by Paul Cronin
How did you end up choosing the eight perpetrators you filmed for On Death Row?
For each film there was a selection process not dissimilar to the casting I would do for a feature film. The website of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice contains basic details of every inmate on death row, including a summary of the crimes they were convicted for. I picked what I felt were the most interesting ones, leaving out things like bank robberies and acts of lawlessness that are relatively easy to comprehend. I was looking for an array of cases, and didn’t want, for example, four rapists. The crimes were all different in nature, and the eight films include a child murderer, a wife killer, a kidnapper and someone who randomly killed two people because he was angry that day. One of the perpetrators in the first season of On Death Row is a woman.
These individuals inevitably led to a wider circle of people, from family members to law-enforcement representatives, coroners and attorneys, and certain questions relating to these surrounding characters emerged when it came to deciding who to pick for these hour-long films. How eloquently could the prosecution state its case? How coherent was the perpetrator’s mother? The victims’ and perpetrators’ families often refused to talk, and occasionally I felt that a person I wanted to speak with wouldn’t be articulate enough on camera. For Into the Abyss I filmed a conversation with a former girlfriend of Michael Perry that I didn’t use because she was rather boring; everyone else we recorded appears in the film. For On Death Row I contacted the defence attorneys of every perpetrator I wanted to film with, and in one case a lawyer asked me not to meet with his client because it might jeopardise his chances in an upcoming hearing. “He has a tendency to say stupid things,” the lawyer told me, “and it’s only going to be to his detriment.” I immediately cancelled our meeting, only twenty-four hours before we were due to film. Also important was the existence of police videos and audio recordings, and whether ongoing appeals might prevent me from using them in the film. If I were able to include this material, was it presentable? In the case of Blaine Milam, who appears in the second season of On Death Row, I never wanted to see photographs of the young child he tortured and murdered, but they were accidentally projected on a wall in front of me. My response was similar to when I saw photos of the remains of Timothy Treadwell and Amie Huguenard in the coroner’s office. Not even my worst enemies should see what I saw that day.
Is there a particular technique to filming interviews like these?
These aren’t interviews, they are conversations. In situations like these you have to be open to whatever comes at you and move in whatever direction is necessary, so the starting point is never a catalogue of questions I bring with me, which is how a journalist functions. I would never want to talk to anyone with the aim of denouncing them; I want to show everyone at their best. That said, if you’re filming a conversation with someone and they are clearly lying, gently encourage them to be ever more outrageous and wild. Audiences will spot the insincerity all the more easily.
What’s important is the intense concentration involved. Learn how to listen carefully to whatever is said to you, and consider how the tone of your voice can impact directly on the responses to your questions. A question asked softly will often draw the same emphasis and inflection from whomever you’re talking to. Also vital is knowing how to endure the silences – those instances of quiet introspection – for as long as possible. I nudge the conversation along in a particular direction, towards moments of great magnitude, then stop talking. It takes nerve to sit silently in front of someone you have invited to have a filmed conversation with, but you must learn to absorb the silences that inevitably arise, as you sit behind the camera, holding eye contact with the person you’re talking to. By staring into the abyss, somehow I’m able to encourage them. This is never an obstinate silence; there is always empathy and understanding with the person, which is somehow manifested in my physicality and the attention I give with my eyes, even the way I sit and hold my head. Lingering silences often have more weight, emotion and tacit horror than things that could ever be said. The silences in my films go on for about as long as it’s possible to hold such moments of quiet before an audience starts shuffling in its seats.
The case of Blaine Milam involved the murder of a little girl who was killed in a crazed exorcism. The damage inflicted on her body was so beyond all imagination that a well-seasoned homicide detective with thirty-eight years’ experience fell mute when trying to articulate the facts. His five colleagues at the crime scene had accumulated more than a hundred years of expertise, but they had never seen anything like this. When I filmed him talking about the case, it was as if he had lost the power of speech. The camera holds on him for what feels like an eternity. The image appears to be frozen, but then you see one of his fingers twitching.
Shooting on Into the Abyss was spread out over several months because of issues of access, but editing was relatively fast, in part because I shot less than ten hours of footage for the entire film, which is almost two hours long. Even if I had more time, I wouldn’t have gathered much more material. Working through everything with editor Joe Bini was extraordinarily intense, much more so than during filming. There was no time to think deeply about what these people told me during the fifty minutes I spent with them, and little of what they were saying affected me at the time; I was completely immersed in our conversations. It hit me only later, when I was able to sit back, stop the film, rewind it and slowly absorb what was being said. It was as if Joe and I had been run over by a truck. This was an important moment for me, as I realised I don’t necessarily have to fully understand the ramifications and meaning of something when I’m filming it. In situations like these it’s legitimate for such realisations to come only later. Joe and I had both quit smoking, but every few hours we rushed out into the daylight to hang on to a cigarette. Usually we work eight- or nine-hour days together, but couldn’t take more than five hours a day working on this material. That had never happened to me before. It was a feeling that followed me all the way home, and in the evenings I watched Fred Astaire films.
