“I believe in social engineering in many forms but not when it conflicts with artistic integrity.”

Jack Moulton speaks with director Edward Zwick about his latest film Trial by Fire, based on an influential piece of New Yorker journalism that questioned whether Texas had executed an innocent man.

American film director, writer and producer Zwick is noted for his work in the war drama category (Glory, Legends of the Fall, The Last Samurai, Blood Diamond). He has also helmed intimate dramas such as Love & Other Drugs and the eighties Demi Moore-Rob Lowe romance About Last Night.

Trial by Fire is a search-for-justice two-hander starring English actor Jack O’Connell as death row inmate Cameron Todd Willingham, and Laura Dern as Elizabeth Gilbert. Not that Elizabeth Gilbert; Dern’s Gilbert is a Houston mother of two who becomes Willingham’s ally, uncovering questionable methods in his case. Though mixed, Letterboxd reviews have noted the film’s “damn fine acting” and “genuinely affecting” story, as well as praising Zwick, who “clearly knows what he’s doing behind the camera”.

Letterboxd: When did you first hear the story of Cameron Todd Willingham and in what ways did you connect to it personally?

Edward Zwick: I read David Grann’s article in The New Yorker when it was published 10 years ago and I was very moved by it. I inquired as to the rights with my friend, Allyn Stewart, and we were able to acquire it and begin the process of developing the film.

Obviously the story’s very compelling in its own regard. I was really moved by the relationship between Elizabeth Gilbert and Willingham and then what developed in the worst of circumstances. But I also felt that it was a catalog of everything wrong with the criminal justice system now. Most of all, how poverty and class are the determining factors in whether a man gets a fair trial.

You’re a writer, but you enlisted Precious screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher to write this film. What qualities made his perspective the right fit?

I knew that Geoffrey was a collaborative writer and that he would invite me to that process so we would do this together. We would have the benefit of his best ideas and mine as well. That often makes a happy working relationship.

What did you discover in your research on prisoners and death row?

There was a lot I was surprised about. I didn’t know that for many years they used solid doors rather than bars to keep prisoners even more isolated. I didn’t know how little time they allowed them to exercise nor that their letters were subjected to being read from the inside and outside.

Laura Dern, Edward Zwick and Jack O’Connell on set.

Jack O’Connell is always reliable but this is a particularly powerful performance. What preparations for the role did you assign to him?

We spent some time in jails and read all of Willingham’s letters. We did exercises in a very small cell where he was able to be there for hours to contemplate what that experience might be like.

Willingham is, for the most part, an off-putting character. Even when he meets Gilbert and he’s been through his transformation he’s still a misogynist. How did you want to balance the way the audience could invest in him as a person with the commentary on how society judges the accused?

That was deliberate. I was very intent on having Willingham be unsympathetic, and Jack was very willing to portray him that way. I felt that I wanted the audience to condemn him the same way that people had also unfairly done so in the courts of Texas.

Even if someone is a representative of toxic masculinity and whatever else he was interested in, he still deserves equal treatment under the law and so we embraced that part of him. We trusted that his circumstances, and Jack’s ability to portray that transformation, that that would earn him the compassion of the audience who had been complicit in condemning him.

How did you decide the way you wanted to portray the lethal injection in order to make your political statement?

I spoke to a lot of people who had been in those rooms and we read a lot about it. I felt that it had to be real. It was actually an exact replica of the room and the process from everything that we had learned about it.

Ultimately, the film’s hopelessness overrides the sense of hope it conjures. It’s a tone that has been appearing more and more in contemporary cinema, particularly with new mainstream interest in “true crime”. What do you think is driving this focus on a more downbeat realism?

It’s funny, I think there’s an appetite for authenticity. I think we’re full of superheroes and sequels and there’s some urge to have a real mirror to be held up to the world.

How do you weigh the importance of the work of The Innocence Project for those currently on death row, versus those—such as Willingham—who were executed before any hope of exoneration?

The Innocence Project is a godsend to those people and not everyone has had the benefit of it yet. By the way, it’s not alone, The Marshall Project is there, so there are so many opportunities, but they are remarkable people doing remarkable work.

You conclude the film with searing footage of [former Texas Governor] Rick Perry expressing pride in his death-penalty record. Did you intend to call him out specifically when you started the project?

The more I learned about what had happened and what he had done in abolishing the review board even after the fact, I felt that he deserved to be held accountable.

Do you know if his team has responded?

They have not. I hope that they will.

What do you think needs to change about Hollywood to grant mid-sized budget films like yours a pathway to be made again?

Exhibitors need to keep the films in theaters for more than a week so audiences can see them. But I don’t know, the major studios have abandoned them because they don’t make enough money to move their stock price for multinational corporations. There has to be an economic model or a sweet spot where the films can exist and exhibitors can be happy enough to run them for audiences. All of these things have not lined up yet.

Any chance we’ll see you back for another Jack Reacher? [Zwick directed the 2016 sequel Never Go Back.]

Nope.

Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman and other cast members in a scene from ‘Glory’ (1989).

If Glory had to be made today, what would you want to change and what do you feel you would have to change about it? [The 1989 film about the U.S. Civil War’s first all-black volunteer company focused the story around white general Robert Gould Shaw; problematic, as many Letterboxd reviewers have noted, because it “centers a white character in a story about black soldiers fighting the people who enslaved them”.]

The problem would be that they wouldn’t give me the money to do it properly today. The film has to be about an entire regiment, and a studio now would just give me a dozen guys and a forest. It would’ve been fun to have some of the tools of CG to have a few things a little bit more realistic than I feel they come across in the movie, but that’s perhaps just my harsh judgement on myself.

Ideally your social issue films can break through and make a difference in the world. Do you know if Blood Diamond has had a tangible effect on the diamond industry?

I believe there are some statistics to that fact but I certainly know anecdotally from people who’ve told me they always try to source fair-trade diamonds, or chosen another stone, or chosen a zirconia, which are pretty good-looking in my experience.

While it’s tough to get the larger-budget films you make made without the likes of Tom Cruise or Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead, in light of a big push for diversity in the past few years, how has your opinion shaped on the responsibilities of representation?

I want to cast who’s appropriate for each film and I am in the business of trying to be authentic. I believe in social engineering in many forms but not when it conflicts with artistic integrity.

‘Trial by Fire’ is in US cinemas now.