GIST: "In many ways,
Exhibit A is the opposite of what a true crime show has come to mean. In
Netflix’s
new documentary series, blood and gore is minimal, if it exists at all.
The cases it rehashes aren’t cold. In the episode I saw, no one even
got hurt during the crime—the episode looked at armed robberies, but the
gun never went off. There was no new evidence to introduce, new
witnesses to find, or new theories to speculate about. And for director
Kelly Loudenberg, fairness became more of her subject than murder. “In the four episodes of
Exhibit A’s first season, Loudenberg
examines the forensic science that helped close a case. The series looks
at blood spatter, video evidence, touch DNA, cadaver dogs, and how each
of those shaped the case, influencing what happened to the people
suspected of committing the crime. "I think often when you have
something called science, you take it at face value, but it’s not,”
Loudenberg said when we spoke over the phone. “I think the next round of
waves of exonerations will be from, and have been from, junk science.
It’s the leading cause of wrongful conviction. I think we just have to
be now aware that this happens a lot.” (As such, a man featured in the
series is going to
get a retrial.) Instead of presenting a new theory about a crime that occurred,
Exhibit A
takes a critical look at what the people involved in the crime think
they know. Loudenberg shows how the evidence, forensic science,
witnesses, suspects, and lawyers each tell their own story of what
happened, and then allows the viewer to draw their own conclusions.
Instead of shaping a new narrative, she lays bare the one that exists. In doing so, Loudenberg gently pokes at the flaws in the system, and
teaches the steps of critical thinking it takes to see evidence more
clearly. And in a world where narrative stories aren’t always
trusted—and video can be manipulated to bend the truth—that may be the
most important lesson to learn.
Paste
: How did you decide to look at those aspects of forensics?
Kelly Loudenberg: We really worked from the most
interesting cases and characters outward. It was part of identifying
what the problematic sciences were. But also within that, we had to find
a way to tell a compelling story. It was kind of the chicken or the
egg, trying to figure out, “Okay, well this science really needs a
spotlight, but we’re not finding a case that we could really expand on
at the moment”—also given the time constraints we were working in. There
was a fifth episode on bite mark science that was a pilot and was the
most important one, and I don’t know if I should talk about it, but
there was just some political reason that it was pulled at
Netflix. I think that would’ve given a more comprehensive view of what I was trying to do.
Paste: What do you think it illustrated better?
Loudenberg: Bite marks were my entry into this. It’s the
most egregious example—I mean, aside from maybe microscopic hair
analysis. That was just the science that I saw that was just so
obviously unscientific and shouldn’t be allowed in the courtrooms. There
was such a nationwide effort to get it banned from being used. Because
it was on its way out but still existing, I thought it would be a good
example of how it can go wrong. It was a kind of macrocosm that could
represent the other sciences. As we continued looking at all the
different sciences, it was just narrowing it down to the most
interesting cases and the most interesting characters and trying to
create a diverse tableau. I just wanted to try to show how it affected
people in different geographies, of different backgrounds and races and
genders and socioeconomics. Trying to pick from that, within four
episodes, it’s a little hard. But we were going for that. So those are
the sciences that could easily be included.
Paste: I really liked that the episode I saw was a case
that wasn’t super sensationalized. No one had died, no one got hurt, and
it was like this could have happened to anyone. Is that something that
you thought about?
Loudenberg: Definitely. That was super important in that
case. It’s not like I’m a true crime filmmaker that loves murder and
blood and guts and goriness. I don’t like that stuff. It makes me really
uncomfortable. I actually like that there was nobody hurt here. I mean,
George Powell is hurt because he’s been in prison for over 10 years. No
one was killed. In the DNA case there was somebody badly injured and
blinded in one eye for life. So it was a horrendous crime, but the
victim is still alive. It didn’t need to be these cliché, sensational,
murder cases. That’s not how the real world works, anyway. A lot of
people are convicted on bad science and it’s handwriting, it’s for
fraudulent checks. You know what I mean? It’s not always bloody murder,
like you’d see in
Dexter.
Paste: One thing I’m really interested in with this
series is how you get people to question stuff they think they know,
while using a medium that people don’t always trust. You’re using video
to tell people not to trust video. How do you portray yourself as
trustworthy?
Loudenberg: That was definitely something we, as
filmmakers, thought about a lot while we were making it. It was probably
the most meta episode. Filmmaking is subjective no matter what.
Especially when you’re using the medium of storytelling. I tried to make
that a question more than something I was going to try to answer. So, I
think if people were asking that question, I think that’s important. I
try to present all different sides to this, looking at the same piece of
information and seeing different things. That was what boggled my mind
about it. I try to be fair. But I think we all have to concede that
we’re telling a story. It’s still a version of that story. I try to
present as many different sides as I can.
Paste: How do you cope with telling sides? If you’re
looking at different sides of things, one of them could just be false.
Do you still show that or do you decide not to include it? Or has there
been any instances of that?
