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Behind the Scenes with Andrew Jarecki · Revisionist History

0:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hello, Hello revisionist history listeners. As many of you
0:23
Speaker 1: will know, we did a seven part series last fall
0:26
Speaker 1: called The Alabama Murders, the story of the death of
0:28
Speaker 1: a preacher's wife in the shoals in northwestern Alabama thirty
0:32
Speaker 1: five years ago and the tragic reverberations of that case.
0:35
Speaker 1: I honestly think it's one of the best things we've
0:38
Speaker 1: ever done on revisionist history. And almost the exact time
0:41
Speaker 1: that our series dropped, HBO aired a brilliant documentary called
0:46
Speaker 1: The Alabama Solution. The Revisionist History series was about the
0:51
Speaker 1: death penalty in Alabama. The Alabama Solution was about the
0:54
Speaker 1: prison system in Alabama.
0:57
Speaker 2: We had record numbers of people leaving out of here
1:00
Speaker 2: body bays. They don't want to put a biet what's
1:02
Speaker 2: really going on?
1:03
Speaker 3: Only at that How can a journalists go into a
1:05
Speaker 3: war zone but can't go into a prison In the
1:08
Speaker 3: United States?
1:10
Speaker 1: The state is settling one.
1:11
Speaker 4: Lawsuit after another. There's no consequences for their actions.
1:15
Speaker 3: There's an argument that there is some systemic problem within
1:18
Speaker 3: all of our facilities, and I, whileheartedly.
1:20
Speaker 1: Disagree with that, the two projects fit together almost perfectly.
1:28
Speaker 1: So I called up the director of the documentary Andrew
1:31
Speaker 1: Jireki and said, do you want to sit down for
1:34
Speaker 1: a conversation and he said yes, and so we got
1:37
Speaker 1: together at on AirFest in Brooklyn for a long talk
1:40
Speaker 1: about Alabama and filmmaking and all kinds of other things.
1:44
Speaker 1: If the name Andrew Jireki seems familiar to you, it's
1:47
Speaker 1: because he's one of the pre eminent documentarians of our time.
1:51
Speaker 1: He did Capturing the Freedman's The Jinks. A brilliant, brilliant guy.
1:56
Speaker 1: Here's a conversation, Andrew, Welcome to Brooklyn. Thank you, thank
2:02
Speaker 1: you for doing this. The reason you and I are
2:07
Speaker 1: on stage is that in the fall, we released a
2:13
Speaker 1: seven part series on Revision's History called The Alabama Murders,
2:16
Speaker 1: and almost at exactly the same time, you released a
2:19
Speaker 1: documentary on HBO called The Alabama Solution. Our series was
2:23
Speaker 1: about a capital punishment case. Your series was about the
2:27
Speaker 1: Alabama prison system. And it was this marvelous instance of
2:31
Speaker 1: two works that overlapped but didn't overlap. And I texted
2:36
Speaker 1: you and said we should have a conversation, and here
2:39
Speaker 1: we are, and I found your documentary extraordinary, and I
2:45
Speaker 1: was just telling you backstage, I'm not someone who listens
2:48
Speaker 1: to watches love documentaries. But I have seen all of yours,
2:53
Speaker 1: Captain of Freedman's JINX. This is the best in my mind.
2:57
Speaker 4: Thank you.
2:57
Speaker 1: And I was curious, I would like you to start
3:00
Speaker 1: tell us how you came to do a story about
3:03
Speaker 1: the Alabama prison system, because I suspect it's not a
3:06
Speaker 1: straight line. You didn't sit down one day and say
3:07
Speaker 1: I want to do a story about the Alabama the system.
3:10
Speaker 4: Yeah. I think nothing's a straight line, certainly for me.
3:15
Speaker 4: And I was noticing also your podcast around that same
3:20
Speaker 4: time and then and I was sort of I was
3:23
Speaker 4: kind of holding back because I thought, is this going
3:25
Speaker 4: to influence what we're working on? You know, just because
3:29
Speaker 4: it's hard, like when you're making one thing and then
3:31
Speaker 4: somebody else does something else, and especially if it's a
3:33
Speaker 4: smart person, You're like, what if they do this better?
3:36
Speaker 4: Or what do they have an idea? And then I'm
3:38
Speaker 4: drawn to that idea or something like that. But I
3:40
Speaker 4: did get to listen to it, and it's it's really
3:43
Speaker 4: superb and and and and extremely familiar to me. So
3:47
Speaker 4: I you know, when I was making Capturing the Freedman's
3:51
Speaker 4: I had reason to go into Dana Mora correctional facility
3:55
Speaker 4: in Upstate New York, and I found that the visit
3:58
Speaker 4: was so punishing, just as a visitor, everything about it
4:03
Speaker 4: was so difficult and brutal. And then when I saw
4:10
Speaker 4: the waiting room and I saw how people were being
4:12
Speaker 4: treated there, I just thought, I think I need to
4:15
Speaker 4: get deeper into this prison. And I wasn't able to
4:17
Speaker 4: do that. But then over the years, I just visited
4:19
Speaker 4: a lot of prisons and I was really amazed at
4:23
Speaker 4: how poorly we do this. But I never really understood
4:28
Speaker 4: the Alabama system because it's so secretive. I mean, I
4:31
Speaker 4: would say all prisons in the US are sort of
4:33
Speaker 4: treated like black sites. And you know, you drive down
4:37
Speaker 4: the highway and you see a little metal sign that
4:39
Speaker 4: says XYZ correctional facility in Upstate New York or someplace,
4:44
Speaker 4: and you think, well, I probably don't need to drive
4:47
Speaker 4: down there. If anything really bad's happening, you know, somebody
4:51
Speaker 4: will tell me about it. But that presupposes that you
4:55
Speaker 4: will be able to read it in a paper, you
4:57
Speaker 4: will be able to see a television show that explains it.
5:00
Speaker 4: And that's not the case because the press is really
5:03
Speaker 4: not allowed to visit prisons.
5:04
Speaker 1: There's a great line from one of your one of
5:08
Speaker 1: your character is in your documentary, one of the prisoners
5:10
Speaker 1: who says, isn't it crazy that if you're a journalist,
5:14
Speaker 1: you can go to a war zone, but you can't
5:16
Speaker 1: go to a prison in your own country?
5:18
Speaker 4: Yeah? Yeah, yeah, you can visit a war zone and
5:22
Speaker 4: you can't go to a prison in the United States
5:24
Speaker 4: of America. And so I was always curious and then
5:31
Speaker 4: didn't think I would ever get a chance to do it.
5:34
Speaker 4: And then oddly, my daughter, who was like fourteen, she
5:37
Speaker 4: went to Dalton, and at Dalton they had a really
5:39
Speaker 4: good speaker program and they had brought in a guy
5:42
Speaker 4: named Anthony ray Hinton who had been wrongfully convicted in
5:46
Speaker 4: Alabama and had been in this prison system for like
5:49
Speaker 4: thirty years. And she said, you know, I think you
5:52
Speaker 4: should read this book with me because I think, you know,
5:55
Speaker 4: you're interested in this stuff. And then we read the
5:57
Speaker 4: book together and we just sort of spontaneously decided to
6:00
Speaker 4: take a road trip to Montgomery. We went to Montgomery,
6:03
Speaker 4: we didn't know anybody. We almost accidentally met a man
6:08
Speaker 4: who is almost eighty years old who was the first
6:10
Speaker 4: black prison chaplain in the state of Alabama, appointed by
6:13
Speaker 4: George Wallace. I think he was like George Wallace's one
6:18
Speaker 4: black friend, because he had to have one. And so
6:25
Speaker 4: I asked him to have dinner with us. So we
6:27
Speaker 4: sat and had dinner, and I started asking him questions
6:30
Speaker 4: and he was kind of reluctant to tell me too much.
6:33
Speaker 4: But I could also tell he had a lot of
6:35
Speaker 4: pain because he goes into these prisons all the time,
6:37
Speaker 4: so he knows what's happening in the prisons. But he's
6:40
Speaker 4: afraid that if he tells me too much, then I'm
6:43
Speaker 4: going to get too nosy and then maybe he's going
6:46
Speaker 4: to get kicked out of the prisons because we start
6:48
Speaker 4: so but I could tell he didn't want to let
6:50
Speaker 4: me leave either, and so we had this little standoff
6:55
Speaker 4: for a while where I was asking questions and he said, well,
6:58
Speaker 4: why don't you just, you know, come back and you
7:00
Speaker 4: can see for yourself. And I said, well, I'm a filmmaker.
7:02
Speaker 4: They're not going to let me into the Alabama prison system.
7:05
Speaker 4: And he said, well, just come in without a camera,
7:07
Speaker 4: just come in and volunteer and we'll give about hygiene
7:09
Speaker 4: packages and food. And so I said, or maybe I'm
7:14
Speaker 4: going to do that. Well, if I do come back,
7:17
Speaker 4: what will I see? And I could tell that he
7:19
Speaker 4: was sort of thinking about whether he wanted to say
7:22
Speaker 4: this thing that he was going to say to me,
7:23
Speaker 4: because he knew if he said the right thing, I
7:25
Speaker 4: would come back, and if he didn't, maybe I wouldn't.
