CR 013: Skye Borgman on the Art of Documenting True Crime
The award-winning documentarian discusses her career, her approach to filmmaking, and her latest project, Netflix’s “American Murder: Laci Peterson.”
Truth, as they say, is stranger than fiction—something that Skye Borgman’s work proves time and again. In 2019, Borgman—who had already been working professionally for years as a cinematographer and director—became a viral sensation after Netflix premiered her true crime documentary Abducted in Plain Sight. The film, about a girl who was kidnapped twice by a family friend, was an instant hit, generating thousands of headlines and Tweets of the “how can this possibly be true” variety.
Over the past five years, she’s directed a number of riveting true crime documentaries, including Girl in the Picture, Dead Asleep, Sins of Our Mother, I Just Killed My Dad, and The Truth About Jim, as well as episodes of Trial by Media and Unsolved Mysteries. Her latest project, American Murder: Laci Peterson, is a 3-part miniseries that premiered on Netflix on August 14th.
Despite being known primarily for her work in the true crime realm, Borgman says that her films are about so much more than sensational misdeeds. “I’m not in the business of doing crime stories, necessarily. I’m in the process of doing human stories. I feel that crime stories give you the full spectrum of humanity. You see the very best of people, you see the very worst of people, and you see everything in between. I love that about crime stories, seeing how people respond to things.”
I recently chatted with Borgman over Zoom about her career, how she gains the trust of her film subjects, and the importance of setting personal boundaries.
SANDRA EBEJER: How did you get into this line of work? When did you know you wanted to be a filmmaker?
SKYE BORGMAN: I look back to what I was interested in as a kid and as a teenager and what I thought I wanted to do, and theater was something that was interesting to me. I love this process of public storytelling. I grew up in a small town in Oregon, and I never in a million years thought I could make movies. I didn’t even think that was a career choice that was available to me. I loved watching films, but it didn’t feel like that was a job that existed. I went to college, to an art school in Seattle, and even then, there were some video-making classes, but it was really a theater-based school.
I ended up doing the classic post-college European vacation and fell in love with these other places, and my worldview started opening up a little bit. It was really at that point that I started thinking about taking photos and chronicling this journey that I was on, and that’s when documentaries first started to enter my consciousness. I thought, “This is something I could really love doing, public storytelling and traveling and logging it in a photographic kind of way. I guess it’s documentaries. I guess that’s what I should be doing.” So I came back to the United States and went to film school at USC, and then spent the next almost 20 years as a director of photography, filming both documentary and scripted works. But I knew that it was really the documentary world that I loved, and that’s what I wanted to throw myself into. It was a long way of getting there, but always knowing from the beginning that dealing with real people and telling those stories was interesting.
Who are some of your influences?
Barbara Kopple, certainly. Lucy Walker. Errol Morris. All of them, I think, are really pushing boundaries with storytelling. I think documentaries overall have just such an open canvas to work with. I guess scripted does to an extent, but there’s so many different ways of telling a documentary based on what story elements you have access to, and I think those filmmakers do that in a really interesting, evocative, groundbreaking way.
The story told in Abducted in Plain Sight seems so far-fetched, but the film is riveting. How did that project come about?
A colleague of mine had read the book, and it was interesting because the book wasn’t widely available. I think Jan Broberg and her mom, Mary Ann, self-published the book with the intention of going on the speaker circuit and talking about what had happened to them. So it was just through a series of circumstances that this colleague of mine found the book and read it. It was around the same time that the young women had escaped from Ariel Castro in the Cleveland area, so she was kind of obsessing with that. She read this book, and she was like, “This would make a great documentary.” She came to me because she knew how much I loved documentaries, and she said, “Is this something you could do? Are you interested in this?”
I read the book, and I remember just being so confused by it. I’m like, how did this happen? I mean, the events happened, but how did you get from one to the next? Reading the book was my first introduction to the story. I didn’t know everything that I would come to find out in the preparation of the documentary. Mary Ann’s relationship with [family friend Robert] Berchtold and Bob Broberg’s relationship with Berchtold—neither of those were in the book. And those were critical in terms of knowing how this family put blinders on, how shame really entered the picture for them, because they were doing what they considered this very shameful thing. It turned their perspective inward and onto themselves, and they stopped looking at their kids. When I found out about Mary Ann’s relationship with Berchtold, things started to make more sense. I could understand the progression and how things ended up snowballing. And it was during the research that we found out about Bob’s relationship with Berchtold, and then the pieces of the puzzle started really fitting together in more of a cohesive way.
