- 4 weeks ago
- #citizensleuth
In this conversation, EoM senior interviewer Thomas Manning speaks with filmmaker Chris Kasick about his feature documentary directorial debut "Citizen Sleuth," an official selection at SXSW 2023. Kasick discusses the vast evolution of the project over a five year period and talks about the unique ethical concerns of the documentary’s subject matter.
Official Synopsis:
"Citizen Sleuth" examines the ethics of the true crime genre and how the power of narrative can affect truth and communities. The film follows Emily Nestor and her Mile Marker 181 podcast, as she conducts an amateur murder investigation into the death of Jaleayah Davis. Emily teases a cover-up by the Sheriff's Department and pursues her top suspects. With a growing audience of millions, Emily's podcast becomes a hit. But as she gets deeper into her investigation, Emily's confronted with a new truth she struggles to tell her listeners. Told in real time over years, "Citizen Sleuth" chronicles the rise, fall, and redemption of a podcaster in the new media landscape.
Screening during SXSW 2023. #CitizenSleuth
schedule.sxsw.com/2023/films/2081791
Official Synopsis:
"Citizen Sleuth" examines the ethics of the true crime genre and how the power of narrative can affect truth and communities. The film follows Emily Nestor and her Mile Marker 181 podcast, as she conducts an amateur murder investigation into the death of Jaleayah Davis. Emily teases a cover-up by the Sheriff's Department and pursues her top suspects. With a growing audience of millions, Emily's podcast becomes a hit. But as she gets deeper into her investigation, Emily's confronted with a new truth she struggles to tell her listeners. Told in real time over years, "Citizen Sleuth" chronicles the rise, fall, and redemption of a podcaster in the new media landscape.
Screening during SXSW 2023. #CitizenSleuth
schedule.sxsw.com/2023/films/2081791
Category
🎥
Short filmTranscript
00:00Hi, and welcome to EOM Presents. I'm Thomas Manning, Senior Interviewer for Elements of Madness, and today I'm sharing with you my recent conversation with filmmaker Chris Kasich, talking about his new documentary, Citizen Sleuth, which premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival.
00:15This was a really interesting discussion. This documentary is definitely not your typical formulaic cookie-cutter type of narrative, and just the way it's constructed and the way it almost interrogates the ethics of the subject matter itself is very fascinating, so I really did appreciate this conversation with Chris Kasich.
00:36And I do want to say a bit of a spoiler warning. You don't typically hear a spoiler warning when you're talking about a doc, but in this case, something happens in the last 30 minutes of the documentary with a shift in perspective, and Chris talks about that specifically in our interview here, so I just wanted to point that out.
00:57But I still think you can still appreciate a lot from this conversation, disregarding that. So thank you so much for watching and tuning in and listening. Hope you enjoy the conversation. Once again, talking to director Chris Kasich from Citizen Sleuth. Hope you enjoy.
01:15So, you know, previously you've worked in television as a writer and director and producer across various projects, and I think you also did a feature film back in 2015. So how exactly do you find yourself helming this documentary that explores subject matter that, at least stepping back from a broader look, appears to be pretty different territory than most of your prior work?
01:37I, when I was 19 years old, my favorite filmmaker was Errol Morris, a documentary filmmaker who made The Blue Line, and I started, I got an internship at his office, and it started a 20-year sort of partnership with him in development and ideas and on set and interviewing people next to him, casting, and so I've been surrounded in the world of documentary my entire career.
02:02It was always, I'm a story guy. I'm a story guy. I follow the story. I love writing. You know, my last feature was like a dark comedy. Stories grabbed me. I've done a decade of work in advertising in documentary. So I'm really familiar with how to make documentaries. And in the past, you know, five, ten years, I think the face of documentary is changing with social media, where people are used to
02:31present tense. They're used to live stories and reactions and stuff. And so I always wanted to make a present tense documentary about an intimate subject matter that resonates larger. And you really can't piece that together in the beginning, you just find a character who's in conflict, and you go down this journey with them.
