It’s nearly three years since documentary series Making A Murderer arrived on Netflix and became a word-of-mouth sensation. The ten brilliantly-constructed episodes explored the story of Wisconsin used-car dealer Steven Avery, who was arrested, charged and imprisoned for sexual assault and attempted murder in 1985, but was exonerated after 18 years in prison, when new evidence came to light. Then in 2005, just as Avery was suing the local police, he was arrested for a new, unconnected crime – the murder of photographer Teresa Halbach. His teenage nephew Brendan Dassey, who confessed in highly controversial circumstances to “helping” with the murder, was also charged. Both were convicted in 2007, and both are still incarcerated.
Now Making A Murderer: Part 2 updates the situation, with ten riveting new episodes. Pilot TV sat down with the show’s directors and writers, Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos, to discuss the challenges of season 2.
Having created this phenomenon, was your approach for Part 2 different?
Laura: Our approach was the same, but the phase of the process that we were covering was very different. In Part 1 we were covering someone who was awaiting trial in a murder case, and in Part 2 that person and his co-defendant have been convicted, are now serving life sentences and have vowed to fight and are challenging their convictions.
And how different was the experience of telling that new story?
Moira: It was different, mainly because with Part 1 it was an independent project before Netflix came on board, so it was just Laura and myself filming events, with occasional help from one or two other people. We based ourselves in Wisconsin for 18 months and we could just shoot and shoot and shoot. Plus, we were covering events that were unfolding in a highly structured way – someone was charged, they were going to trial and there was going to be a verdict – so we had that three-act structure. We also had time to digest it all and work with the footage. No one was expecting us to deliver a 10-part series; no one knew who we were.
Fast forward to Part 2, and we’ve got the financial backing of Netflix which means we can hire crew which opens up new creative options that weren’t there before. But the real difference was that this was a story that everyone is now following, and we can’t just put out the series seven years after the events. We had to find a way to do the same kind of storytelling in a much more condensed time frame – basically we were in post-production the entire time we were in production. From June in 2016 when we started shooting again, we were editing, and the last shoot was July this year. That was a challenge: to follow events as they are unfolding while trying to finish the early episodes.
Laura: Yes one of the main ways it was different this time was that we knew Part 2 had a home [at Netflix]. Knowing that what we were making would be seen by a lot of people is a different experience.
Was it hard to work out a structure for Part 2, considering the events were unfolding as you were filming?
Moira: We had a hint of a structure because we knew [lawyer] Kathleen Zellner had taken Steven’s case and we knew what she was going to do was to file a post-conviction petition and argue for a new evidentiary hearing. We didn’t know that document would be over a thousand pages…
Laura: I don’t think anyone but Kathleen knew that…
Moira: But we didn’t know if that would be a three-episode arc, or longer, and we certainly didn’t know how dynamic Brendan’s case would be. So we looked at these events and tried to work out the structure we were going along, but yeah, it was hard.
How many hours of footage did you have?
Laura: It’s harder to count now because we’re shooting digitally on fancy HD and not on actual mini DV tapes that we used for Part 1, but I’d say at least a thousand hours.
You mentioned Kathleen Zellner, who seems like an extraordinarily larger than life character. What did you make of her?
Laura: Meeting Kathleen reminded me of how Steven’s story kind of fell into our laps. It was never that we were looking for the perfect murder story, and I feel the same way about Kathleen. I remember reading a profile of Kathleen in Newsweek after she said she was taking on Steven’s case, and I really couldn’t wait to meet her. At that point we knew Brendan’s new lawyers, Laura Nirider and Steve Drizin, who appeared in episode 10 of Part 1, had filed a petition in 2014 to challenge Brendan’s state conviction in a federal court. And now Steven had Kathleen, this really accomplished post-conviction lawyer who is the winningest private post-conviction attorney in the country, so we reached out to her, told her we were considering continuing to cover Steven’s story, and she came on board.
Moira: When we knew Kathleen Zellner had taken the case and when we knew about her, shall we say… unconventional methods, we felt we had this character the viewer could go on a journey with, and we thought that might be a pretty incredible journey.
Did the fact that the world is now watching this story have an impact on you while you were making Part 2?
Moira: Yes, we were definitely working in different circumstances. There were times when we would be in the cutting room in LA and there would be major breaking news in the courtroom in Wisconsin, so we tried to make sure we could be as nimble as possible.
Laura: Luckily this time we had a great production team we could call upon. We had spreadsheets of people we could call at a moment’s notice.
Moira: It also helped us that so many news crews are covering our story points now. Sometimes we’d go to a major event like oral arguments in Brendan’s case, and there would be a reporter doing a “stand-up” and we’d turn our camera on the reporter so they could set the scene for us. So the global interest in this case proved beneficial to us.
Finally, will you carry on telling Brendan and Steven’s stories?
Laura: It’s all up to Moira!
Moira: Oh it’s up to me this time? [laughs] Well the short answer is “maybe”. it’s all about whether a Part 3 would offer anything new. We were convinced Part 2 would take us into a very important and much lesser known part of the justice system – post conviction. We thought there were a lot of key questions about the appeal process that needed addressing: what were these guys were up against? How long would appealing their convictions would take? What toll is it going to take? We’d need to see if the story takes us in new directions.
Making A Murderer Part 2 is on Netflix now