STACK Magazine November Issue 121

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NOVEMBER 2014 JB Hi-Fi
FEATURE
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The story of theWest Memphis
Three is so incredible that there
have been numerous documentary-
style films made about the real life
tale. But now, 20 years after the
horrific murders which triggered
one of the most followed legislative
battles in history, director Atom
Egoyan thought the story was ripe
for a dramatic retelling.
I n 1993, the naked bodies of three
eight-year-old boys – hog-tied with
their own shoelaces – were found in a
muddy ditch inWest Memphis, Arkansas.Three
teenagers – Jason Baldwin, Jessie Misskelley
and Damien Echols – were arrested and charged
with the murders, despite there being no
evidence to connect them to the crime.They
were troublemakers (in the shoplifting sense)
and listened to heavy metal music, but when
hearsay whispers of their interest in Satanism
were spread around the town, a moral panic
ensued which resulted in their conviction.They
were jailed for 17 years, during which time
much new, vindicating evidence came to light.
Appeals were constantly launched, and many
high profile icons joined the cause for their
release (including Henry Rollins, Johnny Depp
and director Peter Jackson). In 2011 they were
released under a weird legal loophole called
an ‘Alfred plea deal’, in which ‘guilty’ pleas are
entered but innocence is maintained.
Academy Award-nominated Canadian
filmmaker Atom Egoyan was well acquainted
with these events, and the various
documentaries made about them,
before he decided to helm the
dramatisation Devil’s Knot.
You’re allowed to do things
with drama that you can’t
do in a documentary
“I think you don’t punch into this without
looking at the documentaries because they’ve
been so crucial in bringing the case to light and
certainly keeping it all alive,” Egoyan says.
“But, I also think that you’re allowed to do
things with drama that you can’t do in a
documentary. I think that the documentaries all
had a really clear agenda, which was first and
foremost to show that the boys were innocent,
but also to point at who might have done it and
to move the process towards other suspects.
And my feeling, honestly, after 20 years of this,
and now making this drama, was that there
are no answers.”
Still, Egoyan sees that a lack of definitive
truth as to who committed the crime shouldn’t
stop the story’s depths being plumbed in a
dramatic, semi-fictional way. “What happened
20 years ago continues to be of interest
because it’s such an extraordinary story of what
happens when there is no closure,” he explains. Devil’s Knot
is out on
November 19
“I wanted to construct this drama in a way that
plunged the viewer who knew nothing about the
case and was encountering it for the first time,
to sort of see this crime, to expect that justice
would be served, and then to see this whole
machinery that’s placed where there
is an illusion that justice has been served,
but it’s completely fabricated.”
The chance to do things a little differently
within this genre, and bring the audience to a
place wherein they do not have an answer –
just as it is in reality – was central to Egoyan’s
approach. “You would expect that a drama
would come to a conclusion, and yet we had
permission with this story to actually take
the risk of not putting the pieces together
at all – of actually leaving the viewer in this
very unconventional place of feeling that
even through dramatic organisation,
that sometimes there’s no answer.”
Egoyan based his screenplay on one of the
many books written about theWest Memphis
Three: Mara Leveritt’s novel Devil’s Knot,
published in 2002. “We went through everything,
really, but Mara Leveritt’s book is just so
exhaustive,” Egoyan says. “Of course it has its
own point of view, but [it] provides so much
other material, and on these other suspects as
well. And I think what I found intriguing about
the book was not that it was pointing towards
John [Byers, stepfather to victim Christopher
Byers, who was long held by the public as a
person of extreme interest in the case], but it was
saying that there was so many other strands...
and I thought, why don’t we illustrate these other
strands in a way that documentaries cannot?
The documentary cameras were not on these
other suspects, but we can recreate them.”