The Interview Has to Fail
A Case Study of Exit Interviews (2025)
Written by Joshua Allen
Founder and Executive Director, The Atlantis Awards
“Every former partner gives Robert something true. The documentary only succeeds when none of those truths can answer the question that created it.”
The Atlantis Awards Case Studies are not reviews. Their purpose is to examine the craft behind exceptional filmmaking — celebrating successful creative choices and identifying the mechanics behind why they work.
Content notice: The following contains full spoilers and discusses relationship trauma, addiction recovery, emotionally difficult dynamics, and a screenplay sequence carrying ambiguous relapse or self-harm imagery that the finished film resolves plainly.
A Note on Sourcing: This essay is based on the festival screener supplied to Atlantis, compared directly against Garrett Abdo’s shooting script (a title page dated January 5, 2024 — offered here only as a fact about the document itself, since public interviews describe a script finished in October and a shoot beginning in January without specifying which year, and the two accounts don’t cleanly align). Production and festival details are drawn from interviews and official festival listings, cited individually below; any claim not directly attributed comes from comparing the screener to the script.
A red light begins blinking.
Robert has placed a camera in front of an empty chair. He has cleared his dining room, replaced the family-sized table with something smaller, enclosed the space behind fractured geometric screens, positioned two interview cameras, tested his lights, and converted a room designed for communal life into a controlled site of inquiry. Six men will sit opposite him. Each has already left. Robert believes that their departures have made them uniquely qualified to explain him.
That is the promise of Garrett Abdo’s Exit Interviews: if Robert can ask the right people the right questions, he can convert abandonment into information. He will treat his romantic history like a failed company treats employee turnover. What made each person leave? What could management have done differently? Which problems repeated? What must change before the next person arrives?
The premise is witty because it converts emotional chaos into administrative procedure. It is also doomed. A corporate exit interview presumes that the departing party understands why they left, can isolate that reason from everything surrounding it, and can communicate it to someone capable of acting on the answer. Robert’s exes repeatedly complicate every part of that assumption. Some understood themselves only later. Some wanted contradictory things. Some still love him. Some were hurt by him. Some cannot separate what he did from what they were already carrying. Every interview contains truth. None contains the truth.
That failure is the film’s governing mechanism.
Each vignette appears to move Robert closer to an answer, but actually removes one more place where he might locate it. Joey prevents him from treating good intentions as innocence. Santi separates affection from commitment. Travis demonstrates that people continue changing after Robert stops watching them. Michael shows that the search for past explanations can destroy a present relationship. Joseph divorces meaning from permanence. Donny separates personal worth from another person’s choice. Christopher finally rejects the premise that either man can supply a clean explanation for twelve years of love, suffocation, infidelity, care, resentment, dependency, and flight.
The interview has to fail before Robert can understand what the camera was recording.
It was never primarily recording the men in the opposite chair.
It was recording him.
The Film Has to Find Its Audience
Exit Interviews had its world premiere at FilmOut San Diego, the city’s LGBTQ film festival, on August 22, 2025. It went on to screen at Atlanta’s Out On Film — where it was the first title announced for the 2025 lineup — the New York Latino Film Festival, the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival, and was selected for the LGBTQ+ Experience program at London’s Little Venice Film Festival. It was also recognized in WSXA Paris’s LGBTQ+ Diversity Awards program and listed in WSXA Amsterdam’s Audience Awards program.
Queer and regional media carried much of the coverage a larger release would normally receive from mainstream outlets. Rough Draft Atlanta, Rage Monthly, The Word SD, Georgia Entertainment, and The Contending each interviewed Abdo, Tuc Watkins, or members of the cast around the festival run, and their coverage functioned less as advance publicity than as an extension of the film’s own concerns — queer relationships, middle-aged loneliness, and the difficulty of recognizing one’s own blind spots.