7:27
Speaker 4: And he said, if you come back, I'll take you
7:32
Speaker 4: on the death row at Holman Prison and you'll see
7:35
Speaker 4: it's a slave ship. And that was a very important
7:42
Speaker 4: kind of moment for me. That was seven years ago,
7:44
Speaker 4: and I think it's the reason that line was the
7:46
Speaker 4: reason I went back, because I just thought, well, whatever
7:49
Speaker 4: this is, I have to see. And then I went back.
7:52
Speaker 4: And you'll see in the film we sort of get
7:55
Speaker 4: access until we don't. But in the course of going
7:58
Speaker 4: into Easterling Prison, we start hearing from these men who
8:01
Speaker 4: are saying, look this visit you're making here, I'm not
8:05
Speaker 4: supposed to be talking to you, but this is a
8:07
Speaker 4: curated visit, rightwing. You just what they want you to see.
8:11
Speaker 4: But see that building over there, that's where they do
8:14
Speaker 4: solitary confinement. There are men that men that have been
8:16
Speaker 4: in there for five years or seven years at a time,
8:19
Speaker 4: seeing nobody, and see that building over there is the
8:22
Speaker 4: wide dorm. That's the behavior modification dorm, and somebody was
8:26
Speaker 4: just killed there by guard and we just started to
8:30
Speaker 4: understand how bad it was. And then last thing that
8:33
Speaker 4: happened is, you know, we get kicked out, and then
8:36
Speaker 4: we thought we didn't know how we're going to tell
8:38
Speaker 4: the story until we discovered that there was this network
8:40
Speaker 4: of people inside who had contraband cell phones and had
8:45
Speaker 4: access to a charger, were borrowing a charger from a
8:49
Speaker 4: friend and would have to put the cell phones up
8:50
Speaker 4: when the guards came. But it was our only window
8:53
Speaker 4: into this very secretive system.
8:55
Speaker 1: Had anyone I want to pause on that for a
8:57
Speaker 1: moment because one of the many remarkable the most remarkable
9:02
Speaker 1: thing about the documentary from a technical standpoint, is that
9:05
Speaker 1: it is largely shot in FaceTime right or in video calls.
9:11
Speaker 1: I don't know what percentage of the movie ends up being.
9:15
Speaker 1: Thirty percent of the movie is just the is the
9:18
Speaker 1: prisoners facetiming with you and you had this? Has this
9:22
Speaker 1: been done before?
9:25
Speaker 4: I mean I don't know of it having been done before,
9:27
Speaker 4: because it's such an unusual situation, not only because the
9:33
Speaker 4: men had access to cell phones, but because they had
9:36
Speaker 4: collected all this material over years that showed what was
9:41
Speaker 4: really happening in the system and showed episodes of you know,
9:46
Speaker 4: really shocking episodes. I mean, when I saw it, I thought,
9:50
Speaker 4: you know, this is like watching Titkeke at follies. You're
9:53
Speaker 4: looking at a whole segment of the population that's just
9:57
Speaker 4: been abandoned, and not just abandoned, but also harmed. And
10:02
Speaker 4: then we discovered that there were these men inside who
10:04
Speaker 4: were leaders, who were really civil rights leaders, who had
10:07
Speaker 4: been managing like a non vibe protest movement for years,
10:11
Speaker 4: even before we got there, and so we had the
10:14
Speaker 4: benefit of you know, it was like talking to Mandela
10:17
Speaker 4: on Robin Island on a cell phone.
10:19
Speaker 1: So I would to pause on this because I think
10:21
Speaker 1: it's a really important point. And I was naive enough
10:25
Speaker 1: about documentaries that it hadn't occurred to me before. But
10:29
Speaker 1: with the notion that you were the narrative engine of
10:33
Speaker 1: this documentary is the videos being recorded by the prisoners
10:38
Speaker 1: themselves in real time and being sent to you, And
10:42
Speaker 1: with that you overcome what has always been the biggest
10:45
Speaker 1: problem with documentaries, right which is you're telling a story
10:49
Speaker 1: after the fact, and any almost always in documentaries, any
10:53
Speaker 1: video that you're capturing, unless you get some archival talking
10:57
Speaker 1: to people as they reconstruct something that happened far away
11:00
Speaker 1: and long ago. This all of that, our artificiality is
11:05
Speaker 1: gone from Alabama solution. You're right there to prison with
11:09
Speaker 1: these guys.
11:11
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, it was, it was. It was an
11:15
Speaker 4: enormously eye opening and I would say violent experience to
11:21
Speaker 4: be drawn into that and to understand that the only
11:27
Speaker 4: way that these people can get away with treating human
11:29
Speaker 4: beings this way is if it's in darkness. You know,
11:32
Speaker 4: you can't you can't do this if the public knows
11:34
Speaker 4: that you're doing it, even even a jaded public in
11:38
Speaker 4: Alabama who you know, as you know very well, Alabama
11:43
Speaker 4: is sort of inured to certain kinds of indignities, and
11:48
Speaker 4: you know, they're very propagandized group. You know, it's sort
11:53
Speaker 4: of very tough on crime, and the politicians really like
11:56
Speaker 4: weaponize the crime victims to just have this constant narrative.
12:00
Speaker 4: It's like watching cops twenty four hours a day. It's
12:03
Speaker 4: just an advertisement for poor people are crazy and dangerous
12:08
Speaker 4: and so being able to to eliminate that layer. You
12:15
Speaker 4: know that propaganda layer. You know, there's a great line.
12:18
Speaker 4: I mean, one of the leaders in the film, Robert Earl,
12:22
Speaker 4: counsel who goes by Kinetic Justice, says, you know, I'm
12:26
Speaker 4: in prison. I'm supposed to lie, I'm supposed to exaggerate.
12:29
Speaker 4: I'm supposed to make up excuses. So that narrative is
12:34
Speaker 4: so strong that unless we can tell the story directly
12:38
Speaker 4: to people, they're just going to assume that it's not true.
12:42
Speaker 4: And you know, and I felt like going into the
12:44
Speaker 4: prisons there, I was far more you know, they would say, oh, well,
12:48
Speaker 4: don't talk to the men because they're very dangerous and
12:50
Speaker 4: they're going to tell you lies and so on. And
12:53
Speaker 4: I felt so much more comfortable talking to the men
12:55
Speaker 4: who are incarcerated than the guards.
12:57
Speaker 1: Well, how long did it take for you to realize
13:00
Speaker 1: that the movie was going to be constructed out of
13:02
Speaker 1: these based on videos and prisoners we're sharing with you.
13:07
Speaker 4: Well, you know, my biggest anxiety was that we were
13:09
Speaker 4: not going to be able to get enough material talking
13:13
Speaker 4: to the men. Obviously this archival material where you can
13:16
Speaker 4: see really telling things that happen, there was an embarrassment
13:23
Speaker 4: of traumatic events. I mean, it was just that was
13:27
Speaker 4: like terror bytes worth of that material, but being able
13:33
Speaker 4: to talk directly to the men. Once you do it,
13:37
Speaker 4: once you're talking to them for five minutes, you think
13:39
Speaker 4: this is the only thing I want to watch. I
13:41
Speaker 4: don't want to hear anybody. I don't want to hear experts.
13:44
Speaker 4: You know, we had this sex do Or Pontier was
13:46
Speaker 4: my partner in making the jinks. Who's sitting here right there.
13:51
Speaker 4: He and I talked a lot about experts when we
13:54
Speaker 4: were making the jinks. You know, we had access to
13:57
Speaker 4: the people that were in Bob Durst's life, and we
13:59
Speaker 4: had access to people that were present during crimes and
14:03
Speaker 4: helpful in crimes and so on, and so it just
14:06
Speaker 4: was every time we'd interview somebody would say, well let
14:08
Speaker 4: me tell you how this works or something. It just
14:10
Speaker 4: wasn't very effective, and in this case it was. It
14:14
Speaker 4: would have been absurd, you know, there was we wanted
14:17
Speaker 4: to talk to some of the system actors. So we
14:19
Speaker 4: ended up getting access to like the Attorney General, who's
14:22
Speaker 4: an incredible cinematic villain, and.
14:26
Speaker 1: It is I want to talk to him in more detail.
14:28
Speaker 1: I want to come back to him. Just pause on that,
14:29
Speaker 1: because anyway, keep going.
14:32
Speaker 4: And by the way, I particularly enjoyed and my mind
14:36
Speaker 4: was a little bit blown by hearing Steve Marshall, the
14:38
Speaker 4: Attorney General in your podcast, you know, speaking as the
14:45
Speaker 4: convincingly right as the authority who's explaining how you know,
14:49
Speaker 4: he's there for crime victims and they've waited thirty five
14:52
Speaker 4: years for justice and all that stuff. And this is
14:54
Speaker 4: a guy who's presiding over death camps in an American state.
15:00
Speaker 4: But he was something, he was somebody that had to
15:02
Speaker 4: be there.
