Even at the time there was skepticism about the Y2K bug, an issue created by computer programmers that couldn’t foresee a future in which more than the last two digits of any given year needed to be processed as all of the cyber infrastructure was built on top of it over the course of decades. Looking back over two decades on, it may seem even sillier that the other two digits – that of 19 changing over to 20 at the dawn of the millennium – could cause such a panic, but as Marley McDonald and Brian Becker find in “Time Bomb Y2K,” there was a real concern that financial markets could be thrown in disarray and computer systems could crash when the clock struck midnight on December 31st, 1999 with not even the most experienced tech workers sure how old sequencing would respond.
Not much attention was paid to the work that was done to avert disaster in the seven years leading up to the turn of the century – coding doesn’t make for interesting TV – but the premise of potential technological apocalypse, on the other hand, created a media frenzy and McDonald and Becker thread the needle brilliantly in their co-directorial debut between honoring the diligence of those who toiled in obscurity to make for a smooth transition while observing the snowball effect that media coverage had, beginning with seemingly benign human interest stories that gradually stoked fears that the worst could happen. A situation that’s ridiculous in retrospect looks to serve as a perfect way to ring in New Years to come as one can rejoice as revelers in Times Square do when disaster didn’t come to pass and can observe the hysteria at a cool remove, yet “Time Bomb Y2K” finds a shrewd way into recounting how people react to the threat of societal collapse, at a distance but also in parallel with the recent experience of living through the pandemic where information had a way of becoming warped in making its way to the public.
Becker and McDonald observe with clear eyes those who worked to fix the problem without fanfare, those that sought to hype it up upon seeing a business opportunity amongst doomsday preppers and some, like Peter de Jager, a computer engineer who was one of the first to sound the alarm publicly, who could have valuable perspectives yet nonetheless fed the hype machine and were susceptible to craving time in the spotlight. Showing the very real fallout of speculation and conjecture as some people can be seen moving off the grid entirely and others simply into paranoia, the film evolves into a riveting cautionary tale that illuminates what should be taken seriously while chronicling all that shouldn’t have been as Y2K became a media sensation. Since its premiere this past spring at True/False, the film has been counting down the days until its big release this New Year’s Eve weekend on HBO and Becker and McDonald, who came to collaborate with one another after working in the editorial departments of some of the finest documentaries in recent years such as “Spaceship Earth,” spoke about building this exciting time machine, creating suspense in a film where everyone will know the ending and its capacity to speak to different issues in a constantly changing world.
How’d you come to join forces on this?
Brian Becker: We worked together in what can probably best be described as a windowless hallway where we sat back-to-back for about nine months of our lives [on “Spaceship Earth”] and Marley and I really quickly aligned as far as our cinematic and creative interests, first as really good friends and that friendship has been a keystone for the making of this film. Secondly, we knew we wanted to direct a film together, so that spawned a lot of GChatting about good ideas for movies, a lot of bad ideas for movies, and just about our lives. This idea to make a film about Y2K was the first one that we heard or that we came up with where we were like, “Okay, this is our film to make. Let’s do this.”
Marley McDonald: Brian actually had bumped into a clip of Y2K when he was working on a different film and sent it my way via that long running GChat, and that was in the summer of 2020, so the first images that come up when you Google “Y2K” are empty grocery store shelves and people lined around the block at gun stores. It immediately resonated with all the images we were being flooded with in that COVID summer and we saw this resonance immediately. Then the more we dug into it, the more we realized that it was the same characters coming up in the media and the same American subcultures that were using Y2K as a crisis to espouse their worldview that were still in the media landscape today and like Brian said, we realized we were the perfect people to make this movie after recognizing that our entire generation is named after this single event.
When it’s this sprawling a subject, was there anything foundational that you knew you could build on or did it come into focus organically?
Brian Becker: The one event we knew we had to include from the jump was New Year’s Eve, but the word “organic” is a perfect descriptor for how this came together. It was a research-based process that focused upon further investigation of the problem [of the Y2K bug] and these subcultures that Marley mentioned, and then constant watching and discussion amongst ourselves and with our team, really just looking towards which characters were emerging from this huge archive we were creating by discovering and researching footage. and also keeping an eye on which themes had very clear resonance with our present moment. We knew from the top that we didn’t want to include interviewees, so those moments that connected us between past and present were crucial in guiding our edit and further directions for the research.
Marley McDonald: Yeah, we knew that we wanted to structure the film the way that Y2K emerged in the world, and that period of research before we even started the edit went on for about a year and some months, so we started with this technical problem and watched the way it radiated out of the cubicles and into the mainstream consciousness and we thought of following that to the fringes of America. So we knew we wanted to end on New Year’s Eve, and that was another major challenge of the edit, how to keep ramping up tension when you know that your audience knows what happened. They’re know the world didn’t end. So that became a massive challenge to the structure, but I think that we were able to crack it by expanding that night out to what it really was, which was just this epic celebration of humanity.
