Film Show 073: Kyle Mangione-Smith

Kyle Mangione-Smith

Kyle Mangione-Smith (b. 1998) is a writer, photographer, and filmmaker based in Los Angeles, California. Throughout the past few years, short films like Annihilator (2023) highlighted him as a unique voice in contemporary horror, and his debut feature film Compliance (2026) stands as one of the year’s most audacious. Simultaneously a DIY political thriller and found-footage horror, its conspiratorial story of a criminal organization is told through security cameras, hacked webcams, and body cameras, capturing the disorienting experience of parsing information in the present day. Compliance plays at this year’s edition of Fantastic Fest and Nashville Film Fest. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Mangione-Smith on August 4th, 2026 via Zoom to discuss the texture of the internet, avoiding didactic messaging, and the ideas and inspirations behind Compliance.

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Do you have an early memory you can share of enjoying the feeling of being scared?

Kyle Mangione-Smith: It’s always been a point of fascination for me. From as young as I can possibly remember, like 5 years old, I was obsessed with scary or Halloween episodes of shows I was watching. I made it clear to my parents that I was really interested in watching horror movies, but they were understandably reserved because I was so young. They allowed me to watch them when I 10 or 11, and that was basically all I watched until I was 14 or 15. This was during the final days of Blockbuster and the early days of Netflix, so I would just pick anything from the horror aisle that looked the most fucked-up or scary. I think that’s where I got my taste for shitty 2000s mall horror (laughter). I think I was 12 when I saw The Shining (1980) for the first time and that was the moment when I was like, oh, I want to do this. That idea planted itself in my brain.

So when did you finally act on that and make movies?

Around when I was 17. Frankly, I didn’t want to go to college, but my parents had been saving up a college fund for me and they were like, “You don’t have a choice, you’re going to college.” (laughter). I said, “If that’s the case, is it okay if I go to film school?” They were supportive of it. With film school applications, they ask you to submit samples, so most of the early stuff I made was because of that. Still, I was writing scripts when I was younger. The first feature I tried to write was when I was 16, and when I decided that this was the path I wanted to go down, I did the classic avant-teen thing of locking in and watching as many movies as I could. For two or three years, I watched at least one movie a day. That’s when I first got exposed to arthouse and older international films. At the time, I wasn’t quite as focused on actively making stuff, but I was trying to expose myself to enough so that when I was in college, I’d know a little bit about what I was doing.

People are going to watch Compliance (2026) and think about it in relation to other found footage, screenlife, or contemporary horror films. But is there something that someone would be surprised to learn impacted the way you approached this movie? Were there things outside of horror that impacted it?

By far the biggest point of inspiration was Southland Tales (2006). A lot of the early building blocks weren’t centered around horror. I liked this idea of creating a found-footage film that was a collage of every way that people are captured on camera or are surveilled. I wanted to comment on how all this shapes how you experience the world, modern politics, and the tech industry. One of the original places that I got an idea from was this one space rental company that had a scandal a few years ago. The first third of the movie is inspired by that. The company was having victims of rape or assault, and they’d have victims sign NDAs and get a huge sum of money so it wouldn’t snowball into this huge thing. There was a big story about it that I read in 2021, and I was just connecting the dots. It’s about the paranoia that everyone has of staying in certain places—the potential of there being hidden cameras. Tech companies all do shit like this. They try to restructure the way people do simple tasks, and it may be convenient for the customer, but it sacrifices so much in the way of security and privacy.

Can you tell me about the process of shooting the film with these unconventional cameras? How much of the film was shot out of necessity or convenience? How much were you thinking about the texture of a GoPro, for example, compared to a flat digital screen?

Before I even started properly making the film, I went out of my way to do a lot of tests. I was trying to accurately capture the texture that these cameras have. If I was going to make a movie where there was the entire thing, I didn’t want it to look like every fucking movie where they cut to a security camera shot, slap on an overlay, and color it green. Scene to scene, we discussed how we wanted the textural elements to change. I did that with the sound, too—we figured out different ways of degrading the audio in order to make it feel like these were different cameras. So yeah, the textural part of it was very important to me, and I spent an insane amount of time trying to get it right.

What did the early tests look like? What were you looking for, and what sort of adjustments did you make?

Originally, I wanted to shoot the entire thing on security cameras. I bought some off eBay in 2023 and I started fucking around with them. I tried to reverse engineer them so they could be used as camcorders, and we did end up using some of those cameras in the actual film. Something else I learned is that they’re really unreliable. We only ended up being able to use them in certain moments where it made sense. We shot the whole film in 13 days, and our days were crazy packed. We just really didn’t have any room to fuck around on set.

The other thing I realized as we got further into pre-production was that we weren’t going to use any practical effects. It was all VFX. It’s challenging to make VFX look good on 480p security camera footage, so there was this realization that we would have to take higher quality footage, do the VFX, and then downgrade it. But in the process of doing this, I found all these different ways I could process footage that would give me the authentic look I wanted. I didn’t need to deal with the million different headaches that actually shooting with those cameras would’ve brought on.

