Zal Batmanglij and Brit Marling know their time-travel cult movie is hard to decipher. As Sound of My Voice’s co-writers, they intentionally crafted a story that’s like a jigsaw puzzle of modern art — full of odd-shaped pieces and open to interpretation.

“The film is designed like a calculus proof, very carefully,” director Batmanglij said in an interview with Wired. “That X factor, that N — what the value of that N is, you just have to trust your instinct at the end of the experience.”

What he means is that the film gives you the equation and some numbers, but a few key scenes in Sound of My Voice remain open to analysis. Any given audience member can solve the problem differently based on what they determine the values of those Xs to be.

(Spoiler alert: Minor plot points follow.)

Take, for example, Maggie — the cult leader, hauntingly played by Marling, who claims to have come from the year 2054 to inform people about their impending future. Lorna (played by Nicole Vicius) and her boyfriend Peter (Christopher Denham) have been trying to expose Maggie in a documentary. When Lorna is shown a photo of the enigmatic leader wearing what appears to be a costume outside Grauman’s Chinese Theater, her reaction indicates that she sees the picture as proof that Maggie is a fraud. But the scene could also mean Maggie once owned a crazy dress and walked down Hollywood Boulevard.

“Is that photo offering concrete proof that Maggie is definitely not from the future because she was Cinderella in front of the Chinese Theater, or did she really arrive here and begin as a street urchin and work her way up to Cinderella?” Marling said to Wired. “We tried to craft it so that each seed could be interpreted multiple ways.”

So, is there one definitive ending? What about one right way to interpret any particular scene? Um, maybe? To find out, Wired got on the phone with the film’s director and star to try to crack the code of Sound of My Voice. Along the way, we got their thoughts on the possibilities of time travel, cults named after IP addresses, and what’s going on with their upcoming anarchist infiltration film, The East.

Wired: There seem to be clues in the film that are meant to reveal the truth or lead you away from it. Was that intentional? In a way you could prove any ending of this film was the “real” ending, right?

Marling: I think that we tried to — and I hope this worked — we tried to have everything offer or inspire multiple interpretations. We tried to craft it so that each seed could be interpreted multiple ways and that you’re constantly, as the audience, with Peter, sort of pushed back and forth between whether or not she is or isn’t extraordinary.

Wired: This film seems to deal with trust on a lot of different levels.

Batmanglij: Trust is fascinating because in so many ways the movie is kind of cynical about it. Because it kind of suggests you shouldn’t trust anyone. But yet in other ways the film asks you to trust — especially in its ending, it asks you to just trust [it] in general.

Marling: Or trust yourself and your interpretation. It’s true of Peter and true of the audience. In the end, it’s about the audience trusting themselves and their interpretation of the events.

Batmanglij: Either way, you have to trust what your instincts, your gut, tells you happened.

“A lot of things that began as science fiction are now science. Wild ideas of fiction writers in the ’70s about what technology might be able to do, it now does.”

Wired: Is there a right answer to what actually happens in the end?

Batmanglij: Yes. I think the right answer is that if it’s Peter’s story, you have to follow Peter’s journey. And for Peter, I think there’s a change. There’s an excavation of who he really is. For the audience, I don’t think they get any such luxury. That’s true in real life. At the end, the movie’s about faith and you don’t get that luxury with faith either. Faith requires a leap, otherwise it just becomes science.

Wired: Which is interesting, because some people probably think of cults as being anti-science, but Maggie’s cult is built around a time-traveler and they do things like engineer their own food. Were you trying to juxtapose faith and science with this?

Batmanglij: Yes, and it’s only science fiction if time-travel is possible [in the film]. But if it is possible, then it’s science fact. It gets kind of funny, because if time travel is [actually] possible …

Marling: Then the movie isn’t science fiction.

Batmanglij: Then the movie isn’t science fiction. Well, it is, because we know time travel isn’t possible.

