When a film is based on a true story, a story of murders and families, is there an ethical line the director must adhere to? Can a film be made about real, horrifying events and not be considered sensational? What is a film of a true story ultimately responsible for? Truth? Insight? Or just the creation of content, of entertainment? And at whose expense?
This is not about a movie based on the Paul Bernardo murders, but it might as well be.
The movie in question is Scorn, which will air Sunday on CBC at 8 p.m., and the director is Sturla Gunnarsson. He is high-minded about the creative intentions for his movie. "It is not exploitative. It's not a torn-from-the-headlines film. You can get into real trouble [with a film based on a true story] Doing Bernardo, the level of art you have to achieve to not be exploitative is so high. The same applies to us."
But is attention to "the level of art" what keeps something from being exploitative? Not everyone involved in Scorn was as confidant of the line. Andrew Rai Berzins, screenwriter on the project, admits he had "reservations" about what was his first foray into "this tricky territory."
In large part, the film is based on Such A Good Boy, a book by Lisa Hobbs Birnie, that documented the court case of two murders that shocked Vancouver a decade ago. But not only are the facts of the court case in dispute by one family involved, the film is also informed by interviews with the central figure -- a murderer whose versions of events could be questionable.
On Oct. 5, 1990, Sharon Huenemann, 47, and her mother, Doris Leatherbarrow, 69, were murdered in the kitchen of the elder woman's home in suburban Tsawwassen outside Vancouver while they were making dinner. They were repeatedly beaten with crowbars and their throats slit. The house had been ransacked as though by burglars. "Why are you doing this?" Sharon Huenemann reportedly cried before her throat was cut. The answer was far more horrific than she could have imagined.
Her son and only child, Darren Huenemann, then 18, had masterminded the murders and convinced two schoolmates to carry out the plot. With his mother and grandmother dead, Darren stood to inherit $3-million. Into his fantasy of wealth and freedom, and a bizarre idea to invade Brunei and install himself as divine ruler, he brought David Muir, 18, and Derik Lord, 19, both vulnerable teens at the same high school in a suburb of Victoria. Darren, who spent the evening of the murders with his girlfriend, Amanda Cousins, to provide an alibi for himself, planned to pay his friends an allowance for carrying out the killings, and to give one a house and the other a hundred acres of land.
Pretty weird stuff, and it's in this warped world of Darren Huenemann's mind that Gunnarsson is interested, because it allows him to explore societal issues about teenage violence. What particularly intrigued him was Huenemann's obsession with the production of Caligula his school happened to be putting on at the time, which served to bolster his murderous resolve. "Here is this banal material-and-greed-loving kid who identifies with the character of Caligula in order to make his crime grander and carve himself out as a god. Boys gravitate to that archetype, to that mythology."
Is that what really happened?
During the 1992 trial, both Huenemann and Lord denied any involvement in the murders. Muir, however, confessed to the police. With that confession, plus key testimony from Cousins and tapes of telephone conversations between the boys after the murders took place, all three were convicted of two counts of first-degree murder. They are all serving life sentences.
Huenemann chose not to plead insanity, although it was an option. He was reportedly insulted by the suggestion. Despite his conviction, he continued to deny responsibility for the crime, but changed his mind, according to Gunnarsson and Berzins, when he was approached by the filmmakers for interviews. Part of the creative process was to bring Huenemann on side to more fully understand his thinking. So they charmed Huenemann, perhaps even flattered him into co-operating. Berzins, whose job was to approach the convict at Prince Albert Penitentiary in Saskatchewan, "was very persuasive," Gunnarsson says. Huenemann now admits full responsibility for the murders, a turn of events that could be part of his calculated bid for day parole in 2012.
Doesn't Gunnarsson worry about a version of events coming from someone who he admits has been diagnosed as "deeply narcissistic and disconnected?" Couldn't Huenemann be self-aggrandizing?
"We have to assume that's what he's doing," says Gunnarsson evenly. "For our purposes, that's fine. We wanted the fantasy as he saw it. That was the exercise. . . . We're telling the story from Darren's point of view, so the portrayal of the parents, like the portrayal of the boys, it's all really from his point of view."
That creative licence -- Gunnarsson says his film "is a work of imagination based on a true story" -- has brought problems. Lord, who was a distressed, suicidal teenager before the crime occurred, continues to protest his innocence. Incarcerated in the Matsqui prison outside Vancouver, he was unavailable for comment, but his father, David Lord, calls Scorn "an arrogant, ignorant production not made from the point of view of truth. They just want to make something sensational out of it. It's really unfair to other people involved to take the word of a certified nut case as the absolute word in this case."
He and his wife, Elouise, have been picketing screenings of the film in Vancouver and Victoria. He says they will sue the CBC for defamation of character. The filmmakers never approached his family, Lord says. Berzins says he did write to him. In fact, what happened was that elder Lord got wind of the film and wrote to Berzins first, suggesting that he might want to hear the arguments for his son's appeal (which has not been forthcoming.) Berzins wrote him back, saying that the film would be based on the court case and on interviews with Huenemann and that if Lord had any further information he would be happy to look at it. Because the film had been mostly mapped out by then, Berzins did not interview David Muir or Derik Lord or Amanda Cousins.
"If I were trained in journalism, I would have had the impulse to get to the root of this," Berzins says. "It may have been an oversight. I would feel horrible if this movie were a perpetuation of some distortion of lies, but if anyone had brought forward material to me to suggest Derik was not involved, I think we would have put the brakes on. The only source of the denials was the Lords."
And that's why Gunnarsson -- and CBC spokeswoman Ruth-Ellen Soles -- adopt a sympathetic tone when discussing the Lords' combative remarks. "To lose your child to the prison system is a horrible thing," Gunnarsson says. "But we don't believe this is a miscarriage of justice. The evidence is pretty overwhelming. There's not a shadow of a doubt in my mind." Soles says there has been no notice of legal action received by the CBC.
What responsibility did Gunnarsson, who is 49 and has two children, feel for the truth of the story? He has a string of well-regarded films to his name, including the Emmy-winning documentary Gerrie and Louise, the Oscar-nominated documentary After The Axe, and the lush film adaptation of Rohinton Mistry's novel Such A Long Journey. Scorn is a sort of amalgam of his experience as a director of both genres.
"The ethics of delving into people's personal lives are that there has to be a level of truth-telling that warrants it," he says. The film was "heavily lawyered," especially for material that involved behaviour and relationships. For instance, Huenemann told them a lot about his relationship with his mother and grandmother that some surviving family members could find offensive and possibly slanderous. (Darren's stepfather, Ralph Huenemann, declined an offer to contribute to the film.)
Still, one of the details Gunnarsson did leave in is the suggestion that Derik Lord suffered physical abuse in his home. Gunnarsson is clearly edgy about the subject. "I wouldn't want to talk about that," he says. Berzins is nervous, too. "We're onto shaky territory there," he says. "It was something suggested to me."
On Sunday night, Derik Lord will likely be watching on his television set in his cell, a prison official said. His parents will be watching too, and thinking over their course of action. Darren Huenemann will likely be watching as well. It's his immortalization, after all.
Gunnarsson, meanwhile, probably won't be watching. He is well into completing his next film, Rare Birds, an adaptation of Ed Rich's novel, starring William Hurt and Molly Parker. It's a comedy.