15:02
Speaker 1: So to to pause for a moment, the movie is about.
15:07
Speaker 1: It's a in general, an investigation of the extraordinary brutality
15:11
Speaker 1: inside the Alabama prison system, and in particular about the
15:16
Speaker 1: murder of a young man at the hands of a guard,
15:18
Speaker 1: of a sadistic guard, and then the cover up that
15:22
Speaker 1: ensues that you're able to uncover by virtue of these
15:27
Speaker 1: calls with the with the prisoners inside the same institution.
15:31
Speaker 1: So it's simultaneously a kind of Upton Sinclair like expose
15:37
Speaker 1: of a institution and also a murder mystery and im
15:42
Speaker 1: and the murder mystery which I don't know whether we
15:45
Speaker 1: should give away the one of the key kind of
15:48
Speaker 1: moments in the in the movie, but you get it.
15:52
Speaker 1: Takes a surprising and horrifying twist. As you're in the
15:57
Speaker 1: middle of it. You think you think you're investigating one
16:00
Speaker 1: murder and then you end up investigating too And I'm
16:04
Speaker 1: how how far into the film was the twist?
16:10
Speaker 4: Well, we didn't know what we were making. We never
16:12
Speaker 4: know what we're making, right, And sometimes today I think
16:16
Speaker 4: in documentary world, you know, somebody, some streamer or something
16:20
Speaker 4: will send you a like a an email saying like,
16:24
Speaker 4: you know, you need to make this film, and I
16:27
Speaker 4: almost never open them, but when I do open them,
16:30
Speaker 4: there's always like a deck, and the deck literally will
16:33
Speaker 4: say to you, you know, here are the main characters,
16:35
Speaker 4: and we've already made agreements with them, and this is
16:38
Speaker 4: what they're going to say, and then you know, here's
16:40
Speaker 4: what your plotline is going to be. And I just think,
16:45
Speaker 4: like that should be an AI film, like you already
16:48
Speaker 4: know what it is and you should just say I
16:50
Speaker 4: that thing and some people watch it. But the whole
16:53
Speaker 4: idea is the journey, right, The whole idea is that
16:56
Speaker 4: we don't know what's going to happen. You know, when
16:58
Speaker 4: I was making Capturing the Freedman's I thought I was
17:00
Speaker 4: making a film about professional children's birthday party entertainers in
17:04
Speaker 4: New York City, and then you know, it turned out
17:07
Speaker 4: to be something that was radically different from that because
17:10
Speaker 4: you discover something along the way. When we were making
17:13
Speaker 4: the jinks, we knew that Bob Durst wanted to talk,
17:18
Speaker 4: and that was interesting enough for me and Zach. What
17:22
Speaker 4: we found, the fact that he wanted to talk enough
17:26
Speaker 4: that it would lead us down enough pass that we
17:28
Speaker 4: would discover evidence and he would get arrested for murder
17:32
Speaker 4: the day before the last episode, was totally unpredictable. And
17:36
Speaker 4: that's why you do it, right. I mean, so in
17:40
Speaker 4: this case, we had just gotten a text message from
17:43
Speaker 4: one of the men inside and the I guess the
17:47
Speaker 4: only precursor of that was that we had been looking
17:49
Speaker 4: at all of the pro sae lawsuits filed by prisoners,
17:54
Speaker 4: you know, lawsuits that are filed without the benefit of
17:57
Speaker 4: a lawyer. But these guys are kind of incredible lawyers.
18:00
Speaker 4: Some of them are really extraordinary, sort of jailhouse lawyers,
18:04
Speaker 4: but very very sophisticated. And we had been looking at
18:10
Speaker 4: all these lawsuits because we wanted to see who are
18:13
Speaker 4: the guards that are coming up repeatedly in these lawsuits
18:17
Speaker 4: and we had found this one guard named Rod Gadson,
18:21
Speaker 4: Rodrick Gadson, and he was named in I think twenty
18:24
Speaker 4: four different brutality suits. And you have to understand, like
18:28
Speaker 4: bringing one of these lawsuits in prison is it's the
18:34
Speaker 4: most optimistic and kind of absurdest thing because there's no
18:41
Speaker 4: money in it. They never get an award. Their conversations
18:44
Speaker 4: that happened like, Okay, well this guy got his finger
18:47
Speaker 4: intentionally cut off in his cell door by a guard.
18:50
Speaker 4: But how much is a finger really worth? You know,
18:52
Speaker 4: maybe it's five thousand dollars. It's very hard to get
18:55
Speaker 4: a lawyer to cover that. We have lawyers said that
18:57
Speaker 4: would say to us along the way, like find me
18:59
Speaker 4: a murder that might be worth it, that might be
19:02
Speaker 4: worth my getting into it. So in this particular case,
19:05
Speaker 4: rod Gadson's name had kept coming up. And then one
19:08
Speaker 4: day Mel texts Charlotte, my co director, and says, hey,
19:17
Speaker 4: we understand somebody got beaten very badly at Donaldson Prison
19:21
Speaker 4: and he's currently at UAB Hospital. So he was moved
19:24
Speaker 4: off the campus to the hospital. So Charlotte, I had
19:26
Speaker 4: just got in a car in Birmingham and we just
19:30
Speaker 4: drove over to the hospital. We walked in and I
19:33
Speaker 4: like took my iPhone and I stuck in my pocket
19:35
Speaker 4: and moved it around a little bit, and they said, oh,
19:38
Speaker 4: you got to go up to the fourth floor, and
19:40
Speaker 4: we went up there, and by the time we got there,
19:41
Speaker 4: we found that this young man, Stephen Davis, had died.
19:44
Speaker 4: So he had been and we didn't know how that
19:47
Speaker 4: had happened, other than that he had been beaten. And
19:50
Speaker 4: then we went to find his mother because often the
19:54
Speaker 4: prison doesn't tell the family members if somebody has been
19:58
Speaker 4: killed in prison, especially if it's done by a guard,
20:01
Speaker 4: if the guard is responsible, they immediately scramble all the
20:04
Speaker 4: witnesses and they will say, well, let's not tell his
20:06
Speaker 4: mother for two weeks. We'll move the these guys around them,
20:09
Speaker 4: we'll give this guy an incentive to go to a
20:11
Speaker 4: different facility, and we'll help this other guy, because they
20:14
Speaker 4: just don't want the evidence. And in that case, we
20:17
Speaker 4: went to Sandy Ray's house. She had just been with
20:20
Speaker 4: her son hours before that and had taken Mo off
20:22
Speaker 4: life support, and she said, you guys are making a
20:28
Speaker 4: film and we said yeah. She said, well, I want
20:30
Speaker 4: to help you do it. I don't want this to
20:33
Speaker 4: happen to any other mother, and so right now they're
20:36
Speaker 4: lying to me. I know, the prison's calling me right now,
20:39
Speaker 4: and they're lying to me about what happens. So show
20:41
Speaker 4: me how to record my phone calls. So we got
20:44
Speaker 4: on her phone and we showed her how to record
20:45
Speaker 4: a phone call. And then she said, by the way,
20:47
Speaker 4: there are no motels here because Uniontown only has four
20:51
Speaker 4: hundred people in it, so you know, I have this
20:54
Speaker 4: spare room. So Charlotte just like got her duffel back
20:57
Speaker 4: and just moved in for a couple of weeks into
20:59
Speaker 4: Sandy's house, which is.
21:00
Speaker 1: Why, yeah, waiting for the call to come.
21:02
Speaker 4: Not just that call, but it's just watching how Sandy
21:06
Speaker 4: was discovering what had really happened to her son and
21:08
Speaker 4: eventually getting a call from somebody inside the prison who
21:12
Speaker 4: was a whistleblower who said doesn't even want to identify himself,
21:15
Speaker 4: but says, you know this is not this was not
21:18
Speaker 4: a I wonder described it well.
21:20
Speaker 1: Watching My first kind of like technical question was you
21:25
Speaker 1: had you're there in the room on camera with the
21:29
Speaker 1: mom when she gets the call from the state or
21:32
Speaker 1: the Department of Corrections. I was like, how on earth
21:34
Speaker 1: were they there in the room, like I didn't understand. Technically,
21:36
Speaker 1: now I know how it happened. They were victims of
21:38
Speaker 1: their own because it's they built a delay in order
21:41
Speaker 1: to build a cover up, and in so doing they
21:43
Speaker 1: destroyed their cover up weirdly.
21:46
Speaker 4: Well yeah, and by the way, in terms of being
21:48
Speaker 4: shot with your own gun, the contraband cell phones that
21:52
Speaker 4: are in the prison are all sold to the inmates
21:57
Speaker 4: in the prison by the guards. Right. As a matter
22:00
Speaker 4: of fact, when I started to discover how many, just
22:04
Speaker 4: how much drugs were coming into the prison or this
22:10
Speaker 4: enormous cash of cell phones that were coming to the prison,
22:13
Speaker 4: I was talking to one of the prisoners and I
22:15
Speaker 4: said to him, you know, where's all this coming from?
