INTERVIEW JEFF HUTCHENS
“They were ultimately trying to get one of the Manson Family – Bobby Beausoleil – out of jail for the murder of Gary Hinman by setting up copycat crimes. It’s that flawed logic that then led to the continuation of multiple crimes.” What’s particularly unique about this retelling is that it brings the voices of the women of the Manson Family to the fore, giving considerable airtime to their accounts of life inside the group – particularly Dianne Lake (“Snake”), who was 14 when she first encountered Manson and would end up a key witness for the prosecution. “You can get a sense of that internal emotional push-pull,” he describes. “She came from a family situation where she didn’t feel loved or like she belonged, and then here comes Manson love-bombing and gaslighting and doing the whole nine yards to try and hook her.” Hutchens has carved out a niche in the true-crime space – shooting Murder in Big Horn , Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel , Cold Case: The Tylenol Murders and, most recently, A Killer Story – so he’s pretty unshockable when it comes to being in the room for horrifying testimonies. How does it affect him and how does he feel about the genre as a whole? “My focus is on really listening; I’m trying to pay attention to where the camera needs to move, whether we need to stay with the subject. So much of composition, lighting and how we shape the frame is informed by what’s being said, but also the kind of space we’re trying to make for subjects to feel comfortable sharing. And then there’s the kind of space we’re trying to make from an aesthetic point, which needs
to match what they’re talking about,” he offers. He is keen to stress that the team is conscious of the responsibility of both revisiting traumatic events and respecting victims, and of avoiding a treatment that becomes “garish, over the top or irresponsible”. But ultimately, he says, he doesn’t make much of a distinction between true crime and other kinds of social documentaries. “It’s all really about looking at things that are on the further edges of human experience; the outliers in terms of what the general human experience is. But I try and approach it the same way I would any documentary – very conceptually, aesthetically forward and subject-matter forward.”
With the blend of archival footage, interviews and recreations, another challenge was maintaining a consistent look. One way they approached this was by giving the recreations a Super 16 feel on the ARRI ALEXA 35, deliberately degrading the image so that it blended with the archival imagery. “We upped the grain, we lowered the contrast, did a bit of colour shifting,” he explains. The recreations, whether depicting the grungy, sun-bleached world of Spahn Ranch or the horror of the murders, are immersive, chaotic and feel startlingly authentic. “It’s dusty, hot and grubby in this communal living space,” he says. “And we wanted to inject as much of that feeling as possible, as much texture as we could.” They also mixed in Super 8, shot on actual film, while Hutchens used 16mm ZEISS Super Speeds alongside a Canon 11-165mm zoom. “The general imperfections of that lensing – whether that’s chromatic aberration on the edges of outlines – all of that is contributing to this very textural aesthetic,” he says. “This was my first time shooting with more of that Super 16 vibe and that particular lensing with the ARRI ALEXA 35. Seeing just how close you can get to the aesthetic of that era, even with modern technology and modern cameras – that
RANCH LIFE Conversations with a Killer director Joe Berlinger on the Spahn Ranch set in Cape Town, South Africa
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