Speaker 1: I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing.
Speaker 1: Joe Burlinger has been making documentaries for almost two decades
Speaker 1: along with his directing partner Bruce Snowsky. Their first film,
Speaker 1: Brother's Keeper, about a murder among brothers who were struggling
Speaker 1: dairy farmers in upstate New York, won the Sundance Film
Speaker 1: Festival in nineteen ninety two. Their most recent film is
Speaker 1: also about murder. Paradise Lost three Purgatory is the third
Speaker 1: film in a series of documentaries about a crime that
Speaker 1: took place eighteen years ago. Three eight year old boys
Speaker 1: were murdered in rural Arkansas, and three teenagers were charged
Speaker 1: with the crime, Damian Eccles, Jason Baldwin, and Jesse miss Kelly.
Speaker 1: The prosecution painted the teens, who wore black, listened to
Speaker 1: heavy metal, and read Stephen King novels as Satan worshippers
Speaker 1: participating in ritualistic killings. When Burlinger went down to investigate,
Speaker 1: he found very little physical evidence. What he did find
Speaker 1: was a modern day witch hunt. At a press conference,
Speaker 1: Inspector Gary Gitchell said the case against the accused teens
Speaker 1: is very strong. That's an excerpt from Burlinger's first film
Speaker 1: about the case. His films brought a lot of attention
Speaker 1: to what was happening in Arkansas. Just last August, after
Speaker 1: eighteen years in prison, Echoes Baldwin and ms Kelly were released.
Speaker 1: This probably wouldn't have happened without Burlinger's films and support
Speaker 1: from celebrities like Johnny Depp, Eddie Vetter and others who
Speaker 1: raised millions to fund appeals regarding DNA evidence. The fact
Speaker 1: that the three were ultimately released surprised no one more
Speaker 1: than Burlinger. When he first went down to work and
Speaker 1: saw he expected to find something very different. We went
Speaker 1: down thinking we were going to be making a film
Speaker 1: about guilty teenagers, because we didn't know at the time
Speaker 1: just how we're responsible. The local press was and covering
Speaker 1: the story, and this was right around the time of
Speaker 1: the Jamie Boulger case in the UK. About a year
Speaker 1: and a half before that, a ten year old kid
Speaker 1: had lured a younger kid out into the railroad tracks
Speaker 1: in Liverpool and and just beat him to death. And
Speaker 1: so we thought there was an emerging trend of youth violence,
Speaker 1: and so we went down thinking we were going to
Speaker 1: make a real life River's Edge and we got down
Speaker 1: there and one plus one was not equaling to you
Speaker 1: know that Um, you know, I can't say immediately because
Speaker 1: it took about three months to negotiate access into their
Speaker 1: holding cells prior to the trial. But once I met
Speaker 1: once Bruce, and I met Damien, and in particular, we
Speaker 1: just felt like this was not you know, out of
Speaker 1: a one out of ten. In the film he says
Speaker 1: it's an eleven. It was like a minus one. And
Speaker 1: you started to base that thinking on conversations with the
Speaker 1: defendants themselves, or evidence and discussions with their attorneys as
Speaker 1: well all of the above. You know, you look at
Speaker 1: Jason Baldwin, a sixteen year old, scrawny kid with you know,
Speaker 1: arms that are couldn't be capable of the crime that
Speaker 1: was committed. He just used credibility. Damian Eccles, I mean,
Speaker 1: even though he was his own worst enemy in some ways,
Speaker 1: because he kind of enjoyed the attention and was, you know,
Speaker 1: a little narcissistic about the whole thing. It just didn't
Speaker 1: make sense, you know, And when you start looking at
Speaker 1: the forensic evidence, I mean, here you have allegedly a
Speaker 1: crime by three teens who are not professional killers, who
Speaker 1: brought according to the prosecutor, three little boys out into
Speaker 1: the woods and slaughtered them to death in this savage beating.
Speaker 1: And yet there was no blood found at the crime scene.
Speaker 1: And then you look at the confession, and the confession
Speaker 1: is riddled with inconsistencies and problems coaching and coaching. Um so,
Speaker 1: within months we knew that something was amiss. I found
Speaker 1: that Eccles came across as a very unsympathetic person at times,
Speaker 1: and as you mentioned the word narcissism, he never seemed
Speaker 1: to really suffer. Were there times that you were convinced
Speaker 1: Ecules really was genuine that he suffered off camera? You
Speaker 1: never really showed him, not that I needed to break
Speaker 1: down a cry. And now that's interesting, you know, because
Speaker 1: some people view echoes that way, and some people view
Speaker 1: echoes very differently, very sympathetically. I mean a lot of people.