22:17
Speaker 4: And he looked at me like I was an idiot,
22:19
Speaker 4: and he said, you know, we don't leave, right. So
22:24
Speaker 4: clearly the people that come and go every day are
22:26
Speaker 4: the ones that are going out and getting drugs and
22:28
Speaker 4: going out and buying cell phones and bring him in.
22:31
Speaker 4: So it's kind of incredibly ironic that the tool that
22:34
Speaker 4: the men are using to identify the crimes that are
22:38
Speaker 4: being committed by the ostensible law enforcement officers are sold
22:42
Speaker 4: to them by aforementioned law enforcement officers.
22:45
Speaker 1: I had a lot of difficulty, even after I had
22:47
Speaker 1: spent months and months and months doing my Alabama project,
22:51
Speaker 1: I was just aghast. I don't know why was I
22:55
Speaker 1: I was just something about seeing it because I only heard.
23:00
Speaker 1: My whole thing was just listening to people tell me stories. Right,
23:02
Speaker 1: I didn't see anything. Will be the point. I'm doing
23:05
Speaker 1: a podcast. I suddenly there's a scene in the doc
23:10
Speaker 1: when it's I don't know why the scene has stayed
23:13
Speaker 1: with me, but I've forgotten. One of your characters gets
23:16
Speaker 1: sent to solitary and he's on the phone and he
23:21
Speaker 1: shows you these jars he has that are full of
23:25
Speaker 1: He's telling you why he hangs his food up in
23:29
Speaker 1: a bag high off the ground on his prison cell.
23:32
Speaker 1: And then and then he gets in trouble for it
23:34
Speaker 1: every day, but he says, well, the reason I do
23:35
Speaker 1: that is because of these guys. And he shows you
23:39
Speaker 1: jars that have little live rats inside of it. And
23:41
Speaker 1: then he shows you his toilet and you see rats
23:44
Speaker 1: swimming in his toilet, and he says, I caught eleven
23:47
Speaker 1: of these last.
23:48
Speaker 4: Night, Eleven caught in one night, eleven caught in one night.
23:51
Speaker 2: They keep my food laundry bead hanging from the bars,
23:55
Speaker 2: and they write me different, theres be hanging things from
23:57
Speaker 2: the bars, but if I had put it on the floor,
24:01
Speaker 2: they'll hit it rats.
24:06
Speaker 4: One back.
24:08
Speaker 1: And that was the point, was like I was like Jesus,
24:14
Speaker 1: why that's not the worst but way not even close
24:17
Speaker 1: to being the worst thing that happens. But something about
24:19
Speaker 1: the visual of realizing that there are people who will
24:23
Speaker 1: happily tolerate conditions like that inside of prison, like the
24:29
Speaker 1: administration is fine with that. Somehow, that somehow got me.
24:34
Speaker 4: Well, first of all, I can tell from your description
24:36
Speaker 4: that everyone's going to run out and immediately go to
24:38
Speaker 4: HBO and watch this film so that they can see
24:43
Speaker 4: But it is, it is, it is extraordinary that that
24:49
Speaker 4: the and I have to say just I think one
24:53
Speaker 4: of the things that in your podcast that was so
24:59
Speaker 4: telling to me, and I really think it brings these
25:01
Speaker 4: stories together, is your postulate of the moral failure cascade.
25:09
Speaker 4: You know that you have a series of small or
25:15
Speaker 4: larger or growing problems and events that happen, and then
25:22
Speaker 4: one thing leads to another and it gets worse and
25:24
Speaker 4: worse and worse, and I think, you know, people get
25:27
Speaker 4: used to it. You know, they get to the point
25:29
Speaker 4: where they say, well, I mean, how many people are
25:31
Speaker 4: really you know, I mean some people are going to die? Right? Well,
25:36
Speaker 4: I don't know what if we have the deadliest prison
25:38
Speaker 4: system in America at some point, are we going to
25:40
Speaker 4: look at that and say, like, maybe we're doing something wrong?
25:43
Speaker 4: But you hear you have Steve Marshall, the one person
25:46
Speaker 4: that we share in this the podcast and also in
25:49
Speaker 4: the film, who says, you know, I've been told that
25:52
Speaker 4: there's some kind of systemic problem in all of our facilities. Right,
25:56
Speaker 4: We've just been watching an hour of the most punishing material.
26:02
Speaker 4: You can't imagine prison after prison after prison, Donaldson Prison,
26:07
Speaker 4: Kilby Prison, bib Prison, each one of these places home
26:11
Speaker 4: and where they have two hundred and forty people on
26:13
Speaker 4: the death row. And your guy was right before he's executed.
26:21
Speaker 4: You've been watching that for an hour, and then here's
26:23
Speaker 4: Steve Marshall, the chief law enforcement officer of the State
26:27
Speaker 4: of Alabama, and he says, I've been told that there's
26:30
Speaker 4: some systemic problem in all of our facilities. And I
26:33
Speaker 4: wholeheartedly disagree with that. Yeah, and it's not just willful blindness.
26:39
Speaker 4: I mean, it's just it's just intentional cruelty. It's a
26:43
Speaker 4: willingness to preside over a system of death camps. They
26:48
Speaker 4: are death camps. We have to say that's what they are.
26:51
Speaker 4: Since we started working in the film, which was seven
26:53
Speaker 4: years ago, fifteen hundred people have died in that little
26:57
Speaker 4: prison system. You know, they have twenty thousand people in
27:00
Speaker 4: the prison system. They have another twenty five thousand in
27:03
Speaker 4: the jails in Alabama where people die regularly and somehow
27:08
Speaker 4: people are done of, you know, highest level of drug
27:11
Speaker 4: overdose of any prison system in the country, not that
27:14
Speaker 4: there are not lots of other horrific ones, highest numbers
27:18
Speaker 4: of suicide, highest level of sexual assault, and just the
27:25
Speaker 4: brutality of the situation. You can't you can't run that
27:29
Speaker 4: without knowing it. You can't say, well, I wasn't aware
27:31
Speaker 4: of it, because there were enough layers between me and
27:33
Speaker 4: the people that were, you know, actually in the in
27:38
Speaker 4: the trenches doing the business of killing people.
27:43
Speaker 1: After the break, more from my conversation with Andrew Jireki,
27:56
Speaker 1: Let's talk a little bit about Alabama, because I'm curious
27:59
Speaker 1: about what you what was your level of understanding, knowledge,
28:04
Speaker 1: familiarity with Alabama before you did this project.
28:08
Speaker 4: It was probably the state I knew the least about
28:11
Speaker 4: in the Union. You know, it's just not something if
28:14
Speaker 4: you grew up in New York City and you study history,
28:17
Speaker 4: you're not spending a ton of time on Alabama. I
28:20
Speaker 4: knew a little bit, you know, like there, I don't know,
28:23
Speaker 4: like the state motto of you know, a typical American
28:28
Speaker 4: state will be like the Sunshine State or the show
28:31
Speaker 4: Me State.
28:31
Speaker 3: You know.
28:32
Speaker 4: Alabama's motto is we dare defend our rights. Yeah, you know,
28:37
Speaker 4: which is really like if you want to come and
28:39
Speaker 4: have an opinion, you can go fuck yourself. We're not
28:43
Speaker 4: interested in your opinion. We're just going to do our thing.
28:46
Speaker 4: And certainly we don't want you telling us how to
28:47
Speaker 4: deal with our negroes or our population of prisoners, or
28:53
Speaker 4: our crime or you know, any of it. It's just
28:57
Speaker 4: there's a wall.
28:58
Speaker 1: I'm not sure whether that's more or less egregious than
29:01
Speaker 1: New Jersey calling itself the garden state. But where are
29:04
Speaker 1: these gardens in New Jersey? I get to see anything
29:07
Speaker 1: along to it Turnpike. But uh, it's it's a heart.
29:13
Speaker 1: You know. I've done I was kind of I think
29:15
Speaker 1: that I have done more. Podcast episodes of Rusion's history
29:19
Speaker 1: that are situated in Alabama, within in any other state.
29:21
Speaker 1: I'm drawn to this place. And for the same reason,
29:27
Speaker 1: I feel like it's not the United States. It's something
29:33
Speaker 1: an it's it is within the United States, but not
29:37
Speaker 1: of the United States, or maybe I'm being too kind
29:38
Speaker 1: to the United States. It is clearly in some ways
29:41
Speaker 1: a foreign country.
29:43
Speaker 4: It's kind of amazing you're saying that because the chaplain
29:46
Speaker 4: who I visited and met and encouraged me to come back,
29:52
Speaker 4: Chaplain Browder, after I was in it for six months,
29:57
Speaker 4: so the first year or two, and I was stayed
30:00
Speaker 4: in touch with him constantly. He's quite he's quite a
30:03
Speaker 4: bit older now, he's seven years older than when I
30:05
Speaker 4: first met him. But he's still very thoughtful guy. And
30:09
Speaker 4: he said, I'm telling you, Andrew, Alabama and in these
30:12
Speaker 4: United States. Yeah. But you know, then you ask yourself
30:16
Speaker 4: whether that's even right. You know. The reality is is
30:18
Speaker 4: that you know, upstate New York, Robert Brooks just got
30:21
Speaker 4: killed in upstate New York by corrections officers who beat
30:25
Speaker 4: him to death. And the only reason we don't think
30:27
Speaker 4: it was natural causes or a drug overdose is because
30:30
Speaker 4: they were I don't even want to say dumb enough.