Marling: Yeah, but do we? That’s the weird thing about science fiction is that what we consider science is always being revised. Science is our best guess as to what’s going on right now, but there’s no question that human perception is pretty limited. A lot of things that began as science fiction are now science. Wild ideas of fiction writers in the ’70s about what technology might be able to do, it now does.

So, I don’t know, is time travel possible? Maybe. I like to think that it might be. It certainly was a fun exercise for us to daydream about what it might be like if there really was a time traveler in the practical sense — things like time-travel jet lag.

“In the original outline, the group was known only by their IP address.”

Wired: And that brings it back to faith. A lot of what is now scientific fact started out as a theory taken on faith that someone went out and proved.

Marling: That’s such a nice way to say it. And so many of those ideas and theories have begun with people saying that: “You’re crazy.” It’s a lot like what people said to us when we said we were going to try to make this movie with very little money. The crazy people are interesting.

Wired: And that explains why people want to follow Maggie, right?

Batmanglij: We thought that if there was a time-traveler — especially one that never leaves a basement because she’s dying from her time-travel to get here, according to her — a cult would naturally just spring up around her.

Wired: At what point did you guys know Brit would play Maggie, and how did that influence your writing of that character?

Marling: I had always wanted to play Maggie. Even in the early writing phases, she was really unclear to us and I think because it’s sort of intimidating to think that you need to write a charismatic cult leader. How is she able to hold the attention of this group so deeply that they are giving their blood to her? [Eds. note: This actually happens in the film.]

The moment that broke her open for us was the scene where she really puts Peter under pressure and sort of cracks him. Something about that moment helped us understand her as someone who, despite all her flaws and weaknesses, does have a very acute perception for seeing people, and seeing clearly and being able to articulate to someone the thing that makes them tick and maybe some kind of center that they have avoided or have been looking for. Maggie is able to expose that in a way that is both terrifying and compelling. And the sense of release that comes with that is what Lorna calls an “emotional orgasm.”

Wired: Brit, did you write toward something that you wanted to act out one day?

Marling: I think that we’re always interested in writing the sort of female characters that we don’t see that often in cinema. That is something that Zal and I talk about a lot and are really attracted to — this idea of women acting with agency and not being passive and not being these thin characters that are just The Girlfriend or The Wife or The Daughter. I think Maggie was exciting in that way. I always like to do the thing that I’m a bit afraid of, and I think that I was afraid of Maggie and whether or not I could …

Batmanglij: Pull it off. We knew Brit was going to play Maggie and I think that that’s why it was hard for us to figure Maggie out for a while. By the end of the script, we had written someone who vacillates quite suddenly but quite masterfully between uncanny empathy and viciousness.

“I think that we’re always interested in writing the sort of female characters that we don’t see that often in cinema.”

Wired: The cult doesn’t have a name in the film. Did you ever try to think of one?

Batmanglij: Yes. In the original outline that we ever wrote for this project, the group was known only by their IP address.

Wired: The IP address of who or what?

Batmanglij: I guess Klaus’s computer. It was like 172.19 …

Marling: 195.45.3 … Something like that [laughs].

Wired: Why an IP address?

Batmanglij: Peter had been looking for a group to join to debunk it and he had stumbled upon this group on the internet. It’s unclear, and Lorna asks him this in an early draft: “Wait, did we get in touch with the group or did the group get in touch with us?”

Marling: Did they find Peter in a chat room or did Peter find them? It’s hard to say in the internet.

Wired: So the two of you just finished filming your latest collaboration, The East, in December. The only details out there are that it’s about a contract worker who infiltrates an anarchist group. Is it going to be as much of a mind-bender as Sound of My Voice?

Batmanglij: Do you want to go see this movie? It would be no fun if you knew all the twists and turns. It’ll be more fun if you go into it blind.

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Sound of My Voice opened in New York, Washington D.C. and Los Angeles last week and expands into more cities Friday.