Kevin Flynn (Crime Writers On..) talks with director Liz Garbus about her film Lost Girls. Based on the book Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery by Robert Kolker. The film follows Mari Gilbert (Amy Ryan) as she searches for her missing daughter Shannan. Meanwhile, the police uncover four more bodies and suspect a serial killer is on the loose. There will be spoilers, so make sure you've watched the whole film before pressing play.
Kevin Flynn (Crime Writers On..) talks with director Liz Garbus about her film Lost Girls. Based on the book Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery by Robert Kolker. The film follows Mari Gilbert (Amy Ryan) as she searches for her missing daughter Shannan. Meanwhile, the police uncover four more bodies and suspect a serial killer is on the loose. There will be spoilers, so make sure you've watched the whole film before pressing play.
Erica Quiroz: Welcome to You Can't Make This Up, a companion podcast from Netflix.
I'm Erica Quiroz. And I'll be introducing this week's episode here on You Can't Make This Up. We go behind the scenes of Netflix original true crime stories with special guests. This week, we don't have our regular host, Rebecca Lavoie. Instead, we have her fellow crime writer and real life husband, Kevin Flynn. He'll be interviewing director Liz Garbus about her film, Lost Girls.
Liz Garbus is known for directing award winning documentaries like What Happened Miss Simone. But Lost Girls is her first venture into scripted narrative film. The story is based on the Long Island serial killer and adapted from the book Lost Girls An Unsolved American Mystery by Robert Kolker. Amy Ryan stars as Mari Gilbert, a working class mother whose daughter Shannan goes missing as Mari tries to find out what happened. She finds support in unexpected places and the police find the bodies of other victims. In this conversation, Kevin and Liz will discuss the difference between making a documentary and a narrative feature, how Mari had to fight to get Shannan's disappearance taken seriously and why this case remains unsolved. Now here's Kevin Flynn and Liz Garbus.
Trailer Clip (Police): What was she doing in a gated community 100 miles away from home in the middle of the night?
Trailer Clip (Mari): My daughter didn't run away. She's missing. Her last contact with anyone was 9-1-1. What happened?
Trailer Clip (Michael Pak): I'm just a driver. I wait in my car. That’s all I do.
Trailer Clip (Police): Honestly, who spends his first time looking for a missing hooker? While searching for a missing girl, one of our offices located four other bodies.
Trailer Clip (Mari): What is over there? Tell me, d*mmit, what did you find?
Trailer Clip (Police): It's not your daughter, Mrs. Gilbert.
Kevin: The film has Lost Girls. The director is Liz Garbus and she joins us now. Liz, what a great film you put together.
Liz Garbus: Thank you.
Kevin: See, I mean you're mostly known for your documentaries. So you know, what made you say, okay, now is the time to do a narrative film, something dramatic as opposed to some nonfiction?
Liz: Well, I had always been kind of open and looking for a narrative scripted project that would inspire me the way that my documentary subjects had inspired me. And when the script of Lost Girls came to me, I thought, “OK, this is the one. It's about so many issues that I care about. There's this extraordinary character at the center who's quite complex.” It kind of just spoke to the various themes and richness of character and complexity of life that I look for in my films.
Kevin: Yeah, tell me a little bit about, you know, the script as it comes in, because first of all, the source materials, Bob Kolker, great author, and then you've got the screenwriter, Michael Werwie, am I saying that right?
Liz: Michael Werwie. Yep
Kevin: Werwie? Yeah. So I think he has done this before or he's taken a nonfiction story and dramatized it. On Netflix, it was the Ted Bundy film, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile. Did he….He seems to like to have the sensibility to know how to transfer that into a dramatic scene.
Liz: Yeah. Well, look, I mean, the sort that like you said, you reference the book by Bob Kolker, Lost Girls, which is an extraordinary piece of journalism and a great nonfiction novel in the spirit of In Cold Blood and other great predecessors. And in Bob Kolker's book there are five women who went missing in the 2000s. So many of them were these kind of cold cases of these girls who went missing, which the authorities didn't seem particularly interested in investigating. What Michael Werwie did was he took the story of Shannan Gilbert, who was the last woman in that series, and made her the centerpiece and the way in which we look at the entire mystery of what happened on Gilgo Beach.
