Full Transcript for When Hollywood Tells The Truth: with Tom McCarthy, Antonio Campos, Tina Satter, and Tobias Lindholm.

in the community, was accused of killing his wife. Michael Peterson is the name of the writer. He claimed that he found her dead at the bottom of the stairs and the police claim that he killed her, that he beat her to death. And so then what happened was a documentary film crew from France came and they documented the entire case and followed him and had total access. 00:06:34 Speaker 1: This is 2008. 00:06:34 Speaker 6: I had just made my first feature and this producer sent me this documentary. 00:06:44 Speaker 2: The Staircase. 00:06:45 Speaker 6: And the producer, when I got to his office, said, well, look, there's three things you should know. He said, one, the producer of the documentary and the director don't agree about what happened, whether or not Michael Peterson was guilty. The second thing you should know is that there's a lot more that happened that isn't in the documentary. And the third thing you should know is that the editor of the documentary fell in love with Michael Peterson. And eventually left her family for Michael Peterson and then dedicated her life. 00:07:17 Speaker 3: To getting him out. 00:07:17 Speaker 6: I was like, okay, well, this is just layers and layers and layers. All of that sort of made it more interesting. 00:07:24 Speaker 1: And when you were told that the editor of the documentary fell in love with Michael Peterson, the convicted murderer, ultimately, right? What did you ask next? Like, what was your next question? 00:07:35 Speaker 2: Well, I think my question was like, can I meet her? 00:07:38 Speaker 6: So, Sophie was one of the editors on the documentary, and she started a communication with Michael. 00:07:44 Speaker 3: She only knew him by cutting? 00:07:45 Speaker 6: She only knew him by the footage. She had never met him until she went to visit him in prison. 00:07:51 Speaker 2: Did she fall in love with him already in... Well, this is a point of contention. 00:07:55 Speaker 6: Whether or not she had feelings for him during the editing is sort of up for debate. What we do know is that she eventually wrote to him and started communicating with him, and. 00:08:06 Speaker 6: Eventually she went from France to go visit him and at that point he was in prison. 00:08:11 Speaker 3: Did you talk to her? 00:08:12 Speaker 5: Yes. 00:08:13 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:08:14 Speaker 1: And does she say that the relationships started after she was actually working on the project? 00:08:20 Speaker 2: Yes. 00:08:20 Speaker 6: I was very adamant about meeting the filmmakers and then once I met them I was like, I need to meet Sophie, the editor, and then once that happened I was like, okay, this is it. 00:08:28 Speaker 3: And why do. 00:08:29 Speaker 1: You need to meet them? If you're fictionalizing something, I wouldn't take it for granted that you have. 00:08:33 Speaker 4: To, I guess. 00:08:35 Speaker 6: Well, the Truth is always stranger than fiction. I mean, look, the reality is this series took me 12 years to make. From that 2008 to when I was actually making this was 12 years. And in that time, all this stuff had happened. So I didn't know where the journey was going to take me. And I started the process and I said, you know what's going to happen? I'm going to figure this out. I'm going to use computers and CGI and I'm going to recreate this thing and build a set. And I At some point, like four or five years in, I was like, this doesn't matter. Like, I can't figure this out. I was like, because I did, at some point I realized, oh, I'm not going to figure it out. And it's okay. And it's okay to sort of live in this space of not figuring it out. But the processes, the trying to figure it out, and why is everybody trying to figure it out? 00:09:26 Speaker 2: Why is it. 00:09:27 Speaker 6: That Michael Peterson is such a great, perfect suspect? And it was like, that was a more interesting space to play in and sort of like, The possibilities were more interesting to me than the final answer. 00:09:38 Speaker 2: But you did something, and let me ask you about that, because you did something different. Often what you, with a sensational story, you want to go in and investigate and find that missing link. It's not like you were trying to do that. It was more like you were trying to show me that all these different ways could be possible. It's almost like you took a step back and made a documentary about a documentary that was being made. Yeah. and you know i was in love with michael peterson i was drawn to this character she. 00:10:04 Speaker 1: Started writing letters yeah so how how did the real life sophie feel about her portrayal can you. 00:10:10 Speaker 6: Say yeah it's complicated i she had a complicated reaction to it yeah she was mad yeah she was. 00:10:16 Speaker 1: Is it important like like did you feel like i want them to like it Because as a reporter, I sometimes want someone to like it, but that's not always in line with what I'm doing. 00:10:31 Speaker 2: I think so. I think I did. I think I did. I do. 00:10:35 Speaker 6: But this is sort of the trickiest part, because you're dealing with real people, and in dramatizing it, you have to kind of get to the. 00:10:40 Speaker 1: Essence of it. 00:10:54 Speaker 5: In the case of the movie I did, Reality, with Reality Winner herself who's being portrayed, I wasn't able to communicate with her for a long time because she was in prison. 00:11:05 Speaker 1: This is Tina Satter. Tina made a play that she then turned into a movie last year, starring Sidney Sweeney, about Reality Winner. Reality Winner, if you've not heard of her, is the name of a real person. Reality was a translator for the National Security Agency. After the 2016 presidential election, when Reality was 25 years old, she got worried that Americans were maybe being misled about the extent of Russian interference that had happened in the previous presidential election. Reality printed out a classified government report which proved there were