Speaker 1: You know. The amazing thing about this story, I think
Speaker 1: he's ultimately sympathetic be cause he's innocent as a character. No,
Speaker 1: I mean, I think he didn't do himself any favors
Speaker 1: when he took the stand, you know, well, I think
Speaker 1: he kind of enjoyed the attention, and as he explained
Speaker 1: to us, in a subsequent film. You know, he just
Speaker 1: never imagined that he would be convicted for these rumors
Speaker 1: and ghost stories. He just believed that it would be
Speaker 1: made right. I mean, the interesting thing for me is
Speaker 1: just this worldwide explosion that these films created. And it
Speaker 1: was people both famous and not famous, regular people and
Speaker 1: people like Johnny Depp who all said, like, you know what,
Speaker 1: that guy could be me. I dressed a little different,
Speaker 1: I acted a little differently the other I was the other,
Speaker 1: and in the right circumstances, I could have been that guy.
Speaker 1: And so I think he did evoke a lot of
Speaker 1: sympathetic feelings from people. But the culmination of this long
Speaker 1: two decade is doing which you made three films. These
Speaker 1: men walked out of prison for time served in exchange
Speaker 1: for copying this plea? What was the state of Arkansas
Speaker 1: let them out under what's called an Alfred plea. It's
Speaker 1: a rarely used legal maneuver. It's incredibly bizarre. Uh. It's
Speaker 1: disheartening that this was the resolution. You know, on the
Speaker 1: one hand, of course, we're all delighted these guys are
Speaker 1: out of prison, but not but not exonerate. And that's
Speaker 1: the problem. The Alfred plea is where you profess your innocence,
Speaker 1: but for legal purposes you plead guilty to lesser charges.
Speaker 1: So the charges were reduced from capital murder, which is
Speaker 1: the death penalty or life without parole, to first degree murder.
Speaker 1: And because they had spent eighteen years in prison, they
Speaker 1: were they were sentenced to time served. Also, there's a
Speaker 1: suspended sentence hanging over their heads that if they ever
Speaker 1: violate a crime, they will have to serve more time
Speaker 1: for these murders. Are you planning on a fourth movie?
Speaker 1: You know? We people keep asking that, and you know
Speaker 1: we we we made these three move is as acts
Speaker 1: of advocacy. A fourth movie feels like we would be
Speaker 1: kind of milking it, you know, And I'm not sure
Speaker 1: I want to go down that road. I honestly don't
Speaker 1: agree with you. Really to be the last chapter of
Speaker 1: this is what did wrongful conviction and wrongful incarceration due
Speaker 1: to them? Life for them freezes there as a young
Speaker 1: man and their body keeps aging. But you wonder what
Speaker 1: kind of development they have then you release them out
Speaker 1: into the world. And I mean, god knows. The state
Speaker 1: of Arkansas had the least generous public defender approach towards
Speaker 1: this case. Was their council public defender at first, well,
Speaker 1: some of them were public defenders, and some of them
Speaker 1: wanted to take the case on, but they did not
Speaker 1: get the kind of representation that you would expect. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's in fact, one of the great tragedies. And what
Speaker 1: people should focus on with this story is that it
Speaker 1: has taken eighteen years, millions and millions of dollars provided
Speaker 1: by people like Peter Jackson and Eddie Vetter of Pearl
Speaker 1: jam and Johnny Depp three Natalie Maine's three very relatively
Speaker 1: expensive documentaries from HBO. I mean, there's something wrong with
Speaker 1: our legal system where this is what it takes to
Speaker 1: get somebody out of prison, and why don't they have
Speaker 1: that kind of defense right from the get go? You know,
Speaker 1: maybe there is a four paradise last four if we
Speaker 1: want to exonerate these guys because the Alfred plea, it's
Speaker 1: deeply disturbing. You have three guys who are wrongfully convicted,
Speaker 1: spent their entire adult life up till now in prison
Speaker 1: for a crime they didn't commit, and the State of
Speaker 1: Arkansas is making them plead guilty so that a they
Speaker 1: won't be sued for wrongful convicting, so they're not going
Speaker 1: to get any compensation and be that means the state
Speaker 1: of Arkansas is not looking for the real killers. I mean,
Speaker 1: the people of the state of Arkansas should be disgusted.
