This week we're revisiting the Netflix Original documentary film, Amanda Knox. Eric Eddings, co-host of Gimlet's The Nod, chats with Amanda Knox director Brian McGinn about the making of the documentary. If you haven't yet seen this film, or aren't familiar with the Amanda Knox story, here's a brief recap. In 2007, Amanda Knox was studying abroad in Italy when she was arrested for the murder of her roommate, Meredith Kercher. She spent almost four years in an Italian prison, while she became a household name across the world. This documentary takes a deeper look into the murder and convictions, the international obsession with the case, and the eventual acquittals, by talking to the people who were directly impacted by it all.
This week we're revisiting the Netflix Original documentary film, Amanda Knox. Eric Eddings, co-host of Gimlet's The Nod, chats with Amanda Knox director Brian McGinn about the making of the documentary.
If you haven't yet seen this film, or aren't familiar with the Amanda Knox story, here's a brief recap. In 2007, Amanda Knox was studying abroad in Italy when she was arrested for the murder of her roommate, Meredith Kercher. She spent almost four years in an Italian prison, while she became a household name across the world. This documentary takes a deeper look into the murder and convictions, the international obsession with the case, and the eventual acquittals, by talking to the people who were directly impacted by it all.
Rae: Welcome to You Can’t Make This Up, a companion podcast from Netflix.
[Music]
Rae: I’m Rae Votta, your host for this weeks’ episode. Every other week we discuss a different Netflix series or film with a special guest and all of the stories are surprisingly true. That’s why we call it You Can’t Make This Up. You get it? We’re not making it up.
This week we’re taking a look back at the Netflix original documentary film Amanda Knox. In 2007 Amanda Knox was studying abroad in Italy when she was arrested for the murder of her roommate, Meredith Kercher. She spent almost four years in an Italian prison while she became a household name across the world. This documentary takes a deeper look into the murder and convictions, the international obsession with the case, and even the eventual acquittals by talking to the people who are directly impacted by it all. And here to talk to us about it all are director Brian McGinn and co-host of Ginn with Benaud, [phonetic 00:00:52] Eric Eddings.
Eric: Hey, Brian. How’s it going?
Brian: It’s going well. How are you, Eric?
Eric: Not too bad, not too bad. Can you hear me all right?
Brian: I can. Can you hear me?
Eric: Yeah. You’re perfect. So, I’m really excited to talk to you today. I really love the doc. Seriously. It was like, it was amazing. I actually didn’t know that much about this story before I had seen it.
Brian: Oh, wow.
Eric: So, the whole time, my mouth was just, kind of, agape. So, I mean, I don’t know how you feel about it overall, but for me it was job well done.
Brian: Ah, well, that’s very nice of you to say. That’s… You know, it was-, it took us a long time to make that movie. So, it’s been really nice to have so many people watch it. I mean, that’s the thing when you make a documentary, you’re never sure, is there going to be an audience for this? So, we spent, you know, five years, kind of, being unsure what was going to happen with the movie, whether it was going to be a movie, where it would end up. And then, you know, we were just so lucky that Netflix ended up, kind of, taking the reins of it and getting it out in the world.
Eric: So, I guess like, one of the things, kind of, on that note, like, when you-, like, how’d you first hear about Amanda Knox? Like, just the story itself.
Brian: Yeah. So, I’ll be honest. I’m not a true crime person necessarily. That was never really my cup of tea. When I initially heard about the story, I don’t think I paid much attention to it because it just seemed like, you know, another, kind of, very sad tragic story that was on the periphery of, kind of, my interests.
And then what happened was, a friend of one of my friends growing up had been on a journalism fellowship through Italy and had spent time in Perugia which is where the Knox/Kercher case happened. So, he had spent some time there. And he had gotten to know the Italians involved and the Knox family who, I think at that point, were living in Perugia. And he had said that he thought I might be interested in the story.
And the thing that really got me hooked on it was when I started to look at the way the case was being covered in the British tabloids. And I actually remember… I was thinking you were going to ask me this, so I did some digging into my archives and I actually found the first news article for the-, basically that goes back to the first day of court that I thought was really interesting and, kind of, got me hooked. And it’s a picture of Amanda walking into court. And she’s smiling. And the headline is ‘Smirking, Relaxed, On trial for murder.’ And I remember reading that headline and going, huh? Wait a minute. What?
