If you want to understand what happened in Oklahoma City in 1995,
you have to start years earlier.
That began with the incident in Ruby Ridge in 1992
That began a kind of coalescing of a movement,
and brought together disparate parts of the extremist right.
And I think for Timothy McVeigh, he was part of
this movement and that ultimately led to
the bombing in in Oklahoma City.
Hi, I'm Barak Goodman, I'm the director of "Oklahoma City."
And I'm Don Kleszy, I'm the editor of "Oklahoma City."
"Oklahoma City" is about the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in 1995
by Timothy McVeigh,
which cost the lives of 168 people.
Really the film tells the story of what led up to the bombing --
of the building of a far-right extremist terrorist movement,
of which McVeigh was a part.
We hit upon the framing structure of the film which was to frame it around the day itself,
and to use the history and the delving into McVeigh's psychology more as flashbacks.
And we look very carefully at several events particularly the Ruby Ridge incident in Idaho in 1992,
and the Waco tragedy in Waco, Texas in 1993.
Both of which were confrontations between people on the right and the federal government.
And both of which served as symbols of government overreach
and galvanized an extremist movement in this country.
Timothy McVeigh, in the middle of the Waco standoff,
he actually physically went down there selling bumper stickers.
And it shows how much he was watching.
He was looking for places to express his frustration and anger and here was Waco,
and he made a pilgrimage there.
In that sense we weren't inventing connections,
the connections were very much there in history,
and we just had to illustrate them.
And McVeigh was not a stray actor,
he was very much rooted in this movement
and there's a series of terrorist acts that have happened since of other people also rooted in this movement.
It's very useful for us to point this out,
to sort of bring to light how serious this is.
Ruby Ridge is the story of the confrontation between the Weaver family,
a white separatist family who lived in northern Idaho,
and the federal government who came to see them as stand-ins for a whole movement.
It couldn't exist as a full story in "Oklahoma City" because it drew you in so far
you forgot about the rest of the film.
So Mark Samels made the decision to spin it off as its own hour.
Three main characters are in the film:
A U.S. Marshal named Dave Hunt
who was skulking around surveying the cabin up on Ruby Ridge
and shot some incredible footage which we got ahold of and has never been broadcast before.
Bo Gritz, this very larger-than-life far-right
totem who becomes the improbable hero of the story.
So Sara Weaver was extremely reluctant to talk.
She has become over the years, within the Weaver family,
the person who is the keeper of their point of view,
their story.
This is a woman who's mother lay dead on the floor in the kitchen for a week
while they were holed up in this cabin,
and she was caring for her younger sisters throughout the entire ordeal.
So we definitely understood her reluctance and
we just listened to her and she trusted us,
and in the end she gave us, I think, one of the more powerful interviews I've ever done in my career.
In the Oklahoma City film, Ruby Ridge serves to remind everyone
how it became a kind of symbol for the extremist right and galvanized that movement.
But once you actually look at the event and zoom in on this family,
it starts to become a story about how things can go wrong when each side perceives the other
in a sort of conspiratorial way.
It's really about conspiracy thinking.
Sara herself says this is a film about fear,
and about fearing each other rather than conversing.
And I think that's a very important lesson to take from the film.