The Mortician Director Talks About The Ending To His HBO True-Crime Doc [Exclusive Interview]

So how did a project like this come to you? You’re now a figure in this world, in this kind of storytelling mold, if you will. Are people pitching you ideas? Are you still doing the same research you were doing years ago and just stumbling across this stuff yourself? Is your producer bringing ideas to you? How does that work?

It’s kind of all of the above. It definitely has reached the point where people pitch me stuff. I haven’t … that’s actually not true. There’s two great ones that we’re in the process of producing now, but prior to this — I was about to say I haven’t done it — but in terms of me directing, I haven’t done anything that I’ve been just offered outright. And that includes a green-lit doc at a streamer about Crypto story of the moment. It’s like, come on. I don’t give a s*** about that. These things are so hard to make. I have to be just madly in love with them. So we search, Steven and I, and one of our really most trusted colleagues is the head of our research. His name is Lukas Cox. We look, and we look, and we look. 

I happened to find this during a rabbit hole that I was going down in December 2020. I was editing “Sasquatch” and “Bob Ross” at the time and knew they would be finished the following year. And I really love L.A. noir stories — “The Long Goodbye,” “Sunset Boulevard,” “Chinatown,” “Mulholland Drive” — I love these things and I’ve always wanted to make one. And so I just went on a “L.A. noir in the form of documentary” hunt, if you will, and I ended up on these old L.A. Times articles about this story. And was immediately hit with that thing of, oh my God, if I could make this, I feel like this could be really, really special. But I knew it all depended on getting an interview with David Sconce because I feel as though if you’re going to tell a story like this and have it really feel like you’ve gone deep and it being worthy of anybody’s time, you’ve got to have the guy.

So we wrote to him in prison and he got on the phone with my producer and he agreed to do an interview, if and when we came in to the prison to film with him there or if he got out, because parole was on the table at that point. He didn’t know when, but it was on the table. And since it was really peak Covid, nobody was getting led into prisons to shoot. And California specifically does not allow you to make inmate specific interview requests.

So I kind of knew we weren’t going to get in, and I needed him, if this interview was going to happen, to get out. And he didn’t get out for another two and a half years. We started making this, in effect, by the end of 2021, and we got notified that he was going to have a parole hearing late 2022, and that was an election year. Every governor will rescind parole hearings that are leading up to the election because they have to show that they’re tough on crime. That’s what they’re all running on in some capacity.

So sure enough, his got yanked and I really felt like, wow, I may have something that is just not going to pan out and I’m going to be on the hook with HBO and these people are going to just hate me and never want to work with me again. Then about six months later, I was driving, I had just dropped a friend off. We’d had lunch and Steven calls me, my producing partner, and he said, “He is getting out in the next 48 hours. He’s been granted parole.” So we immediately need to mobilize the crew. I mean, my DP lives in New York. [David] was locked up outside of Sacramento. The next morning, Steven and I drove up to Sacramento. People are on planes, people are driving up, equipment is getting checked out of rental houses, and by that next night, we were sitting in a hotel just prepared. 

That morning, I can’t remember what time exactly that we pulled into the parking lot at the prison. I don’t think it was 4:30, but it was soon after that. It was probably about 5 AM. And we sat and we sat and the sun comes up and other people are pulling into the parking lot waiting to pick up a person who they’re waiting for. And we see corrections officers pulling in to go to work for the day and some who are checking out people in the administrative building. And then finally around 7:45, out people come, and we’re looking for him and we thought, oh my God, there he is. And he sees us and he’s got a big smile on his face and he points at us, and we’re rolling the whole time. And he got in the car, and I don’t even know that we were three minutes down the road outside of the prison parking lot when he just, on his own, brought up the mortuary, the cremations, I don’t want to say everything, but for not getting asked a question, he brought up a lot. And I just thought, holy f***, this is going to be a crazy couple of days.

Man, that’s an incredible story.