Herzfeld takes a minute to chat

Director John Herzfeld shopped his screenplay for “15 Minutes” a full decade before a studio finally agreed to produce the film. Every few years, interest would bubble up and then fizzle out just as quickly. But as media and television moved in the mid-90s from being conveyors of news to becoming the news themselves, it finally seemed there was a niche the movie could fill.

“Studios would ask me: ‘Is this a thriller, or is this a satire? And what’s all this comedy in the middle?’” Herzfeld said in a recent interview in Boston. “And I’d say that it’s just what it is. They didn’t get it.” But after the moderate success of his feature, “2 Days in the Valley” and his Emmy-winning tele-pic, “Don King: Only in America,” New Line Cinema decided to run with the idea.

“The script, frankly, became more relevant. As all this reality stuff came in, as the OJ trial came in, somehow the script took on another level. It worked,” he said.

For Herzfeld, it was worth the wait to make a movie whose message would be pertinent and timely. “Is the media fulfilling the public’s appetite for violent stories, or are they encouraging it?” he asked.

Herzfeld personally offers no answer, but the film seems to offer its own reply. As Emil and Oleg carry their rampage across the television screens of a nation of voyeurs, he seems not only to be decrying media, but its audience as well.

“I’m not indicting the media at all, because I watch these things too,” he asserted. “But how far is it going to go? Where do you stop? Where is the moral responsibility of the media for how far you do go?”

Critics, students and scholars alike have pondered these questions. In the very early `90s, when Herzfeld finished the first version of his script, there weren’t nearly as many examples of media corruption as there are now. But one event served as a touchpoint for the story he was writing at the time.

“I saw on a reality show a parachutist jump off a plane, and there was someone in the stands videotaping it. The chute didn’t open, and he hit the ground. They kept rewinding it on TV, and digitally zooming in,” he said. “They just kept showing it over and over. It just makes me wonder how far you go.”

Herzfeld hopes his film will be accepted as satire, but the situation it explores is almost too close to reality to be considered satirical. “Some journalists I talked to thought this movie wasn’t as satirical as I thought it was,” Herzfeld said. “I hope it is.”

“The media has to be careful that they don’t provide a spotlight for someone out there who commits a heinous act of violence just to become a celebrity,” he said. Indeed, “15 Minutes” shows us just that kind of thinking, and leaves us to sort out the morality or immorality of how we deal with it.

“I don’t have the answer by the way,” Herzfeld said. “I’m a filmmaker, not a politician.”