You’d think there would be no surprises left when it came to the story of OJ Simpson. There was the shocking fact of a celebrity being accused of violently murdering his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ron Goldman. Then there was the surreal, televised car “chase”, in which OJ – holding a gun to his head – was half-pursued, half-escorted by police cars as roadside crowds waved him on. Then there was the “trial of the century” culminating in a not guilty verdict, followed by the civil trial with a guilty verdict. The OJ story was a sports movie that became a true-crime drama, then a legal thriller and, ultimately, a soap opera.

Two decades later, the new surprise is that Simpson has recently been the subject of two long-form, high-profile works: FX’s star-studded The People v OJ Simpson, which aired on BBC2; and ESPN’s eight-hour documentary OJ: Made in America, which has just launched on BBC iPlayer. The latter – which has just won an Oscar, the longest documentary ever to do so – looks set to become the definitive version of events.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘There was no point I was trying to prove’ … Ezra Edelman. Photograph: Christopher Patey/Getty

If the film’s 42-year-old director was surprised by this acclaim, the shock seems to have worn off. “I underestimated the appetite people have for this story,” says Ezra Edelman, looking jet-lagged having just flown into London. Speaking to me a few days before the Oscars ceremony, he suggests that 20 years is simply the length of time that needs to pass before anyone can properly re-examine events as seismic as this.

“I don’t think people stopped being interested, but we Americans kind of OD’d on it. We were so fixated on the trial. Everyone remembers where they were during the Bronco chase, or during the verdict. And then you go, ‘Do you know what happened to OJ?’ And people are like, ‘Oh, isn’t he in jail?’ Or they can’t remember. It’s like we turned it off. ‘We’re done with you.’”

You could compare OJ: Made in America to the true-crime binge phenomena Making a Murderer or Serial, but Edelman goes much deeper. Not only does his film probe every facet of Simpson’s identity, its attention to detail and context is forensic. Laying out the entire landscape of the era, it becomes a story about celebrity, privilege, masculinity, politics, justice, social history, the media and – most of all – race, in particular relations between African Americans and the Los Angeles police. Simpson’s trial began in 1994, just three years after Rodney King’s videotaped beating by the LAPD. The officers’ trial and acquittal is widely believed to have triggered the LA riots of 1992.



We had a colour-coded system for all the people we wanted to talk to: yes, no, maybe, impossible

OJ: Made in America is constructed as a seamless oral history, told by friends, colleagues, relatives, lawyers, detectives, even jury members. The lack of narration adds to its authority and immediacy. Edelman says he had no agenda: “There was no point I was trying to prove, beyond searching for greater clarity and understanding. This was about the recollections of these people who lived through this history, and I very much did not want to manipulate that. Who am I, as this outside arbiter, to come in and say I’m going to write this story? No, I’m going to let you tell these stories.”

Persuading these people to talk was like getting key witnesses to testify, it seems. Edelman and his team had a four-metre wall of index cards in their office with the names of all the main people. “We had a colour-coded system of who we’d reached out to, who’d responded, who’d said yes, no, maybe. And a group that were the impossibles, who we knew we wouldn’t get.” The latter included Simpson’s family and most loyal friends – and Simpson himself, who is currently nine years into a prison sentence for armed robbery and kidnapping. He will be eligible for parole in October.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘You’re breaking the laws of God’… trailer for OJ: Made in America.

But almost everyone was an impossibility initially. Most hadn’t talked about the case for two decades and were not minded to, having been perennially harangued by the media. You can see why Edelman gained their trust: he’s engaged, intelligent and sincere, charming but self-effacing. “We’d say, ‘This isn’t just about the murder and the trial. It is inclusive of this history and context that goes back 30, 40 years. You’ll find we’ve thought about this, and we’re doing it in a very sober way.’” With a smile, he adds: “And, by the way, it’s not as if any of that just worked.” In the end, many simply felt the time had come to talk.



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Given the recent cases of African American injustice – from Trayvon Martin to Michael Brown, Eric Garner to Freddie Gray – Edelman has been told many times his film is timely, but he doesn’t see it like that: “This should always be timely as an issue. This has been happening consistently since OJ’s time, for the last 20 years, and for 30 years before that, and before that.”



As well as Rodney King, the film cites lesser-known cases such as Latasha Harlins, a 15-year-old black girl shot dead by a shopkeeper 13 days after the King tape. Or Eulia Love, shot dead by the LAPD in 1979 over a dispute about her gas bill. One of the most telling statistics during the Simpson trial was a survey by the Washington Post that found that 71% of African Americans thought Simpson was innocent and 72% of white Americans thought he was guilty.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest OJ Simpson in his football kit in 1967. Photograph: Bettmann Archive

“It’s not a newsflash that we live in a country where there is profound misunderstanding on matters of race,” he says. “So it wasn’t about African Americans rooting for OJ to be innocent – it was more that they understood that the police are very capable of framing somebody, that the justice system is very capable of not doing its job when it comes to an African American defendant, and that’s something white Americans have not experienced in the same way.”



Edelman is not pessimistic, though. “Do I think we’ve evolved? Yes, I do. The conversation is different among black people, and between black and white people, than it would have been 20 years ago. A dialogue has come from it that is meaningful and necessary.” A Washington Post survey in 2015 found that the proportion of African Americans who now believed Simpson was guilty had risen to 57%, and white Americans to 83%.



There has also been a shift in terms of gender, Edelman suggests. Another shocking aspect of the OJ trial was the response to revelations that Simpson had repeatedly physically abused Nicole Brown Simpson. The predominantly black jury was apparently unmoved by photographs of her bruised face shown in court. Looking at the case of singer Chris Brown, who was prosecuted and universally condemned for his similar abuse of Rihanna in 2009, attitudes have clearly changed. Perhaps, says Edelman, the outcome of the trial would be different if it took place today. “But you almost need to use the example of OJ to get us to that place. What would be the galvanising event otherwise?”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest OJ Simpson and Nicole Brown Simpson at their wedding in 1985.

One of the many themes running through the OJ Simpson story is justice: who has access to it, what sways it, how it is perverted, whether or not, as Martin Luther King would have put it, the arc of history is bending towards it. Different qualities of justice come into play in Edelman’s film: social, personal, legal, even karmic. But there’s also the matter of doing a story – and history – justice. In that respect, you could say Edelman was well placed to tell this story. Washington DC-raised, Yale-educated and a self-described “sports nerd”, he cut his teeth in factual sports TV. “I’ve always sought to tell stories that use sport as a lens to talk about bigger issues,” he says.



I grew up in a very political house. What seeped into me was a deep sense of justice – and fairness

Edelman is also the son of two respected lawyers: his Jewish father worked for Robert Kennedy and the Clinton administration; his African American mother worked for Martin Luther King and has campaigned for civil and children’s rights. They were one of the first interracial couples to legally marry in Virginia. Someone ought to make a documentary about them. “I grew up in a very political household,” he says. “How those experiences filtered down to me, and how I see the world – that’s who I am. What seeped into me was a deep sense of justice, from a social standpoint, but also, to use a synonymous word, of fairness.”



When I ask how he would define himself ethnically, he pauses before saying “biracial black man”. Life is literally not black and white for him. “I try to defy the simplistic labelling of people and things,” he says. “Things are invariably more complicated and nuanced than we’re normally allowed to absorb them as. That’s why I made a film that’s nearly eight hours long.”