Dazed bring you an exclusive trailer of the soon-to-be controversial scientology comedy starring Leo Fitzpatrick...

Knowledgy is a hilarious send up of scientology starring Leo Fitzpatrick as an exchange student from Newfoundland who documents a couple's initiation into a thinly-veiled version of the popular sci-fi cult. The debut from Icelandic directing duo Kristín Bára Haraldsdóttir and Hrefna Hagalín premiered last week at Soho House in New York, and it seems a uniquely brave proposition considering the amount of converts to the cash-guzzling cult of the moment there are currently residing in the Hollywood Hills. We invited the girls to undergo a little Dazed Digital auditing to find out more, and present an exclusive trailer of a film that is likely to cause a tsunami of reaction.



Dazed Digital: Why do you think do you think people are so willing to believe in cults?

Kristín Bára Haraldsdóttir: I suppose if you are lost and and somebody tells you that they have the answer you are looking for then you think you have something. We looked into a lot of cults and the Jim Jonestown massacre was one of our inspirations: throughout the whole film you don’t think that people are going to get killed but then, you know…

Hrefna Hagalín: I think you’ll believe anything if you are lost and leaders of cults have that charisma that convinces people that they should join. I am totally fascinated with cults. The guy who wrote the film (Hugleikur Dagsson) is a master of making things look funny in a very dark way. There is a little twist to everything that he does.



DD: How did you manage to get Leo Fitzpatrick involved?

Kristín Bára Haraldsdóttir: I know Noua M Phoenix, the actor who plays the lead role of the cult leader, and he knows Leo, so basically I just called a friend who called a friend. Leo plays a student in Iceland that makes crap movies. He’s in film school making a terrible documentary about cats, and then he meets this Icelandic couple that are about to join the cult, so he gets the chance the film the auditing process of them becoming ‘Knowlegdists’. It all ends in some very weird stuff!



DD: It’s’s only been shown a few times so far?

Hrefna Hagalín: It has been shown twice in Iceland, so I think maybe about five hundred people in Iceland have seen it. There are only about 60 people in New York who saw it at Soho House last week, but they all really liked it. Everybody was laughing throughout the whole film. I think America responded better to it than Iceland because they know more about scientology, and they kind of knew what we were doing,



DD: Do you have some trepidation about the reaction from the so-called church of scientology?

Kristín Bára Haraldsdóttir: I know that Tom Cruise can ban us from working in Hollywood, but we will work through that; there are people that we can work with. Hollywood stars just have so much money that they get lost and bored; they get into something like scientology because they think that is what they need. The film is about scientology but we didn’t do the film because it was an attack, we just did the film because we liked the script. I suppose we won’t like the repercussions but we’re sure we’ll be okay. This is not our voice saying something about scientology; it’s the writer’s voice.



DD: Does your drive come from a wish to entertain or to get some kind of message across?

Hrefna Hagalín: It’s a combination of both. We have never done a script with a boring story that doesn’t mean anything and of course it is supposed to be entertainment… or at least interesting. We want people to talk about it afterwards, and at the New York show people were asking some difficult questions. I don’t like Tom Cruise's acting anyway, so I am not worried about him never wanting to be in our films!