When I was asked to handle the interview forNo Man of God, which premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival this week I was delighted to learn that the film concerned a man I’ve been reading about for years – and I’m not talking aboutTed Bundy. Yes, Bundy is a central figure in this story, and played with chilling menace byLuke Kirby, but the protagonist of this film is FBI profilerBill Hagmaier, who is played byElijah Wood.
Like directorAmber Sealey, I’ll just let Wood tell you whatNo Man of Godis all about since he’s so gosh darn good at it, which is no surprise, given that he doubles as one of its producers.
“No Man of Godis a film that depicts the last four years of Ted Bundy’s life as he sat on Death Row awaiting execution. It depicts his relationship with FBI profiler Bill Hagmaier, who met him on a number of occasions leading up to his execution. It’s about what sort of transpires between those two men. Bill was in the early days of FBI profiling, so he took that opportunity when no one else wanted to because Ted was so manipulative and really was very distrustful of the FBI and law enforcement in general. And what transpired was an actual connection. At the end of it, Ted considered Bill his best friend, [though] Bill did not consider Ted his best friend. In addition to helping families get clarity on the whereabouts of their family members, there was also a human connection between these two people. It’s a fascinating story that is not about glorifying Ted Bundy but rather getting into the heart of who he was as a flawed and deeply troubled individual.”
I mean, yeah, I couldn’t have said it better myself. Sealey explained that her manager has a relationship with Wood’s company Spectrevision, and so the project came to her via traditional channels. She is likely not alone in her first reaction to the very idea of the film.
“My first thought was, ‘another Bundy movie? What the hell’? But then I read it and it was such a great read and I immediately had a take on it. Obviously, I’ve been a fan of Elijah’s for forever and I love Spectrevision, so I was like, ‘yeah, I’ll go in and I’ll pitch my take and if they love it, great, and if not, no worries.’ But I said to them as a kind of parting thought, ‘look, you don’t have to hire me, but you need to hire a female director. You can’t make a movie about two men sitting in a room talking about raping and murdering women and not have a female director in today’s climate.’ And they were like, ‘oh, no no no, we’re way ahead of you, and we know that already.’ So yeah, we just connected and they liked my take and it was off to the races.”
Of course, the race slowed down a bit given the pandemic, which prevented the filmmakers from meeting with Hagmaier in person.
“Look, if circumstances were different, we would’ve spent a lot of time with him, so I only regret that we made the film during a pandemic for that specific reason. We had plans to travel east and sit down with him and engage in a lot of conversation. That being said, we definitely spoke to him, and I think it was important for me… I certainly felt the responsibility of bringing him to life in an honest and truthful way that felt accurate and true to his experience.”
Hagmaier is an interesting figure among early FBI profilers largely because he wasn’t quite an A-list star, but he seemed to be a supporting character in many of their books.
“You’re right, he is not a star performer in the history books as it pertains to the life of Ted, and that’s actually for a reason. It’s because he doesn’t have an agenda,” said Wood.
“He didn’t write a book. He didn’t grant a lot of interviews to discuss his relationship with Ted. He’s a man of integrity. He was there to fulfill a specific purpose, largely to bring closure to families and to try and tie up those cases as best he could whilst also trying to understand the psychology of Ted. But it’s his humanity and his integrity that is a throughline of that particular story and is true of his entire career, and when you speak to him, that becomes so apparent as well.”
Wood impressed me as he continued.
“There’s a very good reason why he’s a side character in the grander stories of Ted, [and that’s] because he’s not a loud personality. He’s gentle, he’s intelligent, he’s considered and he’s human… Which isn’t to say that the others are bad at their jobs. They’re great at their jobs, he just takes a very different approach. And what’s sort of lovely about him is that he’s unassuming. And it’s that quality actually that allowed him to be uniquely, innately perfect for that relationship with Ted, who was so distrustful of law enforcement. Ted wanted to be the smartest guy in the room as well, that was a big part of it, but Bill is disarming in who he is and that allowed for that connection to even be possible.”
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Kirby knows how many actors have portrayed Bundy before, but he said he didn’t look at any other performances before playing the vicious murderer.
