By Jennifer Vineyard - Vulture
Margaret Atwood is helping promote a new film called Payback, a documentary spawned from her 2008 collection of essays Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth — which, despite the title, is not the economic work it sounds like. Her definition of debt is more flexible, and includes moral debts and the acts of revenge that they might inspire. (Payback opens with a blood feud between two families). With her classic work The Handmaid's Tale, about a dystopian future in which women have no control over their reproductive rights, being cited by politicians during this campaign season and its influence on the recent blockbuster The Hunger Games, Vulture thought it high time to check in with the author, who was in town to kick off Payback's premiere at Film Forum.