Many of your films bring to light unusual true crime stories. What is the research process like? And how do you know when you have what you need, and you can stop researching? I would imagine that it’s easy to get caught up and continue down a rabbit hole of constant research.
Yeah, it’s really, really easy. The beginning of the research process is really just finding what kind of documentation exists. If there’s anything written about it, reading that. If there’s anything produced from a film perspective, watching that. And gauging my own emotions. How am I feeling about this? Do I feel like this is a full story? Do I feel like it’s not a full story? But really, the research starts with talking to the participants, or the people who could be possible participants in the telling of a documentary, and getting their perspective, putting all those pieces together, taking great notes, and seeing if there’s a story there to be delivered. And then, if there’s any archive—are there pictures that exist? Are there recordings that exist?
It really is this research phase where the story starts to take shape, even if I don’t know the structure of how it’s going to be. A story that has a lot of archive is going to take a different shape than [something] like Abducted in Plain Sight, which had very, very, very, very little archive. It had some family photos, but not much else. So, are recreations going to enter into that? Or is there a different way to visually represent something? Is it an interview-driven project, or could it be a verité-driven project? All of this research and what’s available to us—this is how I visualize it—they start converging and coming together, these different pieces, and they start to make a shape. Once that shape starts to form, it is up to myself and my team to go, “How are we going to capture all of this in visual format that we can put together and then put out there?”
Research, honestly, continues until picture lock. It never stops in the course of it. It definitely gets to a point where I feel like we’ve got this story, and we have an approach at the structure of it. We’ve got a beginning; we’ve got a middle. Hopefully we have an end—sometimes you do, sometimes you don’t—but you’ve got a shape to it. I mean, it always changes in the field. Something surprises you, and the story ends up taking a different direction, or something that you knew was going to be great ends up deflating and not being something, so you’re shifting course while you’re in the field. But the research goes until the very end. I always have a good sense of when I’ve done enough research to be able to feel confident about going in the field and capturing the story, and then you get in post, and you’re like, “Oh my gosh! There’s all this stuff that I didn’t even think about, so we have to go out again.” I like to preserve a little bit of time to go back and get pickups for all of the surprises that we end up finding in post.
When you’re working in the non-fiction realm, you’re taking it upon yourself to tell someone else’s story. That’s a lot of pressure. How do you go about gaining the trust of your film subjects?
I try to be as honest with subjects as I can. I try to give them a pretty good sense of what the process is like, what the product ends up being like—because it’s pretty different, the process and the product. Usually, after an interview, most people feel pretty good. They feel unburdened, or they feel like they’ve really opened up. That’s not always the case, but for the most part, that’s usually how people feel after the interview. And then we go away for a very long time, because we’re in post, and it can take months, if not years, sometimes, to get something cut together. And then once the product is finished and it’s out there, it’s a whole other thing. And if it’s out there on a bigger platform, on something like Netflix, the world is seeing it, and the world is pretty good at tracking people down. So it opens up families who have been open enough to tell their stories to getting telephone calls and door knocks and emails from people, both in a positive way and in a really, really negative way. So I try to be open and honest about what the process is like, what potentially could happen once the film is released.
I do work in the crime world, predominantly. A lot of these stories I’m telling are very sensitive stories. They can be very traumatic for people to talk about. It can be very cathartic, too. But it’s really [about] listening to people, because I feel like a lot of times people just don’t feel listened to and they don’t feel heard. So listening and talking and asking questions and bringing no judgment or very little judgment to the table—that’s how I go about building trust with people. I think it can really be broken down into one thing, and it’s just listening to them.
I would imagine it’s a lot of pressure for you, as well. Have these stories affected you personally?
I think to continue in this genre, it’s important to be able to be open and empathetic to people, but also to be able to step away from it, to be able to compartmentalize work from life. I definitely find myself better at setting boundaries. Like, I’m sitting in my office now. I come to an office and I work, and then I go home and I try not to bring it home with me. I find myself doing more yoga and going, okay, let’s breathe it out, be in the moment—taking more steps to make sure that I have routines in my life that take me to a place of beauty and to a place of peace, so that when I come to work and when I’m dealing with some of these things, I can be present for that. I do find I institute more boundaries to get away from it, because I feel like it makes me a better storyteller. It gives me the opportunity to be in it more when I come back to it.
