Showrunners<\/strong>\u00a0:\u00a0<\/span>David Anthony Ngo<\/a>,\u00a0Erin Williams-Weir<\/a><\/p>\n Executive Producers<\/strong>\u00a0:\u00a0<\/span>John Battsek,\u00a0Chris Smith<\/p>\n Co-Executive Producer<\/strong>\u00a0:\u00a0<\/span>Michael Agar<\/p>\n Producers<\/strong>\u00a0:\u00a0<\/span>Erin Williams-Weir,\u00a0Daniel Joyce,\u00a0David Anthony Ngo,\u00a0Louise Schultze<\/p>\n Editor<\/strong>\u00a0:\u00a0<\/span>Julian Hart<\/p>\n Cinematographers<\/strong>\u00a0:\u00a0<\/span>Samuel Broeren,\u00a0Matthew Jenkins,\u00a0David Gregan<\/p>\n Composer<\/strong>\u00a0:\u00a0<\/span>Simon Walbrook<\/p>\n Archival Producer<\/strong>\u00a0:\u00a0<\/span>Cassie Sagness<\/p>\n Animation Director<\/strong>\u00a0:\u00a0<\/span>Luke Jurevicius<\/p>\n Sound Design<\/strong>\u00a0:\u00a0<\/span>Duncan Campbell<\/p>\n Assistant Editor<\/strong>\u00a0:\u00a0<\/span>Brody King<\/p>\n Subject<\/strong>\u00a0:\u00a0<\/span>Barry Cooper<\/p>\n Year<\/strong>\u00a0:\u00a0<\/span>2025<\/p>\n Category<\/strong>\u00a0:\u00a0<\/span>Series<\/p>\n Country<\/strong>\u00a0:\u00a0<\/span>Australia<\/p>\n Language<\/strong>\u00a0:\u00a0<\/span>English<\/p>\n Run Time<\/strong>\u00a0:\u00a0<\/span>50 min<\/p>\n<\/ins>\n \u00a9Courtesy of Sundance Film Festival<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Exclusive Interview Directors\/Showrunners David Anthony Ngo, Erin Williams-Weir<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Q : Could you talk about the genesis of this film, how did you get the project started?<\/b><\/p>\n ERIN WILLIAMS-WEIR: It was a very short version of his story. Barry had this big, loud Texas accent. He’s wearing a fedora and he just started talking the more we looked into it, we realized, oh, no one has told this full story before. So we did a little bit of research and yeah, we just were really dogged and jumped onto it and we ended up flying Barry over to Australia to start interviewing.<\/p>\n Q : In the film they talk about, Where they hide the stash and his daughter talks about putting a joint on the straw of the happy meal. It’s such a funny story. Are there any more funny stories like that the drug dealers hide a stash in other places?<\/strong><\/p>\n DAVID ANTHONY NGO: A lot of what Barry is also an expert in is sniffer dogs, drug detection dogs, right? And so he does a lot about that in terms of how these dogs are trained and how you can fool them. Also involving a sense for hunting that puts the dog off. But he was also a whistleblower in terms of police dog false alerts and how dogs can be trained to false alert and give police unjustified access in search and seizure. He’s certainly an expert in that and there’s a whole heap of tips in his videos.<\/p>\n<\/ins>\n Q : And he also trained his own sniffer dog, Toby. To get a certification of a proper narcotic dog. Could you talk about his process of training his own sniffer dog?<\/strong><\/p>\n DAVID ANTHONY NGO: I was shocked to find out that police have to pay to get a trained dog.<\/p>\n Q : $5,000, right?<\/strong><\/p>\n DAVID ANTHONY NGO:<\/b>\u00a0Yeah for Barry, he’s always been a person that when there’s a barrier to anything that he wants to achieve, he leaps over it, smashes through it and in the case of him being prevented from getting a drug dog simply out of cost, it so happened that he was well-deserved in training dogs because he trained dogs as a kid when he was a hunter and so that skill came in handy to train his own police drug dog.<\/p>\n Q : Could you Permian Basin, the drug task force that he joined after he made 100 arrests in the year?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n DAVID ANTHONY NGO: That’s a big question. We did a lot of research into the Permian Basin Drug Task Forces, as well as other drug task forces that were established within Texas.There seems to be a very particular system there in terms of The kind of various jurisdictions and how all these different departments work. The particular one that Barry was working for was quite notorious and quite an aggressive organization that had a lot of accusations about corruption that we found throughout it as well. And we go into some of that later on in the documentary.<\/p>\n Q : When you think about catching a narcotic, wearing the bullet proof, fully armed and busting windows while they are filming, and once they get back to the station washing the video and laughing, I just want to question the approach of arrest? How have the tactics of police officers changed these days?<\/strong><\/b><\/p>\n DAVID ANTHONY NGO: I\u2019m no expert on the evolving nature of law enforcement, so I\u2019m not sure how much it has changed since Barry was involved. But I will say, we certainly don\u2019t intend this film to be a one-sided attack on police. They\u00a0have\u00a0a tough job. And in the State of Texas where many civilians are armed – it\u2019s a very dangerous job. However, I do think there are some problematic incentives for law enforcement that lead to very bad outcomes and there\u2019s a real human cost to that.