TRUE CRIME ETHICS
TO TELL THE TRUTH It’s vital for film crews to be mindful of the sensibilities of victims and their families, as in the Laci Peterson case
SHIFTING THE FOCUS ITV’s 2023 The Long Shadow dramatises the five-year hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper. In dramatised true crime, more often than not the perpetrator becomes the focus of the narrative, though this isn’t the case with The Long Shadow , on which Ed Rutherford, BSC served as DOP. “It was a conscious direction to avoid, in any way, playing the perpetrator’s point of view,” says Rutherford. “It was supposed to be from the victims’ perspective, set among this muddy minefield of patriarchy and incompetence of the police that existed at the time. But how do you stop it from becoming a procedural cop series? You need the sense of a thriller, but also a huge amount of sensitivity because of the nature of the material. That’s the tricky part – you still need to give it momentum to ensure audiences will stay with it across seven episodes.” The filmmakers ran into issues with filming permissions across Bradford,
the show, so you have to hook in the viewer in the first few minutes,” he says. “We had previously unseen footage of Laci as a teenager and I wanted to include as much of that as possible early on in our show; that was a point of contention. It was visceral for me to see this girl in a happier time of her life, as a real person I could connect to, so we fought really hard to include it, and in the end we found a nice balance. I really wanted to know and understand more about who Laci was because I wanted to
connect with her as a person, not just as a new story to tell.” Milewski acknowledges that he’s worked on shows which have received criticism for their content, and remembers being completely caught off guard after reading one review of Waco . “One of our subjects is watching a building burn on TV, and her whole family are in there,” he says. “It was important to tap into the emotion and not just to relay the facts, but there’s a fine line there. I put this picture of her as a child, sort of split screen, next to her face, and one of the critics said this was a horrific thing to do. I remember thinking that this is an adult telling the story of her trauma, and that she’s still stuck in this place as a child; I really wanted that to hit home. It was interesting to me that it was perceived in that way, as being a disgusting thing to do. As someone who always tries to keep these things tasteful, and is concerned about the nature of how we present the material, I was really taken aback.”
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