There’s-, it didn’t seem to me like the normal way that a murder case was covered in the news. It was a front-page story and in big block letters, murder. I’m looking at the page now. Murder is in yellow. The text is in yellow and the rest of the text is in white. And then there was another article from that same day where the headline was: “The Foxy Knoxy show: Smiling murder suspect makes grand entrance as trial begins.” And so, I remember being really interested in, okay, here’s this narrative and this story that’s being told that’s turning this trial and this case into a real, kind of, hook-ey, click bait-ey form of entertainment. And I thought that was really interesting.
I’m one of these people who’s totally obsessed with the way we process information, the way we tell each other stories, the way that all of those things are morphing and changing as the types of-, as the ways we get information change. You know? So, from newspaper to, this case was, kind of, when social media is going online. It was happening at the very beginning right around the time when I was getting out of college. And all of us getting out of college at that point were, kind of, the first Facebook generation and then Twitter was coming online.
So, for me, it was interesting in the context of all of those components. How do we process stories? How do we tell each other stories? How do we get each other interested and keep each other interested in reading? So, those things were really interesting to me in the context of this tragedy and this terrible grisly murder that occurred.
Eric: Yeah. And specifically, about the documentary, like, I feel like it really optimizes, kind of, on that note, the idea of kind of like, show, don’t tell. Like, the documentary exploits these things of, you know, sexism, kind of, media irresponsibility, the criminal justice system. And it’s just, kind of, all in there in the way that this story unfolded through the, you know, through the documentary.
So, like, when you and your partner were talking about like, how to-, like, how to tell this story. You mentioned, you mentioned, kind of like, being pulled in by the media’s relationship to it. Was that obsession, and some would say irresponsibility, was that, kind of, the central theme that you, kind of, wanted to tug at? Basically, if you could talk a bit more about the themes that felt really central to actually telling this story right.
Brian: Yeah, totally. Well, okay. The first thing that was really important to us in telling this story right was we wanted as many of the core people, the first-person accounts who were at the center of this story to be telling their version of events and their personal narratives that were connected to it. Because, I think, in a story like this, everyone in the world had an opinion, right? And it became so-, it became so divisive.
And we learned that on Twitter when the movie came out. And people that disagreed with us would, you know, send us messages and argue with us about the evidence in-, that we presented in the movie or all of those, kind of, things that I think we now see every single time any news breaks in the world. So that was the first thing that was really important was we wanted to get away from that as much as we could and go to the core people who were actually driving the story.
So, for us, the people that we were able to get to participate were Amanda, her boyfriend, Raffaele, the prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini who took quite awhile like Amanda did to come on board, and a Daily Mail journalist named Nick Pisa who had been a really crucial central person on the news side because… I’ll give you my little spiel.
At this time, a lot of foreign correspondents were being chopped from traditional news outlets. And so, freelancers like Nick who would work for the Daily Mail, but the occasionally would write an article for The Sun or something like that, he and others like him started getting hired by other networks. So, Nick would report for NBC News in the States. Or he would report-, you know what I mean? He would report for Sky in the UK. So, all of a sudden, this per-, you know, the type of tabloid journalism that was used to be, kind of, restricted to the tabloid journalists, actually, because of this lack of foreign correspondence seeped into the mainstream.
And so, those voices became the ones that were telling the story in the majority of publications, not just in the broad sheets in the UK. So, I thought that was really interesting. And that was why we wanted to talk to Nick. And then we talked to a few of the lawyers involved. We got really close to getting Rudy Guede who is the fourth-, excuse me. He was the third person that was convicted of the crime and the fourth, kind of, party involved. We got really close to talking to him and we ended up speaking to his attorney.
And then we reached out a number of times to the Kercher family, but never heard back from them. So, that was the first thing that was important to us was trying to go to those first-person accounts because we wanted to try to get passed as much of the chafe as we could, and the, kind of, feedback loop. So, that was the first thing that was important.
And then what we really tried to do was, we knew that the case was super, super, super divisive. And so, we tried to, first of all, tell personal stories for each of the people that we were featuring. And then also to, from an evidentiary standpoint, to take the Italian court decisions and build the evidence and the important pieces of evidence that we present in the film from those court records and those court decisions. This is a case that, I mean, in kind of, I think, 2018 Netflix could have been a 10-part series. It was—
Eric: Yeah. Totally.
