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The problem with any documentary subject is that once you put them on camera, are you getting the real person or someone performing?
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That’s a key question which prompted filmmaker Antonio
Campos to revisit, research and adapt into for HBO a mini-series about crime
novelist Michael Peterson who was convicted then acquitted of murdering his
wife.
“And the problem with Michael Peterson is, even in real
life, there’s a performative quality to him,” says Campos. VF. “So it’s a
performance in a performance almost.”
You’d need to be familiar with the background to these
events to fully appreciated the meta-narrative that Campos has delivered.
The Staircase is based on a 10-part documentary of the same
name released in 2004 on the Sundance Channel before landing on Netflix in 2018
with a further three updated episodes. It follows the true story
of Peterson and his wife Kathleen after she is found dead at the bottom of
a staircase in their home, and the 16-year judicial battle that followed.
The show stars Colin Firth and Toni Collette rounded
out by Michael Stuhlbarg, Sophie Turner, Patrick
Schwarzenegger, Parker Posey and, Juliette Binoche).
In many ways the original The Staircase pioneered what we
know as the true-crime genre in the way it forensically examined a case
building suspense and probing the evidence of multiple episodes.
What intrigued Campos was not just whether Peterson had done
it (he took an Alford Plea of voluntary manslaughter to settle the case -
meaning sufficient evidence exists to convict him of the offence, but the
defendant still asserts their innocence) but to what extent the documentary
series itself had shaped the narrative of actual events.
That’s why the documentarians – French filmmakers
Jean-Xavier de Lestrade and Denis Poncet - feature as prominent characters in
this new dramatic restaging. De Lestrade and Poncet had spent two years
‘embedded’ with Peterson as they built their doc.
“One of the things that intrigued me was that the
documentarians had different opinions about what happened – that the producer
and the director don’t agree,” Campos explained.
The co-showrunner and co-writer with Campos is Maggie Cohn.
She told Variety,
“We really thought it was such an interesting way to have a Greek chorus.
They’re the people that are seemingly not invested in an outcome, but then you
slowly see them become very invested to varying degrees in Michael Peterson’s
fate. That’s kind of the most direct comparison to what the viewer’s experience
will be.”
Campos was so interested in the original series when it came
out he was also present during courtroom scenes that were captured in later
episodes of the docuseries but was wary of getting too close to Peterson.
While the original filmmakers spent hundreds of hours with
Michael, Campos and Cohn took the opposite approach— purposefully limiting the
amount of time they spoke to him.
“I had avoided talking to him because I was worried that it
would skew my perspective and affect the way that I was looking at him as a
character,” Campos told Vanity Fair.
In the article, Cohn admits that she “struggled with how to
keep that separation and distance” between filmmaker and subject.
“I mean, I was in a three-hour conversation and I was
struggling with it. So imagine, over the course of two years, trying to keep
that separation and that distance when you’re so intimately connected. And then
to leave and go edit the documentary. I got a very small taste of what that’s
like to try to keep up that boundary...it’s very difficult, or it was for me.”
Campos himself counters, “that a good documentarian has to
get close to a subject, to a certain degree, to get them to open up. That’s the
challenge too, right? You have to try and maintain objectivity, but you also
need to develop trust.”
The best true crime docs are perhaps the ones where there is
suspicion but no firm evidence. There is
still no definitive resolution for how Kathleen died, meaning this new TV
dramatization can only repeat the speculation of the prior series.
The very existence of the original documentary was even
credited by Petersen as being one key to his acquittal since it showed him and
fellow witnesses in a different light.
In his 2019 book, ‘Behind the Staircase’, Peterson expressed
his gratitude to the documentary crew: “Allowing them to film everything was
the wisest decision I made,” he wrote, “for during the trial, witnesses lied
and committed perjury to convict me; it was all on film.”
This leads Esquire to wonder whether filmmakers should be more
sensitive to the circumstances of the true crime cases they dramatize and
publicize.
The Dropout, the dramatisation of the Elizabeth
Holmes and the Theranos scandal has also arrived at an awkward moment for
the real-life case. The trial of Holmes business partner Sunny Balwani was held
up when two jurors were dismissed by the judge, as they had watched the Disney+
series, despite being asked not to engage in anything to do with the case
beforehand.
Do we need more distance and time before the TV true-crime
industrial complex jumps into action? muses Esquire.
“For the innocent wrongly accused of crimes they didn’t
commit, it’s arguably never too soon. But for those unresolved cases with no
clear-cut perpetrator, sometimes turning the cameras on only serves to muddy
the waters of already impossible cases to solve.”
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