“Oh, you tapped out early,” filmmaker Rodney Ascher joked with me after his newest documentary, A Glitch in the Matrix, had its virtual Sundance premiere. 

I’d explained to him that I was so disturbed by an early scene in which an “eyewitness”—a.k.a. a person who believes we live in a simulated reality—vividly describes a dissociative episode that I had to close my laptop and take a Klonopin. (A few days later, I watched the film again—this time beneath a number of comforting afghans.) For a filmmaker devoted to making work about irrational fears, there could be no higher compliment.

In the film, eyewitness Paul Gude tells his story of “descending into the Null” while rendered (as all eyewitnesses are) as a computerized avatar. He looks sort of like a ThunderCat but with a trick up his sleeve. His terrifying tale comes amid a barrage of wacko talk that shreds the fabric of existence, and the way Ascher slowly lets the pretzel logic build—moving beyond online denizens with handles like Brother Læo Mystwood to include thinkers like Plato, René Descartes, Philip K. Dick, Elon Musk, and Neil deGrasse Tyson—has a cumulative effect. After watching the film, I am not entirely ready to say that we live inside an enormous high-powered computer program. But we all live somewhere, and that place is still pretty weird.

Ascher’s films, like the books of Philip K. Dick, have a tremendous knack for seeding playful paranoia. His first feature, Room 237, used different interpretations of The Shining to investigate obsessive behavior. The Nightmare, which explored sleep paralysis, had an unforgettable midnight Sundance premiere in which an audience member (who later explained she suffered from the condition) caused a kerfuffle that spread through the crowd, much to the director’s glee.

A Glitch in the Matrix, which debuts at virtual cinemas and VOD this Friday, is a serious film about an enormous topic, and includes testimony from the so-called “Matrix murderer” Joshua Cooke. But it’s also a movie about nutcases who think we live in a microchip and the planet is inhabited by “NPCs” (i.e. “non-player characters,” a term imported from video games). It takes a special kind of filmmaker to make this story work; Ascher is that filmmaker.

Vanity Fair: So you do the research, you have conversations, you replay them 100 times as you edit, you create the trippy visuals. At what point did A Glitch in the Matrix really start to fuck with your head?

Rodney Ascher: It would be a better story to say that it did. But even having conversations with Joshua Cooke about the murder of his parents, I would go home and play with my kid, then fall asleep in front of the TV. It’s a day at the office. I like to think that my movies are crazier than I am in person.

What affected me was being in the mix room—watching it big, hearing the sound design and music that Jonathan Snipes made. Hearing that existential dread at a loud volume does start to work through your lower intestines.

Your movies are always funny, but you seem to go to great lengths to never make fun of your subjects.

I don’t have a Dogme 95–type list of rules, but it’s a matter of watching, rewatching, and revising. There are jokes in there, but I hope we’re never mocking the people we’re talking to. There are plenty of things people say that I don’t necessarily agree with. 

Anyone doing a close read of your work would probably never think these are your points of view. There are inconsistencies throughout, anyway. Some of these characters accept that we live in a computer simulation, and are coping with that. Joshua, from prison, is denouncing it. 

Both can’t be true!

Most of the time you watch and think, “Well, this guy’s nuts.” Then someone floats an idea and it’s “Oh, yes, well obviously.” This happens time and again in your films. It’s your special trick to make something bananas seem palatable. Is this something you do in life? Do you live to make strange arguments?

Growing up in a New England Jewish family, I can’t tell you how many times we would debate and have arguments that would never die. At a certain point you just agree to disagree, but certainly they lived on my head. I know I’ve walked down the street rephrasing something I said to someone years ago, trying to win an argument I lost. 

It all comes from trying to listen and understand where folks are coming from. These movies are about seeing the world through someone else’s eyes. Depending on who the audience is, there will be more or less agreement. When Room 237 came out, different people held up different characters as either “the most wrong” or “the most right”—and it happened to every character. In fact, some people would accidentally be talking about the same person, because without the subtitles they got confused who was who. 

Room 237 is a window into obsession with a very specific thing. Glitch in the Matrix is the most universal, most fundamental philosophical “what is existence?” line of inquiry. What I ultimately come away with is that even though the film is shocking—it does have a murder—it can be read as optimistic.

Erik Davis, the Philip K. Dick scholar who has written a lot about technology and religion, ultimately says if you grant that we’re living in a simulation, well, what then? What does that change about our obligations of living with other people? 

Brother Mystwood says the same thing: “I live in a simulation. Now what?” I think the big picture is that unless you’re at the bleeding edge of quantum physics and trying to analyze how reality breaks down into pixels, then this is just another creation myth. You can say the world was created by God in six days, or choose the myths of 100 other cultures. This still doesn’t help you take care of your kid, or drive to work, or make you a cup of coffee. 

Unless, I suppose, you have access to some cheat code…

This gets us into Westworld territory. When is it unethical to act violently toward artificial intelligence? If we are merely vessels that react to stimuli, whether you want to say “programmed” or “evolved” or even “divinely inspired,” it’s still stimulus reaction.

