Joe Berlinger’s first feature-length documentary, Brother’s Keeper (1992), garnered several prestigious awards, among them the top documentary prize from the Directors Guild of America. In cinema-vérité style, it follows the unfolding drama of Delbert Ward, an illiterate, upstate New York farmer convicted of fratricide. Next, Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, his co-director on Brother’s Keeper, won an Emmy for Paradise Lost (HBO), about the trial of three teenagers unjustly accused in the murder of three eight-year-old boys. The two men, who met while they were working for the Maysles Brothers (Grey Gardens), spent the next few years doing commercial work. Berlinger also began plotting his narrative filmmaking debut.

The feature Berlinger pitched in 1999, at Artisan Entertainment’s invitation, was based on a sensational 1930s murder trial: After having lived in an attic for decades as a love-slave to a wealthy woman, a man meets and kills his rival, the woman’s husband. Artisan countered with an offer to direct Blair Witch 2 (2000). “The subterfuge involved in getting me out there,” Berlinger says of the expenses-paid visit to L.A., “should have been a clue as to what the relationship was going to be like.” The sequel, panned by the critics, marked a stunning reversal of fortune for Berlinger, who up until then enjoyed a deserved reputation for well-researched and finely crafted documentaries. Nearly a decade after the premiere of Blair Witch 2, and on the eve of First Run Features’ theatrical release of his fourth feature-length documentary, the filmmaker remains stung by that perceived failure.

Crude, directed and co-produced by Berlinger, will open on Sept 9. It’s about Chevron-Texaco’s role in polluting Ecuador’s Amazonian rainforest, an environmental disaster that continues to endanger 30,000 indigenous people. The affected communities, devastated by escalating cancer rates, brought suit against the American oil company in 1993. “The challenge of making this film is finding the balance,” Berlinger says in an interview at his New York City office, “allowing it to work as a movie, and telling people what they need to know about the ongoing lawsuit.” The filmmaker cut 600 hours of HDV footage for the 104-minute documentary, much of it shot under difficult conditions in the despoiled riparian paradise.

Crude marks a return to the approach of Brother’s Keeper and Paradise Lost in one important respect: It is an investigation into the nature of justice. Ostensibly, it is the tale of two indefatigable lawyers, consultant Steven Donziger, an American, and Pablo Fajardo, an indigenous Ecuadorian and the lead counsel in Aguinda v. Chevron Texaco. While charting the progress of the unusual international lawsuit, the documentary raises the specter of 21st-century colonialism. Initially, Berlinger was reluctant to research a project that could not be made in a cinéma-vérité style—the backstory was 30 years in the making—but after a friend introduced him to Donziger, he accepted the lawyer’s invitation to go to Ecuador. What Berlinger saw on the “toxi-tour” of affected Cofàn villages convinced him that this tale of Ecuadorian government corruption and corporate malfeasance was extraordinary.

“One of the themes of the film,” Berlinger explains, “is whether justice is possible when you apply Western standards to this kind of situation. White people’s treatment of indigenous people in both of the Americas over the last 500 years is an incredibly shameful chapter in our history. What I hope people see in Crude is that multinational corporate behavior in developing countries is often just the late 20th-century and early 21st-century continuation of this terrible centuries long trend.” Ferreting out veracity in legal proceedings, Berlinger admits, is always problematic: “The justice system is about persuading people to believe your side of the story, as opposed to the pursuit of an objective truth.”

Like most filmmakers inspired by human-rights conflicts, Berlinger seeks out meaningful “work for a paycheck,” such as the “Iconoclasts” series for Sundance Channel, although he is also proud of his ad campaign for Honda. His first job was as at Ogilvy and Mather, where he produced TV commercials and, apparently, learned great public-relations skills. In response to a journalist’s request for an interview, Berlinger sends a shopping bag full of DVDs; his book which is a companion piece to his $1 million-plus domestic box-office documentary about the hard-rock band Metallica, Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (2004); and copies of just about everything written about him and his work. The documentarian confesses that he’s not “rolling in dough,” but the commercial work allowed him, for instance, to finance the first year’s filming on Crude.



Berlinger is startlingly candid; there are no subjects he’s unwilling to discuss. He returns a few times in the interview, unprompted, to the stinging defeat of Blair Witch 2, which was re-cut by Artisan in post-production—Berlinger made a spoof and Artisan later decided they needed a slasher film. He admits he thought the movie would end his career.

“It put me into a horrible funk, a severe depression,” he recalls. “I curled up into a little ball, literally and figuratively, for months, until one day my wife handed me a DVD of Paradise Lost.” Loren Berlinger is a sculptor; the two share a garage that is her studio and his home office. “She said: ‘Here, watch your movie. Remind yourself you’re a good filmmaker and that every filmmaker has a movie panned during their career.’” Blair Witch 2, with a $10 million production budget, grossed $57 million worldwide.

Metallica, the documentary that followed, was Berlinger’s most successful film to date. It begins as the story of the band’s comeback album, but quickly becomes a portrait of mid-life male angst. “Here was the most aggressive of all hard-rock bands, with all these icons of male testosterone,” the documentarian says, “and suddenly they hire a therapist. They bare their souls. It had all the seeds of great drama. Of course, we had to talk about the fact that this was the movie. Finally, they agreed.”

Berlinger’s relationship with the band began with Paradise Lost: Although Metallica had never allowed their music to be licensed, they gave Berlinger permission to use it on the soundtrack after prosecution lawyers said it was evidence of the accused teenagers’ satanic worship. The claim is untrue.

In Metallica, Berlinger’s regard for Lars Ulrich, Metallica’s drummer, is apparent, as is his empathy for lead vocalist James Hetfield, who says he’s having trouble balancing work with his need to spend time with his wife and children. “If these very successful, very masculine men could confront their existential and creative crisis,” Berlinger observes, “I thought I could, too. I was literally inspired by them.” Berlinger, still reeling from Blair Witch 2, and from his difficult parting of the ways with Sinofsky just before that film—he felt the partnership was becoming confining—called his friend and asked him to come onboard for Metallica. “I had handled the break-up of our partnership very badly, and the Metallica film helped us work through all that,” the director explains. “Now, we collaborate when it makes sense.”

Berlinger, who spent three years making Crude, remains haunted by the catastrophe he witnessed in Ecuador. In a May 2009 interview for the New York premiere, he recalled a moment in the “toxi-tour” when he saw a group of Cofàn eating canned tuna by the river that once provided them with fresh fish. Music of the Cofàn opens and closes the documentary. A judgment in Aguinda v. Chevron Texaco is expected this year, but Berlinger doesn’t hold out much hope for reparations since the company has promised a “lifetime of litigation.” “What impressed me about people in Ecuador is that they are not looking for personal gain,” he observes. “I think they truly want the area to be cleaned up. I’m not sure how realistic that is.”

Berlinger’s weltanschauung is: Everything is complicated. His work is an opportunity to sort it all out. “On Brother’s Keeper, I learned to be much more accepting of people who don’t change their clothes a lot and who live differently than I do,” Berlinger concludes, referring to Delbert Ward and his surviving brother, Lyman. “Paradise Lost taught me how easily someone can be wrongfully convicted,” he observes. “Before that, I was not against the death penalty.”

Berlinger says it is too early to know what he learned from Crude. Asked about his willingness to delve into dark and psychologically complex subjects, he ruminates: “I had a rocky childhood. I think that sharpened my sense of injustice, and made me very aware that the good guys and the bad guys aren’t always who you think they are. That’s one of my most fundamental, deeply held observations in life, and the important thing that I want to impart to my children.”