Orange County has been the source of both trauma and inspiration for filmmaker Eric Allen Bell.

For SqueezeOC.com

While in Orange County Juvenile Hall, Eric Allen Bell stabbed a fellow inmate in the hand with a fork.

At the time, Bell blamed it on voices in his head. But now he says he did it because the boy told him he had molested children, which triggered Bell’s memories of things that had been done to him.

Adopted into a dysfunctional and abusive family, Bell and his younger brother were in and out of trouble while growing up. Bell, now in his 30s, even tried to burn down his high school.

He was kicked out of four different high schools for repeatedly skipping class.

“Bondage,” written and directed by Bell, is based on that troubled time in his life, following a young man from an abusive home, through Orange County’s juvenile hall to a psychiatric hospital.

“We’re all in bondage in someway or another,” Bell said. “We’ve all felt the sense that we don’t have autonomy in our lives … whether it’s a dead-end job or a marriage that isn’t working.”

The film highlights not only what Bell perceives as failures within the juvenile justice system, but on a broader level, the concept that freedom is always there for the taking but that sometimes it has to be fought for.

Bell’s directorial debut came in the form of a short film “Missing Sock” in 2004. “Missing Sock” opened at the LA Film Festival, and ranked No. 6 on Film Threat’s list of best shorts of ’04.

The success of the short film generated a lot of interest in the script for “Bondage” and brought in private investors willing to put up seven figures to back it.

Michael Angarano stars as the main character of “Bondage,” named Charlie Edwards. Illeana Douglas plays his mother Elaine and Mae Whitman plays Angelica, a runaway Charlie meets at the fictional Newport Psychiatric Hospital.

“Bondage” premiered March 11 at the South By Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival in Austin, Texas, and Bell is now talking with distributors, with the goal of getting it into theaters later this year.

We caught up with Bell after the film’s premiere.

SqueezeOC: At the start of the film, it said “For Danny Castro.”

Bell: He’s my mentor, my teacher. I really just owe so much to him. I don’t know what I can do for him other than the tribute at the front end of the movie.

SqOC: Were names changed in the film?

Bell: Absolutely, everything. All the names were changed and the locations were changed, except for Orange County Juvenile Hall. There’s no way to change that. But Newport Psychiatric Hospital does not exist, which is why I went with it. But the character of the hospital, the way it’s run and the way it looks is right.

SqOC: Where was the film shot?

Bell: It was shot at the VA (Medical Center) in Sepulveda (community of Los Angeles), the hospital. And juvenile hall was shot in Compton at a functional penitentiary, which was a real adrenaline rush. They had entire cell blocks that they weren’t using. I looked at them and I thought, ‘this looks astonishingly like Orange County Juvenile Hall.’”

SqOC: In the Q&A after the screening, you said California’s Juvenile Detention system is really corrupt. But California is seen as a very progressive state.

Bell: (Dostoevsky) said the measure of how civilized a society is can be gaged by the condition of its prisons, which I find interesting. I know living in Los Angeles, we’re prone to riots. You get a group of people together and there’s gonna be a riot. I can even remember in Orange County, OP Surf Championships, people overturning a cop car and lighting it on fire.

I don’t know how civilized we are in California. There are parts of it, to me, that feel like a Third World country.

A Web site I found useful was BooksNotBars.org. They cite some studies about the California juvenile prison system that are just astonishing. One really gets the feeling that someone’s asleep at the wheel.

SqOC: What’s the message of the film then? What needs to be changed?

Bell: When you’re creating any type of art, especially motion pictures, I never want to make a movie with a message.

So what I’m trying to do is raise a number of questions. And trust the intelligence of the audience to consider those questions, rather than to dictate to them what I think they should think. So if I were to summarize those questions, it would be ‘What are we doing here? What’s going on?’

SqOC: You had your directorial debut with a short film in 2004. How was this experience different?

Bell: “Most of what I’ve written is comedy. “Bondage” was a real departure for me. My business representatives refer to it as a serious drama. But all I can write is my own point of view on the world, and the world isn’t classifiable into any genre.

SqOC: I think in some ways, “Bondage” could be considered a really dark comedy.

Bell: Well, if you were to gauge it by the number of times the audience laughed in the screening we were at, I’d say it’s a dark comedy. But really dark.

When you’re in a situation, you don’t always see the irony of it. But when you look at it in retrospect, sometimes you understand it better, or if you can look at it from the outside, like as an audience member watching a movie, the irony is obvious. It may not be obvious to the characters, but it’s obvious to the audience.

SqOC: How did you feel after the first screening?

Bell: Relieved, very relieved. I really felt good. I wanted to create something that people would connect with and I felt, when we were rolling credits, a sense of satisfaction that people really had connected. People hadn’t left. The people who stuck around (about 100) for the Q&A, which was a significant number of people, seemed intrigued and really wanted to know more. I felt I had activated something in their minds.

SqOC: How do you feel, then, about Orange County?

Bell: As a culture, I have mixed feelings about it. I like going there. I like that people, compared to L.A. where I live, people are polite. People have respect for each other for the most part. It’s clean, safe and the older I get, the more I appreciate those things.

But there’s a flip side to it, the “other” O.C. The flip side is that there are families where everything isn’t hunky-dory and there is a system in place that’s supposed to help these children and it doesn’t work.