Joe Berlinger, who has directed true-crime documentaries about Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer, has helped get six innocent people out of prison including the West Memphis Three and has aided the families of countless victims of serial killers.
But Berlinger, whose latest series Conversations with a Killer: The Son of Sam Tapes comes out tomorrow on Netflix, does not love everything the incredibly popular genre has become. He tells Deadline that things have changed since he directed his first film, Brother’s Keeper, about an alleged murder in Munnsville, New York, in the early 1990s.
“If you Google me now, it often says he’s a true-crime pioneer or whatever and even today, after four seasons of Conversations with a Killer and Crime Scene and all of the other shows I’ve done, the phrase true-crime associated with my work gives me the willies. I like the pioneer part but I don’t like the true-crime part because true-crime, that phrase, has so much baggage associated with it and so much negativity. It’s because there is a lot of irresponsible stuff. The irresponsible true-crime wallows in the misery of others without some larger reason to tell the story,” he says.
Berlinger highlights some of the cheap content that comes out of the cable television world as well as crime podcasts that have an “irreverent” tone. “This is somebody’s real tragedy,” he says.
Victim approval is key for Berlinger. He says that he recently didn’t pursue a project because the family didn’t want the children of the victims to be exposed to it.
He was also set to direct a narrative film about Bob Rowe, who spiraled from model husband to a man who commits a shocking act of violence against a loved one. But he pulled the plug on the $6M film, Facing The Wind, which was set to star Vera Farmiga, Evan Rachel Wood and Alessandro Nivola and was lined up for Cannes, after the main subject of the story asked him to after starting a new life. “It’s very important to be responsible,” he adds.
However, Berlinger also believes there is a lot of “unnecessary knee jerk negativity directed towards this genre”. Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, the doc he and Bruce Sinofsky directed in 1996, helped exonerate the West Memphis Three – Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley Jr., and Jason Baldwin – who were convicted of the murder and sexual mutilation of three prepubescent boys as a part of an alleged satanic ritual in Arkansas.
“Good true-crime gets people out of prison. Me [and my team] have gotten six people out of prison. My shows have identified five new victims of serial killers. As awful as it is to lose a loved one, it’s even worse to not know what happened to them. So, identifying new victims of serial killers through an investigation, which has been the topic of some of my shows, brings closure to families. Sometimes we change laws, so true-crime can be the best of social justice filmmaking,” he says.
When Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes came out in 2019, he was excoriated by some for showing violence, but noted that he was also lambasted for a related project, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, a scripted feature that starred Zac Efron as Bundy and Lily Collins as his former girlfriend, for glorifying Bundy by showing no violence.
“There is some justifiable criticism of the genre but you have to look at each project differently. You have to look at whether the person has put the time and care and attention into something,” he says.
Berlinger’s Conversations with a Killer strand has been hugely successful for Netflix. For instance, the second iteration that explored Dahmer was watched for just under 60M hours in its first two weeks on the streamer and the follow-up, investigating John Wayne Gacy, also made a big impression on its global top ten.
He says that one of the reasons relitigating these cases is important is to highlight these stories for a young audience that has no knowledge of them.
Stephen Michaud, who, alongside Hugh Aynesworth, had interviewed Bundy for a book that he published in 1989 and offered Berlinger the tapes. He was initially unconvinced, but he says what “pushed him over the edge” was the fact that his two college-aged daughters, one of whom was about to enter MIT, and the other was graduating from Columbia, and their friends did not know who Bundy was. “Literally no one had any name recognition of him. One of [their friends] thought he was a baseball player,” he adds. “I thought to myself, this is worth doing because it was right around the time that poor woman got into a fake Uber and was murdered. The lesson of Bundy, of course, is just because somebody is charming and good looking, it doesn’t mean you should trust them, so I put that story out again for my daughter’s generation.”
The success of the Bundy series saw Netflix clamor for more and Berlinger was subsequently pitched audio tapes for other serial killers. “Once that first show was a hit, then it was a floodgate. There have been several potential Conversations with a Killer that I didn’t think would be at the level that I needed it to be, there wasn’t a reason to tell the story,” he says.
Conversations with a Killer: The Son of Sam Tapes
Netflix
But Berlinger didn’t feel this way when it came to the Son of Sam, otherwise known as David Berkowitz, who killed six people and wounded 11 between 1975 and 1977 in New York City and was responsible for one of the greatest manhunts in the Big Apple’s history.
The three-part series will take viewers inside the NYPD’s desperate race to catch the infamous .44-caliber killer—and into the disturbing mind of Berkowitz himself through these newly unearthed recordings, which offer rare insight into his twisted psyche, revealing what was going through his mind as he unleashed a reign of terror in the late 1970s.
“I view the Son of Sam case as one of the foundational cases in American media that helped launch what we see today as our total fascination with true crime and the media’s willingness to co-operate,” he says. “New York was gripped by fear and Berkowitz brilliantly baited the press, and the press was only too willing to comply. This was an era before the 24-hour news cycle, before social media. Literally every New Yorker was waiting for that next headline to come out. The police force was cut in half because of the financial crisis. There was a blackout that summer. Into this hellscape walks a random shooter.”
Berlinger also did something in this three-part series that he hadn’t done in previous iterations of the franchise: he interviewed Berkowitz. Unlike Bundy, Gacy and Dahmer, Berkowitz is still alive and still locked up at Shawangunk Correctional Facility. Berlinger says it was a big decision that he wrestled with because he didn’t want him to reframe the narrative. The most revealing moment, he says, was when Berkowitz told him he should have gotten help. Unlike the others who were sadistic killers who took pleasure in their acts, Berkowitz’s crimes felt more like a cry for help.
Berlinger, who has also made films such as Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, widely considered one of the best rock documentaries of all time, says that people were far less media savvy when he was making Paradise Lost. It has become big business. “You’re competing with 10 other filmmakers with a current crime. Sometimes I’m embarrassed to show up where there’s other filmmakers and we’re all competing for the same thing. It becoming a business has changed certain things. But I put everything through a filter. What needle can I move? If it’s just because it’s a good yarn and people will enjoy a story [I won’t do it]. What reason is there to tell the story?”