02:54And so when I had met Emily early in 2019, I'd heard my producer, Stabiola Washburn, and Jared Washburn had sent me a podcast of Emily, of Mile Marker 181. And I'm from Ohio. I lived in the mid-Ohio region where Emily was from. I went to college there. And so I was familiar with it, and I was familiar with the people and how life is there. It moves at a slower pace.
03:19And I quite like it. And so this gave me an opportunity to go back to Appalachia. And when I met with Emily, it was like a character out of a story. It was someone who was screaming to tell their story.
03:38And as a documentary filmmaker, you wait for these kind of things. You wait for these characters. And after the first two days of meeting with her, I was in. And so I moved there with Jared Washburn, my director of photography, and we just started the process of always having cameras around and really building a trust and a relationship with Emily Nestor.
04:02And as we were making a film, she was making her podcast. And a meta layer started occurring where the film started becoming a part of the documentary. And I've been around long enough where I knew we had something.
04:19And the difference between working in TV and all of that is there's always a deadline. And I made sure to tell myself, I need to tell this story all the way through. I don't have a deadline of putting this on TV today.
04:34And it was such a blessing to not have that pressure of putting something out early. Because so often, like Twitter, like, who's the first person to tweet something? We're so in this immediate society that you don't get a perspective on something.
04:49And I just felt like this was such a complex story that we needed that time to do it.
04:54And so it was like, something that filled life for five years of developing this story with Emily and getting this story out there. And so that's the long answer and how I sort of came out to it. When I saw that I could have a true character arc over years, a character that really changes. That's a dream scenario. And so I was all in and that's how the journey began.
05:19Yeah. And I was going to kind of ask about the different point of view and documentary and in terms of constructing the various perspectives and voices, because by the time we get to the end of the film, I feel like the focus has shifted pretty drastically, at least in terms of point of view and who we're who's telling the story directly and specifically.
05:41So can you talk a little bit about the evolution of that process?
05:43Sure. When we started this, it was following Emily's investigation and I didn't know what the movie was going to be. And I always approach projects by see where it goes. Character in conflict, maybe a character in crisis. That's the basis of storytelling.
06:04And so often people don't begin with that. And they try to create a conflict as like the crux of a documentary and then they back themselves into a certain point of view or they know where it's going to end and then everything is built towards that.
06:20That wasn't the case. That wasn't the case here. Like you see how the movie plays out on screen is largely how it happened there in the midpoint of the movie.
06:30We have this reveal that shook us. And from a personal level, I felt I was in that with Emily. It really shook us that something could be turned like that.
06:46But as from a filmmaking perspective, it was like, oh, wow, this is what you wait for. This is like the searching for Sugarman moment.
06:52This is like the end of the jinx, but in the middle, like this is something that like like you when it happened, I was like, OK, this is the truth. And Emily's.
07:06Season one and parts of season two, I had a lot of questions. And when it came to victims in this story, I knew the victims eventually would come out to be Freddie, Kristen and Katie.
07:19And so there was like a parallel path that was going on where I was seeking truth also.
07:25And it's it's a significant break at the end of the film where we have the victims voices come in and the point of view does switch to that.
07:36And I'd like to think of it as the ultimate perspective of truth and seeing it.
07:42And those are long drawn out, like sort of a meditative thing, because I wanted it to be as raw as possible.
07:48So you get this record of truth that's out there and that it is a significant break from the verite and the interviews with Emily where it felt like it had weight.
07:59All of this in the end felt like a pursuit of truth.
08:03It didn't feel like that at the time. It felt like a mess.
08:05But when the reveal happened and Emily realized that she had to change course, it was a real dicey situation and how to present that to an audience.
08:19She says it in the film, like, how do you have the right words to do that?
08:23And I felt like if we can come in and have the voices of the innocent so there was no doubt in the audience's mind what the truth was, that the point of view of it almost doesn't matter because the truth and documentary, that's what you that's what you go after.