Russian cyber attacks on American voting software. And then she mailed it anonymously to the news site The Intercept. They reported on it. And then Reality Winner was caught by the FBI. She was interrogated at her home in Texas by two agents, charged under the Espionage Act, and sentenced to more than five years in prison. It was the longest sentence ever given to a source for sharing classified information with a news outlet. The FBI got wind of it and was able to identify her? 00:12:08 Speaker 5: Yes, because anything printed at the NSA has a very specific code at the top. She sent actual, you know, hard copy papers into the mail to them. For their fact checking, they called up a former FBI guy and was like, does this look real? And that guy was like, it looks real. And also, I'm going to share it with actual FBI people. And then in June of 2017, she was visited by the FBI at her home. And they recorded this interrogation. And so my movie is like verbatim that. using that dialogue to this hour and a half in her afternoon. 00:12:48 Speaker 1: How did you happen to randomly read an FBI interrogation of Reality Winner? 00:12:52 Speaker 5: So Reality Winner does the thing she does. It's in the movie in June 2017. I barely paid attention to that news story, as I think many people did not either. And then six months later, New York Magazine had a story in it called America's Biggest Terrorist Has a Pikachu Bedspread. And I was like, huh. And I was like, you had me a Pikachu. 00:13:18 Speaker 1: It's so funny, Rob and I were talking about this. Rob was like, I want to know if the Pikachu bed spread is real. 00:13:24 Speaker 3: Literally yesterday. I was like, I really just want to know. 00:13:27 Speaker 1: I think it's on my list of questions right here. 00:13:30 Speaker 5: I had seen the little, she was barely covered, right? And that's a whole other interesting story about news. But there are photos of her with this. I'm reading it online in New York Magazine. And I was like, wait, this young woman, like, the details of her life that are in there, like a vectoring. 00:13:47 Speaker 1: She speaks three languages. 00:13:48 Speaker 6: Yes. 00:13:49 Speaker 5: But then she does yoga, but then she's like this young, very young woman. I was like obsessively reading this, just like, wow, this is super fascinating. But somewhere in there, there was like a hyperlink that was like, read about the day reality was visited at her home by the FBI. I click that link and that took you to Politico who had this like somehow crookedly copied I mean, it has a stamp on the top of it, reality winner verbatim transcription. Every page of this thing, I was like this, I couldn't believe it. And I could feel like this simmering tension in it, like from the, hey, hello. Because you read it knowing that this young woman's in prison. So to me, I'm like, when do they get her? Because like, she's clearly obfuscating. And I totally had an instinct that the language stood as a play. And for months, that was what I had printed out as the script when I was doing it as a play. 00:14:48 Speaker 2: How long is. 00:14:49 Speaker 1: The raw transcript? How long is it versus how long? 81 pages. 00:14:53 Speaker 4: Okay. 00:14:54 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:14:54 Speaker 1: What does that translate to, like lengthwise? 00:14:56 Speaker 5: For a play, it's like 70 minutes. 00:14:59 Speaker 2: I had not cut. 00:15:00 Speaker 5: Anything when I did it on stage. 00:15:02 Speaker 1: Not a word? 00:15:03 Speaker 5: Not a word, not a redaction, not a cough. We treated it as like Shakespeare. Like it's all on the page. 00:15:11 Speaker 2: Do you know what I mean? 00:15:12 Speaker 5: Like what does it tell us like half sentence by half sentence? I had written the things before so it was like you wanted to change it if it sounded horrible. 00:15:22 Speaker 2: You know what I mean? 00:15:22 Speaker 5: But it was this amazing constraint. Like we kind of have to figure out what it means. 00:15:27 Speaker 1: I have that experience all the time when I'm reading like transcripts or like 911 calls that I'll get like released through a FOIA or something. I'm always struck by just how much subtext there is to play with in those when you're making even documentary work. I don't know, it's one of the beautiful things about raw material. 00:15:47 Speaker 7: It's like a mystery. There's like a mystery in what's being said underneath it. And what is exciting about seeing it dramatized, I think, is to see it come to life. Whenever I read transcripts, Like almost as a writer, I'm almost envious of how good the tone of the language is. Because people never talk as well as we write them. 00:16:05 Speaker 3: You know what I mean? 00:16:06 Speaker 5: I know, it's so good. 00:16:07 Speaker 7: And so even if we're not Aaron Sorkin in giving them verbal superpowers, we're all making it a little better, right? 00:16:14 Speaker 3: So it's like when I read a transcript, I'm like, oh, this is so, so great. 00:16:18 Speaker 1: So were you always just like, this is going to be verbatim? Was there ever a moment where you thought, I'm going to use parts of this, I'm going to use it as inspiration? I'm going to edit it in some way. 00:16:26 Speaker 5: Really early on, it felt like the integrity of this project, because it's weird and dry, was that it had to be this is what happened in that room that day. The surreality of it was already baked. 00:16:40 Speaker 3: It was there. 00:16:41 Speaker 5: For anyone who's seen it, there's a scene on the lawn. I don't know, third into it. If you're reality, you probably think, what is happening now? But they just start chit-chatting to her about working out and CrossFit. It's almost like you're just at a barbecue chatting with your friend's weird dad. And so if you kept the transcript screenplay, that's like seven pages of screenplay. You have to keep some of that banality. It has to drift. Because I never wanted to change within a