What were all the different cameras you were using? For the scene in the office, were you actually using one of those 360-degree workplace conference call cameras?

Yeah, that was one of the Meeting Owls. I hadn’t seen that before, but my cinematographer brought it up and it worked so perfectly for what that scene was going to be. For the majority of the film it was GoPros and the Sony RX0s, which operate the same way as a GoPro but has interchangeable lenses. With the GoPros, part of it was that the built-in lenses already mimicked the ultrawide, borderline fisheye look that you associate with security cameras.

The other thing that’s worth noting here is that a big reason I made this film, especially at this point in my career, was to figure out how to make a film that felt really expansive and bold for a low-budget production. The thing with shooting with those cameras is that we removed so much of the overhead in terms of cost and time on set. We could get into a space, set dress it, and then slap two cameras up in the corners and go. We could move through the coverage so much faster. It made a lot of the climactic scenes in the film easier because all we had to focus on was that things like the blocking and performances looked right—we didn’t have to worry about lighting or complicated cameras. I monitored the entire thing from my phone, for the most part, and it’s because there’s a GoPro app. I could be in the corner watching it, and it just made the whole process of shooting so much easier.

How did you approach the screenlife material? There’s a different strategy in directing viewers’ eyes when looking at a computer screen. You’re doing that with the red text in the first email we see, and also with advertisements. How did you want to depict the internet and how people interface with it?

The way I approach the screenlife bits was frankly insane. There were absolutely better ways I could’ve approached it if I were more experienced with certain VFX-specific programs, but other than some of the texting stuff, there’s essentially no screen recording in the entire film. I designed all of that in Photoshop, and it essentially functions as a slideshow with animation over it. Anytime you see a detail change onscreen, that’s just a different exported image with the mouse and whatever else animated on top. A big part of why I did it like that—because at first I tried screen recording since it seemed so much simpler—is because I realized how complicated things would get. There just wasn’t any good, obvious way to make tweaks. Like, there could have been typos, or I might want someone to linger on a very important detail than what was initially recorded. With how I did it, everything was editable.

It was an unbelievable pain in the ass to do. It took me six or seven months total just to do the screenlife stuff, and it only makes up like 15 minutes of the film (laughter). Similar to what I was talking about with the cameras, it’s really important to me that if I’m making a film like this, all of the textures feel like the actual thing. That has been at the core of this project from the get-go. I hate when any movie has security cameras or the internet—things that we all know—and it feels like a cheap, ham-fisted imitation. I really did go out of my way and waste an unbelievable amount of time to have this all feel real.

At the end of the film we see a lot more—a Twitch stream, podcasters, a news broadcast—and these are all things that people may interface with on a daily basis. I’m wondering how you approach making these passages filmic? How do you make that feel cinematic? Or are you just having these feel realistic and that’s enough?

In my opinion, all those things—at least to me—frequently do feel bizarrely cinematic. Especially in that montage towards the end, I wanted to capture how when there’s any sort of major event, especially something violent or politically loaded, the narrative gets shaped in certain ways and the truth collapses in on itself. It’s sort of like how you experience it on the internet, where there’s millions of voices on different platforms, and they all have their own personal slant to it. It makes trying to parse the truth really difficult at times.

To your point about it feeling cinematic, just think about something like Charlie Kirk or Aaron Bushnell. There are so many instances where these big, loaded events arrive with images that, to me, feel cinematic. But the way it’s presented is on your feed, so you might just be scrolling at home on your bed and you see Charlie Kirk get shot in the neck. I wanted to capture and comment on how this all changes our perception of things. Like, this is how we process any event in the modern day that’s big or violent or politically loaded.

I appreciate that the film feels almost participatory in the way we engage with the material. And I guess that speaks to how we are doing the same thing when any big event happens, as you said.

I get what you’re saying, in part because the film jumps around so much format-wise. I think people watching it for the first time, beyond just following the narrative, notice that there’s a little bit of time it takes for your brain to adjust to processing all the information. And part of that relates to the political element of the film. There was definitely a statement I was trying to make, but by design, I wanted it to be something that you had to grapple with. I didn’t want it to feel obvious. It’s something you have to engage with and participate with and unravel. I was thinking about shit like The Menu (2022) or, something that’s a much better movie but still the same case, Parasite (2019), where there’s this commentary being made but it feels so didactic. I really didn’t want to do that. I almost wanted to present it in a way where you didn’t know what my politics were from moment to moment. And through that, it’s creating something that isn’t just leading you to a single conclusion I designed.

From the early reviews, people commented that the film was really confusing. And to some degree, this was by design. It’s supposed to be disorienting. And that’s true before everything that even happens in the second half—it’s in the way things are presented in the first 30 minutes, where you’re dropped into the film without any point of reference for why we’re seeing it in this way, though that slowly comes together as we move along. I know that’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but I personally don’t think that’s a problem.

It’s interesting. I think it’s maybe easy in the present day to see a big event and anticipate what the major political sides are going to say. And generally, most people are gonna be in their own bubble and not interact with those they don’t align with.

