Aubrey Plaza obsesses about an Instagram influencer in Ingrid Goes West

Aubrey Plaza explores the warped world of an obsessive Instagram follower in her new film Ingrid Goes West.

Ingrid Thorburn (Aubrey Plaza), right, poses with her online mentor Taylor Sloane (Elizabeth Olsen) for another post on Instagram in Ingrid Goes West.

Aubrey Plaza knew she wanted to play the title role in Ingrid Goes West. She also wanted another role off camera.

“I loved the script so much and felt so strongly about what it could be, and I wanted to help push it in that direction as much as I could,” she says. “So I decided that I want to be involved in every step of the process, and I pushed very hard for them to let me produce.”

For director and co-writer Matt Spicer, this level of involvement from his lead brought all sorts of benefits: affirmation, ­experience, a committed performance. Making his first feature, he says: “I knew I’d need a partner, somebody who was going to look out for me. And she obviously felt confident that I could pull this off.

“Off camera, she really pushed me, but she was also very protective of me.” As an actress, “she saw the potential and pushed herself to go places she hadn’t gone before, and I felt very grateful to have that performance”.

Ingrid Goes West, written by Spicer and David Branson Smith, is the story of a young woman with an unnerving central focus. She’s living her life vicariously and it’s not going well: the film begins with a disastrous meltdown after she has miscalculated the implications of a social media connection.

Yet Ingrid emerges, renewed and undeterred, to find a new source of obsession: Instagram ­influencer Taylor Sloane (Elizabeth Olsen), who lives a perfect, sun-soaked, brand-citing life ­online. For Ingrid — now Ingrid­goeswest on Instagram — everything has meaning once again. She heads to Los Angeles to meet her idol and role model. At first it all seems to be going swimmingly as she deftly ingratiates herself into Taylor’s world. Soon, however, things start to spiral out of control again.

Aubrey Plaza and Amy Poehler in Parks and Recreation. Picture: Larry French/NBC.

Plaza is best known for sceptical, effortlessly caustic characters, beginning with arch-misanthrope April in the TV series Parks and Recreation. Yet in films such as the lo-fi time-travel movie Safety Not Guaranteed or the love-beyond-the-grave teen romance Life After Beth, she brings unexpected depths to difficult characters.

For Plaza, Ingrid Goes West has comic aspects, but that’s not what she responded to, she says. “When I read the script, I didn’t really read it as a comedy, honestly. It really did seem sad to me, and I was interested in having the movie feeling like a character study.” She enjoyed exploring the clever, ­resourceful elements of Ingrid’s character but also her vulnerability, her inability to understand consequences.

Nor is Ingrid Goes West about social media and its discontents. “I didn’t ever want the movie to feel just like ‘The Instagram Movie’. I don’t think people will feel as much if it’s not really ­focused on the human story. So I like it that Ingrid sees Taylor in a magazine first before she finds her on Instagram.”

Ingrid Goes West is a study, she says, of what happens when a character “who is having a really hard time connecting with people is confronted with a platform like Instagram. How does that affect them, how does it feed on the worst parts, the worst impulses people have? It’s an extreme version of what we all feel at times, I think, but we don’t allow ourselves to really go down that dark path.”

In Los Angeles, Ingrid finds a place to live not far from the object of her obsession. Her closest neighbour is Dan Pinto (O’Shea Jackson Jr), amiable, accommodating and generous with his own rather more low-key fixation: since childhood, he has been ­obsessed by Batman.

Jackson’s film breakthrough was in Straight Outta Compton, the biopic about rappers NWA in which he played the role of his father, Ice Cube.

It was Plaza’s idea — one of her contributions as a producer — to cast Jackson in Ingrid Goes West. She met him briefly just after she’d read the script and thought of him as a potential Dan. “It seemed like an interesting take on the part. I thought he was so good in Straight Outta Compton and he just had such a funny energy.

“I actually direct-messaged him on Twitter — as Ingrid would do — and told him I had a script I thought he might find interesting, and that if he wanted to hear about it, write to me. And I got a text message from him a couple of days later with a number and a message saying, ‘Yo, what’s up, it’s Batman,’ and I immediately assumed he’d read the script and wanted to do it.

“But I found out later that he hadn’t read the script at that point, that it was just a coincidence, that in real life he is obsessed with Batman, he refers to his car as the ­Batmobile. It was really perfect, it was all meant to be. The whole casting process felt like that, it felt like we got our dream people for all the roles.”

For Spicer, this casting brought something new and unpredictable to the film. Filming Jackson’s first scene, he says, “we realised it would be foolish of us to expect him to just do it as written because he was bringing so much of himself to the role, there was something very magnetic about him”. And Plaza, an experienced improviser, “was a perfect tennis partner in that way”.

Improv is not always about comedy, he says. “Aubrey keeps it in a very real and human place. She’s not making up jokes; she’s just trying to be in the moment.”

There is a hint in the film about what may have made Plaza’s character act as she does but it’s not something he wanted to spell out. “There was more in the film originally but we ended up paring it back for numerous reasons. I hate it when movies have the obligatory ‘here’s why’ sequence. What we wanted to communicate was that everything that she was doing was from a place of pain, and of wanting to feel a connection with somebody. That was what the audience needed to know. The details are almost irrelevant.”

Like Plaza, Spicer’s cinematic reference points were The King of Comedy, Taxi Driver and To Die For. Writing the film, he says, he had an eye on Instagram, of course. He enjoyed famous Instagram moments of the time: the satirical ­account Socality Barbie and the dramatic shift in tone from social media influencer Essena O’Neill.

“I love Instagram and I use it a lot. I feel the same about LA: I have a love-hate relationship with the two. But we didn’t set out to make a take-down, so every time we felt we might be going too far, I’d go, ‘OK, let’s take it back a little.’ I didn’t want to make those finger-waggy, getting-on-a-soapbox things. It’s not the technology, it’s us. People look for something to fix their whole lives, and whatever the shiny new thing is makes them think, “If I just have that, then I’ll be happy.’ ”

Ingrid Goes West opens on October 26.