From School Days to Wild Nights

In “someBody,” Stephanie Bennett plays a schoolteacher who worries what the parents of her young charges would think if they knew how wild she was after hours. “You’re supposed to be teaching morals and manners,” she says to an unseen, unheard interviewer in the faux documentary, which opens Friday at Laemmle’s Sunset 5.

In real life, Bennett was a teacher whose extracurricular activities in bars and bedrooms around Los Angeles made her friends’ jaws drop. But she’s not losing too much sleep over what the parents of her former students--or her own parents, for that matter--might think when they see her burn a swathe through L.A. nightlife in the gritty “someBody.”

“It would make me uncomfortable if they saw the movie,” she says of both groups of parents. “But even though I’ve made no secret that this is about things I went through, this is not in fact a documentary, and I’m an artist. Ultimately, I didn’t make it for those kids’ parents or my family.”

The film, a Sundance entry last year, grew out of a messy breakup Bennett endured after leaving her college boyfriend of seven years to try on the stiff new shoes of a single person. Finding herself unmoored for the first time in her life, she embarked on a spree of overconsumption--of drink, men and regret.

“Watching it in the editing room, it’s so clear that it’s self-destructive and self-involved, but those were the real things I was going through,” says Bennett, 31. “I was very, very scared of, what if I got sick? Am I going to grow old alone? So I started going to clubs and in my search for another somebody, it became, ‘I don’t want to be alone.’ It wasn’t, ‘How am I going to figure out how to live alone?’ It was, ‘I’ve got to find somebody else right now.’”

Bennett’s words, slightly tinged with a Texas drawl, tumble out in a torrent. Dressed in a simple black dress and cardigan, she’s petite and noticeably smooth-skinned; reality does her more favors than the grainy gaze of a digital camera. (She says the stress of reliving her dysfunctional past also made her skin break out during the main two-week shoot.)

It’s before hours at North, an unmarked bar in West Hollywood where much of the overheated action--on screen and off--took place. Beside her in the booth is Henry Barrial, 35, her diffident, bespectacled director and fellow student at Playhouse West, a school and repertory theater founded by Jeff Goldblum and Robert Carnegie.

This being L.A., Bennett began working through her confusion three years ago with the help of film therapy. She began to write about her sordid experiences and those of other people she knew who found themselves suddenly single, and she teamed with Barrial to turn it all into a movie. “I think watching the downward spiral of somebody is quite fascinating,” she says.

Exactly whose downward spiral you’re watching on screen, however, is hazier than one might think. “someBody” isn’t exactly a re-creation of Bennett’s experiences. The filmmakers prefer calling it “a re-exploration” because they incorporated and encouraged spontaneity on the set.

In the film, Bennett is Samantha, and some of Samantha’s lovers were actually Bennett’s, and some were also actors at Playhouse West, although she won’t identify which ones.

Inspired by the heavily improvisational techniques of the Playhouse West school, Bennett and Barrial distilled her writings into an outline and then asked the actors to improvise scenes and interviews that comment on the action. The results sometimes surprised them.

“We really asked the actors to open up their souls and talk” during the interview segments, Bennett says. “We said, ‘This is your character, but if you want to bring in something that’s really happening in your life, we won’t know if it’s real or false.’ So everybody took big risks and went to places that were embarrassing and humiliating, and the actors allowed themselves to go there.”

“I never wanted to speak in terms of characters because I didn’t want any sense of phoniness coming into it,” Barrial says. With a foundation in the Sanford Meisner philosophy of naturalistic acting, he adds, “What Playhouse West was about was figuring out how to approach a scene by exploring your own life. We just tried to take that a little further. I’m not interested in characters, like [telling them to] come in with a limp. We picked people because of who they were.”

Audiences will probably note echoes of “sex, lies and videotape,” Steven Soderbergh’s seminal hybrid of documentary and narrative styles of telling an intimate story. Barrial also says he was inspired by the Dogma 95 filmmakers who use digital technology, hand-held cameras and available light to present stories raw with emotion.

“SomeBody” does depict a decidedly unromantic view of the quest for romance. Characters grovel out of control, stalk each other by phone or foot, abandon their friends and reduce lovers to body parts.

“One of the reasons we decided at the very beginning that we had to be brutally honest in the rawest, truest sense is because this was a very small-budget movie--$5,000,” Bennett says. “So in order for us to make something good and not care about the production value, we had to do something that was really, really honest so you’d get involved in the story.”

Bennett and Barrial received funding from Next Wave Films, an Independent Film Channel company, to finish the movie and take it to Sundance last year, where it was the first entry to be digitally shot and projected in competition. After Sundance, Next Wave gave them more money to transfer “someBody” to film, bringing the total contribution to more than $100,000. Lot 47 Films is releasing it in six cities.

The movie has received mixed reviews, ranging from the New York Observer’s Andrew Sarris, who called Bennett “worth watching,” to the Washington Post’s Nicole Arthur, who said it’s “as vulgar as it is banal.”

Whether “someBody” lifts Bennett and Barrial above the fray of L.A.’s huge army of young filmmakers remains to be seen. After Sundance, they took a lot of meetings, and Barrial is attached to direct an as-yet unfunded project for Spike Lee’s production company, 40 Acres and a Mule.

Meanwhile, the two are keeping their day jobs: Barrial is now a substitute teacher and Bennett is contemplating her own return to the blackboard.

Says Barrial: “I think people in the industry had to go, ‘There’s no three-act structure, there’s no happy ending.’ It doesn’t necessarily fit into that industry thing of, ‘Come on in, you make the kind of movie we make.’ That’s been a stumbling block. But what’s good about digital technology is, if you want to make movies, you can.”