Kevin: So Shannan Gilbert was last seen running through this beach community, which seems so different than the other cases, the other crimes, and maybe just because she was spotted. But I feel like it adds a mystery on top of a mystery.
Liz: Well, as you mentioned, you know, Shannan, some of the facts in her disappearance were different than the other women. Or, as far as we know, because, you know, she went to Oak Beach, who was with a john, a client. But she had been driven there by a driver, which is typically her safety. And at a certain point during this call, everything went bad and she was screaming and frightened. Why? That is the big question: what scared Shannan Gilbert? So much so that she ran out of the house. She was hiding behind the couch, ran out of the house and went screaming down the road in this very quiet, very isolated beach community of Oak Beach, which is way out on Ocean Parkway, past Jones Beach in New York City. And, you know, she was banging on doors, asking for help. Some people ignored her. When there was an older gentleman who offered to help her, and he said he would call the police. That seemed to scare her more and she ran away. So here was clearly a young woman who was afraid of who might come from the police, who might help her and who was afraid of something that was going on in her call.
And that's kind of more information than we have on any of these victims. But we do know that by nearby where this happened, the other young women's skeletons were found and they were, you know, dumped on the side of the road almost without even a care of trying to cover them up, as if the killer just sort of thought, no one's going to bother really looking for these ladies. No one's going to listen to their families. There is a great mystery at the center of Shannan's disappearance. There had been lost evidence, there had been negligence. And, you know, some would allege a concerted cover up. And there is a great mystery there. I do believe we will know the answer one day.
Kevin: You know, we have in the end here sort of again, this this open question about the nature of these crimes. First off, do you think that the crime against Shannan Gilbert is separate from the crimes against Maureen and Melissa, Megan and Amber Lynn, as we possibly looking at two different killers, two different sets of perpetrators that they're connected by geography and not anything else?
Liz: Well, they're connected by, I think, more than geography. They're connected by their type. I mean, they were all advertising on Craigslist. They were petite. It seemed that whoever was booking the calls with them had a type. They're connected, like you said, by geography. I mean, where Shannan went missing and ultimately where her body was recovered was extremely close to where the other women were, just a few miles down Ocean Parkway. You know, we know that Shannan went running and was calling the police. So it's not that surprising that her body was found further away. It wasn't such an easy dump for the killer in the way that the other victims were that he was able to sort of keep them in the same area, just on the side of the road. He had to do something different with Shannan. So I think that there is a lot more that connects them than separates them in.
Kevin: One of the frustrating things that you bring up is that the authorities didn't always think they were all connected.
Liz: Correct. And that was something that, you know, really made Mari Gilbert very mad. The idea that somehow, Shannan, because she had a driver or because her body was found in a different place because, you know, wasn't connected, it was a way of almost minimizing it and blaming Shannan's death on Shannan.
Clip (Mari Gilbert) My daughter isn't on drugs. She didn't run away. She's missing. Now, I have been hung up on, dismissed and ignored. But one thing I won't be is silenced.
Liz: And you know that, oh, Shannan must have been on drugs. And she just got confused and ran into the middle of her marsh with all her clothes off and just died there. Sort of an implausible theory. And this marsh that, you know, that she's found and the police don't even want to look in because they thought it was so hard to get into. So how you would think a 24 year old, I don't know, 100 pound, I'm guessing her weight, she was quite slight, would get into the middle of a march that police don't even want to cross into just by accident because she's disoriented. It doesn't really make any sense.
Kevin: Right. So the Mari Gilbert character has got to carry the emotional load for this film. So casting it meant that you had to find somebody who had some chops. Tell us about that process.
Liz: You know, I got to know her a little bit. You know, while I was making this film before she died, a she was a very complex, very smart, very determined woman, tremendous amount of nervous anxiety that propelled her with a really, you know, tough life story. And casting that role was key. It is really Mari's film in many ways. And when I first met and sat down with Amy Ryan, I think she is, you know, one of the greatest actresses working in America. I think she's a national treasure.
