KD Davila and Levin Menekse On the Terrifying Reality of ‘Please Hold’

When I told KD Davila and Levin Menekse that I was surprised by how deftly they balanced out the darkness and light in Please Hold, Menekse smiled and said, “That’s our specialty.” Not very many people can handle such an entertaining story with such realistic themes so well.

Please Hold follows Erick, a fast food worker who is approached by a drone on the street that informs him that he is being arrested. He is not told what his crime is and no one can offer an explanation. Erick has to accept the handcuffs given to him or he will be physically detained. This prison system is fully automated (for your convenience!), and Erick only has a screen with various menu options to interact with. You know that maddening feeling when you are trying to get a problem resolved and the recorded line tells you, “Your call is very important to us!”?

Davila and Menekse (who are married in real life) were frustrated by the constant news cycle of injustices across the country. They wrote the film together, but Davila (who also directed the short) found direct examples of wrongful incarceration that served as the main inspiration.

“It came from the general state of the existing penal system,” Davila said. “There were a number of stories that we were reading, and I spend a lot of time in the depressing realms of the internet. There is a lot of miscarriages of justice in this country. I read various stories about people who were arrested by mistake. One had been about a man who was arrested, because he had the same name as the suspect even though he didn’t fit the personal description. He was the wrong age and everything, but no one was listening to him. He was in jail for weeks and the case went to trial, and the judge took one look at him and knew they didn’t have the right person. Even his public defender didn’t bother. That is a direct inspiration, but we had been reading about the Seal Beach Detention Center that has a menu of upgrades that you can get. Private prisons in America are already feel like dystopian future. There is a sense that there is this understanding that if you are affluent you can avoid consequences. If you are poor or don’t have means to fight the system–even if you are innocent–you can be stuck in the system long enough to ruin your life. What kind of justice system is that?”

Erick only has a flat, cold screen to interact with, and we understand how lonely that can be. If we are frustrated with an automated system, we can just hang up the phone and go about our daily lives. Erick doesn’t have that, and that created an entirely new type of villain.

“One of the things we talked about was that antagonism wasn’t a malevolent, evil bad guy,” Menekse explained. “There is no mustache-twirling. Apathy is the worst thing. In modern life, we know what it’s like to be swallowed up by this bureaucracy monster. I am from Turkey, so, for me, it was immigration. For some people, it’s health insurance. We’ve all been on the other side of the phone telling us to please hold.”

“And it’s telling us to do it very politely. It’s a feeling of powerlessness,” Davila added.

Please Hold‘s tone is very elusive. Yes, Erick’s situation is dire, and we sympathize with him. At the same time, the premise he finds himself in feels so ridiculous that you are entertained. It’s a tricky style that Davila pulls off extremely well. The film inspires so many emotions from the audience.

“This tone is something that we like to operate in, this comedy and thriller,” Davila said. “Comedy and thriller are two sides of the same coin, because it is all about control and release of tension. With a project like this, it is walking a tonal tightrope. You’re satirizing the situation and the familiarity of that feeling, but the key for us is making sure that Mateo is taken very seriously. For him, it’s never a comedy, and he’s never in on that joke. Erick Lopez really brought it to the character. He was very much in on the anger and frustration. He felt that impending doom, and, as the movie goes on, you see his spirit get eroded. It was also important to us that he wasn’t going to be a typical hero. I relate to him personally. If I am in a situation where I am up against a massive enemy, I might accept the circumstances. It makes it funny on one level as you watch someone lost their sanity that is relatable, but that adds to the tension and the sadness. The fantasy is Mateo punches the drone and takes control, but we know that isn’t going to happen.”

Menekse added that because we don’t recognize any branding it helps to separate us from the world we live in–even if the circumstances seem alarmingly familiar. The addition of Scaley adds to the absurdity of the situation. You know Clippy was dead? Well, prepare to meet his litigious and overly cheerful family member.

“Another thing that helped in the tonal grey area is that it’s not a prison that’s made by Apple,” he said. “It doesn’t have white walls and it’s not shiny. If you watch Back of the Future, it shows today and people are flying cars. Instead of this dystopia and corporate overlords being transparent, we wanted to make a “normtopia.” It’s the vibe that we live with today and how it’s going to look.”

“We wanted it to feel very much like the world we live in. That’s why we used Clippy as an inspiration for Scaley,” Davila said. “His full name is Justice Scaley, Esq. For that, the character design of Scaley was a fun experience. Getting to design that, we worked with our animator, Fernando Nájera. It’s magical to have an idea and then see it get brought to life. Our friend, Greg Karber, is the voice of Scaley, and we don’t know if it’s an insult to say that you have the perfect voice to drive a man crazy. That small thing brings such a personality to the film. It helps it feel familiar but also a bit distanced.”

The entire film gives you a release from that tension, but then you will feel the pangs of anger. Erick finds himself a free man, but that experience in prison has cost him everything. It’s a tragic example of how the system doesn’t care about those it locks up. He walks away with a Hand Made pamphlet with the phrase “We proudly hire ex-convicts!” emblazoned on it. While Erick has escaped the physical cell, he will now carry that title of ex-con with him wherever he goes.

“We get asked a lot about the “happy ending” of the movie, “Menekse said at the end of our conversation. “It was important to us that there was a cost to this journey. He loses his job and his car, and he’s ten thousand dollars in debt to his parents. That pamphlet shows you how time doesn’t stop. It hasn’t just changed his present and past, but it has changed his future. We initially had an after credits scene where he was just crocheting Hand Made stuff.”

“We wanted to not have him sit there and rot in prison for no reason,” Davila added. “That’s not a satisfying arc. We wanted to leave him with a sense of bewilderment but also relief as he walks out. He is relieved, but there is such a strange clash of emotions. He is happy to walk out into the light, but as you hear the layered voicemails of what he left behind, we wanted to leave it with that clash of emotions. We wanted it to be haunting.”

Please Hold is streaming now on HBO Max.