30:33
Speaker 4: They were entitled enough to just leave their body cameras
30:37
Speaker 4: on because they just assumed that nobody was ever really
30:39
Speaker 4: going to try to figure out what happened to poor
30:41
Speaker 4: Robert Brooks who was handcuffed when they beat him to death.
30:45
Speaker 4: So it's happening in New York. You know, if you
30:48
Speaker 4: were in it, if you would put your dog in
30:51
Speaker 4: upstate New York and at kennel because you were going
30:53
Speaker 4: on holiday and you saw this, you would say, I'm
30:57
Speaker 4: calling the ASPCA. This is a total disaster. Nobody can
31:01
Speaker 4: put their dog in this, So it's not a whole
31:05
Speaker 4: lot better in a lot of these places.
31:06
Speaker 1: Two things can be true simultane see. One is that
31:10
Speaker 1: in general, the prison conditions in the United States are
31:16
Speaker 1: appalling compared to our peers around the world. But there
31:20
Speaker 1: is something particular and unusual about Alabama that elevates Alabama
31:27
Speaker 1: even above its miserable peers. And I wonder whether the
31:30
Speaker 1: weekend sort of since we've both been immersed in this,
31:33
Speaker 1: we can put our finger on what it is. And
31:35
Speaker 1: I'm wondering, I'm thinking about Steve Marshall, which is if
31:40
Speaker 1: you I don't know I'm making this up, but if
31:42
Speaker 1: you sat down with the Attorney General of New York State,
31:45
Speaker 1: they they would have the good grace to be embarrassed
31:49
Speaker 1: about what was happening in the prisons. Steve Marshall, And
31:54
Speaker 1: I want you to talk a little bit about your
31:55
Speaker 1: interview with Steve Marshall. Steve Marshall, when confronted with these questions,
32:00
Speaker 1: wasn't even remotely embarrassed. In fact, he had the gall
32:04
Speaker 1: when he had to give that one quote from him
32:06
Speaker 1: about when you ask him about Christian grace, he says,
32:09
Speaker 1: I believe in Christian grace, but that doesn't mean somebody
32:11
Speaker 1: should got out of prison.
32:12
Speaker 3: I mean, look, I think anybody can have a change
32:15
Speaker 3: of heart. Oh I'll say that, I think God can
32:18
Speaker 3: invade somebody believe in the concept of grace. But grace
32:22
Speaker 3: atself doesn't mean released from prison. Grace means that you're
32:25
Speaker 3: relieved from the burden of your sin.
32:28
Speaker 1: It's not even that he's defiant, it's that he thinks
32:31
Speaker 1: he's on the side of God right now. That is different.
32:36
Speaker 1: Can you what are your thoughts on the peculiarity of
32:40
Speaker 1: Alabama and can you talk about let's talk about Steve
32:42
Speaker 1: Marshall because you spend time with him.
32:44
Speaker 4: Yeah, how much?
32:45
Speaker 1: How long was that interview?
32:48
Speaker 4: I think that interview was shorter than most. Maybe it
32:51
Speaker 4: was two hours.
32:53
Speaker 1: This is why I love documentarians. Your idea of shorter
32:56
Speaker 1: than most is two hours.
32:57
Speaker 4: Yeah.
32:57
Speaker 1: My idea of shorter than most is ten minutes.
33:01
Speaker 4: We do some sevens and some nines, you know Jesus. Yeah, yeah,
33:05
Speaker 4: they're kick. Usually the wife is like standing and the
33:09
Speaker 4: corner and being like looking at the watch.
33:11
Speaker 1: But Steve Marshall gave you two hours.
33:15
Speaker 4: Yeah. I mean, you know, the great thing about somebody
33:18
Speaker 4: like this is that they say the quiet part out loud.
33:23
Speaker 4: There's no there's no shame in it. And I don't
33:27
Speaker 4: really know how he manages it, you know, as a
33:31
Speaker 4: self proclaimed Christian, I don't know how he goes and
33:36
Speaker 4: kisses his kids and says like daddy's upholding the law
33:40
Speaker 4: and so on, because he knows what the statistics are. Right,
33:45
Speaker 4: Let's say he just doesn't he forces himself or he
33:47
Speaker 4: prevents himself from from having access to the prisons. You know,
33:51
Speaker 4: you can always put some kind of operachic in between
33:55
Speaker 4: you and the prisons. And then you say, I don't
33:57
Speaker 4: know I saw the reports, and it doesn't look like
33:58
Speaker 4: it's all that bad. So I don't know how he
34:01
Speaker 4: describes it to himself, but and I think, you know,
34:05
Speaker 4: politicians are kind of will of the wisp. And you know,
34:07
Speaker 4: he used to be a Democrat, and then now he's
34:09
Speaker 4: a Republican, and then he was recently so Republican that
34:13
Speaker 4: he was one of the guys who one of the
34:16
Speaker 4: local state officials who came to New York and put
34:19
Speaker 4: on the red tie and the Trump outfit and went
34:21
Speaker 4: down to Lower Manhattan and start talking about how Trump
34:26
Speaker 4: was being railroaded by the justice system and so on.
34:29
Speaker 4: So he's always auditioning. And by the way, right now,
34:31
Speaker 4: Steve Marshall's trying to run for Senate. He's trying to
34:35
Speaker 4: run for Tommy Tubberville's seat in the Senate. So the
34:39
Speaker 4: football coach, Tommy Tubberville became a US senator from Alabama.
34:44
Speaker 4: He's the one that did not know that there were
34:46
Speaker 4: three branches of government, right, He did not have a
34:49
Speaker 4: lot of training.
34:50
Speaker 1: He just thought it was offense and defense.
34:54
Speaker 4: Exactly what would you do with this third branch? Especially,
34:57
Speaker 4: that's what's happening in the federal government too. They're getting
35:00
Speaker 4: rid of some of the branches out here. We have
35:03
Speaker 4: too many branches that we're going to We're going to
35:05
Speaker 4: doze those branches right out. But you know, I think
35:09
Speaker 4: he just imagines. First of all, I think he's very
35:16
Speaker 4: politically expeditious. You know, he wants to become a US senator.
35:20
Speaker 4: He wants to be the guy that's the tough on
35:22
Speaker 4: crime guy. He's sort of made book with this organization
35:28
Speaker 4: called Vocal in Alabama, which is Victims of Crime and Leniency,
35:33
Speaker 4: which is literally like a group of women who are
35:36
Speaker 4: crime who you know, had a crime happen in their family,
35:41
Speaker 4: and they go to every parole hearing and they don't
35:45
Speaker 4: know the people. They get a little card before they
35:48
Speaker 4: go there. We sort of embedded with them and maybe
35:50
Speaker 4: should make a film about them. And they go to
35:53
Speaker 4: a parole hearing where you have a guy who's been
35:54
Speaker 4: locked up for twenty five years. He's an ordained minister,
35:58
Speaker 4: he's taken every conceivable class, he's like mentored five hundred
36:03
Speaker 4: young men that have been in there. And this a
36:06
Speaker 4: woman will get up and say, you know, I'm here
36:09
Speaker 4: to protest the parole of Kevin Johnson, And you know
36:15
Speaker 4: he committed a crime in nineteen seventy three. They have
36:19
Speaker 4: no idea what it is. They just know he committed
36:21
Speaker 4: a crime and he should not be parled. And then
36:23
Speaker 4: they stand in front of the parole board and they
36:25
Speaker 4: say to the three members the parle board, if you
36:29
Speaker 4: let this man out and he re offends, it will
36:34
Speaker 4: be on your neck and everyone will know that you
36:37
Speaker 4: did that. And you know, that's one of the things
36:38
Speaker 4: that drove Alabama's parole rate to eight percent.
36:42
Speaker 1: Which is that the last lowest in the country.
36:45
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was at that time. It was. It's improved
36:47
Speaker 4: a little bit, and I think it's improved in part,
36:50
Speaker 4: you know, because of the work in and around the film,
36:54
Speaker 4: because you know, among other things, it was a lawsuit
36:58
Speaker 4: that was sparked by the film, this class action lawsuit
37:02
Speaker 4: in which Kinetic Justice Robert rol Council is the lead plaintiff,
37:06
Speaker 4: that really calls out Alabama for having a system of leasing.
37:10
Speaker 4: And you know, because a lot of people don't realize
37:13
Speaker 4: a that Alabama and many states like it benefit from
37:18
Speaker 4: let's say, just in the case of Alabama, four hundred
37:21
Speaker 4: and fifty million dollars a year in unpaid labor and
37:25
Speaker 4: the men inside are forced to provide this labor. And
37:29
Speaker 4: by forced, you know, maybe there's not a man with
37:34
Speaker 4: a bull whip that's standing over them, but it's in
37:38
Speaker 4: some ways, you know, every bit is bad because if
37:41
Speaker 4: you refuse to work, then you can be you can
37:45
Speaker 4: be given a disciplinary which can extend your sentence. You
37:49
Speaker 4: can be placed in solitary, which happens a lot in Alabama.
