IMPRISONED BY CERTAINTY
MAKING A MURDERER CREATORS WON’T BACK DOWN FROM CLAIMS OF BIAS
It would be easy, even deliberate, for audiences of Making a Murderer to canonize the 10- part docu- series alongside the pillars of True Crime’s resurrection: Serial and The Jinx. But its filmmakers see it quite another way.
Shot vérité- style over 10 years, Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos argue their creation — which follows the conviction of Wisconsin-native Steven Avery for the murder of local photographer Teresa Halbach — is neither a contemplation nor damnation of the innocence of its subject. Rather, “our goal was always to reach as wide an audience as possible and to start a dialogue,” Demos explains during a recent phone interview. “Obviously there’s a very loud debate about guilt and innocence, but that was not really our driving question in making this. We were using Steven’s story as a window into the system; as a way to really pull back the curtain on the American criminal justice system.”
Ricciardi and Demos reflect their respective backgrounds. Ricciardi, a lawyer, relays phrases in articulate, deliberate paragraphs, while Demos, whose background is rooted in filmmaking, speaks in a higher register, spitting sentences with unmeasured tempo. The pair’s 10- year journey began when they were thirtysomething graduate film students at NYU. Reading about Avery’s story in The New York Times, they headed to Wisconsin to document the trial of the man who had previously been the poster boy for wrongful conviction, spending nearly two decades in jail for a crime he didn’t commit.
Does it bother them that the public discourse has focused more on the specifics of this crime rather than the flawed system? According to Demos, it’s understandable: “Of course people care about that and want to find answers. At the same time one of the things that we think the series challenges the viewers to do is to come to terms with ambiguity. And to feel comfortable with that because you’re not always going to find truth in these matters.
“The criminal justice system cannot be expected to deliver truth in every case. The more important question is for us to understand that the more important value is justice and justice is what you do when you’re uncertain about the truth. We’re really trying to encourage people to not rush to judgment. To not be so attached to needing to find an answer because that can lead you to ignore other questions that are important to engage with.”
The filmmakers would go on to spend the next eight years travelling back and forth, documenting Avery’s legal issues — often from his and his family’s point of view — and the interlocking webs of haze of circumstantial and seemingly coincidental evidence used to — spoiler alert — put him away again. And then another couple of years in post-productions, whittling down the 500 hours of original footage and 180 hours of trial footage to a storyline they were happy with. “Then it took some time to find a home, because we wanted to deliver it as a series and the marketplace hadn’t caught up to that yet,” Ricciardi says. “So we took our time in postproduction and waited for the market to develop in different ways then catch the story up to present day.”
Since its release in late December, Making a Murderer has became a public fetish, launching petitions for the White House to free Avery and Dassey, a Reddit thread devoted to discovering the real killer and even a Buzzfeed quiz on which of Avery’s defenders is “your boo.” As is usually the case, lost in much of the excitement are the actual people behind the story. During the airing of Serial, the subject’s brother posted on Reddit that this was not just “another CSI episode” to him and his family. In the Halbachs’ case, the family of the victim turned to People magazine.
On the day of our call, a cover story quoting the Halbachs stated they believed the filmmakers had produced a one- sided documentary. Ricciardi and Demos had not read the story but, after asking to hear some of the quotes, were quick to point out they had reached out to the family.
According to Ricciardi, “universal access” was something the pair sought out from the very beginning. “We reached out to the Halbach family. I ultimately sat down with Mike Halbach for coffee and what he told us then was that there was nothing to be learned from Steven Avery. And there was nothing wrong with the American criminal justice system. The Halbach family declined to participate in a documentary that we described to them as an exploration of the reliability of the American criminal justice system and the extent to which it had evolved since 1985. Obviously we understand that this entire experience: The loss of Teresa, the investigation, the prosecution, all that must be incredibly painful for the family, and we understand that. But to say that this is a one- sided documentary? We took no sides here.”
Ricciardi firmly believes Making A Murderer to be an unbiased account of what transpired in the Avery case. “We included as many points of view as were available to us, including Mike Halbach. Including Ken Kratz’s and the state’s. These were people that decided for themselves not to sit down with us and give a sit- down interview, but we used our original and acquired footage to tell their point of view as accurately and fairly as we could. We think multiple points of view are represented in the series.”
In other words, it comes down to a larger debate about documentaries and journalism; bias and intent. One that, this week, continues to rage as critics debate the practices of Sean Penn’s El Chapo feature in Rolling Stone. Asked specifically if they consider Making A Murder to be journalism, Ricciardi takes the lead, speaking for the pair. “We’re not trying to make a statement,” she says. “We’re trying to explore questions. If that fits your definition of journalism ... we are documenting events and trying to share that with the public.”
THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM CAN’T BE EXPECTED TO DELIVER TRUTH.