Abdo has described the project as an attempt to make a mirror rather than simply a film. Robert is not a direct self-portrait, and the six former partners aren’t drawn one-to-one from real relationships — Abdo has said the emotions are real even where the people aren’t. The script came together quickly once he sat down to write it in earnest during a solo trip to Barcelona, and he’s spoken about the project’s personal cost directly, at one point calling it his “most expensive therapy session.”
Casting happened fast and late in the year — by Abdo’s own account, in December, a month he’s noted is typically dead in the industry — through casting director Jeremy O’Keefe, whom Abdo has credited by name as “a miracle worker” for landing Watkins and the rest of the ensemble on that timeline. The compressed schedule doesn’t appear to have limited collaboration: Watkins has described working with Abdo to shape Robert together, sometimes revising material or adding inserts once a scene’s performance changed their sense of who the character was. That process is visible when the finished film is placed beside the shooting script — not as wholesale plot changes, but as small, consistent recalibrations: a line flattened, a confession delayed, a justification removed, a collapse withheld, a sequence shortened, a later reaction allowed to redefine what came before.
The Routine Has to Look Like Control
Robert begins with systems.
He runs. He makes a smoothie. He measures vitamins into a segmented case. He answers messages. He opens a document and stares at a blinking cursor. His sister Deborah speaks through the phone while he completes the same morning actions. The repetition presents a man whose life appears disciplined enough to resist chaos. Food, exercise, supplements, grooming, career, and conversation occupy assigned compartments. The visual joke is that his emotional life has no corresponding container.
Even before the interviews begin, the finished film subtly changes who Robert is on the page. The screenplay writes him with more verbal flamboyance and a sharper social performance — an early complaint that his friends know him too well opens, on the page, with “You bitches.” The finished film reduces the line to a quieter question about whether he’s really that predictable. The information survives; the performed identity changes. Screen Robert is more conventionally composed, less socially theatrical, and less willing to advertise vulnerability through language.
That alteration becomes the foundation of Watkins’s performance. Written Robert often explains what he feels or breaks visibly beneath it. Watkins plays a man who has converted composure into part of his identity — pain appears as jaw tension, shortened breath, forced humor, anger, or a refusal to move, rather than as demonstration.
The pickleball injury offers an early, clean example of how the world sees through him faster than he sees himself. Robert jokes that his diving days “might” be behind him. The doctor adds a flat line absent from the script: “They are.” Robert treats the change as still under negotiation. The person looking at the evidence does not.
Deborah remains a voice without a body throughout, attached to routine rather than to scenes of her own — affectionate, skeptical, and increasingly unwilling to hand Robert a solution. Patty is handled oppositely, always embodied even through an intercut phone call, and it’s her passing remark about a workplace exit interview that hands Robert the whole method.
Thirty names become six. The system begins.
The Room Has to Become a Method
Each former partner is introduced by a handwritten name, crossed through by a horizontal line — a graphic that recurs identically across all six interviews. It reads several ways at once: these men are finished chapters, crossed off a list, but the strike also resembles an edit, a first draft of each person that the conversation is about to replace with something less manageable. An audible edit beep announces the first interview, briefly exposing the machinery — this isn’t just Robert talking to an ex, it’s footage, something he can cut, sequence, and shape.
That dual role creates a pressure the finished film makes more immediate than the script does. Robert wants honesty, but he also wants usable material. Pain can become content. The format gives every conversation two audiences: Robert listening across the table, and the camera listening from wherever he’s chosen to point it.
Joey is the first person to force those two audiences apart.
Joey Has to Refuse the Cut
Joey arrives cheerful, and the scene doesn’t start as a confrontation waiting to happen. A flashback of the two of them with Chinese takeout plays under a muted talk show, its studio audience laughing low in the mix — ordinary noise, nothing retroactively ominous. That’s why the later turn works: Robert didn’t recognize this as a defining relationship, and neither does the film, until the interview forces the memory to bear more weight than it was given at the time.