37:53
Speaker 4: So basically, the you know, un says solitary confinement for
37:57
Speaker 4: more than fifteen days as torture. They're putting people in
37:59
Speaker 4: for years at a time, and you could be moved
38:03
Speaker 4: to an even more violent facility than the one that
38:06
Speaker 4: you're in. So so it is a coerced forced labor.
38:10
Speaker 4: You can't be sick one day, you can't do anything.
38:13
Speaker 4: But I think what people don't understand is the prisoner's
38:16
Speaker 4: Alabama and some other states, it's not that they're being
38:20
Speaker 4: forced to work in the prison. Maybe reasonable people could say, oh,
38:24
Speaker 4: maybe you should be sweeping the floor in the prison
38:26
Speaker 4: if you're working in the prison, But they also get
38:29
Speaker 4: leased out to the governor's mansion where they clean the
38:32
Speaker 4: floors and they polish the tiles, and they did the landscaping.
38:36
Speaker 4: They also get leased out to road crews, construction crews.
38:40
Speaker 4: The state makes money from all of that. They issue
38:43
Speaker 4: invoices which you can see in the film. You know,
38:45
Speaker 4: this is for X dollars an hour, and then they
38:47
Speaker 4: pay them in two dollars a day to do sanitation
38:50
Speaker 4: work or something like that, and then they send them
38:53
Speaker 4: out to work at McDonald's. They lease them to McDonald's,
38:57
Speaker 4: they lease them to Burger King, they lease them to
38:59
Speaker 4: the Hyundai Parts Company, they lease them to the Budweiser distributorship. So,
39:05
Speaker 4: you know, you go to the state Fair in Alabama,
39:07
Speaker 4: you know, we have this kind of amazing show of
39:09
Speaker 4: a guy in a corrections uniform who's standing with a
39:13
Speaker 4: little girl and he is reaching into the duck pond
39:17
Speaker 4: and he takes a little duck out, a little baby duckling,
39:19
Speaker 4: and he hands it and the mother's clapping and is
39:23
Speaker 4: taking photographs. And the chilling statistic behind that Alabama DOS
39:29
Speaker 4: not tracked this, but we tracked it is that if
39:32
Speaker 4: you're considered safe enough to go out into the community
39:36
Speaker 4: to work at McDonald's or to work at the state fair,
39:41
Speaker 4: you have a statistically lower chance of being paroled than
39:45
Speaker 4: if you're somebody at a higher custody level.
39:49
Speaker 1: Why because you're not economically valuable to them?
39:52
Speaker 4: Absolutely, yeah, And they don't track that statistic. And I
39:55
Speaker 4: think Steve Marshall might be surprised if I said that,
39:58
Speaker 4: or he would say, oh, it doesn't sound right, and
40:00
Speaker 4: then we would say, well, you know, there's a reason
40:03
Speaker 4: why you don't track that statistic. But it kind of
40:05
Speaker 4: makes sense, right the people that are out there, and
40:07
Speaker 4: people are all these anecdotal stories of people saying, well,
40:09
Speaker 4: I was sick and I woke up in the morning
40:11
Speaker 4: and that guy came in and said, you need to
40:13
Speaker 4: go out there and make me some money.
40:15
Speaker 1: Yeah. How I want to talk a little bit about
40:17
Speaker 1: the difference in the way that you and I both
40:22
Speaker 1: or your team and my team both began with a
40:27
Speaker 1: similar kind of question, which was how can we shed
40:31
Speaker 1: light on the practices of this very strange state. And
40:39
Speaker 1: I was working in the podcast genre, you're working in
40:42
Speaker 1: the documentary genre, and we both of us made very
40:46
Speaker 1: very different choices, And I wanted to reflect on one
40:49
Speaker 1: of the biggest differences, which is in our Alabama murders,
40:55
Speaker 1: we spend an enormous amount of time on the backstory
40:58
Speaker 1: of our characters, our protagonists. We really want you to
41:03
Speaker 1: know we're telling the story of these two guys on
41:07
Speaker 1: death Row. We really want you to know about those guys.
41:11
Speaker 1: We talked to them and who they were and what happened,
41:14
Speaker 1: you know, et cetera. In your movie documentary, we only
41:20
Speaker 1: learn we get that kind of backstory in passing Right.
41:27
Speaker 1: There's a moment, for example, where you're talking about James Syles,
41:30
Speaker 1: one of the principal characters in the documentary, and we
41:34
Speaker 1: learned why was he in one of the highest security
41:38
Speaker 1: prisons in Alabama because he got fifteen years for breaking
41:42
Speaker 1: into a unoccupied building. It just happens in like ten seconds.
41:48
Speaker 1: We learned peace of permission, and then you move on
41:50
Speaker 1: right now. It's incredibly powerful in that little form. But
41:53
Speaker 1: I'm curious, why do you do things that way? Why
42:01
Speaker 1: is it that the form that you've chosen encourages you
42:06
Speaker 1: or directs you away from kind of luxury r curiating in
42:09
Speaker 1: the backstory the way that we do in the podcast world.
42:14
Speaker 4: I mean, you know, if you look at Capturing the
42:16
Speaker 4: Freedman's there's just an enormous amount of archival material of
42:21
Speaker 4: that family, including going back you know, seventy five years
42:25
Speaker 4: to the you know, family members that kind of came
42:29
Speaker 4: to this country. And then in the jinks we have
42:35
Speaker 4: lots of photographs, but we also have moving pictures of
42:38
Speaker 4: Robert Durst when he was a kid, and you get
42:41
Speaker 4: to see the awkwardness, You get to see the feeling
42:44
Speaker 4: that this is a person who didn't particularly fit in
42:47
Speaker 4: and you see him, you know, in modern day, you
42:50
Speaker 4: see him twitching. Robert Durst has a lot of twitches.
42:54
Speaker 4: And then you see a little you know, film of
42:56
Speaker 4: him getting up on the diving board as a kid,
42:58
Speaker 4: or you know, somebody doing a movie of him like
43:01
Speaker 4: his mother, and you see the same kind of twitches.
43:04
Speaker 4: You see the early phases of what his So I
43:07
Speaker 4: think that stuff is extremely valuable in this film. I
43:13
Speaker 4: think that we had so many you know, there was
43:18
Speaker 4: ten pounds of flour in a two pound bag. Always
43:21
Speaker 4: it was always so hard to convey the tapestry of
43:26
Speaker 4: how we got here and try to incorporate everything from
43:30
Speaker 4: the slave labor to the parole to that why they
43:33
Speaker 4: weren't letting people out of the system, how they put
43:36
Speaker 4: people in the system, how people are when they're in
43:38
Speaker 4: the system, and then also try to have a narrative
43:41
Speaker 4: thread that was going to bring people along, you know,
43:43
Speaker 4: because we used to have this expression just in the
43:46
Speaker 4: storytelling process. I always have a blackboard in my office
43:50
Speaker 4: and I at the very beginning of this, when we
43:53
Speaker 4: started to see what we had, I wrote this like
43:55
Speaker 4: mnemonic device. I said, smitwit knows, And that stood for
44:01
Speaker 4: how do we not make the saddest movie in the
44:03
Speaker 4: world that no one ever sees? And it was a
44:06
Speaker 4: real concern because you know, you're dealing with this very
44:09
Speaker 4: dark material. So we knew it had to have a
44:12
Speaker 4: very compelling narrative. It needed to have you know, we
44:15
Speaker 4: need to have a story. And that's like, you know,
44:17
Speaker 4: you got to keep telling yourself, what is the story?
44:20
Speaker 4: So you only have enough room for this archival material, Yeah,
44:25
Speaker 4: you do as much as you can. And also some
44:26
Speaker 4: of those people, you know, it's kind of a deprived economy,
44:30
Speaker 4: and a lot of these families of people who are
44:32
Speaker 4: incarcerated just you know, they don't have like an extra
44:36
Speaker 4: room in their house where they have all the photo
44:38
Speaker 4: albums or they have a milimeter video or whatever.
44:41
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was thinking, and it's not a critesis of
44:44
Speaker 1: it all. I'm marveling about how you made a compelling
44:47
Speaker 1: story where I cared about the protagonists even though I
44:51
Speaker 1: knew so little about them. That's the puzzle, So I
44:54
Speaker 1: came away. So your main character is Stephen Davis, white guy.
45:00
Speaker 1: Seems like a very poor family, and we briefly learned
45:03
Speaker 1: what his mom tells us in one sentence, why is
45:06
Speaker 1: in prison? That's all we get. We don't know when
45:11
Speaker 1: has offense occurred. We don't know what his sentence was.