What was it like filming inside those prisons?
The state of Texas – which at the time had something like three hundred inmates on death row – is exceptionally media-friendly because the politicians are so convinced of their righteousness when it comes to capital punishment. But permission from the warden can still be denied without any explanation, and there were stringent rules imposed upon us, including security checks of our equipment, a crew limit of two or three people, and filming through two-inch-thick bulletproof glass. Thankfully, the guards placed radio microphones on the inmates, otherwise we would have had to record their voices via telephone. I was told that after exactly fifty minutes the guards would pull our plug from the electricity socket, but in most cases they gave us a few minutes more. One hundred and twenty seconds before our time was up I would feel a hand on my shoulder. It was an advance warning, a non-verbal way of telling us our time was coming to an end.
My experiences with the inmates were some of the most intense of my filmmaking life. I had done my homework by going through each individual’s case file – sometimes hundreds of pages of police reports, witness interrogations, photographs and court transcripts – and was familiar with the crimes themselves, but I had never met the perpetrators before. The first time I ever laid eyes on these people is captured in the films; every conversation was a voyage into the unknown. Once they sat down in front of the camera, I had to settle in immediately and engage with them. The short time available meant instantly finding the right tone; I had to deliver. The one exception was Melyssa Burkett, the pregnant wife of Jason Burkett, who had some suspicions about the film, so I met with her beforehand. I always wore formal suits when filming in prison; there is a certain amount of respect that needs to be paid to a human being who is going to die in a few days. Visiting death row means meeting people whose lives are precisely structured around rituals and protocols, and more than tha
t, who know exactly how and when they are going to die. At six o’clock sharp they will be led into the death chamber and strapped down. At 6.03 p.m. a lethal concoction will be injected into them. Less than ten minutes later they will be pronounced dead. When you sit opposite a man who is going to be killed by the state in eight days’ time, most things become insignificant.
The balance and tone in these conversations was essential. My way of dealing with the inmates was risky because I spoke very directly with them, and it could have been all over in two minutes. Someone on death row can see a phoney coming a mile off, so in the first two minutes I looked Michael Perry in the eye and said, “The fact that destiny didn’t dish out a good deck of cards to you doesn’t exonerate you, and it doesn’t necessarily mean I have to like you.” For a moment he was taken aback, but ultimately liked me for being straightforward. In fact, every prisoner I filmed for Into the Abyss and On Death Row seemed to like me, and every one wrote to me saying they would gladly meet with me again. They all knew in advance – because I had written to them, explaining my position – that these films weren’t going to be a platform for them to prove their innocence, which meant I took a fundamentally different approach to Errol Morris when he made The Thin Blue Line, the purpose of which was to exonerate a man. At the same time, this wasn’t an opportunity for me to reiterate their guilt. Michael Perry insisted he had nothing to do with the murders, that he had merely been caught in the company of the real killer. I purposely left out of the film anything that made it absolutely clear he was without question one of the two murderers, that he was apparently the one who shot the mother. I chose not to mention that Perry’s girlfriend was an eyewitness to the killings of the two boys lured into the forest; she testified in court, which meant immunity from prosecution. I even gave Perry a chance to lie to the camera and insist he wasn’t involved in the murders. He seemed to believe what he was saying, perhaps because of the ten years he had spent talking to himself. He was somewhat disconnected from reality, and reiterating his innocence became like a mantra to him. Some of the people I filmed for On Death Row readily admitted their crimes to me, and James Barnes even confessed to two more murders while talking on camera. I immediately handed copies of the tapes to the authorities.
There was never any fake upbeat journalistic enthusiasm from me, no false sentimentality or commiseration, no activist’s zeal. Above all, there was an understanding that these are human beings, alongside a genuine sense of solidarity with inmates concerning their appeals and legal battles to have their execution delayed or commuted to a life sentence. Their crimes are monstrous, but I didn’t make these films to try and humanise these men and women. They already are human, and remain so no matter what.
You clearly have thoughts about capital punishment.
The majority of people in Texas are pro capital punishment, and legislation reflects this, but it doesn’t mean I have to agree with the practice. I made my position clear to everyone, and strongly disagree with the people I met in rural Texas who said, “Why do we even give them a trial? Just hang ’em high.” The state should never be allowed to kill anyone, under any circumstances. In the worst cases, life in prison without possibility of parole is still better than execution. Even if my own child were killed, I wouldn’t demand the execution of the perpetrator. Justice is a strange beast that attempts to settle the travails, tribulations and complexities of human exchanges, and the due process of law is one of the most invaluable achievements of civilisation. Capital punishment taps into the ancient concept of retribution, something we see in the history of almost every civilisation on the planet; in this respect America isn’t exceptional. The most populous nations on the planet still have capital punishment: China, India, Pakistan, Japan, Indonesia, Egypt. The only exception is Russia, which recently abolished it. But statistics make it clear that the death penalty has consistently failed to deter anyone from committing a crime; it’s a feeble instrument when it comes to controlling the chaos of human life. A shift in the use of capital punishment can come only through a change in collective thinking. No film alone has sufficient power.
