Yahoo News ‘Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal’ Director on Uncovering an “Underbelly of Corruption, Greed and Powers of Social Control”
The saga behind Netflix’s Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal was a monster to take on, with added pressure on the filmmakers as details unfolded in real time while they were in production. Directed by Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason, the doc series chronicles the powerful and wealthy Murdaugh family in the Lowcountry region of South Carolina and several criminal investigations into unsolved deaths surrounding the family — culminating in the trial and sentencing of former lawyer Alex Murdaugh for the 2021 murder of his wife and son. Investigators say the same son, Paul, caused a boating accident in 2019 that killed his friend Mallory Beach.
Furthermore, the documentary was released before Murdaugh was sentenced on March 2. Willoughby Nason says the story is far from over, given that the investigations into the family are still active.
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Willoughby Nason spoke to THR about the challenges (and trepidations) of taking on such complicated subject matter and why this story was much more than “just a true-crime story.”
How did you get involved in a documentary about this case?
My producing partner and showrunner, Michael Gasparro, brought us this story and said, “Hey, this has a lot of layers to it.” This is not just a true-crime story — it’s showing all these structures of power at play. It’s focusing on an intimate tragedy of young adults that we can all relate to: Kids making a stupid decision one night and going out partying, someone gets killed in a wreck. It’s tragic. That’s the core of our story. What attracted me to this whole world was the intimacy of that tragedy. And then through that lens, we were able to open up an underbelly of corruption and greed and powers of social control that’s been down in Lowcountry [since] what seems like the beginning of time, with the Murdaugh family for generations [being] solicitors and prosecutors that held court down there.
Given the family’s influence and power, did you ever feel any trepidation to take this on?
In productions where we’re doing investigative journalism around murder, crime and power structures, especially with law enforcement, we do everything we can to protect our team and our crew. We’re very careful about where we stay, how we drive around. All the coordinations at play are very thought out because we are vulnerable down there. And as filmmakers, we uncover things that no one else has, and over the years of making these types of investigative documentaries, we’ve had a lot of scary moments. [There is] humility in knowing that this is beyond entertainment, that these are real people. These are real stories.
Was it ever difficult to get the subjects to participate?
Yes, it took a lot for Morgan Doughty to sit with us. [Doughty is Paul’s ex-girlfriend and was in the boating accident.] She had been asked by so many media outlets to tell her story and been harassed in a lot of ways. She was on the side of her friend Mallory, who died, which basically put her against the Murdaughs, so she was vulnerable in that situation. All the kids were vulnerable because they decided they had enough. This was a turning point where this small town of Hampton and the community surrounding it said, “I’ve had enough and I’ll stick my neck out, no matter what, to go against the Murdaugh name,” because they knew this was so close to home. With Morgan, we shared with her our past work, and [that] has shown that we really care about victims and stories and spend a huge amount of time with them. We give voice to the voiceless.
Talk to me about the timeline of making this doc and its release.
We got involved around the late summer, early fall of 2021. Alex Murdaugh had not been indicted yet. We were focusing on what was going to happen in the boat wreck [case]. The roadside shooting [in which Murdaugh was shot almost three months after his wife and son were murdered] had just happened around the time that we laid boots on the ground there, and it became an escalated turn of events while we were making this. [We had to figure out] how to incorporate all these new things that were coming in and out and stay focused on this boat wreck throughout. … We uncovered a huge amount about Alex Murdaugh while making this in two years. We wanted to focus on this story of the boat wreck, the people involved in that and how that was the precipice of exposing all the misdeeds of this family.
The case was ongoing while you were making the documentary. How did that impact the process?
We didn’t even know, when we finished the doc, the date of the trial. We knew it was coming up. But [in] our experience with these docs that have cases attached to them, we can never time it. It was serendipitous that this show came out while the trial was happening, so there was a lot more awareness to the story. And it was serendipitous that the whole trial was focused on the boat case, because it is the backbone of our series. The boat wreck became a two-way motive for the killings: Alex blamed [someone who wanted revenge on his son] for the murders, yet it was the reason Alex’s financial fraud was discovered. [Prosecutors argued that Murdaugh committed the murders to distract from his financial problems.] In the trial, we could finally hear the unredacted 911 call where Alex says to the operator, “It’s because of the boat wreck that someone’s trying to kill my son.” Our series focused specifically on the boat wreck because it was the catalyst that broke open the impenetrable power that the Murdaugh family held in the Lowcountry for a century.
Did you have any conversations about doing a follow-up episode with the new updates?
We’re just kicking that around. … [When we were cutting the final episode of] our doc about Kalief Browder [Time: The Kalief Browder Story], who was wrongfully arrested for allegedly stealing a backpack and held in Rikers Island for three years in New York City, Mayor de Blasio announced that he was going to close Rikers Island and cited Browder’s case as one of the reasons. With this piece, we had really finalized the show. We didn’t feel like we needed to potentially go back and give a little update on a card. It was also important that we didn’t time it specifically, because we wanted the story to live whether the trial is happening or not.
What were some challenges you faced?
Two things. The first one is that this is a gruesome and tragic, painful story. And I think that’s one of the hardest things about making this, being with people that have experienced the most horrific things in their life, being a conduit for them to tell their stories, [to] sit with them while they’re shattering in front of the camera with disbelief, with grief, with agony. That is a very hard part about making this. Just from a storytelling perspective, this story was a mammoth. That was a challenge … of how to get it into three episodes.
How did this documentary differ from your previous work?
We’ve dealt with the legal system before, and we’ve dealt with it from the side of the legal system not working for people, especially people of color. And in this case, what differed here was this was a white-glove form of legal process. Alex got a six-week trial. He got the highest-paid lawyers in the country, legend defense attorneys: Dick Harpootlian is a sitting [state] senator, Jim Griffin is a huge defense attorney. What was different about this, for me, was seeing the other side of the legal system and how it actually took down someone that seemed untouchable.
Interview edited for length and clarity.
This story first appeared in a May stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
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