We’re already there. I’ve seen a video of a robot that’s been programmed to feel pain. Now, is it real pain? You poke it and it grimaces with a thousand little sensors. This gets back to Philip K. Dick and his two fundamental problems: What is real and what is human? In Blade Runner the replicants are human in the larger sense of the word, if you mean an autonomous being that loves and fears, experiences pleasure and pain, and therefore deserves respect. 

This gets into NPCs, and a real fork in the road with simulation theory. If this is a big computer program, literally or metaphorically, then what does that mean for the rest of us? Are we all in it? Are we all tethered to the matrix? Is everyone in their cocoon, or strapped to a VR headset? Are the other characters in this world fully human, like you are? Or is it Pac-Man, where the ghosts are just ones and zeros? How you come down on that question will have immense ramifications on how you will live your life.

Elon Musk, deemed the wealthiest man in the world, gives every indication that he believes we live in a simulation. This is potentially terrifying, because if he decides that NPCs are Harry Lime’s dots, he does have the power to greatly influence the world. All he has to do is tweet the word “Stonks” and the market goes haywire. Do you have any misgivings about Musk being into all this, and possibly not having the ethical fortitude to handle it?

I’ve got no idea. I have very little insight into what actually makes him tick, or how fully he’s integrated it into his worldview. There’s a part of his speech where he says simulation theory has so overtaken his conversations that he and his brother created one safe place [they] wouldn’t talk about it—which was the hot tub. No simulation theory in the hot tub!

We reached out to him, and got to someone close to him, but the timing was bad because he was preparing to dock a manned spacecraft with the International Space Station that weekend, so he couldn’t Skype with me. But I would have loved to ask how his belief in simulation theory has affected his choices. I mean, he is clearly a smart and powerful man, and seems to put his resources into electric cars and underground tunnels and whatever else. Are those just good businesses, or does this fit into something larger?

Or saying his own company is overvalued and tanking his stock.

He does seem like a wise guy. But also very Philip K. Dick—he wants to colonize Mars. This factors into at least a half dozen Dick stories. Certainly Total Recall and Martian Time-Slip and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. 

When Jesse, in the film, talks about the desire to “reach” our simulators, he suggests that interstellar colonization might increase the amount of space we take up on “the desktop.” So this is a strange convergence of three very different people having the same idea. 

And you slip in the visual of the Tower of Babel as he’s discussing it. 

It’s exactly the Tower of Babel.

Did you reach out to the Wachowskis?

I didn’t. This is more about the audience than the filmmakers. I’m more interested in someone who watches The Matrix a thousand times than more stories about making The Matrix. 

At no point in the film do you mention psychedelic drugs. 

We considered including the topic of DMT, in which people who take it go to another reality. If you read the book The Spirit Molecule, there are descriptions of people who take a short psychedelic trip that reminded me a lot of sleep paralysis, in that there are reports of similar apparitions. One possibility suggests that it is not a hallucination from random imaginary sparks—that you are seeing something “real” from a heightened sense of awareness. 

Terence McKenna wrote about this too.

It would have been fun to get into, and also the Borges idea from On Exactitude in Science [which posits a map that is the same size as its territory]. For me, that’s nothing other than Google Maps or Google Earth. It’s a one-to-one scale of the world that exists now. It’s not on paper, but with a magic window like a phone, if it’s on the dashboard of your car, you can move through it. 

And I also would have liked to have included Duck Amuck, a classic connection between a character and a creator—and a creator that is not completely benevolent.

Well, you did get Tron and Dark City and The Truman Show, and a lot of others.

We got a lot, and we are not doing a Wikipedia entry on simulation theory. That won’t talk about something like Paul, as a kid, driving to St. Louis, and he’s envisioning a movie screen outside the car, and workers changing the background. It’s the personal stories I’m going for. 

Your technique is experiential and subjective—but you’ve drawn your share of critics. In one negative review, a writer referred to you as the “anti Alex Gibney.”

Another accidental compliment I read once was “is he trying to be the Lars von Trier of documentaries?” If only!

Look, Alex Gibney does something very specific, and he does it really well. If I tried to do his stuff, it’d be a very mediocre shadow of it.

When Paul describes “descending into the Null” at a young age, I mean, he basically just had a mini psychotic break. Were you tempted to ask if he, you know, tried therapy?

I want people to tell their stories their way. I give them the space. But he does, at the end, say that as he is getting older, he is noticing that others in his life—arguably the NPCs—are “getting better.” So this raises two possibilities for him. Either the simulation is getting better and the tech is evolving, or he says he’s getting healthier. He wonders if when he was younger if his brain perceived people as fake as some sort of coping mechanism.

So now he has to decide if he wants to double-down on this. That’s quite a “red pill, blue pill” kind of a problem.

This has been edited and condensed for clarity.

— Stanley Tucci on His Love Story With Colin Firth
— Why We Can’t Let Media Executives Reward Trump’s Cronies
— The Hidden History of the Mary Pickford Cocktail 
— Thank You, Leslie Jones, for Making the News Feel Bearable
— Cover Story: The Charming Billie Eilish
— A Complete Beginner’s Guide to WandaVision
— Gillian Anderson Breaks Down Her Career, From The X-Files to The Crown
— From the Archive: Douglas Fairbanks Jr. on the Real Mary Pickford
— Not a subscriber? Join Vanity Fair to receive full access to VF.com and the complete online archive now.