Is that something that you learned over time, or did you know from the get-go that was something you had to do?
It’s something I’ve learned over time. It’s like, “I’m carrying this home with me. I’m lying in bed at night and thinking about all this stuff. I’m not sleeping, and it’s all I talk about with my husband.” Now, we have a few minutes where I come home, we talk about our days, and then it’s like, now let’s talk about projects we’re doing on the house or let’s talk about the dog, or let’s go for a walk. It’s definitely something I’ve learned, because it was a lot at the beginning, especially when I was getting projects and shifting from that DP position into more of the director position. I just wanted to be in it all the way. I’ve learned that it’s actually more healthy to be able to take a step back, so it allows me to step deeper into it.
What can you tell me about the Laci Peterson project on Netflix?
It was a very interesting journey for me on that one, because I grew up in Southern Oregon, so that area of Oregon and California feels like home to me in a lot of ways. I knew of this story when it was happening in the early 2000s. It was on the news every night. I was paying attention to it, and it impacted me. It was this perfect family being destroyed, and this husband killing his wife. That’s what all this media was saying, and it was on all the time. So when it was proposed to me to tell the story, I was like, what is there new to tell? What’s happening with this story? What am I forgetting? What is relevant to be able to tell this story now?
I started researching it, started reaching out to people and learning a lot. There were people that believed Scott was innocent; I had never heard that before. I never knew that his family had spent the last 20 years fighting for his freedom, and so [I started] researching that and talking to Laci’s family and her friends and law enforcement, trying to put together this picture of what happened. Also, what was shocking to me was this statistic: the number one cause of death for pregnant women is homicide. Every time I say it, I’m like, how can that be that it’s not some pregnancy-related something, but it’s homicide? And it’s intimate partner homicide.
That is just as relevant today as it was 20 years ago, as it was probably 100 years ago, and I think it’s an important message for women to know that intimate partner homicide is a big issue. It’s real and it affects many women in this country and around the world. I think that became one of my big motivators in telling this Laci Peterson story over a 3-part series. And also to bring Laci forward in this story. I think for the last 20 years, it’s been about Scott Peterson, and I think it’s easy to forget who Laci was, how her family remembers her, how her friends remember her. I’m very interested in telling victim-forward stories. I felt like Laci got a little forgotten, and it became about Scott, and I really wanted to bring Laci to an audience in 2024.
Some of the films you’ve made have taken years of work. How do you decide which projects to take on? What does a project or an idea have to have in order for you to say, “Yes, I’m going to spend the next few years of my life working on this”?
I think any story has to have something that’s a little bit confusing to me, and that is treading new territory for me, talking about something that I may not completely understand, that I haven’t necessarily done before. So much of the reason why I make the stories I make is so that I can learn something about humanity, or I can learn something about the justice system, or I can learn something about psychology. There’s such a big world out there and such an opportunity to continue learning, and something that keeps me moving forward is this ability and opportunity to learn something new or learn a deeper insight into something. It has to be about more than just crime. It has to have these little opportunities to look at issues, or to look at something that somebody’s dealing with, or to look at family dynamics. It can be almost anything, really, as long as it’s something that goes beyond just a crime story. So what stories have to have for me to say yes are these opportunities to tell a greater story that will impact a lot of people.
What advice would you give to aspiring filmmakers?
The biggest advice I have is to get out there and do it in whatever way you can. Get out and make films or be on sets or talk to people or tell stories. Just get out there and do it. I think we can spend a lot of time thinking about doing it. The hardest thing ever is to start something. Then once you’ve started, it’s like, “Okay, I’ve started. That’s the hardest part. Now, let’s just keep putting one foot in front of the other.” And the experience that you can get on set is priceless. I mean, you can see how you really respect how somebody does something. You can see how somebody does something that you feel like you may have a better way to do it, or you don’t want to implement those things. It’s just such a great environment to learn. So, get on set and work as much as you can.
To learn more about Skye Borgman, visit her website.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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