Q&A Director : Liz Garbus 

 

Q : Hello. Congratulations, Liz Garbus  I’m your moderator tonight. I want to know what it feels like to revisit this story? 

Liz Garbus: Sad. It feels alert, right? This series continues, two more episodes.The next episode you’ll learn what was actually going on in the area. You would know there was a major incidents but we unpack that

Q : Where were you when you heard the news? (The story came out about her previous film, “Lost Girl” which is the feature film that this incident is based on, and this documentary ties to arrested suspect) 

Liz Garbus: I think it was July or August and I was out at Massachusetts and the family members and saying congratulations, which was a sort of a weird things to say, but at the same time did believe that their, at one of my colleagues, I was just, that lost girls was asking a question or that the family members also that I got to meet.

Q : I am curious if you could talk more about how you foster that relationship with the family. Is it clear how much they trust you? I know that’s a delicate relationship.

Liz Garbus: They’re strong and saw a lot of coverage of this. Think they saw in “Lost Girls” that I was less interested in aspects of the case and so therefore they felt more comfortable. I’ve done survivor and victim oriented work, and they have become part of it. It is just like you checking in and you wanna know if there is a human relationship but some of the people who I got to know in the series are, where the contemporaries are their friends. There were other women who went. But we get to fill out the story Feel really lucky.

©Courtesy of Netflix 

Q : You’re underselling it I was impressed by how many people you got to talk to and especially people who had run-ins with Rex Truman, people who had grown up with him, people who had worked with him, and that’s a different relationship than the family how do you get those people comfortable to talk to you? 

Liz Garbus: Liz Garbus : Well, I had an amazing team who worked on this show. Mala (Chapple=Executive Producer) here, and Grace (Burtlett=Associate Producer), and Rebecca (Z. Stern-Archival Producer), and Elizabeth (Wolff=producer), and the outreach that was going on this team to turn out wherever you rock. How do we reach out to that person? That was a team effort. I work with really good people and the people on the other end of those messages sense that trust

Q : How did you decide Shannon’s(Shannon Gilbert) story would be the thrust of the first episode and that’s who we meet.

Liz Garbus: Yeah, this started with Shannon a lot. There was a feeling, I know that there’s been a feeling amongst the other victims family members that Shannon took up a lot of the media attention they’re happy for any attention on the case, but also Shannon’s situation.

This nine one one call was how the world came to know their case, and see that these. People were connected. None of the other women believed that they were really, truly missing people. They just thought, oh, they’re off the grid, or they’re on a vendor, they’ll turn up.

No, they knew they were supposed to see me on Tuesday and they’re not there. I spoke to them six hours ago, just like you would know your friend if they didn’t call you back, but nobody listened to him. But Shannon made that 911 call. And so there was that concrete evidence and that it was a way that the authorities had to start taking the case seriously, it was a way into the story

Q : And when you knew there was no looking back because you wrestled with that?

Liz Garbus: We did wrestle with it. I didn’t really want to start there. Also Lost Girls focuses on that story. But narratively, you move things around, right? And you just keep moving them around until things fall into place and make sense and the story unfolds. And that was how the film found its best shape. Or the show found its best shape. So we live with it and hopefully it works.

©Courtesy of Netflix 

Q : It’s a spoiler, it works. I’m curious how you prepare for a project like this, so different from Cousteau(“Becoming Cousteau”) or Nina Simone(“What Happened, Miss Simone”), or, the greatest hits of Liz Garbus that are not true crime. And so I wonder. What kind of, like the toll that it takes on you and the prep they can do to get into that head space? 

I started making films in the criminal justice system and I guess I still think, now there’s this, terminology true crime that is, extremely popular. And I guess I think about my films as, of course they are, but they’re also criminal justice systems whose stories adjudicate and who fall through the cracks of our attention and of justice. So I think there is a line from the farm and girlhood through these films.

It’s about what voices we hear, what voices we turn out. I don’t know how to prepare for it. I just think I get it stuck under my craw and have to go to it. Is there something I feel in the story, an untapped emotion or soul that I can be the connective tissue to the audience to feel it.

Liz Garbus: in a world where we’re all disconnected and feel far away from each other. Can I let you? Feel like you’re walking in their shoes for a minute. What it would feel like to have someone disappear and nobody listen. In some ways those stories are united by that.

Q : What did it feel like to be covering an active investigation and a bill? 

Liz Garbus: it is an act. He has not been tried yet. The perpetrator in this case if you watch it you’ll see they hone in on him. And that’s dicey, right?

Like I am a defense minded person. Like I think about the rights of defendants. He’s not guilty until his trial. But I’m also connected to survivors and looking at evidence that feels undeniable and palpable.

 That’s a balancing act. And you’ll see in the third episode how we manage that. But yeah, this trial will happen sometime in Suffolk County hopefully this year. people have waited long enough and I think it’ll happen soon.

Q : Yeah. And I guess the last question, you’ve alluded to it already. The second episode is heavily focused on the good people at the Suffolk County DA’s office and the police. And I just, I’m wondering why you chose that as the center of that episode. Like why is that important? 

Liz Garbus: When making Lost Girls, we paid a lot of attention. There were many conspiracy theories about what was happening, why wasn’t this case solved? And of course, people looked at the police and people said, oh, I think they’re in on it. There’s gotta be, oh, I’ve heard about these sex parties on No Beach, and the police are there.

And that’s what happened to Shannon. There’s all these conspiracy theories you can see online. and so we had questions and it was 10 years and, why was there not a suspect? Why did it feel that they were not even close? They weren’t even talking about this case.

When we came to learn later on what was actually happening in the Suffolk County Police Department and who was running it is not Richard Dormer, who in this episode is a police commissioner. He retires. Soon after these press conferences there’s a new police chief Jimmy Burke and Tom running law enforcement and the justice Department, the DA’s office in Suffolk County.

Are now convicted felons. and so it was really like an answer to a question that we all had been wondering about. And if you are running a police department, like it’s your own personal mafia, you’re not working for these. Which is not to say there weren’t people in the police department who really cared.

©Courtesy of Netflix 

Q : We spoke to some of the top grad students. My last question is, was there anything that really surprised you about making this? 

Liz Garbus: I think what I learned a lot about was how these women kept each other safe and had each other’sbacks and the systems they had.

I could have listened to Sarah and I wish I had a whole hour of just Sarah talking about the systems that they had in place. Text. Five minutes after you get into the room with a code word, and then an hour later if you’re not out and haven’t texted, like she goes and finds their boyfriend and like they go and they bang on the door.

Like they had all of these systems that when a lot of these women went in the morning, for instance, fell through the crack that night because they’re left. The extraordinary survivor’s guilt. She could barely. Talk about her friend without, and this is 10 years later, could barely talk about her friend without just completely falling apart.

And, those relationships I wasn’t aware of when I was helping. That was really something that was really impactful. And I’ll see one more thing which is that in documentary filmmaking, and this is something I was talking about with Blackberry filmmaker, as they were walking in, we talked about recreations for the first time I showed the faces of actors.

 Because there were few photographs of these women and projects. I really, I hadn’t, but I didn’t want to feel like these women shouldn’t have faces that you see. And I didn’t want them to just be, backs or shadows. I wanted them to have faces you would remember.

In addition to the beautiful pictures that we have. We had so few. And so I wanted them to feel real and alive. I wanted you to connect to them creatively, that was a new choice for me. I hope it works. It felt really important.Thank you.

Q: hope the rest of you will watch “Lost Girls”. Enjoy the movie. If you haven’t seen it.

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Here’s the trailer of the film.