![]() ![]() Why a Harrowing 18th-Century Shipwreck Is a Parable for Our Timesĭespite his expressed desire to prove his innocence, Bundy was reluctant to speak about the crimes at all until Michaud and Aynesworth, a Pulitzer-nominated journalist who was then Michaud’s mentor, suggested that Bundy try referring to himself in the third person. Michaud believes Bundy chose him for this dubious honor because the killer may have seen Michaud, then an enterprising young journalist, as naive and easily manipulated. Their meeting had been arranged after Michaud’s agent told him that Bundy wanted to share his story in the hopes of clearing his name and getting his case re-examined. As Michaud, an author and former Newsweek writer, explains in the film, he originally met Bundy on Death Row in 1980. “But we quickly realized that Bundy is an unreliable narrator, and certain stuff needed to be contextualized.”īerlinger based his series upon more than 150 hours of audio interviews Ted Bundy recorded in prison sit-downs with journalists Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth (the transcribed interviews were first published as a 2005 book). “My goal was to give people the emotional ride of being inside of the mind of this killer,” Berlinger says. The docuseries attempts to answer that question using chilling, extensive archival footage and, more intriguingly, Bundy’s own words. Why is it Bundy with this perverse, almost rock star-like status?” “I wanted to dive into that and understand why. “There’s a lot of serial killing in this country, and yet the name ‘Bundy’ always floats to the top,” Berlinger says. On January 24th, 1989, Ted Bundy was executed in the electric chair at the Florida State Prison.īerlinger was intrigued by the spectacle that surrounded Bundy - especially during his courtroom proceedings, which, as the first trial to be fully televised, was “the first time that America got to watch murder as entertainment.” ”īerlinger admits to having a long-standing fascination with the perversely charming Theodore Robert Bundy, the serial killer, rapist and necrophiliac who murdered at least 36 women before being captured in 1975 and sentenced to death. “This was more of an editing job, telling Bundy’s story. “It’s not the typical film that I usually make, which is cinema verité, or following a story unfolding,” he says. ![]() The Netflix series, however, is a departure from Berlinger’s usual documentary storytelling style. People will see that in the feature, even though it’s got some style, it feels very authentic and real.” Being able to call upon my doc team for confirmation of factual information, and being able to look at archival footage to help inform production design, was a great for the feature film. We changed the script during pre-production. “It was a great resource for the production designers, the EPs, the art director, even the screenwriter. “We were shooting the movie in Kentucky, while back in New York I had my full documentary team working on progressing the series,” he says. He says the two projects “informed and helped one another to be better.” Specifically, he recalls department heads from Extremely Wicked using elements from the documentary to help shape the feature as they worked on it in real time. legal system - Berlinger also directed the buzzy forthcoming feature Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, which tells the story of Ted Bundy through the eyes of his long-time girlfriend, Elizabeth Kloepfer. Best known for his films Brother’s Keeper and the Paradise Lost documentary trilogy - which focused on wrongful conviction and the broken U.S. Berlinger, the filmmaker behind the four-part Netflix series, should know. “I trace this explosion that we currently live in, this insatiable appetite for programming, all the way back to the Big Bang of the Ted Bundy trial,” director Joe Berlinger tells Rolling Stone. But these sorts of statements make for fascinating television, even when it seems like every channel that used to survive off sappy movies or reality TV is now careening into a constant flow of true-crime. history, Bundy’s self-assessment is beyond suspect. Of course, as one of the most notorious serial rapists and killers in U.S. I’m just a normal individual,” Ted Bundy says in a snippet of an interview at the beginning of the new Netflix documentary series Conversations With a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes.
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