question:  How does Barker view his own film?
context: Can a documentary use scripted scenes and yet remain ontologically authentic? How much can you stylize material before you alter the reality that you're striving, at least in theory, to capture? Unmade Beds , Nicholas Barker's " 'real life' feature film," has proudly worn its mongrel status as a "directed" documentary of single life in the big city, employing, in the face of criticism, what amounts to a cackling-punk defiance. The movie tracks four aging New Yorkers--two men, two women--through their lonely dating rituals, in the process depicting a universe of lusty, coupled-up haves and downcast, excluded have-nots, all viewed Rear Window -style through rectangular openings in the massive apartment houses in which they reside. The director selected his four subjects from many hundreds of potential candidates, followed them around for months, and then scripted their monologues and dialogues to reflect what he says he saw. Calling his own film "an exercise in mendacity," Barker goes on, "I'm quite happy to tell lies about my characters and even collude with their self-delusions if it enables me to communicate larger dramatic truths." It's always nice to see distributors proved wrong about the merits of "difficult" films, but in this case I think they did the decent thing. The outrage it has prompted isn't the Puritan kind; it's more like legitimate revulsion at watching a blowhard pervert people's lives in the name of "larger dramatic truths." Just in case you feel too sorry for him, however, Barker is careful to include a homophobic monologue in which Michael complains about young women who waste their lives hanging out with effeminate males. Michael turns out to be the film's most sympathetic subject--by a wide margin. At least he's not Mikey, a paunchy 54-year-old who writes but can't sell screenplays and who always flees blind dates, because the women he gets fixed up with are "mutts."
output:  He feels justified in bending the truth about his characters in order to depict a more important point to his audience
options:  He considers the film to be an original, unprecedented view of the human psyche  He realizes that his characters likely don't represent the average single person  He feels justified in bending the truth about his characters in order to depict a more important point to his audience  He knows that the rejection of his film by US distributors is part of the larger hypocrisy he is trying to reveal