PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Beyond any theatrical prospects, Zwick hopes the movie can make a
real difference, and notes that even years after Willingham’s case, The
Innocence Project is still actively on the state of Texas to admit
wrongdoing in this case. “The District Attorney had to stand trial recently for prosecutorial
misconduct, and there’s more that I believe yet to come,” Zwick said.
“In the last number of years over 150 people have been absolved or
exonerated based on DNA evidence just within moments or days or weeks of
execution, so that really suggests how many innocent people have had to
be unjustly executed. “Obviously it’s a true story, but to me there’s also a metaphor about
a single life and the complexity and the value of a life, even a life
that you might have initially imagined to be not worth it, or in some
way that we judge to be not worth it,” Zwick adds says about the
ambiguity presented in the first half of this film over whether
Willingham actually committed the crime. “That became the best argument for making this movie: If he had been a
saint then it wouldn’t challenge our beliefs as much as this does.”
-----------------------------------------------------------
STORY: "Ed Zwick Brings Controversial ‘Trial By Fire’ Exclusively To Telluride In Unusual Distribution Deal Strategy," by reporter Pete Hammond, published by deadline.com on August 31, 2018.
GIST:
"Among the high-profile awards-hopeful premieres at this year’s
Telluride Film Festival, from
The Old Man and the Gun to
The Front Runner to
First Man — all
coming here for many reasons, including to get a boost in the Oscar
race — one new movie from an Oscar-winning producer-director has
something more basic in mind: getting a distributor. That is the case for
Ed Zwick and his powerful, humane and important drama
Trial By Fire, which stars Jack O’Connell as a Texas man facing the death penalty for the arson killing of his three young daughters, and
Laura Dern
as a determined woman trying to save his life after lawyers botched his
case and put him on Death Row. The emotional and complicated story of
Cameron Todd Willingham, as detailed in David Grann’s 2009
New Yorker
article that became an obsession for Zwick and the basis for his film,
makes for strong cinema, and the Telluride programmers clearly
recognized it........."As for the film itself, it was that
New Yorker article by
Grann that Zwick couldn’t get out of his mind and was a driving force
for him to make this film. Coincidentally, another
New Yorker
article by Grann was the basis for yet another world premiere here in
Telluride this weekend: the Robert Redford-starring drama
The Old Man and the Gun. When
I ran into Grann on Main Street this morning, he was clearly savoring
the experience of being responsible for the existence of two major new
movies. (Oscar winner Geoffrey Fletcher (
Precious) adapted
Trial By Fire for the screen.)For Zwick, the attraction was partly the many possibilities of a film
that also hit on the emotional and human aspects of this story. “I read David’s article in the
New Yorker, and it’s a great,
great piece of journalism, and in fact, he won the Polk Award for it,
so I’m not the only one who thought so,” he said. “But it was remarkable
in that it told a story that was obviously about a grievous miscarriage
of justice and was a story about prosecutorial misconduct, and then
certainly a story about the state of the death penalty in Texas and in
America, but it went much further than that. It suggested to me this
opportunity to talk about how this random act of kindness created this
extraordinary relationship between these two people, and how finally, it
changed both of their lives, even in the worst of circumstances, and I
was just very moved by that, and I couldn’t get it out of my mind. “So I, as one does, I inquired as to the rights, and it turned out that someone
else
had inquired to the rights, and that was Allyn Stewart, whom I’ve known
since I made my first movie. She was a young executive, and we’ve been
friends, although we’ve never worked together since. I don’t even
remember who called the other and said, ‘Hey, you’re trying to get this
and so am I, and let’s partner,’ and we did,” he recalled. Beyond any theatrical prospects, Zwick hopes the movie can make a
real difference, and notes that even years after Willingham’s case, The
Innocence Project is still actively on the state of Texas to admit
wrongdoing in this case. “The District Attorney had to stand trial recently for prosecutorial
misconduct, and there’s more that I believe yet to come,” Zwick said.
“In the last number of years over 150 people have been absolved or
exonerated based on DNA evidence just within moments or days or weeks of
execution, so that really suggests how many innocent people have had to
be unjustly executed. “Obviously it’s a true story, but to me there’s also a metaphor about
a single life and the complexity and the value of a life, even a life
that you might have initially imagined to be not worth it, or in some
way that we judge to be not worth it,” Zwick adds says about the
ambiguity presented in the first half of this film over whether
Willingham actually committed the crime. “That became the best argument for making this movie: If he had been a
saint then it wouldn’t challenge our beliefs as much as this does.”"