Joey stays light through most of the questioning before naming the real complaint: Robert’s praise didn’t feel like being seen, it felt like a demand to become someone worth the praise. When Robert thanks him and moves to end the interview, Joey slaps the table — “I’m not done yet” — and asserts the right to decide when his own account is finished, not Robert.
The finished performance complicates the aftermath in a way the script alone doesn’t fully capture: after the confrontation, Joey looks drained, almost ashamed to ask for the payment he’s owed. Then he armors back up — the script’s “Oh honey” becomes a mocking “Daddy,” pricing the whole evening in blunt, transactional terms. Robert pays. Joey checks it. The affect disappears entirely. “Thanks.” Flat, final, transaction closed.
The script’s reflection that follows lets Robert off comparatively easy, describing Joey as belonging to “the streets” — someone Robert simply misjudged, the metaphor landing on Robert as the one who was fooled. The finished film’s version reverses that: Robert names his own culpability directly, acknowledging that his need for attention likely contributed to Joey’s own sense of brokenness. He tries a smaller version of the same admission again minutes later, almost offhandedly, in a call with his sister — the insight isn’t delivered once for effect, it’s tested twice.
Joey doesn’t give Robert the answer to why relationships fail. He destroys the assumption that good intentions place Robert outside the cause.
Santi Has to Remove the Translation
Robert opens Santi’s interview through a translation app; Santi answers in English, and the rest of the scene plays without the device the script leans on throughout — the mismatch between a calm robotic voice and rising human feeling. The finished film also compresses their flashback considerably, cutting a fuller sequence of cooking and flirtation and moving more directly from teasing to the bedroom to the interview room.
Santi says plainly that he wanted protection and legal status; Robert wanted love. Neither cancels the other — Santi may have genuinely enjoyed Robert, felt safe with him, desired him, while also seeking something the relationship was never going to be about for him. Unlike Joey’s, this reflection survives close to the script’s original wording, already fairly clear-eyed with little built-in hedge to remove. Left alone, that consistency is its own data point: the film isn’t rewriting Robert’s self-awareness everywhere, only where the earlier draft let him off too easily.
Travis Is Handled More Gently Than the Page Suggests
The script gives Robert his sharpest available cruelty in the Travis scene — a line thrown back at Travis about his father’s homophobia, framed on the page as a knee-jerk remark Robert immediately regrets. Watkins plays it almost entirely differently: not an attack, but a joke reached for in real disorientation at how much Travis has changed, landing badly rather than landing cruelly. Same words, different function — the meanest line in the script becomes, on screen, its most socially awkward one.
The scene’s ending is restructured just as deliberately. The script gives Robert a full visible collapse once Travis turns to leave — tears, an embrace staged as its own beat. The finished film skips Robert’s onscreen breakdown; Travis’s exit line and the reflection voiceover run together over the same shot, with the embrace folded into the middle of the monologue rather than played out beforehand. Robert’s collapse simply isn’t shown — the first of several places the film withholds it.
Michael Has to Interrupt the Documentary
Michael doesn’t come from the documentary at all — he’s a bar pickup, a joke about teaching elementary school added to the script’s version of their meeting, and the first person in the film who asks Robert to leave the archive and be present in the actual night in front of him. A selective-speed effect at the restaurant — the lit foreground holding steady while the darker periphery visibly runs faster — gives that feeling a purely visual solution the page never specifies: not time slowing down, but everything outside Michael becoming noise.
Their relationship grows through ordinary gestures that echo every flashback before it — dinner, television, a toothbrush left waiting so Michael doesn’t have to bring one — which makes the difference legible: the same vocabulary of care that built six failed relationships can also build a working one, depending on whether Robert can let the other person stay separate from his need to explain himself.
Then Donny calls, and Robert’s attention leaves the room. Michael eventually asks the question the documentary can’t accommodate — if something’s fundamentally wrong with Robert, why is Michael still there — and Robert, astonishingly, asks if he can interview him too. Michael says no. It’s the clearest evidence in the film that Robert’s method has stopped being about understanding the past and started actively costing him the present.