Loudenberg: We’re just trying to show a rounded three
dimensional view on this. In the episode you saw, Elsie P, who was the
hotel desk clerk or manager, she knew George in a different way. She had
a different context and perspective on that, and she saw him in the
video on the nightly newscast and she thought it was him. I think that’s
valid. But if you really look at all the camera angles and you really
get down to it, there’s no way it could’ve been him because this person
was much shorter. There seems to be a line somewhere. I don’t know where
the line is. It’s hard because there’s always a flip side, and you
could keep going forever.
Paste: I have a question about how you talk to and relate
to your subjects. For instance, when you’re talking to the hotel
manager, are you trying to convince her? Are you trying to say, “Look,
this isn’t what happened,” or are you just there to listen?
Loudenberg:
I think it depends. It’s probing a little bit.
Asking them to be reflective. I think I’m more interested in at first
trying to see what her memory of that is. Because often these people
haven’t thought about this in a while and I’m getting a very fresh
memory. But then, they may not know things. They may not know some of
the things that have happened since, or they might not know that there
were certain Brady violations. If I introduce that information, it
changes how they remember, but I first want to gather what their memory
was before giving anything new. It’s a little bit of push and pull.
I’m also interested in character, too, and Elsie is just an
amazing character. She had a big impact on that case, but she’s not a
bad person. I was just interested in that some people’s eyes, she was
the villain. I don’t know if she knows how much of an impact she had on
the jury. Then you talk to her, and she’s just a working class lady,
running her own business, trying to make ends meet.
Paste: How do you think this kind of critical thinking
applies outside of the courtroom and the justice system? Do you think
about how it applies to doctored videos, or reading the internet, or how
you talk to people?
Loudenberg: It definitely has changed. Even doing this
series has changed me in a way that just made me more open minded. We
always think we’re open minded until we start talking to people. I was
looking at how people actually look at the world differently. They
actually have completely different viewpoints based on how they grew up,
based on the information that they gather through life and they
collect. I think it just made me want to be more kind toward people who
think differently than me and it made me want to listen more. It made me
see the common thread through all of us, that we’re not that different
when we start talking to each other. I don’t know. Trying to cut through
the bullshit a little bit. I try to bring that into other parts of my
life and try to be kinder toward people and be a little bit more open
and patient. Right now we’re in a time where I feel like it’s kind of
hard to do. It’s such a divisive time.
Paste: Does that affect how you do your filmmaking?
Loudenberg: I think that trying to divide people under
these camps, like bad person, good person, is maybe not as interesting
for me as it is knowing how nuanced the stories are and knowing that
there’s more complexity there and there’s a gray area to explore. I
think that’s what I’m interested in, and I don’t want to just paint
people in this light as one way or the other. I think I’m always
interested in the gray area because I just see that that’s true in
people. It’s not all there, black and white. Sometimes that’s the
message we get, but I think there’s more to it. You know in these true
crimes, it’s either the police are the good guys or the police are the
bad guys. And that’s not true, often times. I had the pleasure of
talking to some police officers and trying to understand how they do
their investigations. Some people are nicer than others. But I guess I
began to try to empathize in some cases and just know that there’s more
to it than what I was seeing.
Paste: I feel like sometimes it is hard to show that
empathy to the police if you know that they did something that you don’t
agree with or if they’re corrupt, especially when you’re looking at the
people who are in jail who maybe shouldn’t be. How can you not be angry
then at the person who made this decision or the system that put them
there?
Loudenberg: It’s hard. There were a lot of times when I was
very upset by this, and I think there are people responsible. When I
was doing the interviews and reaching out to these people, I had to find
a middle ground in myself in order to be fair in the interview. But
sometimes those other feelings overcame that. I tried to be in the
interview, fair. Even if I had to do some pep talking before that.
Because the thing I understood about police officers is they see bad
people all the time, and they’re seeing people who actually did these
crimes. There are a lot of guilty people out there and people that do
horrendous things to each other. That is how their world view is
shaped—through guilty people. So, when an innocent person comes along,
they’re not really seeing things in that framework. They’re kind of
blinded by that. And they’ve seen all these horrible crime scene photos.
For me, I hate looking at that stuff. But if you were to have to look
at that all the time, how would that change your view on humanity?
Paste: I think you do a good job with treating all your
interview subjects fairly. As a filmmaker, how do you not frame someone
within the scene as a villain? How do you visually make that fair?
Loudenberg: It was a very small crew, and we had to deal
with the places we were given. So we were often just trying to find the
most cinematic frame in the space we had. It’s not like we’re given a
ton of money. We’re shooting this out in the location without scouting
ahead of time. We would never want to manipulate somebody’s interview
frame visually. To me, that’s wrong. We tried to keep all the frames
looking the same, definitely within each episode, but across the whole
series, too. I just would never want to use our interview frame to make
someone look like a villain. We want to start with a blank slate and be
fair."
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