Brian: …so much to it. I could walk you though some stuff that would blow your mind that just was-, we just didn’t have time for it. And-, because we made a conscious decision to make a feature film. So, that was, kind of, the second part of what was important to us was being really careful about what evidence was presented in the movie, making sure that was the evidence that swung the decisions in the trials. And then that it reflected the final Italian judicial verdict because we didn’t want, as Americans, to come in and judge the Italian judicial system. We wanted to come in and understand what had happened and then try to get to the bottom of these personal stories.
Eric: And it seemed like, honestly, that decision to, really, kind of, focus on the physical evidence and the timeline as things rolled out, as, kind of like, that central way of exploring the story. Like, that seemed to feel really, really important, kind of, how you mentioned for something that’s so sensationalized. Were there any other things that you felt like that afforded you, that that decision… Where this really became like, a benefit. Like, the narrative structure like, really… Like, oh, man. This is like, actually like, working in my favor for how I want to tell this story?
Brian: Well, this is kind of a personal preference of mine. But sometimes I feel like when you turn a story into eight or 10 hours, the actual narrative and the arcs are maybe not as tight or structured as you would see in, kind of, a traditional film. And so, it was actually the appeal of making the 92-minute version of the movie was that we could really get in there and get to the core stuff. And then see how that stuff affected the main people.
And so, I’d say that was the real benefit of that choice was it meant, okay, when we’re sitting in an edit with Matthew Hamachek who cut the movie, every single question was, ‘Well, is this one of the 30 most important things that people need to know to understand this story and the way that we are telling it with the people we have involved?’ Because if it’s not, that’s the only room we have in the movie. So, it forced us to be really careful and precise with what scenes ended up in the final cut.
And it meant that we, you know, we ended up with dozens and dozens and dozens of hours of interview that never made it in and dozens and dozens and dozens of scenes that were really interesting on their own but felt like divergence or, kind of, digressions from the, the very streamlined story that we were trying to tell.
Eric: You mentioned there’s like, a lot-, there’s a ton on the cutting room floor. And like, considering—
Brian: Oh, God.
Eric: …how long this went on, that makes a lot of sense. Is there anything that you could share? Is there one thing that you’re like, man, I really wish we had time for that, but you had to cut?
Brian: Yeah. I mean, for me, all of the personal backstories of the people that we were featuring in the film were really, really, really interesting. So, I’ll tell you about one. But Giuliano Mignini who was the Italian prosecutor, he told us about growing up as a kid. And his family home actually overlooked the courtyard of the female prison in Perugia. And at that point, a female prison in Perugia was where all of the female murderesses in Italy were sent. And so, as a young boy, Mignini would look out into this courtyard and he would see all of these infamous female killers in Italy.
And I just thought that was such an amazing detail for a man who goes on to, basically to make it his life’s duty to try to put away these people and to fight for a justice that he believes in. So, for me, you know, it’s almost the perfect origin story for a prosecutor who is going to go into this story is that he grew up as a little boy looking out in the courtyard and seeing these female murderers.
Eric: Also, kind of, related to, you know, how you guys focus on the evidence and the timeline, is it seem to also allow some distance in letting the audience really decide how they feel about each of these characters? Specifically, you know, the prosecutor and, and Nick Pisa. Like, I think a lot about, you know, kind of, some of the comments that they would say. You know, and specifically, Mignini. You know, at one point he says, “A female murderer tends to cover the body of female victims. A man would never think to do this.”
Brian: Yeah.
Eric: And like, I hear that and it sounds… It sounds almost too matter of fact. And it also sounds slightly drenched in sexism at the least. But I guess I’m curious, like, how much faith did you have to put in the audience to be able to, kind of, connect some of these dots in what they were saying?
Brian: I mean, look, a lot. But I, I… I mean, here’s, kind of, a secret of making a documentary is you fall in love with every single person that you interview for the movie and every-, you know, we talk about, as directors, we talk about these people as characters, but they’re actually people. And when you’re filming with them, you develop relationships. And we really liked every single person that we filmed with.