“I approached it with great hesitation and reluctance and fear, but I kind of entrusted Amber to sort of take us on a bit of ride that was not going to be for all of the kind of ghoulish reasons that one can endeavor to tell this story. There is a kind of glut of research available and I took as much of it in as I could stomach depending on the day, and I think all of it was probably very. very valuable. I do think the richest resource that we all had was Bill Hagmaier being available over the phone. He was an exceptional resource and something about him gave the thread of it all humanity and made my hesitation sort of just dissipate quite quickly because his experience is real and truthful. He’s the real deal, so that, to me, was probably the best gift we had.”
Kirby said it was hard not to judge Bundy, and that “it’s still hard,” but as an actor, you just can’t.
“I don’t have a lot of interest in participating in a conversation that gives his motivations any purchase or reason, you just have to dive in. I do have an exercise of kind of imagining people as children, and that seems to be a good way into embracing even the worst of us. So in that regard, that was kind of the best I could do to find an “in” with him, if there was any at all. But I’m no angel. I’d throw a stone, probably, a few, or a brick, or a fucking chainsaw. I get it.”
As good as both Kirby and Wood are here, my favorite scene inNo Man of Godfinds the two of them off-camera. Instead, Sealey keeps her focus on a young female assistant who must sit in the room with Bundy and Hagmaier and listen to them discuss brutal crimes without showing any emotion herself.
“In a sense, that [scene] and the under-the-water monologue that goes sort of meta, those are the two moments that I think encapsulate what I was trying to say, and whyIwas directing this movie,” said Sealey.
“Putting it really bluntly, watching her have to sit and listen to these two men talk about these horrendous crimes is sort of what I felt as a human being, watching our society – and I include myself in that – be so fascinated and interested in people like Bundy. So that’s the most “me” moment in the movie, those two moments. I just had that idea and loved it. The natural choice would be to stay on Bundy, but I thought, ‘what’s it like for the women in the room? What’s it like for the 24-year-old assistant,” proving exactly why it was important forNo Man of Godto include a female voice of some kind.
“I don’t know if people will recognize it, but all the women in the film are dressed like victims, actual Bundy victims. So to me, it was also a commentary or a way to bring them into the story because I felt like it was offensive to make a movie where Bundy is such a big character in it and not have the victims be present in some way that was meaningful and not cheesy or melodramatic,” said Sealey. “I didn’t want to do the typical listing of their names at the end of the movie but I wanted them to be present and have weight. I don’t know if you noticed, but throughout the film, the women, at first they’re just clocking Bill and looking at Bill, and then they’re clocking Bundy, and then they look directly at us and they’re asking us, essentially, ‘why are you so fascinated with this guy? Why do you remember his name and not my name?’
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Given that the film is largely about two men talking in a room, Sealey said she usedMy Dinner With Andreas a visual reference point.
“I like to do a lot of visual research in the beginning and then at a certain point I have to shut the door to other filmmakers cause I’ll suffer from too much fear and anxiety and imposter syndrome, like, ‘I’ll never be as good as them!’ So I try not to borrow or mimic too much from the filmmakers I admire, but I certainly do when I’m coming up with the look of the film and the tone of the film. I do a lot of research on other movies, but I come at it from an emotional place,” said Sealey, who drew on her background as an actress to inform her filmmaking.
“I used to be an actor, so I come at it from a place of, ‘who are these people? What are they feeling? What are their objectives? What are they trying to get the other person to feel?’ And that’s kind of like, my way in. and the camerawork is an extension of that, and the production design is an extension of that, of the emotional state. To me, it’s always grounded in some sort of reality,” said the director, who also tends to place a premium on performance in her work.
“I think people will watch any good performance, no matter what the story is, no matter what the production design is. If the performances are riveting, I’ll watch it. If the performance is bad, it doesn’t matter how good the story is or how good it looks, I’m not involved. So to me, the most important thing is the performance, and I just really lucked out having these two rock stars who can do anything I threw at them.”
Wood has more producing credits than acting credits over the last several years, so it’s nice to see him sink his teeth into a role, and he remains committed to balancing both halves of his artistic self, as far as acting and producing are concerned.
“I don’t know that one holds sway over the other, necessarily. The producing is ever-present, just the nature of it – we’re always developing something or in post on something, so that occupies the majority of my time. But yeah, it’s not that one takes precedence over the other, it’s really just more circumstantial in terms of the spacing of those things, as it pertains to the acting. I just love the filmmaking process, so whatever way I can be a part of something and facilitate, I just like to do that.”
Watch the full interview, and if you’re a fan of shows likeMindhunter, be sure to keep an eye out forNo Man of God, which is expected to be released later this summer by RLJE Films.
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