it had to do with my having to reckon with my own sexuality and gender identity. Leading into this film, I saw it as a real opportunity to educate myself, and to rewire my brain, and to re-socialize myself. I was really up front with that to Isa, and she was generous enough to share not only her experiences with me but her knowledge, her eye, and her willingness to—in a way—educate me.

When I talk about this movie, it's a film by Daniel and Isa. It's a shared auteurship credit. I think that very frequently in film we think of auteurship as a monologue. Cam is a dialogue between us.

What was it like initially pitching this film?

Mazzei: No one took us seriously. No one took us seriously because we were 24 and 25. No one took us seriously because we had never made a movie before. And no one took me seriously because I was a woman, and no one took me seriously because I was a former sex worker.

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We then had this additional problem of people not actually taking me seriously, saying, "Oh, you didn't really write the script, did you?" I experienced a lot of sexual harassment trying to sell the film. I don't know if that's the regular experience of a woman or if it's amplified by the fact that I'm a former sex worker. Some people said pretty horrible things to me. Someone even wrote erotic fan fiction of the script and sent it to me. [He’d changed] the ending of the movie so that Alice, who he renamed Isa, gets into a relationship with an older man that I guess was supposed to be him.

Goldhaber: They shared the same name! It was so weird, man.

Mazzei: It was so creepy and blatant sexual harassment. So it was very difficult. But as soon as we met with Blumhouse, we knew they got the film. They understood the politics behind it, and more than that, they understood my involvement. They understood my voice, they understood our creative dynamic, and they were so respectful of that.

You have been collaborators for 12 years. You clearly trust each other, but a significant amount of trust had to be transferred to and from Madeline Brewer for this film as well. What made her the right choice?

Mazzei: She's an extraordinary actress, and I think that Danny saw that she had this incredible technical ability. We knew the second she read that she was the right fit for the film, but more than that, she really engaged with the filmmaking process in a way that I found really, really cool.

For example, we had a nudity rider for legal reasons, but at the end of the day we told her, "We want you to decide, day of, how naked you're gonna be." So some scenes in the film she's more naked than written, and other scenes she's less naked than written. She was really reflecting on how naked and how vulnerable Alice would be. That's why none of the nudity feels gratuitous, because it's coming from some character rather than from this outside perspective of Daniel or me.

Goldhaber: There's a big moment in the movie where she was supposed to be very naked, and on the day Maddie was just like, "This is wrong for the character. This is not where Alice is gonna be.” Isa and I had some very high-minded ideas of why it was important, and she's like, "I get that, and it all makes sense. It's just not what Alice is feeling in this moment."

Mazzei: And she was totally right.

Goldhaber: It would have ruined the scene. It would have tanked it.

Throughout her ordeal, Alice is underestimated by—and even not believed by—various men in her life. The cops barely listen to her. I assume that came from a pretty real and raw place.

Mazzei: Yes, absolutely. Sex workers are not taken seriously by law enforcement, at all. I think they tend to underreport assaults because of that very reason. We have a rape culture in America that says if a woman wears a short skirt, she's asking for it. So for a sex worker, just multiply that a bunch of times.

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A lot of the cop moments were taken from real moments. The part where the cop's hitting on her, a friend of ours experienced that while they were trying to report something. The line "What's the weirdest thing you've ever had to do?" is taken from a line that was asked to me from several executives while trying to pitch the film. Where, instead of wanting to engage with the script, they wanted to find out the weirdest sexual thing that I've ever done. And more than that, the way they even phrased it, "What's the weirdest thing you've ever had to do," as if I had no agency in it.

And when the cop tells Alice, "If you want stuff like this to stop happening, stay off the Internet," that's taken from a story that we both read a few years ago, where this dude was blackmailing Twitch girls into taking off their clothes.

Goldhaber: And when they didn't do it, he would swat them.

Mazzei: He swatted this girl three times, with the same police department, full force. And then their solution was some derivative of the line, "If you don't want stuff like this to happen, stay off the Internet." More than just a commentary of how sex workers are treated by law enforcement, it's also a commentary on how ill-equipped law enforcement is, even in 2018, to handle cyber threats and online bullies. These things are very, very real. Saying just stay off the Internet is such a ludicrous piece of advice for 2018. The scariest part about the cop scene is that nothing that they say has not been said in real life to someone that we know or have read about.

Something I really loved and hated, which is what you were going for, was the sound design of those chat dings, which eventually become part of the score.

[Goldhaber pumps his fist.]

Mazzei: Mike, our sound designer, did a great job. I was talking to him about how when you're camming there's actually almost this Pavlovian response to the tip noise. I still to this day will get turned on if I hear that tip noise sound, because I associate it so much with both sexual pleasure and success. So we really wanted to train the audience in a similar way to, yes, get super excited by it, and then stressed and overwhelmed by it in the same way that you are when you're a cam girl and you're hearing these constant notification noises as you're working.

Goldhaber: It's a really cool filmmaking challenge, because so much of the movie is this girl talking to this website and having it talk back to her. So much is communicated through simply the timbre of the tip. Mike came up with all of these teeny little ways he would manipulate the tip noise so there was, like, more of a cash sound or more of a sparkle sound, or it was a little bit of an echo so it feels threatening. There's hundreds of different variations of tip noises in the movie, actually, to have it be so that the website is almost singing to her.

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What kind of conversations do you want to facilitate with Cam?

Mazzei: It's important to realize that everything you see online is curated. Instagram and Facebook and Twitter sell themselves as some sort of reality, but it's just a representation of a part of ourselves. No matter how real you try to be, even if you post a picture of yourself crying in your bed alone, you're still curating that. I think the point is we tend to dehumanize the person behind the screen.

Goldhaber: There's a good example right here: I'm talking to you, and I'm looking at you, and I'm engaging with you, but I'm also spending about an equal amount of time looking at myself. It's really important to keep in mind that this all warps the social interaction. I'm having a certain feedback that's unnatural, where I'm trying to create this digital version of myself to make a good impression on you.

And so I don't even think that the movie is necessarily saying that that in itself is good or bad. If there's a cautionary component to Cam, it's that those digital identities that we create are fragile, they're corruptible. And because we treat them as being more real than us, that's really dangerous. I think that some of the scariest parts of the movie are when Alice is sitting there in front of somebody as the real flesh-and-blood person and saying, "I'm here," and somebody else is showing her their phone and saying, "No, you're not."

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