when you say the story you were trying to tell that probably includes the story you weren't
trying to tell the story that you didn't want to tell did you always consider it kind of a binary
that there are things that this documentary wasn't going to try to answer and wasn't gonna
try to do yeah because I frankly thought there was an impossibility to it I think that I I feel
like I'm too humble to think that like how am I possibly going to get to an answer or get to a
place that hundreds if not more than hundreds of people have have tried to get to over the
course of two decades and so I I really you know it's nice that that my desire to relieve myself
of that burden happened to drive with frankly something that wasn't as interested interesting
to me and so yes I sort of knew that for me I can steer clear of that being the ultimate pursuit not
that I knew it not that I wanted to ignore the question it just wasn't you know why I was here
probably ninety-nine out of a hundred documentary filmmakers we're gonna do this story they're gonna
do two couple things they're gonna make it to a two-hour movie and they're gonna start with the
end they're probably gonna start with a verdict and work backward from that so let me start with
the second part of that question you clearly didn't want to do that and that guided a lot
of the storytelling or did the storytelling guide that decision no I actually think there were some
fundamental things that guided how I wanted to tell the story and primarily it was you know if
you're going to do this there's no reason to do this if you're going to tell the story the way
it's been told or attempted to be told over the course of however many years and so for me it was
I know this story I want to discuss things that are beyond a story of the murder in the trial and
so how do i alert an audience from the get-go that that's not what this thing is and so for me it was
very clear that I wanted to start in a place where if you're watching this you get that no that's not
what this that's not the framing device I want to tell a longer bigger more inclusive story both of
OJ as a man and of our country and so you know I have to start in a place and I also make sure you
don't end in don't get to the verdict in a place where you're like okay it's the end of the story
you know and so that was very key and so that actually did that was a driving force more than it
was something I arrived at for under the process you conducted I think more than 70 interviews or
maybe there's more than 70 interviews that are represented on screen when you're thinking about
those interviews and how you might categorize them people who are kind of good on camera people tell
good stories and then I create a third category people who reveal something about the story to
you that you that struck you is profound and new how often did those things happen and they
all happen at once or did certain people fall into certain categories and not quite cross over well I
think there are certain things that happen that reinforce what I was trying to do in a way that
I couldn't have expected which is you sit down with the character be it like ron shipp where i
understood his role fundamental in the story is a guy who was a cop who befriended OJ and ultimately
someone who testified you know against him in the trial but what I didn't understand was his story
of oh he was a teenager who played football in Southern California who idolized OJ who went to
the USC UCLA game in 1967 which was something that I was going to discuss in the film before
I went and sat down with him I didn't know that and so he's he's an embodiment of this landscape
where all of these characters yeah interviewed 72 people and part of the film like curatorial
II it's like it's being told by these voices who have lived through this history and it's
not just about their proximity to OJ but it's about the life they've lived in this city that
they've experienced what it's like on the in some ways from from a policing standpoint or they've
experienced from the standpoint of being a child watching USC football and or but all of these
things are interconnected and so it gave me the ability to you know create this tapestry of voices
where it wasn't just about the specific proximity to this thing it's not about Mike Albany's the the
SWAT come and what happened on June 17th 1994 so I didn't need this sort of I'm gonna sit down and
talk to you for a half hour about this thing oh you also you're a cop for 32 years in the LAPD oh
you went up in a helicopter during the riots and you got shot down these are all everyone has more
skin in the game in this story and that sort of really is what I think makes this story rich are
these experiences that transcend OJ I want to hear about the conversations that you had with your
collaborators about two things and that is the way in which you're gonna handle domestic violence and
the way in which you're going to handle the crime scene photographs let's start with a ladder and
about I guess the decision editorially to include them and I guess how you came to have them okay
well how I came to have them was a result of and this is where you know the sort of
painstaking process of the film in general which is so take the three people prominent people in
the prosecution that are in the film you know I there was no one in the prosecution that wanted
to talk to me and they didn't for many months and it was through sort of a painstaking process with
gil garcetti that he finally relented and said okay I'll do this I trust you enough to sit and
do an interview and talk about something I haven't talked about for almost two decades and up to that
point Bill Hodgman the deputy da wouldn't talk to me at all and because Gil did he said okay
I'll have an off-the-record conversation with you and so I go to his office and we talk about this
and he realized that hearing me out he understood where I was coming from that this was you know I
didn't have a specific agenda I was just trying to explain how all this came to be and how the
verdict came to be the way it was and I thought it had so much to do with both what went on in
the courtroom but what all these things that went outside the courtroom and so it is only
through sort of that conversation and then him saying okay I want you to come back here and I
want to give you my presentation that I've been giving to law enforcement over the last 20 years
and he gives me a presentation that involves the crime-scene photos where he's saying and so at
that point I just said matter-of-factly you know this is pretty incredible I don't know how many
people have seen this publicly but would you be willing to let us show this and he said you know
sure now the point of it to me is and this gets back to a little bit to your question about the
media I feel like we got so lost in this in terms of what this was all about that I I felt that both
for the just the general need to understand the story but also in the course of how long this
story plays out you know in this rendering that you're Lowell into a sense of look at all this
stuff that this became about you know from a media statement of our obsession with Marcia
Clark and our session with judge Ito let alone just the the conversation about race and so how
this appropriated how we were absorbing this thing it was everything about what actually happened on
June 12 1994 so I felt that you needed to really understand this is why we're here this is the
brutality of that crime and you need to sort of absorb that in a real true fashion and I don't
think frankly and I'll say the collective we I don't think we have done that and I think that
was a very necessary thing for people to engage with and so that's why I felt it was important