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So how did a project like this occur to you? Now you are a figure in this world, in this type of story narration mold, so to speak. Are people throwing you ideas? Are you still doing the same investigation you were doing years ago and you only run into these things? Is your producer bringing you ideas? How does that work?
It is a kind of all of the above. It has definitely reached the point where people present things to me. I have not done it … that is not true. There are two excellent that we are in the process of producing now, but before this, I was about to say that I have not done it, but in terms of directing, I have not done anything that they have offered me directly. And that includes a green illuminated document in a streamer on cryptography of the moment. It’s like, come on. I don’t give how *** about that. These things are so difficult to do. I have to be madly in love with them. So we are looking for, Steven and I, and one of our really more reliable colleagues is the head of our research. His name is Lukas Cox. We look, look, and look.
I found this during a rabbit burrow that was going to go in December 2020. I was editing “Sasquatch” and “Bob Ross” at that time and knew they would end the following year. And I really love Noir’s stories: “The Long Goodbye”, “Sunset Boulevard”, “Chinatown”, “Mulholland Drive” – I love these things and I have always wanted to do one. Then, I simply went to a “noir in documentary”, so to speak, and ended up in these old articles of the Times about this story. And was immediately beaten with that thing of, My God, if I could do this, I feel that this could be very, very special. But I knew that everything depended on getting an interview with David Scon because I feel that if you are going to tell a story like this and that you really feel like you are deeply and be worthy of someone’s time, you have to have the guy.
So we wrote in prison and he put himself on the phone with my producer and he agreed to do an interview, if we arrived at the prison to film with him there or if he left, because probation was on the table at that time. I didn’t know when, but I was on the table. And since it was really Peak Covid, nobody was taken to prisons to shoot. And California specifically does not allow you to make applications for specific interviews of inmates.
So I knew we were not going to enter, and I needed it, if this interview was going to happen, to leave. And did not go out for another two and a half years. We began to do this, in effect, at the end of 2021, and they notified us that he was going to have a probation hearing at the end of 2022, and that was an electoral year. All governors will terminate probation audiences that lead to elections because they have to demonstrate that they are difficult with crime. That is what everyone is running in some way.
So, indeed, he got lying and I really felt like, Wow, I can have something that simply will not work and I will be in the hook with HBO and these people will hate me and will not want to work with me.. Then, about six months later, I was driving, he had just left a friend. We had lunch and Steven calls me, my producer partner, and he said: “He is leaving in the next 48 hours. He has been granted probation.” So we immediately need to mobilize the crew. I mean, my DP lives in New York. (David) was locked out of sacrament. The next morning, Steven and I went to Sacramento. People are in airplanes, people are uploading, the team is being reviewed from the houses for rent, and for the next night, we were sitting in a hotel just preparing.
That morning, I don’t remember what time we arrived exactly to prison parking. I don’t think they were 4:30, but it was shortly after. They were probably around 5 am. And we sit and sit down and the sun rises and others are coming to the parking lot waiting to pick up a person they are waiting for. And we see that correction officers stop to go to work for the day and some who are reviewing people in the administrative building. And finally around 7:45, they go to people, and we are looking for it and we think, Oh my God, there is. And he sees us and has a big smile on his face and points to us, and we are rolling all the time. And he got into the car, and I don’t even know if we were three minutes after the prison parking lot when, on his own, he mentioned the morgue, the cremations, I do not want to say everything, but for not asking me a question, he raised a lot. And I just thought, Santo F ***, this is going to be a couple of crazy days.
Man, that is an incredible story.