In a sense, it is kind of obvious what everyone is going to say, but if you think about trying to deduce the full picture and the full truth, it’s kind of difficult. For example, Charlie Kirk got shot. People were like, “Is it because this guy was a Mossad agent? Was it because of his transgender girlfriend? Was he an MK Ultra victim? Was it even him that did it? Was he just a patsy? Does the path of the bullet even line up?” Etc., etc., etc. If you’re privy to this stuff and pay attention, you can deduce where people are coming from—whether for their own personal gain or for their own personal reasons—but it creates an ecosystem where figuring out the reality of an event in its totality is really, really difficult. You’re basically told at the end of the film that they accomplished what they wanted to accomplish. You’re given some details and some of its impacts, but most of what you’re shown is the cultural and political environment that it’s created. We know from how the thing is presented that this is a staged event—the surface-level narrative you’re being presented with isn’t the full truth.

In that montage, the point is… is anything these people saying the truth? Is this just a grifter spouting bullshit for their own gain? For the same reason, this is why it was important for it to not be didactic. The reality is that a lot of these things aren’t cut and dry, they’re not obvious. Look at Luigi Mangione. Everyone jumped to him being a socialist folk hero who was doing it for the exact reasons that they wanted him to be doing it. But the more we learned about him, it seemed like he was vaguely right-leaning in a libertarian way, or maybe not even political at all. There’s no way for anyone to really know what his intentions were. So, trying to tell a story like this and have it be a super obvious thing that says “this is the bad guy and this is the point” just didn’t feel real to me at all.

Are there any recent films that you feel capture contemporary reality in this way?

Off the top of my head I’m still thinking of Southland Tales, which obviously isn’t recent, but I think it holds up so well because it does that same thing. I’ve watched that movie five times and there are multiple details and multiple scenes where I can’t really tell you what the intention or messaging is. And yet, you still get the point by the end of the film in this convoluted, roundabout way. It never holds your hand through it. Part of why that movie works so well and why its reputation has gone up over time is because of how it presents the reality of these things, of wealth and power in America. It’s become more and more true since it came out.

As far as modern movies go, I’ll be honest—nothing’s really coming to mind. A big point of inspiration that is probably obvious was Spree (2020), but that was in terms of the way it does this montage style of jumping through different formats. With that movie, if you remove that element, it’s a pretty straightforward horror-thriller and black comedy. There are definitely moments in it that comment on the bigger picture, though.

Can you talk about the casting and how you approached directing the actors? Did the cameras you were using impact how you did that?

For starters, I got really lucky and feel really blessed that I got the cast that I did, especially Megan [Wilcox] and Lindsey [Normington], who are the two leads. They really just got what their characters were and the full depth of what that looked like off the bat. There’d be small adjustments or notes I’d give them, but for the most part I just let them do their thing. Regarding the cameras, something funny is that there was all this body camera footage, and they had this full GoPro chest rig strapped to them and everyone had to pretend that it wasn’t there (laughter). It was awkward to figure that out at certain points, but for the most part, the way we filmed meant fewer limitations and less need for direction than what I’d need to do normally.

I had a bunch of conversations with Megan about this when we were filming. She loved the way we were shooting it because she felt it gave her more freedom and space to play around as an actor. Everything was these huge wide-angle shots. The camera isn’t part of the blocking for the most part—it’s just them in this space. It actually created a situation where I was able to be hands off and let them figure it out. Beyond that, with all the smaller characters, I made it very clear that I wanted this to be gritty and raw and realistic. I wanted them to approach it in a more naturalistic way.

Is there anything we didn’t talk about today that you want to mention?

One of the big ideas that I came into the film with was those John Waters quotes about his early films. He was trying to take all these trash films he was watching and make an epic saga out of them. I’m forgetting his exact words, but I really liked the idea of doing something like that but with found-footage horror, shot-on-video horror, and grimy underground shit. In the early stages of pre-production, I loved the idea of like… what would it look like if someone like Fred Vogel tried to make an epic—something was expansive and felt like a fully-formed world. I pulled from a lot of things but two of the bigger inspirations were August Underground (2001) and [Clifton Holmes’] In the Dark (2000). Like, what if someone tried to make something in the ballpark of those films but turned it into something that’s on a way bigger scale than what those filmmakers are trying to do? Also, I was thinking about a lot of the classic ’70s political thrillers, especially The Parallax View, where an individual gets caught up in this massive, unknowable system. You can only get at that idea if you present how big and all-consuming this unknown organization or force is.

I end all my interviews with the same question and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?

This can be a problem for me at times, but I have realized that if I set my mind on something, it becomes the only thing I think about and want to do. And frankly, that’s the only way I was able to make this movie the way I did. Towards the end of post-production, I was actively losing my mind. I was working 18 hours a day, every day for a month. If I decide that there’s something I want to do, I will borderline fuck my life over to accomplish it. It feels crazy, surreal, and cool that I’m at this point with the project after how long I’ve been working, but I did go through some real shit to get there.

Kyle Mangione-Smith’s debut feature film, Compliance, plays at this year’s edition of Fantastic Fest. The film will also play at Nashville Film Fest.

Thank you for reading the 73rd issue of Film Show. FML (positive).

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