She probably came across my radar in The Wire, was when I first started kind of clocking her as an actress. Her work in Gone Baby Gone, which earned her an Oscar nomination was incredible. There was this laugh that she does, which is so guttural and it like, come, it's not Amy Ryan. It comes from some other other place.
Kevin: Yeah
Liz: She's just so talented. And then, you know, all the kids know her and love her from her role as Holly on The Office. So in any case, you know, Amy was a dream come true. And she's so brave. There was no place she wouldn't go. And she's also so supportive of her fellow actors. She's just the best.
Kevin: Was it intimidating directing an Academy Award nominee?
Liz: Well, Amy is the most down to earth person. And so I would say she brought no attitude. She wanted to get to work. We shared so much research together, looked at, you know, documentaries in which Mari had appeared, looked at other inspirational groups of women like Mothers of the Movement, mothers who had lost their children to gun violence, and the kind of impact that those families and women had coming together after their losses, which spoke a lot to what Mari's character went through.
So it wasn't intimidating because Amy is not intimidating. But, you know, yeah, I should have been intimidated by her because she's such a baller. But in fact, she was just.. she's just a hard worker. No nonsense, incredible actor.
Kevin Yeah. She she gives a great performance. And you should obviously take some of the credit for getting her there. So as far as you know, who did you meet? You among the families and didn't like those experiences really inform the way we see them on the screen. Quirks or personality traits or or whatever else.
Liz Yeah, I did get to spend some time with Mari Gilbert before she passed and that was so useful. First of all, we kind of hit it off and chatted and I got to get a sense of her energy and mannerisms. She also told me a couple of things that I kept dear. One thing she said to me was, “you know, I don't care if you have me smoking in the movie. I do smoke. But I know I would never smoke when I went to a press conference.” And it was such a telling instruction from her because it was sort of like, “yeah, I know how people perceive me. They perceive people who smoke as working class and they're not going to take me seriously. Therefore, I understand the codes, the game that I need to play in order to have my voice taken seriously.”
Kevin: Like the way she would dress intentionally to be taken seriously with the authorities.
Liz Exactly. That in some sense that she understood the prejudices against her. She understood that the reason that people weren't looking was because they wrote them off, as you know, a sort of citizen, you know, society, citizens, that didn't matter. And she needed to combat that using the codes that they understood. And it was just, you know, little details like that in meeting her that enabled me to have some details in the script, like the suit you mentioned or like smoking only behind closed doors. That felt very true to who she was and the way she was approaching this battle.
Kevin: How did you hear about how she died?
Liz That was the craziest thing. I was actually it was a summer of 2016 and I was just having dinner with friends. We were actually outside on a picnic table and a text came up from Bob saying he had heard that Mari had been killed. And it was just the craziest thing because, you know, she was the one searching for justice, searching for the killer. So of course, my first thought is like, could the same person who killed Shannan and the other women have come and killed Mari? How brazen. That would have been strange. But then to hear that actually it was Mari's own daughter, who had been suffering as schizophrenia, was more tragic. Mental illness had plagued Mari's family. It was, it led to some of the divides in her raising of Shannan, where she had to basically send Shannan away. She couldn't raise her herself because she couldn't get the mental health care she needed. And then to be killed by your surviving daughter, who was... you know, Mari was helping, who Mari was taking care of, who she was checking in on her to try to see if she was taking her meds every day. It was the cruelest irony that, you know, once Mari was able to take care of someone and get her the help that she needed, that that ended up ending her own life.
Kevin: Did it change the way you signpost the family dynamic in the film?
Liz: Sure. Well, I think that, you know, Sarra Gilbert, who is now in prison for killing her mother, you know, she was not displaying symptoms of schizophrenia at the time that, you know, that Mari was searching for Shannan and that Sherre was searching for Shannan. You know, as you may know, schizophrenia sort of a later onset disease. But in talking to some psychologists and doing some research, you know, we explored some of the kind of precursors that might have been occurring at that age. Although, you know, she really wasn't displaying symptoms. But it was important to kind of, you know, get a sense at this character, that there was something else on Mari's plate that she was, she was needing to deal with.