45:14
Speaker 1: We don't know what his personality was, we don't know
45:16
Speaker 1: anything about him. We barely see him because he's he's
45:19
Speaker 1: dead ten minutes in right, whatever it is, and yet
45:25
Speaker 1: my concern over him and feelings for him sustain me
45:29
Speaker 1: through the entire movie. This is what I'm in. A
45:32
Speaker 1: million years, I would never have thought I could tell
45:34
Speaker 1: a story like that where my main character is someone
45:38
Speaker 1: the audience knows almost nothing about and who exits, and
45:43
Speaker 1: yet I still care an hour later. That's what I'm
45:46
Speaker 1: trying to get at. How did you do that? Well?
45:49
Speaker 4: I mean, you know, as a young storyteller, I think
45:50
Speaker 4: you're going to evolve. You know, you're going to learn
45:53
Speaker 4: more about how to tell these stories, and I'm looking
45:56
Speaker 4: forward to that. But I think, you know, a little
45:59
Speaker 4: goes a long way. We do see pictures of him
46:02
Speaker 4: as child, and I think that's extremely powerful, you know,
46:06
Speaker 4: when you see somebody who you've been trained to believe
46:10
Speaker 4: is going to be a hardened, terrible criminal, but we
46:13
Speaker 4: sort of know really what he was was a drug addict.
46:16
Speaker 4: And now you see a picture of this of this
46:21
Speaker 4: young man, you know, with his hair shorn and his
46:24
Speaker 4: face pale, and wearing a jumpsuit that's exactly what everybody
46:31
Speaker 4: else in the prison wears, and he becomes totally homogenized
46:35
Speaker 4: and dehumanized. And then you get to see a photograph
46:38
Speaker 4: of him as a child, you know, with a smile
46:43
Speaker 4: and just seeing pride on his face, or him starting
46:46
Speaker 4: to play little League or something like that, and then
46:49
Speaker 4: you're just reminded that I have somebody in my family
46:52
Speaker 4: who is playing little league and then ten years later
46:55
Speaker 4: was a drug addict, you know, was playing little league,
46:58
Speaker 4: and ten years later was an alcoholic and his life
47:00
Speaker 4: is falling apart. So you make a connection to those
47:03
Speaker 4: people that goes beyond whatever their you know, their crime was.
47:08
Speaker 4: But it's you bring up an interesting point that I've
47:10
Speaker 4: not talked about regarding this film, which was that there
47:16
Speaker 4: were people who came to test screenings of the film
47:19
Speaker 4: and literally said the following, I'm uncomfortable if I don't
47:26
Speaker 4: know what crime they committed. So could you have some
47:29
Speaker 4: kind of a device where as soon as I see
47:32
Speaker 4: somebody on screen, there's some kind of a chiron or
47:36
Speaker 4: a little designator on the bottom that says murder one,
47:40
Speaker 4: or that says burglary, or that says you know. And
47:44
Speaker 4: I was so instructive to hear somebody say that, right,
47:48
Speaker 4: And of course you could have the debate with them,
47:50
Speaker 4: or you could say, so you're saying that it's okay
47:53
Speaker 4: for prison guard to beat somebody to death, you're going
47:56
Speaker 4: to make the evaluation of whether that's reasonable or not
47:59
Speaker 4: based on whether they had a burglary charge or an
48:01
Speaker 4: aggravated burglary charge. And then they always said, well, no, no,
48:05
Speaker 4: of course, of course, of course, of course. But they're
48:07
Speaker 4: revealing that they're begandized. They're revealing that like nobody, everybody
48:12
Speaker 4: wants safety. Everybody wants their family to be safe. Everybody doesn't,
48:15
Speaker 4: you know, people don't want people to rob their store
48:18
Speaker 4: or whatever. But this idea that anything goes if somebody
48:25
Speaker 4: is a criminal. We're just going to suspend our humanity.
48:31
Speaker 4: We're going to suspend right. And that's the basic idea
48:33
Speaker 4: of sort of the constitution is you have this absolutely
48:37
Speaker 4: minimal level. You're not supposed to be treated to a
48:42
Speaker 4: cruel and unusual punishment, which is already kind of a
48:45
Speaker 4: you know, I know it when I see it kind
48:47
Speaker 4: of situation. You know, but well, if they committed a crime,
48:53
Speaker 4: then maybe they should just be locked up forever. You know,
48:56
Speaker 4: doesn't make sense for you know, there are plenty of
48:58
Speaker 4: countries where the maximum sentence for any crime is ten years,
49:01
Speaker 4: because you say, somebody commits a crime wh they're nineteen
49:03
Speaker 4: years old, completely different human being. Eleven years, twelve years later,
49:09
Speaker 4: you know, maybe ten years is enough to reset that
49:14
Speaker 4: person and try to bring them back into civilization. And
49:16
Speaker 4: yet Alabama has these three strikes laws that are put
49:19
Speaker 4: locking people up for life without parole.
49:23
Speaker 1: But this is a really interesting point which I think
49:26
Speaker 1: is worth dwelling on a little bit, which is that
49:29
Speaker 1: as storytellers, so the urge when the people in the
49:33
Speaker 1: screening said I want to know what crime they committed?
49:37
Speaker 1: That that was my urge when I watched it. It's
49:41
Speaker 1: a natural human urge to want to know as much
49:43
Speaker 1: as possible about the person whose world you're And what
49:49
Speaker 1: we don't think about is what are we using that
49:51
Speaker 1: information for? And how will that kind of information at
49:55
Speaker 1: the margin affect the quality of our moral judgments? And
49:58
Speaker 1: what you're saying is the value of that incremental information
50:02
Speaker 1: about these characters reduces the quality of our moral judgment.
50:07
Speaker 1: It actually contributes to pros. I see the phenomenon you
50:10
Speaker 1: were trying to confront, which is, people, regardless of who
50:15
Speaker 1: they are, deserve a certain level of respect and decency
50:20
Speaker 1: in the way we treat them. Right, there was there
50:23
Speaker 1: was an obligation here on the part of the The
50:26
Speaker 1: titration and the limitation of information given by the storyteller
50:30
Speaker 1: is a hugely consequential question. It's not just a storytelling question.
50:34
Speaker 1: It's a moral question. It's what do you want people
50:37
Speaker 1: to take home from this story? Right in a profound way,
50:41
Speaker 1: and like, so you shouldn't now, I agree with you.
50:45
Speaker 1: I had that impulse, and then I thought about it
50:46
Speaker 1: and I was like, no, I don't need to know.
50:50
Speaker 1: It is not relevant what Stephen Davis was in for.
50:53
Speaker 1: It's like it shouldn't matter, or it shouldn't matter with.
50:58
Speaker 4: Robert Robert Earl.
50:59
Speaker 1: Robert Earl or who is the one who had the
51:01
Speaker 1: rat swimming in the toilet?
51:03
Speaker 4: Robert Robert Earl. Yeah, like Robert Earl's crime, I mean
51:05
Speaker 4: Robert Earl's crime. Yeah, there's a guy and sort of
51:09
Speaker 4: speeder that there was a guy trying to run him
51:10
Speaker 4: over with a car and he was nineteen and he
51:14
Speaker 4: had a gun, which everybody in Alabama has a gun,
51:16
Speaker 4: and he shot the guy and he prevented him from
51:19
Speaker 4: running him over. In today's world, you know, that's like.
51:22
Speaker 1: Stand your ground.
51:23
Speaker 4: Yeah, right, So there's no question that would have been
51:26
Speaker 4: a self defense case, but for the fact that the
51:29
Speaker 4: police went to incredible lengths to try to tie him
51:33
Speaker 4: into an earlier altercation that night because nobody died in
51:39
Speaker 4: but they were sort of trying to say, well, he
51:41
Speaker 4: was involved in a robbery, which he actually wasn't involved in,
51:45
Speaker 4: because that enables you to give him a life sentence
51:48
Speaker 4: because you can say it's capital murder. So I guess
51:52
Speaker 4: our you know, kind of theory going in was maybe
51:59
Speaker 4: we don't need to talk about the crimes at all,
52:01
Speaker 4: and then we realized that there are certain crimes, right
52:05
Speaker 4: and Steve Marshall of the world will want you to
52:08
Speaker 4: assume that everybody in there for this right. They say, oh,
52:11
Speaker 4: but we've already let out all the non violent criminals.
52:14
Speaker 4: That sounds like totally reasonable. Well, yeah, I guess people
52:16
Speaker 4: that are non violent should be led out, right. But
52:19
Speaker 4: in Alabama, I think in the rest of the country,
52:22
Speaker 4: maybe we have like maybe in the federal system, we
52:24
Speaker 4: have like four crimes that are considered violent, and in
52:27
Speaker 4: Alabama it used to be you know, ten, and then
52:29
Speaker 4: it was twenty, and then it was thirty, and now
52:31
Speaker 4: it's forty four crimes and they include entering an unoccupied
52:36
Speaker 4: building that's considered a violent crime. So by redefining what
52:40
Speaker 4: a violent crime is, you get more and more and
52:42
Speaker 4: more people, and then you get to stand in front
52:44
Speaker 4: of a crowd and say, we've let out all the
52:46
Speaker 4: good ones. But Robert Earl, I guess we concluded that
52:50
Speaker 4: we had to tell something about some of the crimes
52:53
Speaker 4: because we didn't want We've felt like if the audience
52:56
Speaker 4: was going to really have to fall in love with
52:59
Speaker 4: Robert Earl, which is not hard to do because man's
53:02
Speaker 4: a genius and he's an unbelievable human being. Then we
53:10
Speaker 4: would have to let people know that he's not Jeffrey Dahmer.