And so, what that does when you get in the edit is, I think it allows you to say, well, rather than me applying my personal bias or my personal opinion onto what these people are saying, it makes more sense to-, you know, you’re constantly reminding yourself, okay, back off from what you think and let’s help them-, let’s let them tell their opinion in their words. And then, it’s totally the audience’s job when they’re coming into a movie like this is to make up their mind about how do they feel about it?
It’s not-, you know, we were presenting the final legal decision, but that wasn’t really what the movie was about. That was just a me-, an entry point to hearing what these people had to say. And then, you know, the audience can decide from there who they believe, who they associate with. I always thought it was really interesting that Mignini would say that line that you were talking about, about a female murderer tends to cover the body of a victim that they kill. A man would never do that. And at the same time, he would talk about having four daughters and that so much of his motivation for doing what he does is because he has those daughters and he can actually imagine what it would be like to be in the Kercher family and to have lost a daughter.
And so, I always thought that was a really interesting dynamic that his view on women and the different roles that they play in his life was really fascinating and that he deserved as much time to talk about that as he could without judgment from the filmmaker.
Eric: Yeah. It’s interesting watching this film even now, kind of, in a different context where stories from the Me Too Movement are being explored a lot right now. And it feels like so much of the stories that, kind of, fall underneath there when you’re exploring, kind of, sexism, and how the relationships between I actually say men and men in power and women and how those things can be perverted. It feels like there’s a lot more emphasis now on, kind of, calling out what the thing is.
Looking back on that, do you-, are there-, were there ever points where you like, you just kind of wanted to also just say the thing?
Brian: I mean-, yeah. I mean, but that’s a decision that I think you make as a filmmaker going into a project is how much do I want to stand on a soapbox and make my personal opinion come through in the movie verses how much do I want to tell a great story? And I would argue, actually, that had I gone into interviewing Giuliano Mignini because I hold different beliefs on female/male relationships, on sexuality in the 21st century. If I had gone into those interviews trying to convince him, or trying to get him to agree with me, or really, do anything other than listen to what he had to say, I wouldn’t have actually gotten him to talk about the things that he really believed.
And so, my personal belief is that as a documentarian, your job is to listen to other people and to present their point of view to the audience. So, I certainly think that the overall story, if you look at it, you know, I’ve spent a lot of time recently looking at the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the way that the media treated her. I’ve spent a lot of-, I went back and looked at the Gary Hart scandal and the way that Donna Rice was treated in that story.
I certainly think that the Knox case fits into that, if you want to call it a-, there’s many more stories than that, but that triumphant of, kind of, the overt sexualization of women for behaving in a way that is totally, totally normal, I think that that is certainly something that is a through line through all of those stories but is by no means unique. And I think, really, reflects a culture that is in the midst of a really positive change now.
So, it’s, sort of like, going back and looking at any period of history that we don’t agree with. In 2018, you go, well, this is a different time. And this way of looking at things may not be what I personally believe. But it’s worth listening to it and understanding it because that’s that only way that you can, really, kind of, comprehend how these things went down.
Eric: I kind of want to jump back into, kind of, how the media covered this story. You know, I mean, it seemed like it was just relentless, for lack of a better word. And there’s actually a clip I want to play for you where the journalist in the film, Nick Pisa, he’s pretty plain about his desire to, kind of, be first to the story with a lot less concern about being right.
(Clip begins)
Nick: And I think now, looking back, some of the information that came out was just crazy, really and is just completely made up. But, hey, what are we supposed to do? You know? We are journalists and we are reporting what we are being told. It’s not as if I can say, right hold on a minute. I just want to double check that myself in some other way. I mean, there’s no [unintelligible 00:20:45]. And then I’ll let my rival get in there first before me. And then, hey, I’ve lost a scoop.
(Clip ends)
Eric: Like, I’m a journalist. In hearing that, my mind was blown. You know? It was kind of amazing. And, you know, we had just talked a bit about, you know, kind of, looking back at things in a different context. And I’m going to ask you a really hard-, maybe an unfair question.
Brian: No, go ahead.
Eric: You know, I’m curious, like, this obsession and this desire to just get things out, that has the affect of, kind of, perverting a story. Are there any, sort of, changes that you think might be able to be made to maybe prevent this type of coverage, or to prevent things from going down this path.