08:40Like the ultimate, like the ultimate highest form of intimacy is truth.
08:45And when you're making an intimate movie that is trying to, like, register at a larger level, when that became the pursuit, it became everything.
08:56And so that's a roundabout way to think about it.
09:00Yeah, and over the course of the documentary, basically every single individual involved in the story finds themselves in a harrowing predicament to one extent or another.
09:12So for you as the director, how did those distressing moments affect you?
09:16Because you weren't involved in the case to begin with, but you still found yourself in the middle of this developing chronicle of events.
09:22So just what were your reactions and perspectives on those more emotionally riveting moments?
09:30I mean, I took it on personally.
09:32Like, I mean, this is I don't want to say this is derailed my life, this film, but it sort of has where I felt a responsibility to everyone involved in the making of this.
09:46There's like another documentary out called Subject about, you know, being a subject of a documentary and the relationship between a filmmaker and subject.
09:57And it's not in my film, it's not just the relationship with Emily, it's the relationship to Freddie, Kristen, Katie, and all the participants of this, because they exposed who they were and to me.
10:10And I feel like, I mean, this is 500 hours of footage that have been down to 82.
10:15I feel like they're all these honest, raw moments of it, of these people revealing it to me.
10:21And so I felt like I was walking this tightrope with Emily this whole time.
10:27And like, if you see, like, you know, there's fighting on camera, we have there's pushback.
10:33But in the end, we felt tied to this story where she was making a podcast, and then I began making a film.
10:41And now we're at this another meta layer where people like journalists like you and reviewers and critics are now offering their perspective on this.
10:52It's a really interesting to look at, like, the new media landscape now and the vacuum that has been left by the death of, like, journalism in a way, and local journalism in particular, where people are searching for this sense of community.
11:08And the library scene really surprised me.
11:10I didn't know anyone was going to go to the library scene in the movie.
11:13And then it was, like, lying out the door.
11:15And then you start realizing that people really want this, like, sense of community, a sense of connection to everybody.
11:23And it's not – there's – and someone like Emily doing Mile Marker 181 filled this vacuum of this area.
11:30And it was unexpected when we began it, and it just tied all my relationships to the subjects together where I felt like I had to do them justice in this situation.
11:42And you alluded to the 500 hours of footage that you shot and editing that down to 82 minutes.
11:50So can you talk a little bit more on collaborating with your DP and your editor to just find a way to weave a narrative out of these – you know, this massive amount of footage that you had at your disposal?
12:01Another thing I wanted to do was make a film, cinema.
12:07Oftentimes, true crime feels almost like a magazine article.
12:11It's just, like, this sensational thing.
12:13It's our Discovery ID.
12:14And I like films.
12:16I like three-act structure.
12:18I like – I find storytelling like that I respond to.
12:23Even people had tried to convince me to do, like, a series about this, and I thought that an hour and a half punch of what this story is was the way to go.
12:36And so my relationship with the director of photography, we started working together at 19 years old.
12:41We were PAs on an Errol Morris set, and then he liked us both, and we started – we were hired on all of Errol Morris' shoots for over a decade.
12:50We had developed this, and then we had done advertising, and so there was a real shorthand with the director of photography and his wife, Fabiola Washburn, a producer on the film, and we were embedded together in Parkersburg, and we do scene work.
13:07That's how I always approach it, is, like, location scene work and put cameras up, and we roll for hours, and there's long conversations, and there's devices, like, you know,
13:19we're driving at night, and so my relationship with Jared, and then when the meta layer started going, it was, we need to document the process.
13:28We even need to document when we're pushing a tire into the frame of the camera, and when we're talking about setting up shots and everything, because that meta layer, I feel, is important.
13:39It didn't make sense to me at the time, but it felt like something.
13:42And then the editing of the film – so Jeff Gilbert is the editor, he did Boys State, he did The Overnighters, a true legend in documentary.
