Director Atom Egoyan is no stranger to dramatizations of real-life tragedies: One of his best-known films, 1997’s “The Sweet Hereafter,” examined a small town in the aftermath of a horrific school bus accident. In “Devil’s Knot,” out Friday and starring Reese Witherspoon and Colin Firth, he’s taking on the story of the West Memphis Three, a murder case that has been the subject of several documentaries — 1996’s “Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills” and its two follow-ups, and 2012’s “West of Memphis.”
When three young boys were found murdered in a small Arkansas town in 1993, the frantic hunt for justice led to the arrest and conviction of three long-haired outsider teens, despite a lack of evidence. The three were eventually freed after a long and public campaign, but under a tortuous legal loophole in which they are still considered technically guilty. Another arrest has never been made.
The Post spoke to Egoyan about his interest in the trial and what differences in perspective a dramatization could bring to this story.
Post: How well-versed in this case were you when you decided to make this film?
Atom Egoyan: I had seen the documentaries. And then I plunged into these amazing Web sites, where people have accumulated all of the documents presented in court, all the medical reports, all the police surveillance tapes, all the interviews. There were a couple sites where you plunge into it and it’s just endless — but nothing becomes more resolved. It just opens up more questions. And I can understand how people can become obsessed with it — I can’t think of another situation where you have such a grisly crime scene, a clear-cut case of extraordinarily evil intent. It’s so unspeakably horrible, three young boys found bound and sexually mutilated — and yet there was a shocking absence of any hard evidence. Not even a branch had been disturbed. And this happened in a small Southern town. Clearly, it was a demonic act, so demons had to be found. And if they couldn’t be found, they had to be created.
Post: How would you say your film differs from what we’ve seen in the four documentaries?
AE: What I really tried to look at is the bigger picture of 20 years later. For all the finger-pointing, we are really no clearer. We wanted to craft a film that situated where the case is, and how unresolved it still is. And, crucially, to do something the documentaries could never do, where we look at all the avenues never explored, all the leads never followed, all the mistakes made. An encyclopedic view.
Post: Neither Reese Witherspoon nor Colin Firth is the star of the movie, per se; how did you convince these two to take on smaller roles?
AE: It would have to be something challenging to get these really extraordinary actors, who you would think would have agency normally in a film — when you see a brilliant mind in a Southern courtroom wearing a suit, you think he’s the knight in shining armor. That’s not what Colin gets to do here. His character was this very successful investigator working in Memphis, Tenn., who took on this case because he was obsessed with capital punishment and felt the boys could not be sentenced to death. So he went about helping this very green legal team who’d never been in court before. These parts are a study, really, of people who understand that something is wrong, but have no agency to do anything about it.
Post: Did you come to any different conclusions about the case that you wanted to present in the film?
AE: The documentaries give you a sense of offering answers, but that’s not where we are. We’re in this very unresolved space. The killer’s still out there. There are people who are living with this stuff every day, and they have no resolution. We had a screening in Little Rock, and Pamela Hobbs [mother of one of the murdered children, who is played by Witherspoon] was there. She thanked us for hanging onto this case, and for presenting her perspective: the fact that these boys disappeared from her world, and we’ll never know what happened.
Post: How involved were the West Memphis Three — Jason Baldwin, Damien Echols and Jessie Misskelley — in the making of the film?
AE: Jason was on set a lot of the time. Damien chose not to be involved, and I respect that. I understand that he has his own story to tell; he made that clear. Jessie was involved, but wasn’t present during shooting. He is an executive producer. It was a good opportunity to get him some money.
Post: I had read that Damien was not entirely supportive of his portrayal in the film.
AE: We were trying to show what the town is thinking of this character, and Damien thought he was being revictimized by the script. That was something we were trying to tone down, and that was completely altered after his response. We wanted him not to feel that way. I think he made some comment about the actor who plays him — but I needed someone who was able to create the weird charisma that Damien had. I think [the real Damien] was playing that up, because he was given this amazing pulpit from which to exhibit his outsiderness. And one of the reasons this case became so heralded by this culture is that a lot of kids imagine that could happen in their town, happen to them. I was certainly an outsider in my town; I was raised in a small Canadian coastal town. A lot of people felt that could have been them. And maybe the ultimate outsider is this Goth kid who had a history of mental illness, who is victim of his own teenage rebelliousness.
Post: Jason was actively involved. What was your impression of him?
AE: Jason is a supermensch. He’s so full of life, so full of hope. It’s astonishing. Think what it would mean to go to an Arkansas max-security prison, at the age of 16, for sexually mutilating and killing children. He was beaten and tortured by these inmates. But he somehow emerged from this — by the time he left, they were cheering him. He’s so full of light. There’s an incredible optimism to Jason Baldwin.
Post: Did Reese make contact with the real Pam Hobbs?
AE: Reese and Pam spent quite a bit of time together. Reese was really obsessed with making sure the details were accurate, and coming from that part of the country, she wanted to make sure it didn’t veer toward caricature. Pam visited on set as well. One of the amazing things about the shoot was having all these real people there — actors making contact with the people they were playing. It was a very unusual climate. At the end of a shooting day, we’d all repair to a bar and compare various stories.
Post: Did you do much research on the ground in West Memphis?
AE: I spent some time talking to the current police chief there. He was a young officer at the time of the murders, and he talked about all these blunders that had been made.
Post: Why do you think this is the right time for a different take on the case?
AE: If the first documentary hadn’t been made, we wouldn’t be talking. That was a hugely important act, having those cameras in the courtroom. It was revolutionary. But a lot of time has passed, and this case has become a piece of American mythology. There’s no more extreme act of violence or more horrifying death than that of children. And, ultimately, I can’t think of anything more upsetting than this community willing to sacrifice three young men on the altar of justice. There was a weird symmetry to it. It was the most public witch hunt since the Salem trials — you even have these young girls giving testimony at the end. I think it can be seen from different points of view now. It’s such a cautionary tale of a perfect scapegoat.
I’ve come to think that for all the talk of dark magic swirling around, the only magic is what happened when the prosecutor made his summation. When he basically said to his jury, “There’s no evidence, but there’s circumstantial.” And the jury was led to believe it. A demon had been conjured in a Southern courtroom, and then they sent that person to be killed.
Post: What’s your ideal for what happens after “Devil’s Knot” is released?
AE: My hope is — and this is what seemed so possible when we premiered in Little Rock, where the trial happened — there’s this momentum for people to reopen this case, and to exonerate these kids and not leave them in this limbo where they’re free but still villains. There’s a growing body of evidence for this case to go back to trial. And in West Memphis there’s this sense that the killer is still out there.