Hollywood may love neat, cathartic resolutions, but the filmmaker Liz Garbus has always been drawn to open-ended stories. “You have to deal a little bit with the discomfort of the gray areas in the world,” she said in a recent phone conversation.
Don’t look to Garbus’s 22-year career for easy answers. Ambiguity is woven into the fabric of such films as “Who Killed Garrett Phillips?” (don’t ask the police) and “There’s Something Wrong With Aunt Diane” (nobody knows exactly what). Garbus’s Academy Award-nominated documentary about Nina Simone, tellingly titled “What Happened, Miss Simone?,” is energized by the often contradictory complexity of its prodigiously talented but mercurial subject.
Even Garbus’s recent scripted debut, Netflix’s “Lost Girls,” was marked by a disquieting restlessness — the movie was based on Robert Kolker’s nonfiction book about the unsolved killings of Long Island sex workers. Now she’s turning Michelle McNamara’s true-crime best seller about the Golden State Killer, “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark,” into a six-episode documentary series for HBO that debuts on June 28.
The complex story of how the series came into being — full of twists and tragedies all its own — is less about yet another deranged male killer than about another subject of deep importance to Garbus: who gets to tell women’s stories and how.
“What intrigued me was Michelle’s voice as a writer,” said Garbus, who oversaw “I’ll Be Gone” and directed multiple episodes. “I didn’t want to make a series about the Golden State Killer. I wanted to make a series about Michelle’s journey, her observations and articulations, the plight of the victims and the kind of 1970s-through-1980s attitudes toward rape.”
“I’ll Be Gone” is very much of a piece for Garbus, 50, with its troubling sense of unfinished business. McNamara, who died in 2016, had spent a half decade attempting to uncover the identity of the killer, a serial rapist and murderer who terrorized multiple Californian communities in the 1970s and ’80s, pouring her painstaking but fruitless efforts into a book published almost two years after her death. As HBO bought the rights and approached Garbus for the project, the elusive criminal appeared safely tucked away on the cold-case shelf.
Then came a plot twist in April 2018, just two months after McNamara’s book was published. “After that first day of filming, unexpected by any of us, they actually arrested somebody,” said Nancy Abraham, the co-head of HBO’s documentary and family programming with Lisa Heller.
That somebody was a former cop named Joseph James DeAngelo (as of mid-June he was expected to plead guilty soon), but Garbus did not let him hijack her series: She knew that her take on “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark” was, and had to remain, about women. Garbus devotes time to survivors of DeAngelo’s assaults, but it’s McNamara, her presence both spectral and earthy, whom we really get to know — the book, after all, is subtitled “One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer.”
(HBO approached Garbus because “she has had such experience making multiple kinds of documentaries, and she would be a person with the dexterity to deal with the intertwining story lines,” Abraham said. “Lisa and I also thought she would probably relate to and have an affinity with Michelle McNamara.”)
McNamara’s voice is heard often in the series, pulled from various archives. But her words are also articulated by the actress Amy Ryan, who played a mother searching for her missing daughter in “Lost Girls.”
“Mostly Liz and I talked about Michelle’s caffeinated energy,” Ryan said in a recent phone interview. “She’s really on the cusp of figuring this out, and this driving force is keeping her up late at night, going down these rabbit holes of investigation. I listened to a lot of existing recordings, her podcast. When you layer in the emotional side of it, I think the audience will forgive that it’s not exactly a dead-on impersonation.”
McNamara wrote about pursuing leads and digging into reams of police reports, but she also revealed quite a bit about herself. She did hold back, however, on the extent of her prescription-drugs use: Suddenly, the book abandons the first-person to inform readers that she died in her sleep, discovered in her bedroom by her husband, the comedian Patton Oswalt. She had an undiagnosed heart condition, and Adderall, Fentanyl and Xanax were found in her bloodstream.
The documentary fills in some of those blanks as it reveals more of the toll McNamara’s quest took on her mind and body.
“It was very, very hard to watch these episodes,” Oswalt said on the phone. “I told Liz: ‘I don’t think I’ll be able to watch Episode 5. I just can’t deal with that level of grief again.’
“Michelle was amazing at adding the personal elements of her successes and failures trying to solve the case, and how it affected her physically and psychologically,” Oswalt continued. “If she was able to do it in the book, it was hard for me to shy away from it in a portrait of her. I wanted her courage, I guess.”
Garbus said that Oswalt “shared endlessly” with her and her team.
“He wanted us to be able to get into Michelle’s head,” she added. “That is a huge responsibility. What do you include, what do you not include? How much of Michelle’s discussion about addiction do you show? This is not a cop-out because I don’t think there’s one answer.”
Good documentarians must balance ethics with entertainment: They don’t want to sacrifice integrity, but they also need to keep viewers viewing. Amy Hobby, the executive director of the Tribeca Film Institute and a producer of “What Happened, Miss Simone?,” recalled that she and Garbus — who cited Janet Malcolm’s ‘The Journalist and the Murderer’ as one of her favorite essays — often talked about how to deal with sensitive material.
“She has a road map for that and is aware of the ethical decisions she’s making,” Hobby said. “It’s important to her.”
Garbus has often used her films to examine the major fault lines underlying American ideals, institutions and rituals, having delved into subjects including health care, politics or the media. (For her 2018 Showtime docu-series “The Fourth Estate,” she embedded herself for 16 months at The New York Times.) Several of her past works have shined a light on the criminal justice system: Her directorial debut feature, from 1998 (with Jonathan Stack and Wilbert Rideau), “The Farm: Angola, USA,” goes inside a Louisiana state penitentiary on the site of a former slave plantation; earlier this year, she oversaw three episodes to the Netflix docu-series “The Innocence Files,” directing one herself.
“I’ll Be Gone in the Dark” creates discomfort and suspense in part by playing off the discrepancy between the horror of the crimes and the placidity of the suburban locales. Asked if the series, the first true-crime series overseen entirely by her, was another examination of systemic dysfunction, Garbus hesitated.
“In some ways there were systemic failures in the investigations of these murders and rapes — first the rapes, of course, weren’t taken seriously enough,” she said. “But thinking about Michelle, there’s a larger story about a society of avoidance we are living in. There is not a lot of time for introspection, which can be painful and hard.
“Michelle was not alone; there are so many Americans from richest to the struggling who rely on prescription drugs and are addicted. The silence around it makes things quite worse.”
It’s hard not to wonder how Garbus, herself, manages to maintain a modicum of sanity and forbearance.
“Avoidance,” Garbus said, laughing. “I don’t have a procrastination thing, so I can kind of complete, which I think is really important because otherwise things will haunt you. And my kids keep me grounded and give me tremendous joy, and so I manage to compartmentalize.” (She lives in Brooklyn with her two children and Dan Cogan, her husband and partner in the production company Story Syndicate.)
Exploring vastly different subjects simultaneously helps, too. Garbus is working on a project about voter suppression with Lisa Cortés, as well as a film about the French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, who died in 1997. But even that isn’t all fun and underwater frolics.
“He was diving and being paid by oil companies,” she said. “He’s involved in some level of destruction of the sea floor. But as time goes on, he becomes a totally different person, this extremely important voice in terms of conservation.”
“That shift, like the Nina Simone shift,” she added, referring to the singer’s activism during the civil rights movements, “is interesting to me.”
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