13:55It took me six months to even get a slot to edit with him, and then when we began the process, it was this – him and Connor Hall, the associate editor,
14:06took a month just to watch all the footage, unbiased, without real input from me, so that they could look at it objectively.
14:14And then we came together in where we wrote out a beat sheet of what is the arc of the movie, like – and it all changes, but it gives you, like, a roadmap to begin with.
14:25And I knew that the movie – I wanted it to feel like a true crime movie up top.
14:31I wanted it to play with the tropes of true crime, and I also wanted to play with almost like a mockumentary-type element with the music to it, where when people were talking about it, it's entertaining to them.
14:46It's not a trauma-tragic thing.
14:48It's water-cooler talk.
14:50And so oftentimes there was – when I was talking to people who lived in the town, they came at it as a story, and they were excited to talk about it.
14:58It was gossip. It was the sense of community.
15:01And through the edit, I was like, we need to start reflecting, like, how people really talk about this and the difference between someone who's internalizing, like Emily, and the townspeople.
15:12And so the edit took a year.
15:14It was lots of versions of this, and you start refining and refining, and these moments start happening, and you start connecting it.
15:22And this internal story of conscience, which is what turns out to be the main conflict in this story, wasn't obvious at first.
15:31There was external conflicts, like, is it her versus the sheriff?
15:34But it was really Emily versus Emily.
15:36Can she tell the truth when it doesn't serve her?
15:41And what does that mean in the ethics of true crime?
15:44And all of that stuff was within the last year coming out of producers Tyler Davidson and Drew Sykes at Low Spark Films.
15:52They had a real crucial role in seeing the objectiveness of it because they came on right before the editing process, and so they saw it unbiased, too.
16:01And we were part of the story.
16:03I mean, I think there's, like, a line that Emily says is, like, you tell me, like, I'm in this, and I've lost perspective on it.
16:10And the editing process really was about bringing me back up to speed about what we went through in an unbiased view of it to tell the greatest story that we could about what really happened there.
16:22And then the meta layer really came out.
16:25And at first I resisted it.
16:26I was like, I don't want to be in this movie.
16:27I don't want my voice in this movie.
16:29That wasn't the idea.
16:30But these conversations, I was struggling with the conversations that Emily was with my position being there and, like, what am I doing here and how does that contribute to, quote, the ethics of all this?
16:43And it's not like I have an answer.
16:45At the time, it was, like, it was coming at us in real time.
16:49And so I think I'm hoping that the film is this raw look at the behind the scenes of how things are made because every newsroom I've been in or stuff, people talk about this stuff, but they're just afraid to put it on camera.
17:01And I don't, you know, I trust the audience enough to interpret that and see how it happened, and that's why it's all in the movie.
17:12And so you began the project five years ago, and it went through a lot of different changes over the course of that.
17:20Can I ask generally about the budget and resources that you began with and how that evolved, if any, over the course of the five years?
17:28Or was it pretty much just consistent, just you and your crew kind of carrying it all on your shoulders?
17:33It was started that way.
17:35It started in 2019.
17:37It was just very small, and they were doing it.
17:40And then as these larger stories had started happening, I had known Tyler Davidson at Low Spark Films because he's from Cleveland.
17:48I'm from Cleveland.
17:49I'm from Ohio.
17:50And so we had contact, and I was like, you know, a bit of financing to further us down the line would really help in solidifying.
17:59And so when people put in a bit of financing, it really makes the project go.
18:04And that didn't come until 2020 with Tyler coming in.
18:08And so we were supporting it.
18:10I was in my own production company, but I needed help at a certain point.
18:13When the story started getting bigger and I truly knew what I had, I sort of kept it tight for a long time because so often it's like you go around, you pitch ideas and stuff.
18:24But, like, ideas are sort of documentary.
18:26I don't want to say they're worthless because they're not worthless, but an idea, and everyone has an idea in a documentary, but it's really about how deep you dig.
