In Alexis Bloom’s new documentary Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes, a former Fox News staffer recalls his early days at the conservative cable channel.

“It was imparted on me right from the beginning that it was not about journalism,” explains Joe Muto, a former associate producer of The O'Reilly Factor. His commentary sounds especially eerie in the Fake News era: “It was about drawing the biggest audience possible. We used to call it ‘riling up the crazies.’ That’s what we were there to do. We were there to stir up outrage.”

Divide and Conquer, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival this week, is part character study of Ailes, the political consultant and media mastermind who founded Fox News in 1996, and part post-mortem of Trump’s election. The two went hand in hand; explains Muto, “Trump is such a Fox-y character that if he wasn’t real, Roger Ailes would have created him in a lab.”

Bloom, who previously co-directed Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, initially intended to make a documentary about Rupert Murdoch, the News Corp media mogul who hired Ailes. But Bloom ran into issues of access. And besides, Bloom told Vanity Fair this week, “He’s tough to watch. Murdoch’s had such an enormous influence on our lives, on our media landscape. But he’s this organism that’s perfectly designed to make money. And that’s the only thing that animates him. Doesn’t make a terribly good subject for a documentary.”

Ailes, who died last year, was a bit more charismatic. He spent some of his early career on-camera and, in one of his more light-hearted trivia notes, at one point tap-danced as a means to maintain a slim physique. Ailes also had a more intriguing backstory than Murdoch: born in Ohio, Ailes was diagnosed with hemophilia as a child and lived in fear of the medical condition. Though he could not cure the disorder, he found a way to inflict fear in others.

Asked how much sympathy she has for film subjects like Ailes—a man accused of stoking outrage, serial sexual harassment, and extinguishing the careers of women who resisted him—Bloom was careful not to cast men like him as black-and-white villains. “It’s too convenient to make them a monster, or sort of shovel them into a paradigm,” said Bloom. “We’re all in this together. We’re all human. I grew up in apartheid South Africa where there was sort of extraordinary evil in very ordinary guises. People who enforced apartheid on a daily level, from not letting black Africans into the tennis club or onto the beach—not all of those people were evil, although their acts were certainly despicable. I fundamentally connect with all people as human. And if you’re going to do a film like one about Roger, you have to know that he’s ordinary and human in some way.”

Ailes certainly had his hangups: he spun lies and created a false mythology for himself. (He incorrectly claimed, for example, that he invented the split-screen effect). His relationship with his mother had not been very physical—in an interview, Ailes confessed this could have been because his mother felt responsible for his hemophilia. Ailes was also wildly paranoid, so much so that he carried a gun at all times, installed a steel door to guard his office, and outfitted his personal and professional lairs with cameras.