00:26This is Tim Walsberg from Fast Track Unstruck TV.
00:29I'm here in Austin, Texas for the South by Southwest Film Festival.
00:33Always wanted to really focus on the climbing because that is just so incredible.
00:38And it takes a second for your eyes to adjust to understand what she's actually doing and how she's doing
00:44it.
00:44And when we say crawling, it's, you know, the pendulum rocking motion that she does.
00:50But for the true crime, never wanted to do a salacious, like, can you, you know, blow it up and
00:58make that the focus?
00:59But I always kept asking Mandy, like, how and why?
01:03How and why do you still keep, like, how can you still keep going?
01:06And she could never answer that for me directly.
01:09And so with this is about like back in Colorado when I first met her all the way through to
01:18even two years ago.
01:20And the true crime side is the how and the why.
01:25It is this, like, rage and raw energy of the trauma, like, literally pushing her up the mountain.
01:35And her personal growth to overcome as it's been incredible to witness that there are these forces of she's mourning
01:46the self that never will be because of what happened to her.
01:51And she's got all of this pain in the past that's still pushing, pushing her and pushing her.
01:57And these two things are like crushing into her present and disorienting her.
02:03And through doing the intercuts and with the style of animation that we went with, that was able to just
02:09really take us inside, inside the mind of Maddie Horner.
02:17I had a lot of that going into this climb.
02:20You can't do it.
02:21You're going to hurt yourself.
02:24I didn't tell you that story about how I started the first time.
02:28And someone was like, you cannot do this.
02:31You're lazy, you know.
02:32Oh, I've heard that.
02:33And I was like, see me then.
02:38Because if myself also I listened to those buddies, even some were like my family.
02:43They really care about, no, we don't want you to hurt.
02:48But I was like, this is something that I like.
02:51But I was like, no, no, no.
02:52People just tell me I'm crazy.
02:55I've been told many times.
02:58Did you talk about using the different perspectives, but also capturing her and who she is?
03:05Yeah, that's a great question about objectivity as well.
03:10And understanding that the stories that we tell ourselves to get through a traumatic event are different to the realities
03:19of what might have happened.
03:21But that's only because we had one singular point of view of what happened.
03:26And so that was something that we were always striving to understand is like, how did it all go down?
03:33But how did it really all go down?
03:34And then you start talking to some people who were at the bar that night, who we were friends with,
03:40one of the figures in the film.
03:42And you're like, he was an angel?
03:46He was like the best thing since, you know, a Boy Scout cookie?
03:49What are you talking about?
03:52So we definitely wanted to bring in other voices and other perspectives.
03:57But over the course of the investigation with Scott Beltre, the man should have been a detective in another life.
04:05Or he would have been a detective in another life.
04:07He went so deep on this.
04:09Yeah, I think he thought he was Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind.
04:13But I just kept seeing Charlie Day in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
04:21Charlie has a movie here that he does the same thing.
04:24He does.
04:25I met him the other night.
04:26He's a good dude.
04:27Yeah.
04:29Such a good scene.
04:30I love that show.
04:32And Glenn Howerton, hell of an actor.
04:35Okay.
04:36Documentaries.
04:37Yes.
04:41Yeah, getting inside different points of view.
04:44Because I think if you're an audience member and you see a story only told from one side,
04:50we want, there's always just going to be this little voice in the back of our head
04:54being like, what about, like, what does this issue look like?
05:00Or what does this subject look like from the other side?
05:03What are the different points of view?
05:04And that was the thing.
05:05The story just had to blossom and unbattle itself.
05:07And, I don't know, five years.
05:09They don't understand.
05:37Just to get here before dark.
05:39That was partially me being stubborn and pushing a little harder.
05:42But, now I'm going to pay for that.
05:46We ran into an old-timey railroad that refused to let two of its current employees be interviewed.
05:57Otherwise, they'd lose their pensions.
05:58And so, we had to make the choice to, like, work with the railroad and say, look, can we
06:07take their statements that they don't say it?
06:10And then we combine their statements.
06:12And so, where the facts overlap, that's where we go.
06:15That's how we're able to, like, you know, get their point of view into the story.
06:20That also comes back to the narrative.
06:22So, having done quite a few narrative movies now, there's something so beautiful about
06:28the way that your imagination can take over with the animation style that we went with
06:33by animated Mike Lloyd.
06:35Mike is phenomenal.
06:36And he's created this really singular style where the idea of a memory just fades into
06:42the darkness at the edges of the frame.
06:45And whenever Mandy would relay the events of the night, I would push gently to be like,
06:54what was happening over in this corner of the bar?
06:56What was happening over there?
06:57And you could just see this, like, this glaze come in at the sides.
07:02So, it was just a way to visualize what it was like, or what it's like for her, you
07:06know, dreams and her nightmares of what went down.
07:22Work a little bit.
07:24Oh, that's nice, open.
07:27Can you?
07:29Yeah.
07:29Yes.
07:30Okay.
07:32Sorry.
07:34You're all right.
07:35Sorry.
07:36But we can't get an infection in there now.
07:39Yeah.
07:42Tough day, huh?
07:44Okay.
07:47Can you just see?
07:48I'm going to suck it a little bit.
07:53Yeah, I thought I had a tricky family.
07:55And, um, but, you know, all of us, uh, yeah, it's all relative, especially with what
08:02Manny was going through.
08:03Parents really were in a lot of ways, trying to protect her from certain things that they
08:09hadn't, hadn't told her or that she had been told, but had maybe, uh, forgotten.
08:15And so that there were these little, just like little points of friction where we had to kind
08:22of navigate in there while still remaining objectives so that we can, but of course, but
08:28naturally you're spending five years with, um, with one family.
08:32You know, you want to see them come together.
08:42You know, you want to see them come together.
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