This week, several of our Kickstarter contributors were on-set for the filming of “Atlas Shrugged: Who is John Galt?” Our Students for Liberty interns sat down with them to find out more about their experience. This interview was conducted by Wesley Wright.

Name: Annag Chandler

Question 1: How did you hear about the Kickstarter campaign and what motivated you to contribute?

I’m not sure where I found the link to the Kickstarter campaign. I’m on a lot of the Atlas Shrugged and Objectivist websites, so at some point last fall I saw the link to the Kickstarter campaign and was intrigued by it.

Question 2: What has your experience on-set been like or what did you find most interesting being on set?

My experience on the set has been really great. It has been a lot of fun to be here, and I think the most interesting part of it was working on the 20th Century scene yesterday, where John Galt stands up and faces down Gerald Starnes. When you watch a movie you see one line done one way, and when you see the whole process going on, and the many different ways he says the line, and how the timing changes a little bit, and the difference it makes. It was really fascinating to see that.

Question 3: How has Ayn Rand/ Atlas Shrugged influenced your life or thinking?

Well my involvement with Ayn Rand goes all the way back to high school, and it has made a tremendous difference from the very beginning. It started with The Fountainhead because a friend of mine was reading The Fountainhead, and I went on to read Atlas Shrugged.

I think that it has made my life a lot more difficult. A lot of the things up until then I would have just not challenged because they were the accepted way of thinking about things. It made me stop and look and challenge a lot of things. That was a huge difference going through college, because I found it in high school. Going through college and then going through grad school and practicing law and all the other kinds of things, I think that it showed me a way that I might have not found on my own to stand up and live an authentic life. A life that really spoke to what it was that I thought [was] important and what mattered to me. I’m not sure if I would have necessarily found that if I hadn’t found Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged.

Question 4: What, if anything, do you wish to see the film accomplish?

I think it would be great if the film got people thinking and talking even more about Ayn Rand and what it is she has to bring to today’s political discussion and economic discussion. There is so much that goes on in politics and economics, and everything people just take for granted, “oh well of course we have to have a social safety net, and of course we have to have government provided health care, and of course we have to have” …. you know we can go down the whole list.

We have to have the agriculture department, we have to have social security, and Medicare and Medicaid, disability, and the whole long list of things that no where did the founding fathers ever think that this was something that everyone was going to wind up paying for. So if people could just stop and think about it, is it really what people ought to have to do?

Do I really have to not only take responsibility for myself but for everybody else on Earth? Wouldn’t it be enough if I just said “okay here’s my husband and here’s my kids, and I promise you, that if you will just get off my back and leave me alone, you will never have to pay a dime [of] anything for us, just leave us alone.” I think it would be interesting to get people talking about that. What if we did that?

Question 5: Do you believe that stopping the motor of the world, or a similar occurrence of innovators going on strike or “vanishing” must occur before the world you want to see is created?

Actually no I don’t. The reason why I don’t, at this point, is because the federal debt is so enormous, and the entire financial mechanism of the United States to the developed world is so precarious that I’m not sure that the strike of the able and the intelligent entrepreneurial is what is going to trigger a mass push [of] the reset button. I’m not sure anymore that’s what’s going to do it. I think it’s going to be, for example, they’re talking already about the federal debt limit is going to be reached in a few weeks and what happens when they reach the federal debt limit, and the treasury secretary is talking about not being able to pay the bills. There’s an old line that is frequently quoted nowadays from Ernest Hemingway about how did you go bankrupt? He says “well first I went bankrupt slowly then I went bankrupt all the sudden.” I hear a lot of people talking about the government [being] in the same process. Right now everybody is still buying the federal debt, and everybody still thinks that things are okay...until somebody starts to doubt. Once a couple people start to doubt and once there’s something that looks like it might be failure of the monthly auction of the tea bills, tea notes, and things like that, then things can go to hell in a handbasket pretty quickly.

Question 6: Are your closest family members/ friends supportive of your decisions (or “in the know” of Ayn Rand philosophy) in taking a larger role in the financing and production of Atlas Shrugged Part III?

My family and friends certainly are in the know in terms of what my opinions, beliefs, and everything are and they’ve been on board from the very beginning. My husband was really jazzed when I told him about the opportunity to come and be in the movie, and then to go to the premiere. He’s like “oh yeah, that’s cool let’s do that!.”

Beyond my immediate family, I would say everybody else kind of knows about it, but they’re a little bit, “why would you do that?” They really don’t have a clue. As you could probably guess there aren’t a whole lot of people who turn to me and tell me I can’t do something I want to do, so they’re not giving me any static.