Kevin Talk to me about Gabriel Byrne's, his character. I'm trying to wonder out whether we're supposed to like him or not.
Liz Well, I think that's a good question. You know, the truth about this case is that Richard Dormer, who is played by Gabriel Byrne, he oversaw this case. Dormer was a immigrant from Ireland. He made his way up the ranks and was promoted to be Commissioner of police in Suffolk County. And, you know, had gone to Harvard. You know, he was kind of living the immigrant's dream. And then during his tenure at Suffolk County, there were many, many scandals. Suffolk County has a history, as many New Yorkers know, of being a sort of corruption-ridden department. And so Dormer’s, you know, his reputation was quite tarnished. And I think he was a man who had very big dreams and goals that were ultimately kind of brought down by the realities of policing in Suffolk County. So I think that by the time this case finds him and by the time we find him (and this is something that, you know, Gabriel and I talked a lot about when thinking about his character) is he's a man who has good instincts, has empathy, wants to do the right thing. But is so on his way out, the power had shifted. He was a lame duck that he, you know, sort of putting going through the motions felt like enough at first until he really became moved, I think, by the outpouring of the, you know, the women's energy to really start looking into this case.
His tenure was, you know, ended soon after. And as you know, we haven't caught the killer. So, like him or hate him, you know, I think that the police work on this case was ineffective. Perhaps Dormer wanted it to be better, but he didn't get the guy.
Kevin: So you might take away is that when his Irish accent slipped in, there wasn't an accident.
Liz: That was right. That was, that was not something we had to work too hard on.
Clip (Dormer) Mrs. Gilbert, there's a lot we don't know, which is why it's really important that you don't talk to the media. Let us handle that. One wrong word and they'll make a meal out of it. It's in your best interest.
Kevin: You shot all over Long Island, it looks like. Do you think that that contributes to the look of the film?
Liz: I hope so. I mean, yeah, we definitely wanted it to be that authentic Long Island brush and thorny nettles. And I don't know if I had talked to you a year ago, I would have remembered the name of all the, the greenery that was very specific to the area. But now, you know, now it escapes me. But you see it and you feel it in the movie. And you know, it's not the Hamptons. I mean, I think when sometimes people think about a beach community in Long Island, they think, “oh, what? You know, this is the Hamptons.” It's not these are middle class retiree communities. A lot of retired firefighters, construction workers. These are not lavish homes.
Kevin” As a documentarian in your bones, how did it feel to take dramatic liberties for the first time?
Liz: Yeah, it was interesting. It was kind of like thinking about other ‘inspired by true stories’ films that I've loved and sort of studying them and feeling like, what is the latitude here? I mean, I think that what's important, and it's the same in docs, is to find the core truth and the core themes that you believe need to be communicated. And of course, we have, do not have all the information of what went on behind closed doors in these families as they struggled with this loss, and on this journey. But I think from the available reporting, the incredible reporting that Bob Kolker had done, we had a sense of the worlds and of the conflicts and of the issues that these families were facing. And we were able to build a meaning, you know, a truthful world. We did have the opportunity to show the families the film just recently. And while, of course, they acknowledge, “oh, that didn't happen exactly on that same day or,” I didn't hear anything about us kind of getting the core of their journeys wrong. So I felt like we were able to find that balance.
Kevin: How did you balance of the idea of you need to give the audience some of who the suspects are without really pointing a finger? First, well, did your documentarian sense kind of come in as far as here's the line where it's still informative, but it's not too far? Do you think you were like, singularly prepared because of your background for that?
Liz: Well, that was definitely one of the great challenges of the film was we don't know for sure who did it. We know some of the things that went wrong in terms of investigating who did it. We know that Mari Gilbert and, you know, had some very strong ideas about who was behind it. You know, the goal was to suggest all of those things, to see the things that went wrong, to get into Mari's point of view about who she felt could have been a suspect, but also giving that suspect, you know, the deniability that they deserve. So it was a very fine balance to strike. And it was, it was one of the great challenges of making the film.