Speaker 1: And you know just how slowly the wheels of justice
Speaker 1: grind forward the simplest things like this DNA action. You know,
Speaker 1: in two thousand one, Arkansas passed a DNA statute which
Speaker 1: allows you to go test new evidence, and they argued
Speaker 1: for several years whether they could even do the test,
Speaker 1: and then the state wanted a particular crime lab. I
Speaker 1: mean literally for six years it took to get these
Speaker 1: d n A results out. However, when it came time
Speaker 1: to craft this Alfred play, when they were fearing the
Speaker 1: HBO broadcast and when they were fearing this evidentiary hearing
Speaker 1: that was coming up in December, and literally in six
Speaker 1: or seven days they are two weeks something like that,
Speaker 1: they banged out this this Alfred place. So you know,
Speaker 1: when it's in their interest, they can make it happen
Speaker 1: pretty damn quickly. Why didn't you abandoned it after the
Speaker 1: first That's a great question. I was both Bruce and
Speaker 1: I were just absolutely tortured at the idea these guys
Speaker 1: were still rotting in prison, and you know, the case was,
Speaker 1: but the movie didn't come out until those guys have
Speaker 1: been in prison already for four years. It just haunted us,
Speaker 1: you know. On the other hand, going back and revisiting
Speaker 1: this is a depressing story. I feel like I lost
Speaker 1: like my fatherly innocence by covering this story. And what
Speaker 1: I mean by that is, you know, my first kid
Speaker 1: was born while we were editing this film, and I
Speaker 1: would be sitting, you know, at the editing bay looking
Speaker 1: at the most horrific autopsy photos and crime scene footage.
Speaker 1: You know, I would go home at night after having
Speaker 1: these images like emblazoned on your brain, and I would
Speaker 1: drop the you know, the door of the crib and
Speaker 1: pick up my new infant who was just arrived a
Speaker 1: few months ago, and holding my child and thinking about
Speaker 1: these eight year olds and thinking about the gross autopsy
Speaker 1: footage that I had looked at. I mean, it was
Speaker 1: just an emotionally draining experience making these films, and so
Speaker 1: it was a very considered decision to go back and
Speaker 1: to do it a second time and a third time.
Speaker 1: And you know, during the second film, I had my
Speaker 1: second kid. Your life's going on and there's isn't. I mean,
Speaker 1: it just tortured me. But you know, like every hallmark
Speaker 1: that my child would go through, you know, kindergarten, middle school,
Speaker 1: high school. I think, my god, these guys are still
Speaker 1: rotting in prison. I just felt we had a you know,
Speaker 1: we had a moral obligation to keep telling the story.
Speaker 1: But was there ever a moment where you and your
Speaker 1: principal staff, your your your real Cadrea people you did
Speaker 1: this film with even in your mind, you just raised
Speaker 1: a glass to each other and said, we got these
Speaker 1: guys out of prison. Oh yeah, we we We did
Speaker 1: some pretty hard party. We did some pretty hard partying
Speaker 1: in Toronto, and really felt good about about what you
Speaker 1: must feel amazing though it's luck. You know, we're filmmakers.
Speaker 1: We made films, were paid to make films. We deserve
Speaker 1: some credit. The people who really deserve the credit are
Speaker 1: the tens of thousands of people, both regular and the
Speaker 1: Johnny Depps, who have given us, you know, big sums
Speaker 1: of money or little sums of money, who selflessly have
Speaker 1: advocated for decades for their release. Lorie Davis knew nothing
Speaker 1: about this crime or this case, saw the movie and
Speaker 1: she was living in Brooklyn as an architect, just couldn't
Speaker 1: get it out of her mind. Started writing to Damian,
Speaker 1: went to visit Damian, fell in love, married him, and
Speaker 1: you know, they've been married for fourteen years. Most of
Speaker 1: that time obviously he's been on death row and she
Speaker 1: has been a tireless advocate for his release, and she's
Speaker 1: a big reason he's to prison. That must be so
Speaker 1: bizarre and I can't imagine. I can't imagine either, because
Speaker 1: they really you know, look, she's a wonderful person. It's
Speaker 1: just one of those bizarre things you could never like,
Speaker 1: you know. Script. I'm Alec Baldwin. More from my conversation
Speaker 1: with Joe Burlinger is coming up in a minute. You're
Speaker 1: listening to here's the thing you had said. There's a
Speaker 1: quote I had from you where you said, there's a
Speaker 1: fine line between being a storyteller and being a manipulator.
