When Hollywood Tells The Truth: with Tom McCarthy, Antonio Campos, Tina Satter, and Tobias Lindholm.
Question Everything
Brian Reed
4.6 • 707 Ratings
🗓️ 19 December 2024
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Four Hollywood directors gather after hours at a wine shop to drink and commiserate about the perils – and power – that come when you’re straddling fact and fiction. With behind the scenes stories about documentary romance, regret, and pirates.
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.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Brian here, just letting you know that our show is also on YouTube and that there is a video version of this episode. |
| 0:06.4 | Check it out on KCRW's YouTube channel. |
| 0:10.0 | From Placement Theory and KCRW, this is Question Everything. |
| 0:13.6 | I'm Brian Reed. |
| 0:14.9 | Today on the show, we have four Hollywood directors drinking together on a chilly night at the Bibber and Bell wine shop in New York. |
| 0:21.9 | And what might you ask, do Hollywood directors have to do with journalism? |
| 0:26.3 | This is a show about journalism, right? |
| 0:28.2 | It is. |
| 0:29.3 | But what's special about these filmmakers is that each of them has used reporting, has used journalism, to create their movies and TV shows. |
| 0:37.5 | And not just in a casual, based on a true story kind of way. |
| 0:41.9 | Every one of these directors has made what I'd argue is a masterpiece out of a reported story. |
| 0:46.8 | And they all go about their work as directors and screenwriters, like investigative reporters do, |
| 0:52.9 | doing tons of research, interviewing the people |
| 0:55.3 | the stories about, drawing from documents and transcripts and documentary footage and police |
| 0:59.9 | investigation files. |
| 1:01.6 | But instead of turning that reporting into a piece of journalism, they turn it into drama, fiction. |
| 1:08.0 | Honestly, in some cases, I think these filmmakers have been able to be more thorough than a lot of journalists who are operating on tight deadlines without enough resources or time. |
| 1:17.4 | In a few instances, these filmmakers have actually uncovered scoops about the stories they were telling. |
| 1:22.6 | And one of the directors specifically made his TV show as a way to fight back against bad reporting. |
| 1:28.4 | A few weeks ago, I read this line from the reporter George Packer, which really hit close to home. |
| 1:34.0 | He wrote, we're living in a world where facts instantly perish upon contact with human minds. |
| 1:41.1 | I'm interested in any approach to telling stories that might help the truth stick with people, |
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