When it comes to my own convictions, I have no intellectual argument, only a story, that of the barbarism of Nazi Germany. There was a systematic programme of euthanasia during the Third Reich, the industrialised extermination of six million Jews in a genocide without precedent in human history, as well as thousands of cases of capital punishment; you could be executed for telling a joke about Hitler. The argument that innocent men and women on death row have died is, in my opinion, secondary. As a German, I would be the last person to tell the American people how to handle their criminal justice; I don’t have voting power here and am a guest in this country. But as I say in Into the Abyss, when it comes to a foreigner like me commenting on how things are done in the United States, I respectfully disagree. There have been public executions for thousands of years, but I would never attend one, and if you offered me a million dollars to film an execution, I would throw the money back at you. The chaplain in Into the Abyss suggested I go see one, adding that he hoped it wasn’t botched. It sounded absolutely horrific to me. A legitimate question to Christians in the United States – particularly fundamentalists – is whether Jesus, who was crucified in public, would have been an advocate of capital punishment. Lisa Stotler-Balloun, whose mother and brother were murdered, says something important in Into the Abyss that I have to accept, because I haven’t gone through the same experiences she has. She talks of feeling a weight being taken off her shoulders when she witnessed Michael Perry’s execution. I asked her if she would have been satisfied if Perry had received a sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, and she said it would have been a credible alternative, adding that some people don’t deserve to live. I appreciated her honesty.
A few days before the first season of Death Row was screened on television, George Rivas – who appears in one of the films – was executed. Before his conviction for capital murder, he had already received eighteen consecutive life sentences for robbing a series of stores and locking away their employees. Rivas was a gentleman thief, dressing up as a security guard, going into a store, calling everyone together and explaining he had been sent over by head office. Then he would pull a gun, apologise, explain he was there for the cash and lock everyone away in a back room. One man even insisted on being shot because he was having a bad day, and Rivas spent time dissuading him. For every employee he locked away, Rivas was given a life sentence. Then, with no prospect of ever gaining his freedom, he concocted an ingenious plan of escape. With six other inmates he took thirteen guards and maintenance workers prisoner, using their clothes and IDs, and escaped from a maximum-security facility. A couple of weeks later, on Christmas Eve, the group robbed a sporting-goods store for weapons and money, and Rivas shot a policeman to death. In addition to capital punishment for this murder, Rivas got a life sentence for every one of the guards and workers he had captured during his escape. All in all, together with his death sentence he had to serve thirty-one life sentences, and on top of all that another ninety-nine years for utilising the pickup truck of the maintenance workers, which he abandoned after less than thirty minutes. I could never condone the murder of a police officer – which is as bad as it gets – but the disproportionality of Rivas’s punishment defies my sense of justice. In the film he explains that what they call the death penalty he calls freedom.
The full title of the film is Into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, A Tale of Life.
Again and again the urgency of life seeped out of the footage. That Into the Abyss is a life-affirming film was unexpected. Somehow this eluded me during shooting, and revealed itself only during editing.
Hank Skinner was twenty-three minutes away from execution, having received the last rites and eaten his final meal, when he was reprieved. Death row is in the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, Texas, but the unit has no death house, so prisoners are transported forty-three miles away to Huntsville for execut
ion. Skinner hadn’t seen the outside world for seventeen years, and all of a sudden he was shackled, placed into a van and surrounded by armed guards, who told him, “If somebody tries to free you, we are under orders to shoot you dead.” He could see the world through the windows during this drive. “It was magnificent, it was glorious,” he told me. “Everything out there looked like the Holy Land.” Curious, I made the trip myself. All of a sudden, amidst this forlorn and drab area of Texas, I saw the glory of the world in all its magnificence, joy and beauty. There was something wondrous at every turn, from the abandoned gas station to the ramshackle little hut with the “Happy Worm Bait Shop” sign. It truly was the Holy Land.
Lisa Stotler-Balloun talks about her father dying and how one uncle hanged himself and another shot himself because he had cancer; this is in addition to her mother and brother being murdered. Yet her appreciation of life shines through. And how does a woman become pregnant when her husband is in a maximum-security prison? Burkett’s wife was a paralegal working on his case when she fell in love with him, which itself raises questions about love and destiny. They married over the telephone, with bulletproof glass between them, and now she can meet him at a table with a guard sitting with them. They are allowed only to touch hands, so how did she become pregnant? Clearly there is contraband that enters prisons, but could there be contraband going the other way? Shortly after we filmed with her, a healthy baby boy was born.