Did you have any hope of “solving” this attempted murder? When did it become clear that neither Josh nor Donna would confess?
We interviewed both Josh and Donna while they were incarcerated, so we didn’t hope for confessions, per se, but merely the re-telling of events as they believed them, or wanted others to believe them. The film presents three different versions of what happened that July day, and no single version is unbiased, including the prosecutor’s. We think this adds to the richness of the film, and we deliberately interweaved the re-tellings to emphasize the differences. I even re-watched Kurosawa’s masterpiece Rashomon, because the situation reminded me of the essence of his story: each person remembering events differently to put themselves in the best light. At one point I even had labels such as “The Woodcutter’s Version,” “The Lady’s Version,” but luckily changed them later to “The Girlfriend’s Version” and “The Farmer’s Version,” because the reference would have been just too obscure! So we deliberately leave the mystery ambiguous, but if you pay close attention to the events as they unfold, you’re aware that the events of that morning were only the climax, that it had been building for many days, with many participants, and with plenty of guilt to go around.
For the most part, the characters all seemed very interested — in some cases, eager — to tell their side of the story. Was it difficult to get the town to open up about it, or were people excited to gossip with a filmmaker “from away?”
First, as painful as it is for me to admit, having been born in Bangor and raised in Portland, I was still considered a PFA — even when we moved back to Westport Island! But I think that had I been living my whole life in Portland, it still would have been difficult gaining people’s trust in a small town of which I was not a part. People were anything but eager to participate, and certainly not keen to “gossip.” People backed out of interviews, made themselves hard to reach, canceled appointments, or flat out declined to participate. I think Mainers, like a lot of rural people, have an innate distrust of outsiders, as well they should . Outsiders usually mean someone coming in to take something away — or put something up. Again, it takes a leap of faith, a belief that the filmmaker is going to give a fair representation of a person’s side of the story and that the filmmaker will take the time to try to understand exactly what the story really was, in all its dimensions. This was a big event in Farmington, a big event in the Osborne family, and people had strong feelings. For many of them, that meant there was an inner desire to participate in telling that story depending on where their sympathies lay, but bridging that divide between intention and exposition took trust — and time.
