LA GRANDE — The 15th annual Eastern Oregon Film Festival will feature “The Way We Speak,” from director Ian Ebright.

This is a [heavily] abbreviated interview with Ebright. Find the full interview online at goeasternoregon.com/now_playing.

Go: What would be your pitch to folks to come out to the festival?

Ebright: If they come out, they get our film on the big screen: we’ve got an amazing looking and sounding film. They’re gonna get myself for a Q&A. We cap that off with the chance to hang around and just chat with people if they wanna chat about our film.

And they get the festival experience, and it’s all those appreciated things that actually also matter, which is supporting indie film at the same time as supporting a local film festival. It’s the opportunity for them to have hometown pride and, like, rather than meeting new people, maybe you see people that you interact with all the time as neighbors, but it’s in a new context. So it’s an opportunity for community.

Go: At the center of the film is a debate, a literal debate, between atheism and theism. You are writing both sides. Obviously, one can be sympathetic to both, but what is it like writing for a character who emphatically believes something that you don’t?

Ebright: Honestly, it was kind of therapeutic. I mean, there’s the first level of that answer, which is, like, I’m a trained screenwriter. One of the adages that I think is sort of essentially universally true is: To make anything interesting, you have to give your antagonist the best possible argument. And I don’t think the film has a universal antagonist, but Simon certainly has an antagonist: Sarah, the young Christian author. So I needed to write really credibly, otherwise I’m not being a good screenwriter. And that was a huge challenge, regardless of my faith or nonfaith affiliation.

The second level of that is, in terms of my own experience: Regardless of where I am today, I was born and raised in a conservative, fundamentalist, Christian upbringing. And today, like, I waffle. What troubles me most is certainty. And I think that helped me write both of those. Sincerely, there are pieces of both of their arguments that make a lot of sense to me.

I lost a lot of family writing this. And, you know, death is a filter for challenging what has value and it challenges what you believe. So I kinda felt it was the strange, safe place for me to not only try to be right by those characters but to explore maybe some of my own beliefs that maybe are changing.

Go: There’s definitely a lot of doubt in this film. There’s a lot of nuance and messiness, and that’s one of my favorite things about it. And it is clear you have studied screenplay structure — it’s a tightly scripted piece.

Ebright: That’s nice to hear. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever written.