Brian: I’m not sure I’m the person to save the media industry necessarily with my grandiose ideas, but I think that… Look. The tabloid media has always covered stories like this. I think, for me, the thing that made this story unique was it was this moment when the tabloid media had, kind of, totally seeped into the mainstream coverage. And so, for me, there’s a real, kind of, dilemma that we all have in our society now. And we’re seeing it with the way that Trump is covered is how much is the media responsive? Because they need to fill 24 hours a day and they need to fill papers and they need to get tomorrow’s headline written. And how much is the media proactive and working really hard to make sure that what they’re reporting is correct and to provide context to their readers?
So, I mean, I guess it boils down to, does the media have a responsibility to entertain their readers, or do they have a responsibility to educate their readers? And I think that that’s really what the core of this story is about is if we went back and looked at the coverage in The Daily Mail, in The Sun, in even some of the more mainstream publications, if we went back and looked at those pieces of writing and said, well, how many of these things ended up being true verses how many of these things ended up being a little bit misleading in some way or another because deadlines needed to be hit and articles needed to be written in order to collect the 100 dollars that you get for a front-page story? Then, you know, I think that the ratio would be a little, a little frightening.
But I don’t know what the solution is for that other than you have to reverse the value proposition for, if a newspaper is paying 150 dollars or 100 dollars for a story, then how much money do you need to support your family? You know? You need… Like, you could write 30 stories a month and still make, basically, the median income. So, that means you need to pump out a story every single day. Well, Nick’s, sort of, right. In that situation, you don’t have as much time to make sure that what you are sending in is 100 percent air tight. So, I don’t know. There’s-, it’s a tough one.
I don’t think that there’s a really good solution out there that I have heard other than, I think that we, as readers, need to do a much better job of understanding that situation and approaching our, kind of, consumption of all of these stories with a little bit more-, of a few grains of salt, shall we say.
Eric: There’s a couple things that what you say in there really stuck out to me. Like, one is, the idea of prioritizing, kind of, entertainment, over-informing the public. You know? And specifically, also, I think about true crime when you say that. And you mention that you’re not the biggest fan of true crime and that what you guys really wanted to do was, kind of, void or even highlight, kind of, how this tragedy had been like, commodified. I’m curious, were you ever worried at points that simply like, exploring this story as in depthly, you know, as you did would continue that at all?
Brian: Oh, of course. Yeah. Totally. And I don’t feel as though 100 percent making the film did not do that. I think that by the nature of revisiting all of the material that’s in the film, it totally did spark another discussion about the case. So, yeah. I think that it’s weird when you’re standing on the sidelines and going, hey, I think there’s a little bit of an odd thing going on here. And then when you get on the field, then you’re playing on the field with everyone else. And so, it’s a weird feeling and, you know, it’s something that I still don’t really know how to reconcile within my own way of thinking about it.
Eric: Yeah. Like, were there moments in making the documentary where you think you particularly struggled in terms of like, how to actually cover this in a way that felt, I guess, responsible?
Brian: I think we were pretty—look. One of the things about working on something for so long is that we were able to really get pretty deep into the evidence and into the story. And by that, I mean, by the end of the production period, we had seen pretty much ever single evidence photo, every single document in any case file about the story, every piece of archival video that we could find from local Italian cameramen to the AP.
So, we had done a pretty thorough job of tracking that stuff down and going through it, filtering through it, and saying what is appropriate, what is not? Where do we draw the line? And so, we had a lot of conversations about that. And I think the way that we ended up dealing with a lot of it was to filter it through the first-person perspectives of the people who were actually there.
There’s nothing really in the film that is us inserting something in order to make the story more “exciting or entertaining”. It is the stories of the people who were a part of it, kind of, at the center of the onion. And so, I think that at the end of the day, we could always return to, well, it is the first-person stories of these people and in most cases, the people in the film had not really actually told those stories before.
That was the very bizarre thing about all the coverage was it was a lot of people from the outside writing, digging, writing again. It was not really people listening to those, kind of, core characters at the heart of it. So, I think that was the way we ended up dealing with it.
Eric: The, kind of, the lingering shots of Amanda and Giuliano, and Raffaele, kind of like, staring into the camera felt so expertly used. At what point did you guys start to feel like that was a consistent tactic in terms of thinking about how to interpret like, different moments of the story?
