How a 30-Year-Old Mastermind Fooled an Entire High School Into Thinking He Was a Teen—And What It Means for Trust in the Digital Age
My Old School has its share of twists — we quickly realize that even basic elements of the yarn Brandon concocted for Bearsden’s faculty and students were lies — and even if you know the gist of this story, it’s really in the details where the film comes alive. Along the way, the documentary becomes a meditation on teenage life, our relationship with our younger self, and the universal desire to go back and start over — an impulse Brandon pursued to alarming extremes.
Is Brandon’s quixotic quest a cautionary tale, a dark character study or an amusing fact-is-stranger-than-fiction curiosity? In our conversation, McLeod explains why he wasn’t interested in crafting a damning portrait of his former classmate. And as he and I talked, I very much got the sense that “Brandon” is alive and well in his mind, as well as the minds of many of Bearsden’s old students. (Also interesting: When McLeod speaks of his teenage life, he refers to it in the present tense.) As such — and to help avoid spoilers — this Q&A refers to this conman only as Brandon.
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