Joseph Needs the Least Explaining
Thomas Dekker’s Joseph is the outlier of the six in the opposite direction from Joey and Travis: more color added rather than removed, and a hint of the flamboyance the film otherwise withholds from Robert himself throughout. A short added scene of the two of them laughing over phone videos exists purely to make the audience like the pairing before the harder material starts.
Joseph’s closing reflection is the shortest of the six, and the cut is precise rather than general: the script’s version hedges its own insight with a line attributing Robert’s blind spots to insecurity and unnamed “mental afflictions” — an excuse sitting immediately beside an admission. The film removes exactly that clause, keeping the self-implicating half of the thought and cutting the exculpatory one. Joseph was funny, honest, and caring, and he still left — the interview doesn’t reveal the connection was false, it reveals that Robert has been using permanence as the test every earlier relationship gets measured against. Joseph withdraws the test.
Donny Is the Film's Most Trusted Scene
The script marks Donny’s interview, in its own capitalized stage direction, as the emotionally pivotal scene of the film. Joseph Haro, who plays him, has described the scene as carrying the film’s thematic kernel — that a relationship ending doesn’t retroactively erase that love was real. The finished film trusts the material enough to move faster through it rather than lingering: several beats are tightened, and at least one exchange is restructured so that Robert’s plainest admission — that he only ever wanted to be enough — gets answered by Donny almost immediately, rather than left to sit alone the way the script has it.
And once more, Robert’s full onscreen breakdown is cut. The script gives him tears and a visible collapse; the film moves straight from Donny’s exit line to the reflection voiceover, denying Robert the moment a second time in as many major scenes.
Christopher Has to End the Documentary
By the time Robert forces a confrontation with Christopher — his husband of twelve years, the relationship the whole film has been circling — the pattern has held for five interviews straight: excuses trimmed or rewritten out of his reflections, his own visible collapse consistently withheld even where the script wrote it in. Christopher’s scene is where all of it comes due.
As the confrontation deepens, the score drops out and the camera pushes in, leaving nothing in the frame but two men working through years of unresolved hurt in real time. Christopher is played in a controlled, barely-contained register for most of the scene before finally landing “I’m sorry I couldn’t stay” with real tenderness. When Robert reduces his leaving to a question of simply giving up, Christopher strikes the table — “No. I didn’t give up. I ran” — anger that reads less like fresh fury than like exhaustion from having explained this before, the anger giving way to sadness once it’s said. Christopher’s most resolute line completes what the previous five interviews approached from different angles: it wasn’t Robert’s job to fix him, and it wasn’t Christopher’s job to be Robert’s entire emotional world.
Robert finally sounds broken near the end. He still doesn’t cry — Watkins holds the same restraint through to the edge of the scene. Christopher leaves. Only then does Robert shed a tear.
Six interviews and roughly seventy minutes of held-back emotion make that single tear specific in a way it couldn’t have been if the film had let Robert break down earlier, the way the script kept writing him to. The withholding was never neutral. It was the setup for this exact moment — and it lands only because there’s no one left in the room to perform it for.
The Ending Has to Keep the Question
The script’s closing pages stage something genuinely troubling: Robert examining a pill bottle, a lid popping open, a handful swallowed on camera, followed minutes later by a reveal that the bottle was actually unopened and what he’d taken were vitamins from an entirely different container. Read on the page, the sequence risks using overdose imagery as a plot mechanism, and doesn’t fully resolve even on its own terms — the description of the pill-taking and the later “unopened bottle” reveal sit in tension with each other rather than snapping cleanly into a fair misdirection.
The finished film doesn’t attempt the twist. Robert is shown taking prescribed painkillers — established earlier as something he approaches carefully, given his sobriety — and then going for a run. There’s no staged ambiguity and no reveal to walk back. Whatever the exact chronology behind any given draft, the finished ending reflects a choice for clarity over a misdirection that sensitive material couldn’t fully support.
