While Dylan Farrow‘s abuse allegations against her adoptive father Woody Allen have been known for decades, HBO‘s Allen v. Farrow has unveiled all-new information about the case. Oscar-nominated documentarians Kirby Dick, Amy Ziering, (The Invisible War, On the Record) and their producer–investigative journalist Amy Herdy sat down with Vulture to discuss how they got access to never-before-seen pictures and home videos, including one of Dylan talking to her mother Mia Farrow about the alleged abuse after it happened.
Herdy said of reviewing the thousands of pages of court documents turned over to them: “When I first had the boxes, I was in a little Airbnb, and I had shuttled all the boxes from my rental car to my room. It looked like something out of a movie, it was me surrounded by boxes and boxes of documents, and they were spread all over the bed. And pretty soon there were pizza boxes, because I was getting takeout, because I wasn’t leaving the room — I was just holed up in this room, going through all these files, noting where things were, taking pictures of what I felt was an incredibly relevant document.”
Dick said: “We have a really rigorous process of fact-checking, and we want to get everything as absolutely right as we possibly can. We try to make sure that it’s completely accurate even before it goes to the attorneys, our attorneys and HBO’s attorneys. This is really important to us that we get this story right.”
Ziering added: “We had no reason or investment or agenda going in. I’m late 50s, and I’m not gonna say I wasn’t a feminist, but I was not the most involved, informed feminist in the ’90s. So I was very much influenced by the common knowledge about the case. If anything, when people say, ‘You went in with an agenda,’ I was expecting to find the opposite of what we did. So I’m not interested in peddling myths or stories; I’m interested in revealing the truth and helping us correct misinformation that we’ve all believed for too long. So that’s what this is — an honest, open, unbiased investigation, and we followed the facts, and you’re seeing where it led us.”
Herdy said of Allen’s consistent denial of abuse: “And the thing to remember, Woody Allen has said repeatedly that he was cleared by New York City investigators. And that episode shows that that investigator did not clear him. That investigator found that he had enough evidence to go to court with. And what happened to that investigator? He got fired!”