line. 00:17:10 Speaker 2: Do you know what I mean? 00:17:11 Speaker 5: Because that would feel like I was then directing... the story. 00:17:15 Speaker 1: What did you learn? So you did the play without talking to reality. 00:17:18 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:17:19 Speaker 1: But then you started talking to her and making the movie. 00:17:21 Speaker 2: Yes. 00:17:22 Speaker 5: But when we went to make the movie, Sydney Sweeney, who plays reality, wanted to speak to reality. And so Sid and her had these private conversations throughout and like Sydney would tell, told me some of it, but I didn't even want to press her. 00:17:34 Speaker 2: I don't know. 00:17:35 Speaker 5: I wanted it also to be her private work, but then you would speak on the phone. 00:17:39 Speaker 1: What were your questions and what did you learn and how did it change? 00:17:43 Speaker 5: They were all, They were detailed. I only wanted to ask her detailed questions, not like, what did it feel like for you? 00:17:50 Speaker 2: Why? 00:17:52 Speaker 5: Because I didn't want it to be too informed to push a certain agenda that she or her family felt. I actually thought showing it most straightforwardly was the strongest way, frankly, for reality. And what I felt was complicated about what happened to her to be presented was. 00:18:12 Speaker 1: And they knew the premise. They knew you were doing it verbatim from the transcript. 00:18:15 Speaker 5: Because the family came to the very first night we ever did the play. You know, I learned after how understandably nervous they were. But then when they saw it, they were actually like, okay, there is this power in showing our daughter and her words, not pushing an agenda too much. 00:18:33 Speaker 1: Totally. Totally. How's everybody doing on drinks? 00:18:36 Speaker 6: Do you need a little more? 00:18:49 Speaker 1: Bias, did you use transcripts and what materials did you use to make the investigation? Like, did you have the whole case file? 00:18:55 Speaker 2: Yeah, I had access to it. In that case, for me, it was like, what details, how many details can I leave out? So it's like, that story was overtold in Scandinavian press. This murder case, it was so well covered. 00:19:09 Speaker 1: You were going into well-trodden territory, basically. 00:19:11 Speaker 2: So I was like, what can I leave out? 00:19:13 Speaker 1: Give the gist for anybody who hasn't seen it. 00:19:15 Speaker 2: So a Swedish... female journalist named Kinval was brought, lived in Copenhagen and was as a journalist who kind of do an interview with this self-declaimed scientist who had built his own submarine, like a hobby project. And she was going to sail out with him. And he ended up killing her on that trip out. And it became probably the most covered murder in Denmark history. It was everywhere. And it was the classical true crime angle from all journalists covering it. Everybody got obsessed with this genius. who had built a submarine and now he was also a sexual predator we were all I guess absorbed with this story for a couple of days and then when it just continued and it just keep growing like every day breaking news it was all over I decided to not really look at it because I felt polluted I felt like how dirty it was to sit there and be entertained by these details and the speculation of a case that had just happened. And a young woman had lost her life. And so later I got to meet the chief investigator. And then he told me some very specific details, not about the crime, but about the solving of the crime, about the investigation. And I realized that that's. 00:20:32 Speaker 6: What were they? 00:20:33 Speaker 2: Stuff like they used special trained dogs to sniff Bodies that were on the bottom of the ocean, then the scent would travel through water up through the surface. That gas would be caught by a dog's nose. It would bark and then they would dive down and find the evidence. The dog is in a boat, like in a small, small rowing boat with a small engine. And it's just in front and it's just waiting. And they just sail around in circles. 00:21:00 Speaker 3: We're all kind of giggling at this image right now. You know that. 00:21:03 Speaker 2: It was the opening of episode four. It was just such a beautiful episode. 00:21:06 Speaker 3: It's incredible. 00:21:07 Speaker 2: And so when he started to tell me about these scientific, almost like Sherlock Holmes-ish crazy things. 00:21:13 Speaker 6: I was. 00:21:14 Speaker 2: overwhelmed with, like, why haven't we told this story? Who cares about a sexual predator? 00:21:20 Speaker 1: None of that had been told publicly. 00:21:23 Speaker 2: Nothing. They had all just been obsessed with, oh, how many has he killed? Has he done it before? 00:21:27 Speaker 3: That's the procedure. How about about the woman? 00:21:31 Speaker 6: Was the reporting about the woman, or was it all mostly just about him? 00:21:35 Speaker 2: She was, to begin with, only portrayed as the victim of this crime. So it was like the female victim. 