In some ways when you look at the tale of O.J.
Simpson it goes well beyond O.J.
Simpson.
And it really is a conversation and a story that involves everything in our culture – race,
celebrity, power, masculinity, the criminal justice system, the media.
Like it goes on and on and on and on.
And I think people respond to this story specifically in terms of who they are and where they come
from - black, white, young, old, male, female.
There’s something in this film that will personally speak to you.
O.J.’s drive I think was very simple.
He says it plainly in an interview that’s in the first hour of the documentary.
He said when I walk down the street I want people to know me.
He had an ambition to be famous from the time he was young.
He didn’t an ambition to be the greatest football player ever.
He didn’t have an ambition to be rich.
He had an ambition to be famous.
Now what that means in some ways is O.J. had also an ambition to be loved and loved by
everybody.
And I think it informs this story in a very powerful way because it speaks to how all
of us were seduced by him.
And the image that we saw on the screen both frankly as a football player not just because
he was wildly successful but that he was so graceful on the football field.
So beautiful in a way that when we’re watching as a viewer, as a fan he brought us pleasure.
And so we’re connected to this guy even though he’s just an image on the screen.
And the same goes for him when we saw him running through the airport in Hertz commercials.
I as a young kid adopted that when I was in the airport and I would try to be like see
people in front of me I would try to avoid people and run around them like I was O.J.
running through the airport.
And so there’s this thing that we feel like we know this person, that we feel connected
to this person.
And it informs so much of why we were so shocked and it was incomprehensible that someone like
that could stand accused of murder when we enjoyed such – and it wasn’t just by the
way because oh, he’s a good guy.
He’s the guy I knew down the street for me.
It’s that he brought us so much pleasure and the celebrity aspect to me is well that
helps explain culturally a level of complicitness that we all have in building him into what
we built him into.
And so it shouldn’t be shocking that we were all sort of taken aback and we all were
so emotionally invested in this thing in 1994 and 95 because it was so much more than just
about O.J.
Simpson and whether or not he was a murderer.
What I already brought to this story as far as my personal knowledge, my knowledge of
O.J.
as a football player.
My knowledge for instance of him going to USC from the projects of Potrero Hill and
knowing where USC was geographically located next to Watts.
I came to it with a notion of okay, what I knew is that O.J. is this guy who notoriously
tried to distance himself from his blackness.
O.J.
was put on trial I 1994 and he became a referendum on race in America.
He was as a defendant sort of race was primarily used to help acquit him.
How do I get from here to there?
That’s the irony in this story.
How do this group of people who live beside him when he was at USC, when he was in this
bubble, how do we get to a place over here where those people who he had nothing to do
with all of a sudden were so invested in him.
There were little things like that that I start off with as premises and the I go well,
that’s the narrative I want to tell I’m going to at least go down these two paths
simultaneously knowing that they’re going to intersect 20 to 30 years later.
How specifically I’m going to weave those two things together, that’s editing.
That’s further thought.
That’s writing.
That’s editing.
But you have to start off with an idea to guide you as you’re going along.
We’re dealing with a story where unfortunately so much of what has been done in relation
to it has been so thoughtless, salacious, sensationalist.
And so when people sit down with someone who has thought a lot about it and is interested
in the substantive parts of the story and the seriousness of it and not the salacious
maybe they were refreshed.
Maybe they thought okay, this is someone I can finally speak to about these things that
have been in my head for so many years.
But frankly no one wants to engage me about it in this way.
Because in the end this is history.
This is a document of history and that was the pitch to everyone.
Sit down and tell me your story and I’ll respect your story.
I’m not going to chop up your story into little bits so it’s unrecognizable.
No, you fully get to be heard.