The closing voiceover is trimmed to a cleaner, shorter final thesis than the script’s more diffuse close. Robert lands on the idea that closure was never going to arrive from outside himself, and that for the first time, not having a complete explanation no longer has to stop him from moving forward. The route he runs at the end is the same one from the film’s opening routine. The runner isn’t.
What the Interview Spends
The episodic format gives the film its precision and its principal limitation. Each ex arrives with a distinct emotional proposition — Joey is accidental harm, Santi is projection, Travis is change, Michael is the present tense, Joseph is impermanence, Donny is worth separated from choice, Christopher is care curdled into control — clear enough that the film can almost be discussed episode by episode. That clarity carries a real cost: even when an interview resists Robert’s framing, the finished film eventually edits that resistance into the story of Robert learning to frame it better. Joey’s pain, Santi’s motive, Travis’s growth, Joseph’s affection, Donny’s explanation — all of it becomes footage, evidence inside someone else’s documentary about himself.
The connective tissue varies in strength, too. Deborah’s disembodied voice works conceptually, tied to routine rather than to scenes of her own, but the repeated calls can start to feel like a delivery mechanism for Robert’s next insight rather than a relationship in its own right. Patty, always physically present, is asked to carry more conventional dramatic bridging, and it’s the film’s least assured performance register — worth naming plainly against how precisely the film handles almost everything else.
Closing
Exit Interviews is built around a premise that could easily have let its protagonist off the hook: a man auditing his own failed relationships, on his own terms, with the camera and the questions both in his control. What the finished film does, scene after scene, is quietly dismantle that control. Reflections that once carried built-in excuses get rewritten or trimmed until only the harder admission is left standing. A breakdown the script wrote more than once gets withheld more than once, so that when it finally arrives — with Christopher, after everything else has been stripped away — it means something the earlier version of the scene never could have. And an ending that once reached for a misdirection built on serious, real imagery gets replaced with something plainer and more honest about what it’s depicting.
The interview never produces the single answer Robert built it to find. It produces six specific, incompatible truths and forces him to stop treating that as a failure. Closure was never going to be a fact one of these men could hand him. It could only ever be something he stopped requiring from the people who’d already left.
A Note on Sourcing: Exit Interviews was written and directed by Garrett Abdo, produced through Garrett Abdo Entertainment. The cast includes Tuc Watkins as Robert, Paul Zenas as Joey, Ray Santiago as Santi, Nick Hagelin as Travis, Chad Darnell as Michael, Thomas Dekker as Joseph, Joseph Haro as Donny, Adam Huss as Christopher, Kiana Dancie as Patty, and Summer Rain Menkee as the voice of Deborah. Casting was by Jeremy O’Keefe.
All script-to-screen comparisons above are drawn from direct comparison between the shooting script and the released film, not from any outside source. Abdo’s account of writing the script during a trip to Barcelona and calling the production his “most expensive therapy session,” and his and Joseph Haro’s accounts of the film’s construction and stakes, are drawn from The Word SD’s August 2025 feature. Abdo’s account of casting the film in December through Jeremy O’Keefe, including his direct description of O’Keefe as “a miracle worker,” is drawn from Rage Monthly’s interview with Abdo and Watkins ahead of the FilmOut premiere. Abdo’s account of the film’s origin as a joke about his own dating history is drawn from Rough Draft Atlanta’s September 2025 interview. Festival and premiere information is drawn from FilmOut San Diego, Out On Film, the New York Latino Film Festival, the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival’s own coverage, and the official program listings of Little Venice Film Festival and WSXA Paris and Amsterdam.
The governing argument — that the film systematically revises its own protagonist toward a harder-won catharsis, trimming built-in excuses and withholding an onscreen emotional collapse until the moment it can mean the most — is Atlantis’s interpretation, built from direct script-to-screen comparison rather than any outside claim about authorial intent.
Disclosure: Exit Interviews is a three-time Atlantis Award winner. This is included as context for the festival’s continued engagement with the work, not as evidence for the study above.