00:21:42 Speaker 3: Not like a three-dimensional, this is who she was and what she's about. 00:21:46 Speaker 1: Exactly. 00:21:46 Speaker 2: And then speculation started. Was she pervertedly sexually active? They were trying to make sense of it. And of course she wasn't. And of course she was just there to do a very interesting piece that she was going to do for an American magazine. And she was going to move to China the next day with her boyfriend and live as a journalist in China. And so two people sail out. Only one come back. He has no real explanation to what happened to his guest. So they had a suspect of a crime and they arrested him, but they didn't have a crime yet. So it's like the opposite of a normal police case. It was here comes in a guy who clearly has done something, but nobody knows what it is. 00:22:23 Speaker 1: It's like a how done it, basically. It's like how done. 00:22:27 Speaker 2: It or what done it. So it opened up all

these other questions. 00:22:31 Speaker 1: That is how Sherlock Holmes is, if you read it. It isn't that you're going with Sherlock Holmes through his investigation to discover it. It's like there's a murder. He goes away and figures it out. He comes back and tells Watson how he figured it out, basically. Like, yours is kind of like that. 00:22:45 Speaker 2: I agree. I was fascinated with that structure of, like, a Sherlock Holmes story. And so these details became the structure of, like, I just tried to then stay loyal to the police work. So I talked to the police officer. And I went home and I was like, I promised myself not to touch this story because I hated the way it had been covered. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And then I called him and I said, if I'm ever going to do this, you need to introduce me to her parents. 00:23:10 Speaker 1: What was that meeting like? 00:23:12 Speaker 2: I was terrified. 00:23:13 Speaker 3: What were you terrified about? 00:23:15 Speaker 2: It was like I knew that there was potentially was something wrong with me coming to their garden and asking them for permission to do something that I would make money from and make an entertainment piece of true crime about their lives catastrophe. And they were extremely open and kind and very honest about their feelings. But they had one simple mission, which was that their daughter Kim should be remembered as a journalist and not as a victim of a sexual crime. And that made total sense to me as a father. 00:23:55 Speaker 1: They told you that on your first conversation? 00:23:56 Speaker 2: They told me that. That was what they had been fighting with the Danish press about, like trying to change the narrative. But driving home from that first meeting, I wasn't sure that I could do it because there was something in it where I felt like a parasite and I had to find a way out of that to do it. 00:24:12 Speaker 1: You and I have talked about this once before and I got the sense that it really took a toll. 00:24:15 Speaker 2: It took a toll. 00:24:15 Speaker 1: Like the obligation, the responsibility took a toll. 00:24:18 Speaker 2: When it was over, I, for a while, thought I probably shouldn't have done it. Like my hair was gray. I took it very serious as I should, but probably too serious. 00:24:30 Speaker 1: But it's funny too. 00:24:31 Speaker 3: What do you mean by that? 00:24:32 Speaker 2: I mean, I am a storyteller and I should live up to that responsibility. And I didn't kill their daughter. I didn't take part in this. And I was too afraid of.... 00:24:46 Speaker 3: Getting it wrong? 00:24:47 Speaker 2: Getting it wrong and doing what I didn't like the press was doing in the breaking news sensationalism. I became very obsessed with details in this. So I would hire the exact police officers and dogs to be in the movie. So the dogs that we see, they're all real. The boat that picks up the submarine from the bottom of the ocean is the exact boat with the exact crew that picked up the real one. All the divers that was doing it was the guys that was doing it that day. And it is the exact location. 00:25:21 Speaker 1: What was your feeling of why that had to be that way? Like the verisimilitude, why such a commitment to that? 00:25:27 Speaker 2: I think it became my, to begin with, it became my excuse that it was all right to do this. Like almost religiously to just be like, all this press that I didn't like got it wrong because they got obsessed with all this. Now I'm going to do it like where I don't add stuff. I just show it exactly as it was. I'm not, and it felt like necessary to explain myself, to myself why I was doing this. 00:25:51 Speaker 1: Yeah, was that like about your own experience? I guess, anxiety about doing the project? Or did it serve the project in some way? 00:25:57 Speaker 2: I think it served the project. I think that had I not been that specific, I would probably have been told to do some CGI submarine, some easy place where it wouldn't have taken us days. But I insisted and therefore I spent like a tenth of the budget to build a submarine that we could raise from the ocean that had. 00:26:11 Speaker 3: The right weight. 00:26:12 Speaker 2: And it connects very well with the transcript. I mean, this was the transcript I had. I had actually access to the right boat, the right people, the right way. I could actually do this. 00:26:21 Speaker 1: Like, how would that affect me as a viewer and in what you're trying to relay to the viewer? 00:26:24 Speaker 2: Well, I think that the specificity of it creates the journey there. Like, you transport somebody into a situation where there is a certain point of view and a specific point of view that allows you to be present in the scene. 