In their film Time Bomb Y2K, directors Brian Becker and Marley McDonald tell the story, through archival footage, of the late 1990s preparations, confusions and mythologies surrounding the end of the millennium, known as Y2K. For KBIA’s True/False Conversations series, Jack Knowlton sat down with the filmmakers - here’s an excerpt from their conversation.
Jack Knowlton: Time Bomb Y2K is a film that relies on archival footage in the years leading up to Y2K. So why did you guys ultimately choose that style rather than, say, finding people who were involved and made some of the decisions nowadays and interviewing them? Why did you choose to kind of go with that archival footage kind of style?
Brian Becker: From the start, we knew we wanted to make this film as immersive as possible and to create this kind of time capsule of the late '90s. And the best way we knew how to do that was by attempting to make this without shooting any new footage, which was a huge challenge.
Knowlton: Was it kind of intentional that you guys portrayed the film in that way where you identified what the issue was at hand and then translated it to how society sort of reacted and interpreted that?
Marley McDonald: Well, that's actually just the chronology of the story. That is how Y2K unfolded. Programmers knew there was this problem. And so for a long time, that problem was contained in the cubicles and office spaces of people dealing with this problem. And then we wanted to watch how it radiated out through subcultures to the largest culture, to just the culture in America.
See more True/False Conversationshere and atVoxmagazine.com.
