Justice in the eye of the beholder

Paris — French director Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s riveting eight-part documentary, “The Staircase” -- which debuted to rave reviews in April on the Sundance Channel, where it is airing in its entirety tonight -- follows the trial of novelist Michael Peterson, accused of murdering his wife, Kathleen, in North Carolina in 2001. With its polished production values, emotional cello score and lack of voice-over narration, some viewers have wondered if “The Staircase” is simply too well-acted, perfectly cast and bizarrely suspenseful to be true.

“I made a documentary in the form of a drama,” De Lestrade said during a recent interview that included his producing partner, Denis Poncet, in their modest office on a busy street in the 11th arrondissement. “I can’t go farther than that, or I will be breaking the rules.”

With a promise not to show any footage until after the trial ended, the filmmakers had unprecedented access to Peterson’s $1-million defense team, and carte blanche to film Peterson at home with his dogs and the four of his five children who stood behind him throughout the trial. It would have been impossible to make such a documentary in France, said De Lestrade, where people are “more suspicious of the camera” and filming is not allowed in courtrooms.

Poncet noted that American subjects come across on film as “actors in their own lives -- characters who become practically movie characters.”

“It can have a perverse effect,” added De Lestrade, who said it took six months of the 20-month shoot to get people to stop playing for the camera.

Once they did, De Lestrade meticulously shot almost 700 hours of footage, elegantly crafting it into a mesmerizing six-hour film that has all the moral complexity of a tragic play set in the cultural context of a deeply divided America.

Courts under a microscope

This is not the first time that De Lestrade, 41, and Poncet, 56, a former foreign correspondent who covered Watergate during five years in Washington, D.C., have taken on an explosive American subject since founding Maha Films in 1999. “Murder on a Sunday Morning,” their 2001 documentary about a black teenager falsely accused of killing a white tourist in Florida, won an Academy Award. For their next project, they set out to find someone “white, rich, who has the means to defend himself, and to see how the American justice system functioned,” De Lestrade said.

After reviewing dozens of cases, they settled on the Peterson affair when De Lestrade, unsure of the novelist’s innocence or guilt, nevertheless had “the profound sentiment that Michael Peterson was prosecuted for the values he represented.” A Vietnam vet, Peterson wrote novels about the war and newspaper columns denouncing local corruption, and despite his being by all accounts happily married, the police discovered that he paid men for sex on the side.

“For the white establishment, he’s a traitor,” said the tall, handsome De Lestrade, who speaks in a gentle voice and gives thoughtful, two-part answers. “In my opinion, he was prosecuted for being a danger to the values defended by the prosecution, which match up more or less with the values defended by Bush -- very conservative, religious, a narrow vision of life. I think the prosecution tried to present a sensible scenario that makes people think that life is simple, that makes them feel secure: She discovers he’s gay, gets angry, they fight and he kills her, because he was the bad guy and she was the nice one.”

Unable to produce a motive, a murder weapon or a single witness to testify that the Peterson marriage was anything less than idyllic, the prosecution painted Peterson as a pervert and a liar. “I think for the prosecution team, it was unimaginable that a relationship like that could function,” said De Lestrade, “so it must end in an act of violence. If you say they were a happy couple drinking Champagne by the pool, she decides to go to bed and falls down the stairs and he finds her having bled to death -- that’s something that in my opinion makes people profoundly uncomfortable, because it shows how fragile life can be.”

Prosecution’s boycott

While the documentary focuses chiefly on the defense’s every backstage move, De Lestrade said that is only because the other side closed the door. “Jim Hardin and Freda Black are really narrow-minded,” he said of the prosecution team, adding that the first time he met Hardin, the stone-faced Southern prosecutor “had a hard time even saying the word ‘homosexual.’ ”

“They’re used to dealing with journalists who do a minute or two on the news at night, not people filming all the time,” he continued. “It must have scared them, because it would have been difficult to control us. But the defense agreed to play the game knowing that if they trusted us and showed us what they had, the film might serve them in the end.”