Brian: Yeah. Well, okay. So, it starts a little bit with, you know, we’re huge, huge, huge fans of Errol Morris, who made the amazing series Wormwood which is streaming now on Netflix as well as one of my favorite movies ever, which is Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. And so, Errol developed this system called the Interrotron which allows for an interview to make direct eye contact with the camera, with the center of the lens, basically, by cross connecting two teleprompters and having one of them go right in front of the camera.
And so, what that does is it creates this feeling that when the interview subject is actually looking at the reflection of my face as the interviewer, what they are actually doing is staring right into the lens. And what it does is it creates this direct eye contact between the interview subject and the audience when they watch the movie. I think it’s one of the great inventions in modern filmmaking. And we are on quite a long list of people who have just blatantly stolen that technique from Errol.
And we-, I’m sure that would be a good interview for you is, how many people have taken Errol’s Interrotron and used it for their documentary projects? But in this situation, we were trying to figure out, well, what can we do with it that’s different than what Errol does with it? And early on we were experimenting around. Matt came up with this motif of basically, what you’re seeing is the characters in the film listening to me ramble on asking them a question.
So, and off-, or for the Italians, listening to the translator try to translate my rambling question into a comprehensible Italian. So, what we realized was that those moments where the people were staring directly into the lens, what it really felt like was that they were waiting for the judgement or the feelings of the audience to, kind of, be projected upon them.
I’m going to film school nerd on you for a second. But there’s something called the Kuleshov effect which is basically… It was a Russian experiment where you could juxtapose the exact same shot of a, kind of, blank expression against a bunch of other activity. So, a baby carriage going downstairs, or a nice family dinner, or I don’t know, a bunch of stuff. And the audience would actually project their feelings about the previous shot onto the blank face. So, they would feel as though the blank face was frightened or scared or angry.
And that felt really quite a bit to us like what was happening in this story was you had these, kind of, syphers, these characters at the heart of this who no one really knew, but who, based on the way that they saw them, they were projecting their own fears or feelings or anger or love or hatred towards them or onto them. So, it felt like, by having them, kind of, sitting, starting directly in the camera, that was actually a way to, kind of, communicate that idea or allow for a little bit more of that effect to get into the movie.
So, that was the intention behind it and it was Hamachek coming up with the great idea that we then, kind of, rippled through the whole movie and made sure that we were shooting every time we did an interview.
Eric: Wow. That was amazing. I thank God for that theft.
Brian: Exactly.
Eric: And so, actually, kind of, pivoting to the-, you talked a lot about putting the personal narratives at, kind of, the center of this film and what that afforded you. Like, Rudy Guede’s story is touched on but it’s not as in depth as, you know, Amanda, obviously, and Raffaele. And the journalist, Nick Pisa, he actually mentioned that the audience itself didn’t care about Rudy. You know? They only wanted to hear about Amanda.
I’m curious, like, the fact that you weren’t able to quite land him, like, was there attention with you wanting to pull more of his narrative into the story to be able to better represent that?
Brian: I mean, his life has been really, really, really fascinating. He and his father moved from the Ivory Coast when he was a young boy. He was, kind of, adopted by one of the wealthiest families in Perugia and really excelled in that family. And then something happened that no one is really… No-, I can’t vouch for the exact details of it. But something happened when he was a teenager and he was, kind of, excommunicated from that wealthy family. But he stayed in Perugia.
And, you know, it’s a really interesting story that in the context of modern Italy and the discussions that are being had there as they are here about immigration and how you build a society of people that come from all over the world and move to your country. I think it’s a-, you know, his story is really compelling.
As far as getting more of him into the film, Nick Pisa really, you know, I think by the point that the movie introduces Guede, we’re pretty clearly seeing things through Amanda, Raffaele, Mignini, and the news media’s point of view. And I was actually looking through the tabloid archival yesterday and it actually is really-, what Nick says is really true. Guede is very rarely named in headlines. It’s always the third person or the fourth person, or the-,
Eric: Yeah. Which is fascinating.
Brian: …another suspect. It’s-, which I had actually, kind of, forgotten about until I went back and looked at that. So, it’s totally true. No one was interested because at that point, the people who were buying those papers were looking for the next Foxy-Knoxy hit. They wanted to know more about her. They wanted to know what she was doing, how was she behaving? Was he flirting with the guards in court? Was she smiling at her family? Was she-, you know, like, those were the things that they were paying attention to.
