Benjamin Crotty, Alexander Carver, and Daniel Schmidt—three filmmakers represented in the film series "Friends with Benefits," featured on MUBI this February and March—talk about some of their recurring interests, their education in film and the fine arts, and the ambiguous connection of their work to independent filmmaking and Hollywood cinema. This entry's title, Four Americans, is misleading, not only because the work of these four filmmakers is superficially related to this country, but because my interview with one of them (Gabriel Abrantes) was destroyed by bad technology. (Given the films' chronic jump-starting and programming and scrambling of desires, forbidden or otherwise, a better title might be Bad Technology, after all.)