- Welcome to Corner Booth.
I am here with Eva Orner and Kimberly Hassett.
You are the director and you're the producer and the editor.
- She's my right hand though. - And the film we're talking
about, right, is Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator.
- [Bikram] So you guys ready?
Do you trust me?
Do you have a choice?
- [Woman Narrator] Bikram considers himself
to be above the law.
- [Bikram] Today, you are not old, educated, wise,
experienced enough to understand who I am.
(calm music)
- It's very compelling, the stories that you told,
the women that were telling their stories, along with
another woman that still believes
and, like, doesn't actually think he did anything
wrong necessarily or still believes in it
and is still rooting for him to come back.
(awkward laughing)
It's like, such...
You're just like "Oh my God."
Right?
- But I kind of,
this is Patrice, and I love her...
- Yeah.
- for her honesty and I'm so respectful and grateful
she agreed to talk with me. - Yeah.
- And when I first contacted her she was
pretty tough on me.
You know, her first question was, you know,
"Do you do bikram yoga?
Have you done teacher training?"
And I was like, "No, I've done a couple of classes."
- Yeah.
- But she was actually, I think she's great
and I think she's in a tricky position
'cause she acknowledges that he has done some things.
She says the women may or may not have made
some bad choices.
You know, she's a little...
She respects the women I think for their courage.
It's a little uncomfortable,
but she still believes in the magic of it all,
and I think she's still caught up in the heydays.
I think a lot of people hide behind
not telling the truth and I applaud honesty.
So, I'm a bit of a fan of hers.
I think she's a good person.
- The main thing to me and why I agreed
to speak with you, Eva, is because this yoga is magical.
- And I imagine it's like what you said.
What's so complicated about it is that he is probably
helping a large majority of people, right?
- Yeah, yeah.
- In terms of, you know... - Yes.
- finding themselves and injury and conflict.
- And that's how he gets them.
I mean we really wanted to show,
in the first act of the film,
the legitimacy of it and why people were drawn to him
and fell for it because we wanted,
if you didn't sort of capture that,
it's easy dismiss people as saying,
"Well, how foolish that you would fall
for something like this."
'Cause when you look at it retrospectively,
you can do that easily.
But we really wanted to capture this world,
because it was a real thing.
It was a big thing in LA and then around the world,
and people believed in it.
- Tell me about why this story,
what motivated you to tell this one.
- Pulse, the UK film company, brought it to me
as just a series of articles and said,
"Are you interested in telling a story?"
And it kind of was just as Me Too was just happening.
I knew it would come out in a couple of years
and I thought, this is interesting
because it's a pre-Me Too story and it'll be
told in a post-Me Too world.
The most important part about it is
it's about the bravery and the courage of women
to come out in a time when the world wasn't
nearly as receptive.
- I went to one of the senior staffers and said,
"Bikram asked me if I would be with him"
and he didn't look shocked at all.
- This was a very different environment.
I mean, it's still not easy to do that now.
- Especially, Nic--,
the one that started it all off.
That was amazing to me, right.
- But to do that then was so courageous
and the thing is, you know, several years later
what have they got out of it?
You know, he went to court.
He was found guilty.
He didn't pay his judgment.
He got away with it.
He's a fugitive in our country.
And a handful of women settled for small amounts of money.
And that's not justice. - Does he pay...
Does he pay those settlements?
Because I notice he didn't pay the big one.
- He's paid four relatively small settlements.
Two are still pending
and he was ordered to pay eight million dollars
and he was found guilty of every charge against him
in a civil court and he fled the country.
- How did you manage to...
That must have been really hard to choose what women...
- I thought it was fun though.
- Yeah, I mean we built a chronological archive.
It wasn't one of these movies where you have you know,
hundreds of hours of footage.
We had to cut, you know, two or three characters
along the way,
but I think that it was actually quite quick
to distill the story...
- Yeah, I think so too.
- You know.
- A documentary filmmaker is nothing
without an amazing editor.
- Where are we in getting justice served with him?
- The DAs have a reluctance to go after powerful men
because they're difficult in sex abuse cases,
'cause they're difficult to win.
They're high profile.
Nobody wants another OJ situation.
- Right.
- It's easy to just walk away quietly,
but in a post-Me Too world, I think as women
we need to say, "Not good enough".
Men need to say the same thing.
And they need to go after him criminally
and, you know, ultimately try to get him here,
extradite him here.
He's an American citizen.
- I live in Los Angeles and I notice the bikram is
very hard to find.
- There's only... - It's now hot yoga.
- There's like five of them left.
- Oh right, yeah. - In Los Angeles?
- There used to be a lot.
- [All] Yeah.
- Wow.
- The names have changed.
It's the same principle... - It's 2016 too.
- It's just that they've gotten rid of the bikram branding.
- We needed to actually have some evolution.
At the end of 2015, I did change the name
to Hot Yoga Pasadena.
- Do you feel like a predator was born,
or do you feel like the ego and the power, you know,
grew and mushroomed and so he just took what he wanted,
regardless of consent?
'Cause I'm sure plenty of women
were sleeping with him willingly.
- I think he always had something in him
that was...
- A seed?
- I think he was primed to abuse if given power.
He got worse as he got more power,
but he was more enabled and he had a, you know,
a core group around him and enabling him and protecting him.
But I think, I don't know, I feel like he was always
very comfortable not telling the truth.
And I think that's always a big warning sign.
- Well, congratulations.
It's great to meet you guys.
- Thank you so much.
- It's really well done.
- Thanks.
- Thanks for stopping by our corner booth.
- Thank you.
We love it here.
- Thank you.