CBS News' Steve Hartman on his Oscar-winning documentary "All the Empty Rooms" [Extended Interview]
The Takeout with Major Garrett
CBS News
4.6 • 586 Ratings
🗓️ 20 March 2026
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Major interviews Hartman about his documentary "All the Empty Rooms", which highlights how parents of children killed in school shootings have maintained their children's rooms following their absence. He delves into why he started this project, the nuanced and careful approach he took with affected loved ones, and his reaction after winning the Oscar.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | All right, we've got Simon on the line. Simon, young people, they're just all a bit, a bit lazy, aren't they? |
| 0:09.0 | What are you for? |
| 0:10.0 | Welcome to McDonald's. |
| 0:11.0 | Have you get the six minutes, please? |
| 0:12.0 | Some say young people are work shy, but at McDonald's, we hired 47,000 of them last year. |
| 0:19.0 | How's your night? |
| 0:20.0 | Like George here, who keeps things running during a Friday rush. |
| 0:25.1 | Resilience, making it happen at McDonald's. |
| 0:31.7 | The film opens with two words. |
| 0:34.1 | Ready? |
| 0:35.1 | Yes. |
| 0:36.1 | Tell me about that conversation I'm not sure which conversation |
| 0:42.6 | you're talking about is that the opening sound of the film yes it's a |
| 0:47.7 | question ready and you say yes ready yet well I think we're taking a deep |
| 0:53.3 | breath before we knock on the door, as I recall. |
| 0:56.0 | And that is me and photographer Lou Boat, standing at the threshold of one of the parents, |
| 1:02.0 | their home about to go in and ask a big, huge favor of, you know, can we photograph your child's bedroom? And you never know what to say |
| 1:13.1 | when you're in those moments. You know, you're just meeting somebody for the first time who's |
| 1:18.3 | lost, you know, a child. And it's just inevitably awkward. You don't want to say. The thing that |
| 1:24.7 | you should never say is like, I'm sorry for your loss because then they don't know what to say to that. |
| 1:29.3 | So it's always just a hurdle to get past that. But once we did, you know, we got, we got close. |
| 1:37.3 | And that's why I wanted to start there, Steve, because the film captures the loss of these parents, this unimaginable loss, |
... |
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