‘The Case Against Adnan Syed’ Director Amy Berg Promises “Major Stuff” is Coming

HBO’s The Case Against Adnan Syed hopes to shed new light on one of the most explosive true crime sagas in America. In 2014, NPR launched the podcast Serial with a season-long deep dive into the troubling murder of Baltimore teen Hae Min Lee. Over the course of months, listeners developed relationships with host Sarah Koenig, and main interview subjects Adnan Syed and Rabia Chaudry. It was a smash hit, but in the end, the series asked more questions than provided answers.

Which is where director Amy Berg‘s The Case Against Adnan Syed comes in. Berg worked with private investigators and professional sleuths to re-examine the case against Syed, and to bring Hae Min Lee to life in a way Serial just couldn’t manage. The four-part docuseries also features interviews with many of the people associated with Serial and uses animation to bring Hae to life, as well as visual aids to explain all that cell tower stuff.





Decider sat down with Berg after the show’s presentation at Winter TCA and asked her about what she uncovered. HBO allowed Decider to see the first three episodes in advance, but the fourth was held back, and Berg teases why that might be.

DECIDER: What was your relationship with the podcast Serial before doing this? And how do you, as a documentarian, pursue the truth when you’re tackling a subject that has so many people with so many different biases already attached to it?

Amy Berg: We called it The Case Against Adnan Syed for a reason. We were taking a look at the state’s case and whether or not it proved that he was guilty. So, we started with the state’s case, because that’s what convicted him, and we found a lot of discrepancies. Really substantial ones, too. The thing that troubled me the most, as a human being not just as a filmmaker, is that they didn’t corroborate anything that they said. There are so many problems from the medical examiner, the star witness. So, the problems were substantial, down to the fact that Jay Wild’s never said that he got a call at 2:35 in the afternoon. That was the “Come and get me” call. He kept saying 3:40 and the state kept saying 2:35. How does this pass through a jury? How did nobody ask these questions?





Whenever I watch true crime docs, I’m always curious what is the opinion of the documentarian. I feel like we always are either rooting for the underdog or the victim who’s been murdered.

I was so confused at the end of Serial, as well, about his innocence or guilt, that when I took this job I said to my producers, “If I find out anything, I’m investigating this case. I’m not just investigating the wrongful conviction, I’m investigating this case, and if I find out anything on it I’m telling that story.” I was attached to the podcast as an entertainment piece and I wanted to know more.

How closely did you work with NPR?

I spoke to Sarah [Koenig] in the beginning and she gave me her blessing, but she had moved on from the story at that point largely. She was very supportive and very sweet, I was very passionate about the podcast, so that was the involvement they had.





I’ve seen the first three episodes. I don’t know if in the fourth one there’s some explosive…

Major stuff happens in the fourth one. We saved a lot until the end, because there was a lot of time that had passed over the 3 ½ years we were working on this film, and that’s how we chose to do it.

Rabia was saying [during the panel] how every wrongful conviction is an unsolved case. Do you feel like, at the end of this, we’re closer to solving Hae Min Lee’s murder than we were before?

I think we’re closer to the truth but I think that, when police detectives investigate a case with tunnel vision on one suspect only, it leaves so many questions. So, I don’t think that there’s a way to actually know what happened, but I think we’re much closer to the truth.





You use a number of different techniques here. You’re pulling from a lot of sources, like the actual footage from the time, you have new interviews, you have the animated sequences. How did you decide on that style? What made you want to lean on the animated sequences for Hae’s life versus footage or photographs or contemporary interviews?

I always wanted to bring Hae to life in a different way. The animated scenes came right out of her journal. That was pretty close to the beginning of the production. I had seen Diary of a Teenage Girl recently and I loved the animations in that film, so I reached out to the animator, Sara Gunnarsdottir, and she was involved from the beginning with creating these beautiful scenes.

We had discussed using reenactments, potentially with actors, and that just didn’t feel like the right way to tell Hae’s story. She’s kind of this fantasy, larger-than-life character now through the animations.

How did you feel reading her journals and getting a sense of her through that as opposed to Serial or the interviews?

I feel like I understood Hae Min Lee after I read her journals. It’s tragic, actually. She had so much potential. She was so passionate, creative, talented, intelligent. It’s crazy to think she’d be 38-years-old today, because you can’t even imagine her any other way than as this beautiful teenage girl who had big dreams. She also had a lot of pain in her life, as you saw, as many teenagers do working through stuff.

It was very important for me, just because domestic violence, women murdered. Women often become just statistics and I wanted to make sure that she was more than a statistic.

What was it like working with Rabia Chaudry?

She’s great, it was great to work with her. She gave us her file, she let us do our thing. She wasn’t directing or anything like that, she was very much like, “Do your thing, I trust you, let me know what you need from me.” That is the best way to work with someone like that, because you want to have the freedom to tell the story the way you want to tell it.

We never had a problem, it was great. I’ve had problems with EP’s before, trust me. This was smooth as can be.

I found that it was easier to follow the cell tower with some visual aids than on the podcast.

Oh my god! That was such a hard story to tell. Susan Simpson is a dream, she has an encyclopedia in her brain and she had that. We had a great collaboration with this company called And/Or who did our graphics and they were able to visualize it in a way that’s beautiful and coherent. It’s really important for people to understand how technical it is. And it’s another thing where it’s like, the state could’ve requested incoming call records. They never did. There are so many things that could’ve filled in so many blanks back then. Where is Hae’s pager records? Why did those never make it into the trial?

I wanted to ask about Don. I was surprised you shot him, obviously he didn’t want to be involved. I felt like after the first episode he’s kind of dropped. What was it like trying to find these people who didn’t want to be involved and how did you maneuver around them when they didn’t want to be on-screen or be a part of the process?

I kept trying. It’s unfortunate that he didn’t want to speak to us on-camera. He did speak to us off-camera. I was able to capture his narrative from his statements that he made to me. Of course it would’ve been great to have him expressing his feelings and his memories, but that just didn’t happen. I feel like with most of the characters, even if they didn’t go on camera, I’ve had that interaction. Including Jay. So, I know where they’re coming from and I have to take that on and try to tell it in the story.

What do you want an audience to pull from this once they’ve seen it?

There are so many different things you can pull from it, but I guess the themes that are the most important to me are prosecutors seeking justice, police officers seeking the truth, putting a face to the families that are affected by this. Those are the things that are really important to me. And remembering that, if Adnan didn’t kill her, there is somebody out there that deserves to be tried and found.





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