So, Nick Pisa is 100 percent right. I think that you could make an entirely different film that was telling the story about Rudy. I still would love to interview him if the opportunity ever arises. But we tried to at least get his point of view on the events that happened, though we couldn’t really tell the personal or emotional story because we didn’t have that first-person access that we did with the other main characters.
Eric: Yeah. My understanding is he’s getting out soon. So, you might have another chance.
Brian: Well, he’s-, yeah. So, he-, I haven’t checked in in the last year and a half. But I believe he was eligible for work release at some point. I don’t know what has happened since then.
Eric: Hm. I’m curious also, so, you’ve directed comedy at Funny or Die and you’ve also worked on like, documentaries like Chef’s Table.
Brian: Yeah. We-, David and I started Chef’s Table together.
Eric: This feels like a different beast.
Brian: Yeah. But all of those things are very different. I mean, my career is really strange. I started, as he said, during sketch. I auditioned for SNL. And I wanted to do digital shorts for them. And then I started doing documentary because one of my college professors who had taught a lot of film directors happened to be teaching documentary. And so, that was my entry point to, kind of, getting a film school education at a place that didn’t have a film school.
And so, I kind of stumbled backwards into documentary accidentally. And started working on this project. And then this project, I mean, really, we didn’t think the movie was every going to happen because we didn’t have access to Amanda or to Mignini or to any of these people. And I’d kind of, abandoned it.
And then David and I went off and created Chef’s Table and started working on that. And I spent a few years making that. And then Amanda Knox re-approached us out of the blue three years after she had turned down doing the movie. And I guess her situation had changed at that point. And she asked if we still were interested in making a documentary. And we talked it over. And honestly, we weren’t really sure, you know, because things had changed in our lives. And we did a test interview and it was a really, really fascinating interview.
And then we went off to Italy and spent a bunch of time working on convincing the Italian side to participate. So, yeah. I’ve done a lot of different things because I think I’m interested in a lot of different things and I think that that’s a-, I don’t know. I like that about my weird career.
Eric: No, I think it’s awesome. I have-, trust me. If you went down my LinkedIn, you’d get whiplash. But I’m curious, even from shifting from like, Chef’s Table, you know, to Amanda Knox…
Brian: And I was working on those simultaneously. So, like, I would—
Eric: Oh, wow.
Brian: I was doing these movies. Like, I would work, you know, three days in LA on Chef’s Table and then I would take the red eye to New York because that was where Knox-, that’s where Matt Hamachek, the editor of Knox weas. And then I would work four days with Matt in the edit on Knox. And then I would fly back to LA and work more on Chef’s Table.
So, for the entire editorial of the Knox movie, I was working- I was-, I had a second life eating tasting menus and making Chef’s Table episodes. And watching cuts of other people’s Chef’s Table episodes. And then at the same time, I was finishing a comedy special with Will Farrell.
So, I had this weird triumphant of very, very distinct projects that had absolutely no overlap what-so-ever except they’re all technically in the documentary space. So, I thought that was cool because every day if something wasn’t working in one project, I could go, well, fantastic. I’m just not going to think about that one. I’m going to go work on the other stuff. And then I’ll come back to this when I have a good idea. And that-, I don’t know that’s a nice luxury to have.
Eric: So, the other thing I kind of think about with this, just with the Amanda Knox documentary as well, it’s like, honestly, there’s just so many amazing moments in it. Like, there’s so many spots where you’re just sitting there like, wow. This person said this, or that just actually happened. And I’m curious like, for you, is there one moment in the doc that you’re like, for me, that’s what holds it all together, or that just feels particularly special?
Brian: Yeah. I mean, you sort of played the clip that is my favorite part of the movie. So, that moment when Nick talks about what is he supposed to do? If he doesn’t get in there and report it, then he’s going to get scooped. And that’s just the way journalism works. That was the moment that I remember when we were interviewing Nick being really, kind of, excited by him saying that, I thought that was really interesting.
