Rarely has a television series generated such a strong impact on real life as when HBO premiered The Jinx in 2015, a documentary that portrayed billionaire Robert Durst, suspected of having murdered his wife, his best friend and his neighbor. When the authorities saw the last episode in which Durst admitted to committing these crimes, they arrested him before it even aired. That is precisely what the second part explores, which arrives today on HBO Max and which also interviews everyone involved in the trial for which he was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2021, a year before he died. Director Andrew Jarecki, who won the Emmy for best documentary, has dedicated much more than a decade to this story, since in 2010 he told it in a film.
How did you initially connect with Robert Durst?
After making a fictional film about him, All Good Things, Durst was very flattered that Ryan Gosling played him. Also, he had read an article about all the research I had done and that’s why he contacted me in a somewhat strange way and asked to see the film. I organized a screening, and as soon as he finished watching it he called me to tell me that he had loved it, that he had cried three times and that Kirsten Dunst was just like his wife Kathy. It was he who suggested that we do something together and that’s how I did several interviews with him, with which I initially didn’t know what to do. We talked for 21 hours simply because I found it interesting, since initially I felt like I had already done it all with Robert Durst. But in those interviews he was very sincere, and many times you don’t look for the story but it looks for you. And that’s how the six episodes of the first season of The Jinx came about.
How did you get everyone involved in the trial to participate in this second part, including the judge who tried the case?
That really surprised us. In the first part, everyone was talking about a series of historical events, and although there were obviously revelations, they were basically talking about the past. In the second part, everything is happening at the moment it is filmed. We simply follow the events as they occur, starting with his arrest a day before the final episode of The Jinx airs, so the anxiety and urgency on everyone involved is much greater. Furthermore, in this second season, there are many who do not want to appear in the series. There were people who realized that it was not a good idea to participate. Maybe they thought that looking back, it was not a good idea to put 100,000 euros in a bag and send it to Durst by courier when he was about to flee. In the first season, there were those who said what they didn’t have to say, like Dick DeGuerin, his lawyer, who said that they had invented a story for the first trial and the jury had believed it. There were very casual comments from people who perhaps didn’t behave properly. In this second part there are many more people who have not acted well, and that can cause legal problems, so it was much more complicated to get them to participate. But we provoke them, force them or persuade them. They are all different ways to get them to talk, but ultimately they knew they had to do it.
How did they get all those testimonies when what they say can become evidence in a court case?
It was very stressful, because suddenly we were playing two different roles. On the one hand, we wanted to create an exciting human story that would surprise the audience, but at the same time we realized that the material obtained could serve as evidence for a trial. We always knew that it was quite likely that Bob had killed these three people, but we never imagined that we were going to have a confession that was going to be decisive. We knew that if there was a trial, they would convict him on that evidence, and we also had to deal with questions from Kathy McCormick’s parents, who for many years did not know what happened. It’s a family that was destroyed by Bob. It was then that we asked ourselves what our obligation was. And because we wanted to act responsibly, we talked to many lawyers and hired Marcia Clark, the prosecutor in the OJ Simpson trial, to tell us what we had to do with all that material to reactivate the case instead of everything being archived. somewhere.
Why did I have that fear?
We imagined that there would be resistance to prosecuting a man as rich as Bob because that is very important in the United States. We knew that he could spend 10 or 20 million on his defense and that they could bury the prosecution in paperwork. We were also clear that even if we presented all the evidence to the court and the 21 hours of interviews, they were not going to rush out to arrest him. That’s not how things work in America. We had no doubt that the trial was going to take years to get underway. But Marcia gave us a lot of advice that changed the filming process. We also knew that by taking all this footage to the district attorney, we ran the risk of the material becoming public through a leak. Or that Bob found out and decided to escape, because he had already visited Cuba, looking for places to live, even before we made the movie. But that didn’t stop us from turning to justice…