The director said he believes that if Peterson, a cultivated aesthete who eschewed the golf course and the country club for the symphony and the ballet and ran twice for mayor unsuccessfully, is the consummate outsider, so is his attorney. “David Rudolf is a Jew from New York. He hates it when I say this but I think that he forgot at a certain moment that even if he’s lived there for more than 20 years, for the people of Durham, he is still an outsider.”

Diligent, smart, a bit of a showoff, Rudolf is also more likable than his client and seems more genuinely convinced of Peterson’s innocence than the man himself. When the guilty verdict comes in, it’s almost easier to feel more compassion for Rudolf than for the man headed for a life sentence without parole; with his twitchy mannerisms, opaque gaze and writerly distance, Peterson fails to provide convincing testimony of his innocence, even if the facts of the case make it impossible to be certain of his guilt.

In a phone interview, Rudolf said that watching “The Staircase” was “a very, very emotionally wrenching and depressing experience. It put me right back in the middle of it, except that I knew that the outcome was going to be a disaster.”

He is still licking his wounds. “It’s just very difficult for me to have my normal energy and commitment and passion for what I do. I don’t know honestly if I’ll ever fully recover from it because it was just such a deflating moment. It made me so suspicious and untrusting of the system. I always felt like if I was able to just get in there and do what I needed to do, that logic and facts would prevail. I don’t think that’s what happened here.”

The director said he sees the Peterson case as a mirror that reflects the attitudes of its observers more than the elusive truth, posing questions about love, relationships, sexual ambiguity, reality and justice.

“David Rudolf is a very good lawyer,” De Lestrade said, “but he wasn’t getting along with his wife at the time -- and from the beginning he said, ‘I would like to meet a woman who I could talk about the way that Michael Peterson talks about his wife.’ He was stuck on that -- it was an extraordinary love, Michael and Kathleen, so I can’t understand how he could have killed her. It was a moment in his life when the story had a lot of resonance for him.”

Rudolf divorced a year later, but said it is unfair to blame that on the case. “I think anyone would wish for the kind of relationship they had. I think that very few people have it.”

Exhaustive effort

In a Times review, Robert Lloyd called “The Staircase” “a cross between Frederick Wiseman’s long-form institutional documentaries and Errol Morris’ ‘The Thin Blue Line,’ an examination both of the workings (and the machinations) of the justice system and of the slippery nature of truth.”

“Those are my two masters,” the director said with a grin. “So I was very happy to read that.”

Nevertheless, making “The Staircase” was a drain, he said. “I don’t think people realize how much making a film like that demands an emotional investment -- spending 20 months with someone and being constantly obliged to ask yourself ‘Is he telling the truth?’ ”

So while Poncet is now producing a project about the life of Hemingway, De Lestrade has decided to seek refuge in fiction. “I’m writing a script,” he said, smiling bashfully and flipping a few pages of what appeared to be a draft posed front and center on his desk.

Is there a murder in it?

“More or less,” he said. “It’s a mystery, the story of a couple.”

A few weeks ago, De Lestrade visited Peterson, who has not been allowed to see the film, in the medium-security prison where he is passing time writing a book about the trial and waiting on an appeal being handled by Rudolf’s associate Tom Maher (Rudolf is unofficially consulting). “He’s exactly the way you see him in the film,” De Lestrade said. “He hasn’t changed.”

Making “The Staircase,” De Lestrade said, was a lesson in humility. “I was persuaded that when it was all over, I would have the definite conviction that he killed her or he didn’t. In the end, there’s a very intimate part of people that nobody can penetrate. I still don’t know what happened.”

Nevertheless, he has the lingering impression that Peterson never put all of his cards on the table.

“I always had the sense that he carried a feeling of guilt around, but not necessarily the guilt of having killed his wife,” he said. “It could have been linked to his bisexuality, or maybe that night he did something that he regrets. Maybe he didn’t stay by the pool but he went out to see someone, and if he hadn’t she’d never have been dead. I don’t think he admitted everything that happened that night. But I still have a hard time imagining that he could have killed her.”