So traumatic, A24 paid for the therapy of the film team

The brutal rape and murder of four teenage girls in a frozen yogurt shop in Austin, Texas is the subject of the HBO docuseries of Margaret Brown “The Yogurt Shop Murders.”

The death of Amy Ayers, Sisters Jennifer Harbison and Sarah Harbison of 1991, and Eliza Thomas Mystified Police, chased the victim’s families and eventually became “part of the structure of Austin,” said Brown.

“It’s something you don’t really get away from in Austin,” said Brown.

Although Brown (“descendant”) was aware of crime, the idea for a four -part docuseries by Emma Stone and her husband Dave McCary, who used to live in Austin, came. The couple brought the docuseries to A24 to produce.

Brown spent more than three years interviewing the investigation teams of crime and the parents and brothers and sisters of the victims. The director and its producing team have also stated interrogation rooms of four teenage boys who have served time for crime. In addition, Brown interviewed “48 hours” correspondent in Moriarty, who dealt with the case, and documentary maker Claire Huie, who tried to make a film about the murders. Huie’s abandoning images, which can be seen in “The Yogurt Shop Murders”, included interviews with the relatives of the victim, detectives and Robert Springsteen, one of the men on the death cell for the crime for the crime after falsely confessing in the much published murders.

Variety Speaked with Brown about “The Yogurt Shop Murders” prior to the release of the series of 3 August on HBO.

The murders happened more than 30 years ago, but the pain that the family members of the victim still bear was clear in the interviews you had held with them. Were those interviews difficult to do, and were you completely worried about exploiting them?

Thousand percent yes. I was terrified. I didn’t really know what I was starting to be honest. I thought, “Oh, I made films about deep trauma before.” I mean, many of my films are about terrible things that happen to people, but I was not really prepared for the unsolved rape and murder of teenage girls, and the effect that it continues to have on (the victim) families. I was not aware of the emotional weight of sitting in the rooms with (the family members) for hours in succession on me. Then I thought, if I have a hard time, imagine what they are going through. It was just like a loop in my head.

Do you have hesitation about making a four -part series about an unsolved crime?

No. I knew about life in Austin and having many friends who are reporters who were completely obsessed with this case and his turns that it would work.

Claire Huie’s interview with Robert Springsteen in 2009 is very revealing. Do you think you could have made this series without Huie’s images?

That visual material was a gift. It would have been without another film. Claire is an incredible filmmaker, but making the film she tried to make her stop to be a filmmaker. It used her and she had to stop. Now she is a meditation teacher.

Have you tried to interview Robert Springsteen?

Oh yes, but he refused.

Was it a challenge to find all the sculptures that you used during the series?

When the project came to me, I asked what the (archive) images they had, and so they sent me all these images. It was like a David Lynch film as a documentary. It was like ‘Twin Peaks’. There was a kind of creepiness. I could hear the soundtrack in my head and I had this whole idea of how I would make the series. Then I met the families, and it was like: “Oh. I can’t make it that way. I can still use something of it, but it can’t be stylized.” It would have been a bad service to make it overly stylized.

You used some photos of the crime scene, but not who showed the victims. Why?

Those photos are so bad. My editorial team was like: “You can never look at it.” They were all so traumatized by the photos. I have seen some of them, but not all, because (the editorial team) said, “They will chase you for the rest of your life.” A24 paid for a part of the (the film team) therapy because it is really difficult for the system if you record it, and it is really difficult not to take it. It was difficult to live in that darkness for so long.

Would you say that life in that darkness was the most challenging part of making the series?

It was just very difficult for us to make it because it was just that dark, but we thought that the right way to make the series was to watch it. Because everyone has darkness in their life and everyone has to deal with trauma. This case is a fairly extreme case of people who are dealing with trauma, but I felt that there was something instructive about it. Every family treated the trauma in very different ways, and I found that fascinating.