When Hollywood Tells The Truth - with the directors of Spotlight, The Staircase, Reality, and The Investigation
Question Everything
Brian Reed
4.6 • 707 Ratings
🗓️ 25 December 2025
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We’re taking a short break over the holidays and will be plopping in front of the TV to watch some movies and shows. Maybe you’re doing the same? Check out one of our favorite episodes of Question Everything, where Hollywood directors gather after hours at a wine shop to drink and commiserate. They talk about the perils – and power – that come when you’re straddling fact and fiction.
Featuring Tom McCarthy, who won an Oscar for Spotlight; Antonio Campos, creator of The Staircase for HBO; Tina Satter, who directed and co-wrote Reality starring Sydney Sweeney; and Tobias Lindholm, director and writer of HBO’s The Investigation.
As we know alcohol is not always conducive to factual precision, so here are some corrections and clarifications from our fact-checker, Maggie. Though honestly the crew this time did impressively well! All we have is that the name of the New York Magazine story that inspired Tina Satter to dramatize Reality Winner is called “The World’s Biggest Terrorist Has a Pikachu Bedspread" (not “America’s Biggest Terrorist Has a Pikachu Bedspread”). And it was a National Security Agency contractor, not a former FBI agent, who alerted the FBI about Reality’s leak.
Here’s the NY Mag story. And here’s a Vanity Fair interview with Sophie, the editor of The Staircase documentary.
“Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter.
This episode originally aired on December 18th, 2024.
Transcript
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| 0:21.1 | We happen to have a release day on Christmas. And I thought, you know what a lot of people might be doing today around this time? Rewatching a movie that you've seen, I don't know, a dozen times, two dozen times. I know that's probably what I'll end up doing with my family for many years. It was Lord of the Rings. I don't know what it will be this year. I've been revisiting Home Alone with my five-year-old, which has been awesome, |
| 0:25.4 | frankly. And so I thought, you know what, it's a good day to revisit one of my favorite question everything episodes we've done because it's about movies. And really, a question I |
| 0:32.5 | obsess over, how do you tell a story that lasts? How do you make a story that cuts through all the noise we're bombarded with every day and has a real impact on people's lives? |
| 0:44.6 | To get into this, we have four Hollywood directors who we brought together on a chilly night last year around this time at the Bibber and Bell Wine Shop in New York. |
| 0:53.9 | And if you're wondering |
| 0:54.8 | why I was chumming around with Hollywood directors on a show about journalism, decent question, |
| 0:59.3 | it's because these filmmakers specifically, they all did something unusual. They used reporting |
| 1:05.6 | to make their movies and TV shows. And not just in like a based on a true story kind of way, but in a way that really strikes |
| 1:14.1 | me as a kind of investigative journalism. |
| 1:16.8 | They interview people, dig up documents, police files, transcripts, archival footage, |
| 1:22.7 | they chase down details the way I do as a reporter, and then they turn it into drama for the big or small |
| 1:29.5 | screen. In some cases, these directors have been more thorough than journalists who are working |
| 1:35.0 | under tight deadlines. One of them uncovered a genuine scoop while making his film. Another |
| 1:40.8 | built his show partly as a rebuttal, too bad reporting by journalists that had distorted the truth. |
| 1:47.4 | And it's just interesting. |
| 1:48.5 | All these directors have had to straddle this very fine line. |
| 1:53.3 | How do you tell a true story as a work of fiction and still stay faithful to the underlying facts? |
| 2:00.1 | And how far should you go as a director making fiction to stay true to those facts? |
| 2:06.4 | I had such a blast in this conversation. |
| 2:09.0 | We have Tom McCarthy, who directed the Academy Award-winning Spotlight. |
| 2:12.8 | Antonio Compos, who did the HBO adaptation of the documentary The Staircase. |
| 2:19.2 | Tina Satter, who directed Sidney in the excellent movie Reality About Reality Winner, who we've also had on our show |
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