00:26:36 Speaker 6: Well, I think that's the thing there is that there's a care. If a filmmaker cares and they care about every frame and they care about every detail, you don't know it, but somehow you just feel it on some subconscious level. 00:26:50 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:26:51 Speaker 6: I mean, ultimately, filmmaking, TV shows, we're just trying to capture moments and create moment by moment. Moments that feel real, that touch you, that grab you, that surprise you. All of that requires an attention to detail. And that's what makes things feel real. And I think that's what allows you to get closer to the characters that are representing the real people. 00:27:14 Speaker 1: It sounds like all you guys, like you're imposing reality on yourselves. You're imposing fact on yourselves and rules. That kind of follow from facts. And that helps you with your process. It's interesting because I've always felt like when I've thought about could I write fiction or could I write something that's not real, you know, that the tyranny of the blank page just like overwhelms me. And I so love the work I do in terms of being able to mine reality for that, for story. But it sounds like you're doing the same thing. Like you guys need that too. You're

not just starting with a blank page. You're giving yourself rules and saying I have to adhere to certain things. I have to, you know. 00:27:54 Speaker 3: I think so. 00:27:54 Speaker 7: But I work with certain writers who I think are very uniquely comfortable in the space of reality, meaning they like stories called from real life, right? 00:28:03 Speaker 3: They want that. They want to go into the facts and find it, find it, find it because it's there somewhere. And then other writers who they're allergic to that. They just want to get lost in it. And that's another part of cinema, which is beautiful and wonderful. 00:28:16 Speaker 7: And like I know because I've worked with a lot of different writers of different sort of intentions that like some people love it and some I'll be like, I could never ask him to go write this. 00:28:27 Speaker 1: Right. 00:28:28 Speaker 3: Because he'll just he'll lose his mind, you know, like he wants. 00:28:32 Speaker 1: The constraints are too much. 00:28:33 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:28:33 Speaker 3: Or it's too wide open. 00:28:35 Speaker 2: Right. 00:28:36 Speaker 1: I was going to ask, what is the role of your imaginations in this work? How do you think about your imagination? 00:28:40 Speaker 2: I realized very early on in my life that I was not a fan of my own imagination. Like, as a child, I didn't like playing with dolls. So Danish. I was like, I'm not amused by it. Who gives, like, yeah, I can think of this, I can think of that, but it's not real. I remember sitting there with, very specifically, probably eight years, seven years old, eight years old, with Lego, which is a Danish toy company, and. 00:29:04 Speaker 3: What is it? Lego? 00:29:05 Speaker 2: Lego. 00:29:06 Speaker 3: It must be specifically Danish. 00:29:08 Speaker 2: L-E-G-O. Right? 00:29:10 Speaker 1: Maybe you've heard of it. 00:29:12 Speaker 2: And these small figures. Back then, it was not, you know, you weren't building a friend's set. It was like just these boring characters. And playing with them, I really fast realized that they weren't talking to each other. It was me making it up. And I realized that they didn't have any emotions. It was not like, oh, now he's really angry at this. It was like, yeah. I can just leave this behind. And so I realized it was much better to, you know, read stories and play chess and follow some rules. 00:29:44 Speaker 1: Is there a liberty that any of you have taken that you regret? Like a, you know, a fictional liberty? 00:29:50 Speaker 2: I think, actually, for me, it's like more the opposite. I did a film called Hijacking. And It's about a Danish ship being captured by Somali pirates. And I decided that I could only make a hijacking if we rented a boat and sailed into the ocean where the pirates were. 00:30:10 Speaker 1: That's the only way you could make it. 00:30:11 Speaker 2: That's the only way I could find the truth in this story, you know. And I had a pregnant wife and a two-year-old at home. And there we are sailing out into the Indian Ocean. And we didn't have money for insurance. So instead we had hired soldiers from the Kenyan army to protect us. 00:30:30 Speaker 1: They were cheaper. 00:30:31 Speaker 2: Little did we know that they have never sailed. So they were all seasick. So they were like all around the boat puking. And we were shooting this scene and suddenly the producer yells, like everything comes to a stop. And I'm down below, like looking at the monitor. And then I just hear this, like this boat approaching. And I suddenly see a guy that I didn't really know what his job was, but he goes like... And he pulls out this huge gun on the side of the boat. Like, clearly he has the intent to protect us if anybody tries to board the ship that we're shooting on. And in that moment, I was like, maybe an ocean that looked like an Indian Ocean could have. 00:31:11 Speaker 3: Been all right. See, my brain goes to the. 00:31:14 Speaker 7: acting pirates on the ship who suddenly realize. 00:31:18 Speaker 3: None of their guns are real. 00:31:20 Speaker 2: You're right. 00:31:20 Speaker 7: And that they're being confronted by real pirates and now they're very bummed. 00:31:26 Speaker 2: Yes. 00:31:27 Speaker 1: I feel like I've gotten a story from everybody about what drama can bring or fiction can bring to a real story. When did you know Spotlight was a story? 