Speaker 1: We're in this film, were in any of the three
Speaker 1: films involved? Was did you feel that you had did
Speaker 1: a little bit of equation? Uh? Um. I believe the
Speaker 1: audience should be treated like a jury. You give them
Speaker 1: the information and your way both sides, and you let
Speaker 1: them come to their own conclusion. But with each passing film,
Speaker 1: we felt like we were moving away from pure storytelling
Speaker 1: and more and more into advocacy, and we certainly wanted
Speaker 1: to get people riled up about this. So, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure we are manipulating people, but we clearly
Speaker 1: have a point of view that there is a there
Speaker 1: is a huge injustice that needed to be you know,
Speaker 1: it's interesting the first film, you know, good of the
Speaker 1: people who walked away from the original film thought that
Speaker 1: they were guilty, and we let both sides have their say,
Speaker 1: and I think there's just been a progression towards, you know,
Speaker 1: more overt advocacy, which is kind of in conflict with
Speaker 1: my overall filmmaking philosophy, which is to treat the audience
Speaker 1: member like a jury member and let them make the
Speaker 1: decision about the events they're seeing. Now, where did all
Speaker 1: your career begin? You you were in advertising Originally, I
Speaker 1: had a brief stint to the very big any of
Speaker 1: my career working in advertising. And actually I was a
Speaker 1: language major in college and spoke fluent in German. But
Speaker 1: I worked in the Frankfurt, Germany office of Ogilvie and
Speaker 1: Mayther That's when I got the film bug, you know,
Speaker 1: because I started producing. I started producing television commercials there,
Speaker 1: and the first time I walked on a film set
Speaker 1: and saw cameras and lights and action, I was like, oh,
Speaker 1: this is kind of cool. And then what happened? And
Speaker 1: so I came back to New York with Ogilvie and
Speaker 1: was on an American Express campaign as a producer, and
Speaker 1: we hired these guys called the Mazel brothers who didn't
Speaker 1: give me shelter and great provision, and we hired them
Speaker 1: to do, uh, some television commercials, to do some unscripted
Speaker 1: documentary style TV commercials and David Mays for American Express
Speaker 1: and what were those commercials? Like, It's actually a campaign
Speaker 1: that I think ended up not airing. It was kind
Speaker 1: of an but now they did a lot of commercials
Speaker 1: actually that quite good, but document you know, kind of
Speaker 1: documentary style. Anyway, I kind of hit it off with
Speaker 1: David Mazel's he's the brother who passed away quite a
Speaker 1: few years ago. They were looking for somebody to market
Speaker 1: their services to Madison Avenue and I was looking to
Speaker 1: get into the film business. And now I was a
Speaker 1: guy who had a couple of years of Madison Avenue
Speaker 1: and so just over lunch we kind of cooked up
Speaker 1: the idea, Okay, let me come work for you. I'll
Speaker 1: get your more commercial business. And and oh I got
Speaker 1: them a lot of commercial did that for about five years.
Speaker 1: So I was like, what did you learn from them?
Speaker 1: The act of faith of making a film about real
Speaker 1: life as it's unfolding, which sounds like, well, what's the
Speaker 1: big deal, but you know, I mean the idea of
Speaker 1: capturing human drama in all its ambiguous glory as it
Speaker 1: unfolds before the camera is first of all an incredible
Speaker 1: way to make a film, and secondly to have faith.
Speaker 1: And I think we take that cinema verite movement a
Speaker 1: little bit for for granted today, I think people are
Speaker 1: better actors today than they are were forty years ago.
Speaker 1: This is where reality shows are are awful because they
Speaker 1: are not unscripted. It's like it's like the stage predation
Speaker 1: and natured documentaries. They get these people all wound up
Speaker 1: and then they throw them in the room together. But
Speaker 1: where you can get unvarnished and real verity insights into people,
Speaker 1: it's often only I find where those those steaks are
Speaker 1: that high, like in a courtroom. Yes, exactly. Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's the last Serengetti, you know what I mean, absolutely,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's you know, our dirty little secret. No
Speaker 1: coincidence that many of the films I've worked on are
Speaker 1: about legal cases. You know. The first big feature doc
Speaker 1: that Bruce and I did was Brothers Keeper to tell
Speaker 1: people about Brothers Keeper. Brothers Keeper was the story of
Speaker 1: four brothers who lived in a shack and lived in
Speaker 1: a way that people might have lived like two hundred
Speaker 1: years ago, no running water and a little more eccentric
Speaker 1: than how people might have lived two hundred years ago.