18:34And I needed to start digging before I started showing it to people because it's so easy to get discouraged, right?
18:40And someone, you know, oh, yeah, we'll talk about this, and another happens, and you kick the can down the road.
18:46But I didn't want to face the reality of people doing that until I knew I sort of had something.
18:51And so we had filmed a lot of 2019, and I had edited together a few scenes, and I generally knew maybe where this was going to go.
19:01And at that point, Low Spark Films came on board and really provided, you know, crucial co-financing at that point to help get over the hump into post-production,
19:13which is really in documentaries where it's written, it's written in post-production.
19:18And so we just needed to get there as quickly as we could with financing still.
19:24And so that's sort of how the evolution of that came on.
19:26And so this was your first feature-length documentary, and so now that you've completed it, how do you see this affecting your approach moving forward in your career,
19:38whether that be in documentary filmmaking or in other, you know, more feature narrative filmmaking?
19:43Is there anything that you're going to be taking from this that's going to be sticking with you moving forward just regarding your general approach?
19:49It's funny because one of the bigger takeaways is, wow, Chris, you're quite a storyteller in how you've crafted the story.
19:58And I've not really had, like, a perspective on my work like that.
20:02And so I'm a story guy.
20:03A good story is a good story, and I'll follow a good story as it goes.
20:08You know, my favorite kinds of stories are there's sick, sad, and funny.
20:11And, like, if you combine those three elements, and so I want to do another documentary, and I want to jump into it.
20:20This has been a five-year odyssey of it, and I haven't thought about much else in the last five years.
20:26And so I would like to jump into something and do this all over again and another great story on it.
20:32It's not like I'm a true crime guy or anything like that.
20:34If it's a good story that has a character and conflict that I can go on a journey with, and the subject matter I'm interested, I'm in.
20:44It's about the commitment to doing it and really going.
20:47So many people half-ass these things, right?
20:49Like, they do, you know, these documentaries are made in a year.
20:52They have deadlines.
20:54And to find that real story arc, it takes time.
20:59And it's a real commitment jumping onto a project for years of your life.
21:03You can only do so many of them.
21:05But my ears are open, and I'm listening, and I'm following up on a few leads on it.
21:09And so I'll jump into something soon enough.
21:13Awesome, awesome.
21:14Well, we'll be looking forward to that.
21:15And so this documentary is premiering at South by Southwest.
21:18So congrats on that.
21:20I know you're very, very excited to have that happening.
21:22Is there any word on how this doc is going to be distributed?
21:26Any production companies have picked it up and are going to be distributing it?
21:30Only, like, 300 people have seen this so far.
21:32It's been two screenings.
21:35And so I'm assuming it'll be out in the fall.
21:38We have to figure out the distribution and all of it.
21:41It was really, this is the first time the world is seeing it.
21:45And the story of what this film is going to be is just starting.
21:50And so I'm assuming it'll be out in the fall.
21:53But we'll get there, and we'll see.
21:55And guys like you coming in who show interest in it,
21:58like, I really appreciate it.
22:00And it feels like people are recognizing it for sort of the work that it was,
22:04and that it is made in a different tradition as most documentaries now.
22:09And I hope it can be recognized.
22:11And I hope people believe in the power of film and cinema and documentaries.
22:15And that's what we wanted to do here.
22:18Again, I didn't want to make a series about this.
22:20I didn't want to make TikToks about it.
22:22I wanted to make a movie, and I'm proud that it feels like a movie.
22:25And I'm really proud about the reception of it.
22:29Definitely.
22:30Well, congrats again, Chris.
22:31It really was a pleasure to talk with you today.
22:33I really appreciate your time.
22:35And hopefully we get another chance in the future to talk about some of your other projects down the line.
22:39For sure, Thomas.
22:40I appreciate it.
22:41I'm looking forward to reading the article.
22:42Take care.
22:43Absolutely.
22:43Have a good one.
22:43Yep.
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