00:31:36 Speaker 3: When I know it was a story? 00:31:37 Speaker 1: Yeah, or when it was a movie. When did you know Spotlight was a movie? 00:31:40 Speaker 3: Can I switch to Scotch if we're gonna do this? 00:31:43 Speaker 1: After a quick break, Tom McCarthy on the troubling secret he discovered while making Spotlight. Also, I'm going to share an outtake from this conversation in our newsletter. At one point, we all ended up comparing notes about the state of our industries, about Hollywood and documentary and audio and journalism, and how it's all affecting what work you end up seeing and hearing. You can sign up for our newsletter at kcrw.com slash question everything. Welcome back to the show. We're hanging out after hours at a wine shop in New York with four movie directors, including Tom McCarthy, who I think of as kind of a bard of journalists. He really has dramatized us a lot. He not only co-wrote and directed the most acclaimed movie about journalism of the last decade, Spotlight, which won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2016. He also made a show about Roger Ailes and Fox News called The Loudest Voice, along with a recent ABC procedural about a newspaper in Anchorage called Alaska Daily. It starred Hilary Swank, and it's really an ode to local news. Tom also actually played a journalist. He's an actor, too, in the fifth season of The Wire. He played a dodgy Baltimore Sun reporter who was making up stories in the paper. You'll hear him talk a bit about that and about the former Baltimore Sun reporter who created The Wire, David Simon. Tom, for people who haven't seen

Spotlight, what's the gist? 00:33:12 Speaker 3: Did this hour date? I wonder if you should do it. 00:33:16 Speaker 1: Oh, you want me to do it? 00:33:17 Speaker 3: Oh, yeah, I love that. 00:33:18 Speaker 1: Spotlight is a wonderful movie. It's about the Boston Globe's investigative unit, the Spotlight unit, that investigated what they discovered was systemic, a cover-up of systemic abuse within the Catholic Church in the diocese in Boston. And it's the story of that investigation and just systematically piecing together that this wasn't just one instance of abuse, this wasn't just one priest, this was. 00:33:47 Speaker 1: Yeah, like the whole church and institutions connected to it, helping to keep this under wraps. 00:33:53 Speaker 2: Robin? 00:33:54 Speaker 3: I think it's solid. 00:33:55 Speaker 2: It's the movie I saw. 00:33:56 Speaker 3: Good take. 00:33:57 Speaker 2: Well done. 00:33:58 Speaker 7: Right, like we knew it was an interesting story when Josh Singer, my co-writer, and I started on it at the time. I say that, but actually when it was first brought to me, I couldn't see it. I said no to the story the first time, which is maybe a, I don't know if you do that as a journalist, or I'm sure you guys have done it a million times. But like someone approached me when the producers brought me it, I looked at it and I thought, I know it, I remember it, but I couldn't see the story in it. 00:34:20 Speaker 3: And I just walked away from it. 00:34:22 Speaker 1: You grew up Catholic? 00:34:23 Speaker 7: Grew up Catholic, yeah, raised Catholic. Went to Boston College, an undergraduate, and... I felt comfortable in the Irish Catholic culture of Boston. I was an altar boy growing up. I know those people. But I just couldn't see the story, and I let it go. And a year later, I was sitting trying to think what I was going to do next. I'm like, I wonder if that story's still out there. And they'd gone to another very good writer. He couldn't crack it. And I just reengaged with it. And so I knew it was something. And Josh and I started poking at it. But we were researching it for a good six months. 00:34:53 Speaker 3: What were the challenges you were coming up against? 00:34:56 Speaker 7: I just couldn't wrap my head around how to say anything new with it. Like, the investigation was so thorough and the storytelling was so complete, right, on some level. 00:35:04 Speaker 3: It's like, what are we going to do? It wasn't interesting to me just. 00:35:07 Speaker 7: To reenact it, to dramatize it. Like, I was like, what do we bring that's new and fresh to this and how do we do it? And we didn't have the answer when we started researching, but we got so into the research for about six months, just going back to Boston and mostly spending time with the reporters and some survivors who were incredibly. 00:35:24 Speaker 3: Generous with their stories. 00:35:26 Speaker 7: But really, really with the reporters trying to understand how that investigation went. 00:35:31 Speaker 3: And that, it just felt like it was our in. 00:35:34 Speaker 7: We knew we had to engage with the survivors in their story because it was so key to the story. But we thought the investigation at that point, and especially where journalism was pitched at the moment, and little did we know how dire it was going to get, but we thought this is a story worth telling. And I think, you know, I'd spent some time on The Wire playing a journalist with questionable ethics. And David Simon had really drilled into me just like how bad it was. 00:36:02 Speaker 3: And you see it on that show, what. 00:36:04 Speaker 2: Is it, 20 years ago? 00:36:05 Speaker 1: How bad what was? 00:36:07 Speaker 3: Where the profession was going. 00:36:08 Speaker 2: I see. 00:36:09 Speaker 3: The profession of journalism. How under fire it was, you know. David was a journalist, right? 00:36:13 Speaker 7: And ultimately, I was, you know, he plopped me in a newsroom and it was just like hammering us with every, like they wouldn't let us do anything wrong. 