At True/False, you mentioned that even though they aren’t for the cameras, you do go out and interview many of the people you see in the archival footage. How does that process shape how you think about all of this?
Brian Becker: It’s definitely a little strange to intimately know someone’s 1998 self before hopping on Zoom with them, but the process is very similar in some ways to recording an on-camera interview. In other ways, it’s a lot less charged because you’re not asking for someone to sit for three hours under hot film lights while you pepper them with questions, so we would research these people, trying to find any quote they’d given to newspapers or any appearance they’d done on the news and then use that basis of knowledge as a guiding point to discuss what Y2K meant to them. Those discussions guided how we were working with their 1990s self in edit and although we didn’t film them on camera, we felt a responsibility, especially if they were giving us their personal footage, to craft a portrait of them that was true to how they explained their experience of living through Y2K.
Marley McDonald: And when we started, the biggest question was, was Y2K a real thing? And it took a lot of those research calls to get to the bottom of that. Eventually, we wound up with the answer that, yes, this was a very real problem that was got out in front of by governments and businesses and actually solved by these computer programmers who put in hours and hours and hours of work. We talked to a lot of computer programmers who told us, we’re lucky to think of it as a joke or a hoax. It’s only because they put in the work that we get to do that. So that was a really important realization from when we started research to then developing the film that we knew we had to to get this right and tell the story about the effort that actually went into solving a very real problem.
You mentioned the present-day parallels earlier, but how much did you want to lean into that versus letting it exist in the moment it took place?
Marley McDonald: Our choice to do it all archival had a big part in that. We knew we didn’t want people looking back and making that connection for the audience, and mostly that decision worked because the resonance was all in the footage. We were also careful not to conflate a virus that killed millions of people with a computer bug that was worked on and solved, but there were parallels that we were finding in [how] an abstract technical problem was translated to the public in ways both effective and ineffective and this cycling of subcultural extreme belief and news coverage. That was kind of the headspace that we were in when we started working on this project in the summer of 2020 and inevitably, that was something we had an eye towards while watching footage because it was what we were living through.
But it’s been interesting in our rollout of the film since we premiered in March and we’ve been traveling around it with it, people were bringing up COVID in a lot of the Q & As at the beginning, and then sometime in the summer, a lot of questions started coming in about the threat and danger of artificial intelligence. And this was the goal with the film — to create this this portrait of the way that Americans deal with existential threat.
You are clearly thinking about technology too, which extends to the way it’s depicted. Was it tricky to find those moments?
Marley McDonald: Yeah, there are some clips in the film that we just have to thank people for actually filming in the ’90s, one of which is [when] someone took a camcorder and filmed all of these Y2K websites off a computer, which was so great for us because some of those are broken links, so you can’t find them anymore. But we knew we wanted to start the film in this idea of the ‘90s that was techno optimistic. It was the first time that people were really encountering personal computers in their daily life and we wanted to capture the hope and energy around that before diving into what then became a confrontation with the reality that we had actually been so dependent on computer systems that were completely out of our sight and we didn’t even know.
The music seems like it must’ve been a really fun part of this to figure out. What was that process like?
Brian Becker: From the start, we knew this film was influenced in many ways by the films of the late ’90s and electronic music, so we wanted it to flow between these different moods and characters seamlessly, almost in the way that a DJ mixes records together. So we worked with a composer named Nathan Micay, who was absolutely incredible. In an all-archival film, music has such a role in setting the emotional tenor, so it was this amazing and fruitful collaboration where sometimes he would send us back a music cue that he’d written in Ableton in 10 minutes, and it was exactly what we were looking for. Other times, he was very patient with our notes and we would work together for weeks and weeks to nail a cue down. But throughout, we knew that, especially with archival, there was such weight to carry for him as far as generating propulsion throughout this film. We wanted to move at a pretty fast clip while at the same time living within certain scenes and Nathan did a good job of of mixing styles and creating a really cohesive score. And in addition to directing the film, Marley edited the film alongside a second editor, Maya Mumma, so that was a lot of very careful work in the edit room establishing that rhythm.
Which leads me to ask Marley, you’ve now had to celebrate New Year’s probably a few hundred times simply in putting this film together. What’s it like to arrive at this point and getting this film out into the world?
Marley McDonald: It’s about as exciting as it could be. I can’t wait for the world to see the film, and it’s been such an amazing year, really celebrating all the work that we’ve done. Brian and I have got to travel around with it all year and when you’re when you’re editing the film and the whole team is working on the film, you’re in an office every day staring at your computer, so this feels like the reward for all of that work that everyone put in. We’re so psyched for people to watch it and to experience the joys of the millennium yet again.
Brian Becker: Yeah, there are two major end-of-year nights this year, December 30th, when our film comes out and December 31st, when hopefully people go to their New Year’s Eve parties and talk about this film. Then hopefully, fingers crossed, celebrate making it onwards into yet another year on this planet.
“Time Bomb Y2K” premieres December 30th at 10 pm on HBO and will stream thereafter on Max.