Kevin: And you feel like a group of characters like a team, and when you write them into in fiction, everybody's got to be different, right? And so the family, the victims all come together. I'm thinking of that scene in the restaurant where they're all sort of meeting for the first time. Was there enough differences between them in real life that you didn't have to, like, do too much or just to dramatically amplify it so everybody seems to be their own person?
Liz: You know, a lot of those women had been interviewed for TV, so we were able to really look at them, listen to them, listen to their accents, listen to their... you know, are they people who cry when they talk about their loved ones? Are they people who get angry or stony? You know, we were able to study them. And so they were all quite different. And the wonderful actresses who played them, I think, embraced those differences and made them unique and interesting characters. It was such a wonderful ensemble of women actors.
Kevin: What was your favorite scene?
Liz: I think, well, they're all my babies. But I do love the scene at night in the hotel room where all the women come together and they're making signs preparing for their vigil. And an argument breaks out between Kim, who's played by Lola Kirke and Mari Gilbert, who’s played by Amy Ryan, about Shannan's status. You know, Mari went for a long time believing that, you know, they would still find Shannan. And in this scene, Mari is confronted with some hard truths.
Clip (Mari) She's probably forced to get stoned, drunk, high.
Clip (Kim) Not forced. I'm just saying, I've lived it.
Clip (Mari) Well, I'm just saying, you're not Shannan.
Clip (Kim) Mari, I feel for you. I feel for myself or any of the other ladies here because she's still missing and no one's better than not knowing.
Liz: And I thought the dynamic between these two actors was fantastic. And I was very happy with the production design of the, of the motel room and the kind of.. we had the whole cast of women in there together. I enjoyed that, editing that scene and shooting it and with Ana Reeder and Lola Kirke and Miriam Shor, I'm sure. I mean, we just had a whole bunch of terrific female actors and of course, Thomasina McKenzie and Oona Lawrence, who play Mari's daughters. It’s just such a great cast.
Kevin: You know, part of this story is we don't have really a satisfying ending. We don't know who the killer is, though we're left with a lot of great suspects. It can be difficult for an audience sometimes to walk away not knowing. How do you present a film in a way that is truthful to that reality, but it's still satisfying to the audience?
Liz: Well, look, I mean, real life is not filled with satisfying endings. And to the extent that movies reflect real life, this one certainly does. And which we tell our viewers upfront, this is an unsolved case, you know. And so you're walking in knowing that that's the case. And hopefully viewers will enjoy after seeing the film, you know, getting online, seeing what they can learn. You know, there's a lot of information out there. Ultimately, the film is a drama about a mother and a missing daughter and her surviving daughters. That's the heart of this film. So I think that the narrative arc hangs itself on that family drama as opposed to the whodunnit.
Kevin: Is there a social justice message in this film?
Liz: There's definitely a social justice message. I mean, you see that, you know, through Mari's struggle and all the other families had the same thing, the dismissiveness of the authorities when a young woman who happened to make a living as a sex worker went missing. That is, you know, sort of a misogynist and classist approach to policing. You know, every body, every missing person should have the same value. And we clearly see that that was not the case in this instance, that these were folks, people who were devalued, their losses, their families didn't have a voice. And at the end of the day, it's about believing women. I mean, these women were right. Their daughters didn't just go off on benders. These women were murdered. And how if the police had taken the early disappearances more seriously, we would have had lives saved. So I definitely think there's a social justice message there.
Kevin: Well this was a glorious film. It’s called Lost Girls and the director is Liz Garbus. Liz, thank you so much for this inside look of your film.
Erica: And that's it for this week's episode. Thank you to Kevin Flynn and Liz Garbus. If you want to hear Kevin and Rebecca's review of Lost Girls, head over to their podcast Crime Writers On.... And if you liked what you heard. Make sure to subscribe. Right. And review this show. You can find it on Apple Podcast, Stitcher, Google Play, Spotify and wherever else, you get your podcasts. And stay tuned for our next episode: Tiger King Murder, Mayhem and Madness. You Can't Make This Up is a production of Pineapple Street Studios and Netflix. I'm Erica Quiroz. Happy streaming.