00:36:20 Speaker 3: And inevitably, he populated it with fellow journalists from The Sun or The Post. You know, he'd be talking to an extra and you're like, this extra is incredibly intelligent. And he knows a lot about foreign policy. 00:36:33 Speaker 1: Specifically in the Middle East. 00:36:35 Speaker 7: You would have these moments of like, I think that was, I really learned a lot from it. 00:36:39 Speaker 3: I came out of that feeling like it was a mini masterclass. 00:36:42 Speaker 7: And so by the time we got into Spotlight, we did all this reporting, investigating all this. And then it was like, I would say it was quite a while before we really nailed like, you know, I'm always asking like, what's it about? 00:36:55 Speaker 3: Like that to me is important. It's not important to every filmmaker, but to me it is. 00:36:58 Speaker 7: Because I'm always like, why am I, am I going to spend two years of my life on this? Like I need to know what I'm talking about on some level or another. 00:37:04 Speaker 3: Or what's going to drive us? 00:37:06 Speaker 7: And ultimately, I remember it was like about seven, eight months into the research and writing. 00:37:13 Speaker 3: We were in my office in New York. 00:37:15 Speaker 7: And I was reading, doing research on psychologists dealing with the trauma of sexual abuse. And this woman said at some point, you know, if it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one. 00:37:31 Speaker 3: And I was like, oh, my God. 00:37:33 Speaker 7: It was one of those moments where I'm like, that's the movie. And I read it to Josh, and Josh is like, oh. 00:37:38 Speaker 3: Man, that's kind of, it's institutional. It's everybody. Like, it just, that level of criminality can't exist in a city without that level of complicity. 00:37:56 Speaker 7: And suddenly, complicity became the word on the board, and then we started looking at that. And what struck me is that In

talking to the reporters about the work they do and how they approach it and the narratives that they ultimately weave, that our work wasn't that different. 00:38:10 Speaker 3: You know, our approach to the work, our research, our attention to details, our character study. 00:38:16 Speaker 7: The more they would talk, Josh and I would go have a drink afterwards and be like, fuck, it could be us talking about our work. 00:38:21 Speaker 3: It's the same work. There's just a different, it's just a different platform, right? 00:38:26 Speaker 7: And that really stuck with us. What they're trying to get to the bottom is the facts, the truth. And I think ultimately, as storytellers, we're doing that. 00:38:36 Speaker 3: But we're really just. 00:38:36 Speaker 7: Trying to get to the essence. I think you used that word earlier, Antonio. I think it's right. The essence of the story. 00:38:43 Speaker 1: That truth. Did you tell me this once? Did you actually uncover something in your research that wasn't known about? 00:38:48 Speaker 2: Yeah. Can you tell me more? 00:38:50 Speaker 3: Yeah, it's sort of in the movie. But it was that idea of. 00:38:55 Speaker 3: We were interviewing the lawyer that Billy Crudda plays. 00:38:58 Speaker 7: And he was sort of saying at one point, I went to the Globe with this story years before. 00:39:03 Speaker 3: And this guy was a little bit of a talker. He was smooth. He was good. And he's a lawyer. And we're like, uh-huh, uh-huh. And he's like, no, I did. Check their clips. Check the clips. I went to them. And they buried the story. And we were like, OK. And we left. And Josh was like, I'm going to the Globe. I was like, OK. I have to go do some work. You call me. And he went right to the clips and he found it. 00:39:24 Speaker 7: And it was a story that Robbie had written, played by Michael Keaton, and it was Barry. They buried the story. And so Josh called me. 00:39:33 Speaker 3: He's like, you got to see this. I got to come to you. And he showed me. I'm like, oh, man. 00:39:37 Speaker 7: And now at this point, as we've talked about a little bit, you become friends with these people. You come very close to them. You want to do right by them. And let's be honest, you want them to like you, because I think that's human nature. And suddenly we're like, this isn't good. 00:39:55 Speaker 3: This doesn't read well. It's definitely a big part of the movie. 00:39:59 Speaker 7: And it speaks exactly to complicity. So we went to Robbie, who was a good friend at the time, and said, look, this is what we just found in your clips, and what do you think? And that is sort of the moment that is portrayed in the movie, late in the movie, where Robbie brings that up, and he's like, It's that thing that every reporter fears, which is we missed it. 00:40:20 Speaker 3: We reported on it, but we didn't hit it. You're stumbling around in the dark, right? 00:40:24 Speaker 7: And it's easy to miss, and it's incredibly painful when the stakes are