53:14
Speaker 4: You know that he's not somebody who's like a serial
53:16
Speaker 4: killer or a child killer. And the percentage of people
53:20
Speaker 4: that are in prison who are a serial killers or
53:21
Speaker 4: child kill is minuscule. But you if you're gonna give
53:25
Speaker 4: the audience the desire to fall in love with somebody,
53:29
Speaker 4: they're gonna hold back their empathy unless you can just
53:34
Speaker 4: give them a little bit of a pass, a little
53:38
Speaker 4: bit of a feeling like this is this is not
53:41
Speaker 4: one of those people that's just going to be released
53:43
Speaker 4: and then immediately go and murder somebody or put somebody
53:46
Speaker 4: in front of a bus.
53:49
Speaker 1: We'll be right back. What's the stage in the process
54:03
Speaker 1: where you're happiest.
54:06
Speaker 4: It's a really good question, and I think it it's
54:12
Speaker 4: a question you have to ask in a kind of
54:16
Speaker 4: longitudinal way because you're having the most fun in the
54:22
Speaker 4: very beginning because it's all new, and then you're halfway
54:27
Speaker 4: through it and it's like the dark Knight of the
54:29
Speaker 4: soul and you think it's a disaster, and then you
54:32
Speaker 4: look back and you think, oh my god, you know
54:34
Speaker 4: that was the time. And then you get further along
54:37
Speaker 4: and you solve a problem, and then that's the time.
54:39
Speaker 4: And then you get to the end of the whole
54:41
Speaker 4: thing you look back and that's a difference. So I
54:42
Speaker 4: guess it's the question, you know, if you ask the
54:44
Speaker 4: question over time, did you.
54:46
Speaker 1: Have a dark Knight of the soul moment with this documentary?
54:49
Speaker 1: It lasted like seven years, so you get by definition,
54:53
Speaker 1: But it wasn't so much.
54:54
Speaker 4: I mean, there were plenty of timeshe we thought, I
54:57
Speaker 4: don't know whether this is going to work, and you
55:00
Speaker 4: go to the best advisors you have and you show
55:04
Speaker 4: material and you just watch and see how people react,
55:08
Speaker 4: and then you do we do these other things, like
55:11
Speaker 4: we'll do like a session with a whiteboard, and the
55:14
Speaker 4: whole team of people that are working on the film
55:18
Speaker 4: will say, Okay, what are the five things that that
55:24
Speaker 4: I feel like if I if these aren't in the movie,
55:27
Speaker 4: we've made a terrible mistake. And then you end up
55:30
Speaker 4: with thirty five things on the board and then you think,
55:33
Speaker 4: all right, well, what is this telling me? You just
55:35
Speaker 4: try to look at it a million different ways. You know,
55:37
Speaker 4: you kind of like, you know, moving around.
55:39
Speaker 1: You're deep dark depression on something. You just call me
55:43
Speaker 1: because if you just you. I'd never show me if
55:45
Speaker 1: you just called me and said, Malcolm, I have cell
55:48
Speaker 1: phone video footage from inside Alabama, the Alabama prison system.
55:51
Speaker 1: I have a lot of it. But I don't think
55:53
Speaker 1: it's going to work. I would have said it's going
55:56
Speaker 1: to work.
55:56
Speaker 4: Good.
55:56
Speaker 1: It's like there's no way for it not to work.
56:00
Speaker 1: I think the correct answer. It really is a I mean,
56:05
Speaker 1: I really I realized I had been gushing, but it's
56:09
Speaker 1: it is. It is an extraordinary piece of work. And
56:13
Speaker 1: I'm both complimenting you but also complimenting the prisoners who
56:18
Speaker 1: who found a way to get their story out in
56:22
Speaker 1: the world. Right there. You're collaborators on this and the
56:26
Speaker 1: result is something that is quite unlike any other. Like
56:31
Speaker 1: I said, it solves the documentary problem for me. You
56:34
Speaker 1: solved it like there's no you're not reconstructing anything.
56:39
Speaker 4: It's there's this great moment in Ibsen, you know, in
56:44
Speaker 4: a Master Builder, and there's this character named Hilda who
56:49
Speaker 4: works with this architect, and the architect is this very
56:52
Speaker 4: grand fellow that is building big buildings and all that stuff,
56:56
Speaker 4: and the and then you see her saying at the
57:01
Speaker 4: end of it, her last line as she says the
57:03
Speaker 4: master builder, my master builder, and a lot of people
57:07
Speaker 4: have have have comment about that over the years and
57:11
Speaker 4: written about it that it's really that Hilda at that
57:14
Speaker 4: time in history, like a young brilliant woman, needed another
57:21
Speaker 4: person who thought that they were a great builder. But
57:24
Speaker 4: really it was her ideas that were coming through. And
57:26
Speaker 4: I do feel that way here that they're that the
57:31
Speaker 4: men knew what they needed. It's not I don't want
57:35
Speaker 4: to act like it's working. I mean, Alabama is still
57:37
Speaker 4: this is still an urgent problem. Alabama is still killing
57:41
Speaker 4: people in its custody all the time. I think people
57:45
Speaker 4: right now are dying at the rate of around one
57:47
Speaker 4: a day, and that's just in one system. We have
57:50
Speaker 4: two million people incarcerated around the country. But I do
57:54
Speaker 4: get the feeling that, you know, while we're walking around
57:57
Speaker 4: thinking we're making a film, the men inside are driven
58:03
Speaker 4: by their own brilliance, their own survival instinct, are saying,
58:07
Speaker 4: we need to get this material in front of the public.
58:11
Speaker 4: We're not a position to do it. Let's let's see
58:13
Speaker 4: if this collaboration can work. And that I think is
58:16
Speaker 4: the thing I feel the most grateful for is that
58:20
Speaker 4: we were able to deliver that and the men in
58:23
Speaker 4: the film have seen the film, you know, because we
58:26
Speaker 4: showed it to them on cell phones, and when we
58:30
Speaker 4: were done, I think they were very emotional seeing it.
58:33
Speaker 4: I think we you know, we spent so much time
58:35
Speaker 4: and showed it to them talk to them about what
58:38
Speaker 4: we were making. Because it's such a responsibility to say,
58:41
Speaker 4: you know, hey, you guys, you've been running a non violent,
58:46
Speaker 4: organized protest movement that includes work stoppages and hunger strikes,
58:51
Speaker 4: and somehow we're going to characterize that, and we're going
58:53
Speaker 4: to put that on television or we're going to put
58:55
Speaker 4: that in movie theaters. But it's really their story. So
59:00
Speaker 4: you have to be in constant dialogue with them about
59:02
Speaker 4: what that is, including now, you know, telling them what
59:05
Speaker 4: we're doing and what we're thinking and trying to you know,
59:08
Speaker 4: we created this sort of whistleblower defense committee of really
59:12
Speaker 4: smart lawyers because we knew that these men have been
59:15
Speaker 4: retaliated against time after time after time, and so they
59:19
Speaker 4: jump in and they'll go and do wellness checks on
59:21
Speaker 4: the men. You're in a relationship with them forever. You know.
59:24
Speaker 4: It's a little different, right because you're I mean, maybe
59:27
Speaker 4: you'll choose to go and have coffee with Steve Marshall
59:29
Speaker 4: once a week if you really enjoy his company. But
59:32
Speaker 4: you know, most of the people that are in your
59:33
Speaker 4: film are kind of already you know, you're not going
59:37
Speaker 4: back to Alabama much and you're not going to go
59:41
Speaker 4: talk to the to the people that are in the story.
59:44
Speaker 4: But these guys are like they're in my life. Happily,
59:46
Speaker 4: I feel very lucky that they're in my life, in
59:49
Speaker 4: Charlotte's life.
59:50
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, Andrew, we are we are out of time.
59:54
Speaker 1: I want to thank you very much both for coming
59:57
Speaker 1: to on AirFest and singing with me, and also for
1:00:00
Speaker 1: the movie which has you know, as the best art does,
1:00:04
Speaker 1: has left America at a little better off than it
1:00:06
Speaker 1: was before.
1:00:07
Speaker 4: Thank you so much, really, appre Shadow.
1:00:22
Speaker 1: Revision's History is produced by Lucy Sullivan, Bend, daph Haffrey,
1:00:25
Speaker 1: and Nina Bird Lawrence. Our editor is Karen Chakerji. Our
1:00:29
Speaker 1: executive producer is Jacob Smith. Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence.
1:00:33
Speaker 1: Original music by Luis Kira, Mixing and mastering by Jake Krsky.
1:00:38
Speaker 1: I'm Malcolm Glabla.