David was the hardest subject to get on camera.
He had agreed, in principle, to participate. But every time we scheduled a shoot, something came up. A conflict. A concern. A request to review the release form again. We spent six months in a kind of holding pattern — regular calls, occasional emails, no footage.
We almost gave up. We had Margaret. We had Ana. The film could work without him. But we kept coming back because his story was the one that explained the others. He had built the systems that Margaret and Ana were trying to escape. He knew, from the inside, what those systems could do.
When he finally agreed to sit down with us, he talked for six hours. We used about twelve minutes of it in the film. The rest — the technical detail, the industry gossip, the moments where he seemed to be working something out in real time — is in our archive.
What he told us changed how we understood the film. The data economy is not a conspiracy. It is not run by villains. It is run by people who are, mostly, just doing their jobs. That is what makes it hard to fight.
David is trying to fight it anyway. We are not sure he is winning. We are not sure anyone is.