that big. 00:40:28 Speaker 1: So he remembered it? 00:40:29 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:40:29 Speaker 7: I mean, he had actually written about it, but it was sort of deeply buried in the paper. 00:40:34 Speaker 1: And it was one story. They hadn't made it a big investigation. 00:40:36 Speaker 3: They hadn't chased, and they should have. 00:40:38 Speaker 7: It wasn't nefarious. There was no intention behind it. I think it was just... You know, it's like in sports, sometimes you don't make the play and it's painful. And especially if you care and those guys all care, right? They're great journalists. But it spoke to, I think, the culture at the Globe at the time. Maybe that's the advantage we get as screenwriters, right? You know, as journalists, you're on a deadline. You've got to deliver the story and you better get it right. 00:41:15 Speaker 5: All of this just makes me think what movies that are fiction projects do that are beyond what mainstream media, especially. 00:41:24 Speaker 2: Recently, can do. 00:41:26 Speaker 5: Say more. 00:41:26 Speaker 2: What do you mean? 00:41:27 Speaker 5: Every one of us did it with a, like, eye that, like, it does go under the headline the way most mainstream media just can't hold for these days. Do you know, like, I grew up in New England, and The Boston Globe was our paper. I'm from New Hampshire, but, like, And of course, I grew up in an age of knowing of all the stuff with the Roman Catholic Church. And until I saw Spotlight, Spotlight was like I fully got it. I could feel it in my molecules. 00:41:56 Speaker 7: You know what I mean? 00:41:57 Speaker 5: Like all the stuff that I love and have been really meaningful and given me a lot of my education was print media, nonfiction print media. But that movie made me understand and then feel a kind of rage that was actually really upsetting to finally fully feel emotionally, you know, and then talk about. 00:42:17 Speaker 1: Everyone I knew. 00:42:19 Speaker 5: And that movie did that. 00:42:22 Speaker 7: It seems like there's a chance with narratives to actually transport people to a place in time. And therefore, all these examples, I think, are reasons to do that, right? Because you can take an audience like, okay, you know the story. Now I'm going to put you in it. Now you're going to breathe it. 00:42:37 Speaker 3: Now you're going to touch it. And you're going to feel it. 00:42:39 Speaker 7: And the director, writer, director is making choices about when they're going to leave you at the doorstep. And you're not going to hear the conversation about maybe the police chief talking to the parents. 00:42:51 Speaker 3: But you don't really need to, right? You know what that– we've seen that conversation. 00:42:55 Speaker 2: Right, right, right. 00:42:56 Speaker 3: But catching it in like the half light in this sort of remote, you know, kind of rural. 00:43:01 Speaker 7: Place with the trash cans still out. It's so identifiable and so foreign. So you're transported there. That's the reason to do it. As storytellers, we're always just looking for a way in to kind of explore humanity, right? 00:43:14 Speaker 3: I think. 00:43:15 Speaker 7: I think if you care, you know, I think if you care. 00:43:24 Speaker 1: Thank you, guys. This was wonderful. Thank you so much. 00:43:26 Speaker 3: Thank you. 00:43:26 Speaker 1: This was a real blast. Thank you. Don't forget, there's a beautiful video of this conversation on KCRW's YouTube channel. My team and I did feel a little self-conscious, a bunch of audio people trying to manage cameras and lights and saying action in front of professional movie directors, but they were very patient with us. As I've mentioned before, alcohol is not always conducive, to factual precision. So we're going to list in the show notes some clarifications and corrections our fact checker Maggie Duffy pointed out from our conversation. For instance, even though it has been reported that the code at the top of the classified document was probably what alerted the FBI to the fact that Reality Winner was its source, the government claims it was actually a crease in the paper that alerted them. A crease meant the document had been folded and folded meant it had been secreted away, maybe in a backpack, or as actually happened, some pantyhose, after having been printed, presumably. That's how they say the FBI tracked reality down. Interesting, huh? Also, Antonio Campos wanted me to clarify that the Staircase Documentaries editor, Sophie, didn't necessarily leave her whole family for accused murderer Michael Peterson, though she did divorce her husband. We reached out to Sophie and she said she never wanted to be a character in the series and was mad about certain ways she was portrayed, including disputing the timing of when the relationship began. Next time on Question Everything, we dive into a true story that probably should be a movie about a journalist whose reporting trip goes awry. 00:45:01 Speaker 4: They took out maybe 20 or 30 feet of cloth and they wrapped it tightly around my head, my eyes, my ears, and part of my nose as a blindfold. They shackled my legs and they put my hands behind my back and zip-tied my hands. And I said, why are you doing this? 00:45:20 Speaker 1: That's what Israeli soldiers did to an American reporter just a couple months ago. They arrested him, held him in solitary confinement in one of Israel's most notorious prisons, interrogated him about his reporting, and yet his story has barely been told. That's on our next episode, which will be after we take a break for the holidays on January 9th. Thanks to the wine store Bibber & Bell in Brooklyn, New York, where we recorded today's episode. It was produced by Brendan Baker and Emily Malterre. Brendan also did the sound design. The episode was edited by Jonathan Goldstein, Robin Simeon, and me. It was booked by Alyssa Shipp. Our show is made by producers Zach St. Louis and Sophie Kazis. Jen Kinney and Neil Drumming are contributing editors. Our fact-checking is by Maggie Duffy. Matt McGinley composed our music. The video of this episode, search for KCRW on YouTube, was edited by Kevin Sprague. Sound engineering by Gabe Kroga. Film production by Ambrose Ang and Luke Hansen at Stone & Spade. Our partners at KCRW include Arnie Seipel, Gina Delvac, Tejalaj Amera, and Jennifer Farrow. Have a great holiday, and please tell your friends and family about the show over the break. Leave a comment on your podcast app. All that good stuff. We'll see you in a few weeks.