Bleibtreu: Of course. If you have somebody like Tarek in this group-- and that's a very important point that a lot of people keep forgetting. This gets out of control because this guy deliberately pushes this situation. He does things in order to get this whole thing out of control.
AboutFilm: In order to get a good story.
Bleibtreu: Absolutely. Maybe if Tarek would have not done it, and he had been just like everybody else, easy and trying to get these two weeks over, then nothing would have happened. On the other hand, in every school class there is one guy that cannot keep his mouth shut, and that's Tarek.
AboutFilm: Group dynamics can cast somebody in that role even though that person might not be there at first.
Bleibtreu: Absolutely. In this kind of situation, maybe if you don't have a guy like Tarek, it would have not gotten as far, but still... some conflicts are not avoidable. Some bullshit is going to happen in a situation like this, because if you put a person that never had any power in his life--maybe not even the power to control his own life--if you put him in a situation where he has power for the first time, it's just a question of time when he's going to start to misuse this power. That's plain logic. It's sure that some bullshit is going to happen, if you play these games. That's also why I think that doing those kinds of experiments in real life is something that is just not necessary.
AboutFilm: Of course, this is based on a real experiment.
Bleibtreu: Yes, although we have always to underline that what we do in this movie has nothing to do with the Stanford Prison Experiment. The idea is the same, but the way we've been playing around with the story has nothing to do with the real events of the Stanford Prison Experiment. But, if you want to get information about the Stanford Prison Experiment, you can do that on the internet. You will see that stuff did not go as far as in our movie, but yet... people did not have a nice time in this original experiment. A lot of bad things happened there, too.
