Awards Daily talks to Allen v. Farrow co-director Kirby Dick about why he and co-director Amy Ziering set out to tackle this controversial story in a four-part HBO docuseries.
Like so many people, the information Kirby Dick knew about the Dylan Farrow sexual abuse case was Woody Allen’s side of the story.
“There was a lot of coverage, but it was really focused on the spin that Woody Allen was putting out,” says Dick, who co-directed the HBO documentary series Allen v. Farrow, which follows the story of Allen and Farrow, from romance to scandal, including the alleged sexual abuse of their adopted daughter Dylan Farrow. “He was an extremely successful filmmaker. He was really able to control the narrative. Obviously when I started getting into this, what we learned was that there was so much more to the story that hadn’t been told and that was one of the major reasons why we felt it was important to tell the story.”
Kirby and his co-director Amy Ziering worked on this film project over the course of three years, and what they discovered upon interviewing Dylan was that she started revealing a lot that wasn’t readily known about the case.
“We were able to get access to tens of thousands of pages of documents, most of which the press hadn’t seen and the public wasn’t aware of. That showed a much more complete and accurate perspective on the story. Going into it, we knew that these materials existed; we didn’t know what it was going to say.”
‘That report has been taken as gospel’
In order to tell Mia and Dylan’s story, Kirby and Ziering went back to the Connecticut house where it all began, which Kirby describes as a very lived-in house, since Mia and her whole family have lived there most of their lives.
“It always is a little haunting, to go somewhere where something really horrific has happened, but I think it’s a testament to Mia that she kept going through all of this and continued to raise the family and stood by her children.”
The house becomes an important focal point in the story, since that’s where the alleged abuse took place. In order to compile all of the facts, Kirby and Ziering looked at the Yale-New Haven report that provided an evaluation of Dylan.
“We don’t know why the report came out the way it did. We do know that Woody Allen was very influential in New York and the country. That report has been taken as gospel, unequivocally proving his innocence. When you look at that report and take it apart, you realize it’s so flawed in so many ways, that there’s no way that anyone can say Woody Allen is innocent based on this report.”
A few things that Kirby learned include that Dylan was interviewed nine times about the abuse and that all of the notes taken on the case were destroyed.
“If a criminal investigation is going on, you absolutely never destroy your notes, because that is evidence in a potential trial. Why would they destroy their notes? It raises a lot of questions and the notes would be able to validate their conclusions and without that, for that reason alone, you have to ask whether something was covered up. Was that their intention? We don’t know.”
Outside of this case, Kirby and Ziering have not found any other examples of notes being thrown out in a criminal case.
Do abusers abuse only once?
The argument has been raised, especially on social media, of Woody Allen’s innocence based purely on the fact that abusers tend to abuse multiple times as a compulsion and Allen doesn’t match the profile. Kirby says their research suggests otherwise.
“We found experts in child abuse who say that sometimes abusers will choose only one child. They’ll choose the child that’s very vulnerable, and that will actually support their position. ‘Only this one child is accusing me—nobody else did, so therefore I must be innocent.’ That is something that definitely happens.”
But even though this argument is often holding up a lot of people’s beliefs in Allen’s culpability, Kirby says that the reception of the docuseries for former Woody Allen defenders has been very eye-opening, based on the evidence, review of documents, and never-before-scene footage from Mia’s home movies.
“Woody Allen is a very beloved filmmaker; he’s made some wonderful work. Critics have justifiably appreciated his work and they’ve really come to love him as a part of that. But we’ve had quite a number of critics who have told us that going into this they were extremely suspicious and thought Woody Allen was innocent. After seeing the series, they did an about-face.”
All four episodes of Allen v. Farrow are available on HBOMax.