<\/p>\n Q : Could you talk about his characteristics and his relationship with his first wife and daughters? Meeting another woman Candi? How to be not so serious, daughter was close to second wives\u00a0<\/b><\/b><\/p>\n ERIN WILLIAMS-WEIR: Barry is the most wild personality I\u2019ve ever met. He’s lived many many lives and there was an enormous amount of fallout, both professionally and personally, when he switched sides and picked a one man fight with the war on drugs. Kathy Vaden, his church band member, said it best, \u201cThere are people who love Barry Cooper. There are people that hate Barry Cooper. And there are people that\u00a0have\u00a0never\u00a0met Barry Cooper.\u201d And that was certainly true of our experience as we spoke to many people who had been involved with him through the years.<\/p>\n \u00a9Courtesy of Sundance Film Festival<\/p>\n Q : After Barry stopped being a narcotic officer, he became the pastor at the church, could you talk about this woman’s incident that\u2019s falsely prophesying that church that he was there? Is that going on at a lot of churches?\u00a0<\/b><\/b><\/p>\n DAVID ANTHONY NGO:\u00a0<\/b>I\u2019m not sure how prevalent false prophesying is in the churches of Texas, as our story really only touches on Barry\u2019s personal experience.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/b><\/b>Q : He started an R-rated church, could you talk about what it is?\u00a0<\/b><\/b><\/p>\n DAVID ANTHONY NGO:\u00a0<\/b>Everything Barry\u2019s done, he\u2019s taken to the extreme. And the R-Rated church was certainly one of his many wild escapades – an adults only congregation where Barry preached about sex and drugs, and people got buzzed on wine all night.<\/p>\n Q : Could you talk about how Barry made the “Never\u00a0Get\u00a0Busted\u00a0Again” show and how he pitched to High Times, lawyer and cameraman to shoot?\u00a0<\/b><\/b><\/p>\n ERIN WILLIAMS-WEIR: After his days in law enforcement, it was really Candi who opened his eyes to the atrocities of the war on drugs. She enjoyed marijuana and convinced Barry that it was immoral to cage people for a relatively harmless drug. So he flipped the script, and decided to share the secret knowledge he had learned from his time as a narcotics officer, training with the FBI, DEA and ATF. He found a young filmmaker, Travis Boles, who jumped at the opportunity and they went about making the DVD to help drug users hide their stash. Later, he pitched it to David Bienenstock at High Times and they promoted it in the magazine. But I don\u2019t think Barry knew it would catch wild fire from there and become a national media sensation.<\/p>\n<\/ins>\n Q : They legalize marijuana in many states in the United States, even in New York, I\u2019m curious to know how Barry thinks these days about the change of the narcotic situation?<\/strong><\/p>\n DAVID ANTHONY NGO: Barry is for the legalization of marijuana, and was involved in activist organizations that were fighting for that as well. But even though it’s been legalized in a lot of states, really nothing much has changed in Texas in particular where he’s from. And so still there are thousands and thousands of arrests each year, and millions and millions of dollars seized in personal assets by the police. While there seems to be a global movement towards change, certainly in the area that Barry grew up in, it’s just as bad as it was before.<\/p>\n Q: Could you talk about the Yolanda story? This is a really big issue that goes on that narcotic officer planting the drug on regular people and getting them busted, wrongly putting them in jail. Could you talk about the situation and also how can they rectify the situation?<\/strong><\/p>\n DAVID ANTHONY NGO: it’s one of the most egregious cases of mis-justice that I’ve ever come across and out of all the people that Erin and I spent a lot of time with Yolanda and her father Raymond and that was the most heartbreaking story I’ve ever heard so it affected Barry as well and hence why he took up the charge in her defense and took the risks that he did as well in terms of exposing that corruption ultimately helping free this innocent woman from prison. But they’re well documented illegal practices that have been going on there for quite some time and are probably continuing to this day.<\/p>\n Q : This will be the last question. This film was selected at the Sundance Film Festival. How do you want our audience to take away from this film?<\/strong><\/p>\n ERIN WILLIAMS-WEIR: We’re honored to be here at Sundance. We’re so thankful for our programmer, Adam Montgomery, to believe in this and have the first 50 minutes of the feature show. So we hope audiences come with open minds. Barry’s a complex character. And we hope everyone can get something out of this.<\/p>\n If you like the interview, share your thoughts below!<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"Never](\"https:\/\/cinemadailyus.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/David.png\")
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