I also really like the moment when the-, well, there was another piece of archive that was a big discovery for us. And it speaks to another real problem that we had in making the movie which was, how do we respect the victim? And how do we have her story be told? And it was really, really, really, really, really hard because we weren’t able to speak to the family. And there wasn’t archival of Meredith in a way that we could build a real character profile of her. But I remember, the one really big breakthrough on that front was we found a piece of video where Meredith’s mother had been approached by news cameras after the final verdict when Knox and Sollecito are found innocent. And, you know, she talks about, kind of, her-, the toll that all of this has taken, and kind of, how she feels at the end is just unsure on what to believe or what to think at this point after all these years. And I thought that that moment was really touching.
And it was important for us to, at the end of all of this, and despite the difficulty in trying to, you know, reflect that part of the story, it was really important and felt valuable to come back to her after all that and understand-, try to put yourself in her shoes for a moment and understand what it would be like to lose your daughter, and then to go through this whole media circus, this whole nearly decade long process where the people that the police are saying killed your daughter are found guilty, and then innocent, and then guilty, and then innocent again. Just where that would leave you after all of that time is devastating. And so, finding that moment was really important. And I’ve always thought that that was, for me, one of the more emotional points in the movie.
And then I also really, really, really like, when Mignini talks about the covering of the body by a female murderer. That was a big bone of contention between Hamachek and I in the edit on whether or not that should be in the movie. And I’m really happy that it is.
Eric: You hit my faves. Well, Brian, thanks so much, seriously, for talking with me today.
Brian: Of course, thank you.
Eric: It was a pleasure. Yeah.
Brian: Thank you so much.
Rae: That was Eric Eddings and Brian McGuinn. And now let’s hear from you. Here’s some of our favorite social media reactions to this documentary:
Female: @ the life of Tippy [phonetic 00:42:25] says: If you want a gripping true crime documentary, go watch Amanda Knox on Netflix. Watching the case progress and seeing the issues that caused them to be acquitted actually made me lose my mind.
Male: @ Danny A. Ellis says: Watching the Netflix special on Amanda Knox. Reporter being interviewed: ‘Well, what am I supposed to do? Tell someone, hold on, I’ve got to fact check this information with other sources?’ Me: That is literally your job.
Female: @ Autumn Langley says: I need everyone to go watch the Amanda Knox special on Netflix. The little Italian attorney at 10928 wrecked the living hell out of the U.S. and now I want to move to Italy.
Rae: If you want a dramatic reading of your thoughts, share your reactions and make sure to tag us. Just search for You Can’t Make This Up. We’re the ones with the blue checkmark. Before we let you go, we’ve got one more treat for you. It’s time for what you watching? The segment where we find out what the people in this episode are watching on Netflix?
Eric: I actually am not ashamed to say I’ve been watching a lot of the new Voltron series. I think it’s in like, the sixth or seventh season right now. And each one I cannot help but binge. I don’t binge a lot often, but I’ve actually cleared time from my schedule when the new season drops just to make sure I can actually catch each one. It just takes me back to my childhood. So, yeah. That’s what I’m watching.
Brian: Wow, that’s good. So, you know, I’m watching a lot of Chef’s Table. I’ve heard it’s really good. No. I’m watching-, my fiancé and I endlessly watch Grand Designs. So, we’re watching a lot of Grand Designs. I’ve been watching The Fall. I’ve been watching Fauda. I’ve been watching Dark Tourist with David Farrier who is amazing and bear’s a slight passing resemblance to one of my favorite documentarians, Louis Theroux. And I highly recommend that show. And then we’re a little obsessed with Adriano Zumbo or Zumboe if you listen to the host of Sugar Rush, I think is the name of it. So, we were watching that. I think that’s enough. Right?
Eric: Yeah. I mean, I’ve got a list now. I know what’s going to be in my que.
Brian: Yeah, exactly.
[Music]
Rae: And that’s it for this week’s episode. We’ll be back in two weeks to talk about a new Netflix original film, The Angel. It’s based on a crazy true story, so make sure to add it to your watch list.
As for the show, you can find us on Apple Podcast, Stitcher, Google Play, Spotify, and anywhere else you listen to podcasts. Make sure to subscribe, rate, and review this show. It helps other people find it and makes my mom really proud of me. You Can’t Make This Up is a production of Pineapple Street Media and Netflix. Our music is by Hansdale Hsu. I’m Rae Votta and thank you so much for listening.
[End of audio]