Speaker 1: Where were they located? Central New York State? And we had,
Speaker 1: you know, read in the New York Times that this
Speaker 1: guy had been arrested for this murder he allegedly you know,
Speaker 1: suffocated his bed mate brother another you know, these guys
Speaker 1: were in their late sixties, and the state police had
Speaker 1: gotten a confession out of him. Um. The local community, however,
Speaker 1: felt he was innocent, that he was semiliterate, semi retarded,
Speaker 1: and this incredible display, this old fashioned Americana display of support,
Speaker 1: and sued. So the locally equivalent of Eddie vetteran Natalie
Speaker 1: Mayne exactly. What's amazing obviously the polarity of it. I'd
Speaker 1: love you to comment on this, where you've witnessed the
Speaker 1: worst of self aggrandizing and self serving human behavior, especially
Speaker 1: from public officials, and then you've seen the best of
Speaker 1: people coming to the aid of their fellow man. I mean,
Speaker 1: I use those words exactly. You know, when I was
Speaker 1: talking about this film up in Toronto where the film premiered,
Speaker 1: I have seen not just the dichotomy between Brothers Keeper
Speaker 1: and Paradise Loss. Where in Brother's Keeper the town assumed
Speaker 1: the best of their citizens and came to their defense.
Speaker 1: In Paradise Lost, they assumed the worst and you know
Speaker 1: it became a witch hunt. So when you look at
Speaker 1: your biography, Brother's Keeper and three versions of Paradise Lost
Speaker 1: and other documentary films you've done are peppered in between
Speaker 1: a lot of air disparate kind of work you've done
Speaker 1: in television with Oprah Winfrey specials and that kind of class.
Speaker 1: For that's for Sunday, We Love, We Love, and Blair,
Speaker 1: which too, that's something we'd like to forget about Blair,
Speaker 1: which too, we'll tell us about Blair, which um, well,
Speaker 1: my whole idea was to make fun of the whole idea.
Speaker 1: And everyone was excited about the movie. We thought it
Speaker 1: was funny and scary and and clever, and literally, at
Speaker 1: the twelfth hour, a new marketing person was hired. They
Speaker 1: you know, decided that the movie needed to be scarier
Speaker 1: and to have, you know, more blood. And even though
Speaker 1: the whole point of the scares and the original blair,
Speaker 1: which was that there were no it was it was
Speaker 1: all psychological, and I kept saying, why do you want
Speaker 1: to show these things? And so they literally recut the
Speaker 1: movie and re shot some pieces, and the movie that
Speaker 1: was released bears very little resemblance to the movie I shot.
Speaker 1: And that's been my one and only experience making a
Speaker 1: Hollywood movie. And I guess you could say that's why
Speaker 1: I make documentaries. Where do you fire? Where? You know,
Speaker 1: you know what it's I'd love, in other opportunity to
Speaker 1: do a feature at some point, but you know, I'm
Speaker 1: just used to being the author of my own work,
Speaker 1: being totally in control. You know. Obviously, you have people
Speaker 1: you report to and people you collaborate with, working for somebody,
Speaker 1: you know, but you know, I just find the creative
Speaker 1: freedom of what I do, and I mix it up.
Speaker 1: You know, I do TV commercials and television, so so
Speaker 1: that's how you do the one for them, one for me.
Speaker 1: Kind of switch commercial commercials. Yes, commercially, my bread and
Speaker 1: butter are TV commercials and kind of web content. And
Speaker 1: I always have a few things cooking, um commercials, couple
Speaker 1: of commercials, a couple of TVs. Get back at a
Speaker 1: trial for nine years exactly my daughter. You know, my
Speaker 1: daughter's going to college next year, so I gotta I
Speaker 1: gotta start paying for that. So you're like attic a
Speaker 1: spinch with a camera and a lab set. Oh I
Speaker 1: like that. Can I use that? No, don't, because then
Speaker 1: you're gonna have to set up an eight hundred number
Speaker 1: for all your request with people talking with Joe Burlinger
Speaker 1: about his film Paradise Lost three Purgatory. This is Alec
Speaker 1: Baldwin and you're listening to here's the thing