Director Amber Sealey talks Ted Bundy and her new film No Man Of God, starring Elijah Wood and Luke Kirby, ahead of the movie’s August 27, 2021 release in Theaters, On Demand and Digital.
It’s been over thirty years since Ted Bundy was executed for the murders of countless young women, and the fascination with his story and heinous crimes is stronger than ever. True crime has always been a prominent category in literature, TV, and film, and the recent surge in popularity of these grisly tales has proven fertile ground for creators who feel compelled to tell these stories.
The latest installment of the Bundy saga, No Man Of God, centers on the killer’s final years on death row as he agrees to a series of meetings with FBI profiler Bill Hagmaier (Elijah Wood). While Bundy, brilliantly played by chameleon Luke Kirby, asserts his typical illusion of control by “helping” profile suspects in other serial murders cases, Hagmaier’s participation hinges on getting the madman to share additional details of his own crimes. By spending time gaining Bundy’s confidence, Hagmaier ultimately hopes to provide closure to the countless families who don’t know what happened to their wives, sisters, and mothers.
While a majority of the film takes place in the cold, stark interrogation room within the Florida prison where Bundy awaits his fate, director Amber Sealey weaves an intriguing story that feels incredibly intense despite the literal confinement of the setting.
Cinema Scholars’ Rebecca Elliott recently sat down with the director to discuss No Man Of God and the many ins and outs of creating a compelling story amid such disturbing and limited context.
Rebecca Elliott: Hi, Amber, how are you today?
Amber Sealey: Good. How are you?
Elliott: I am doing great. I’m excited to talk to you about No Man of God.
Sealey: Well, thank you.
Elliott: Are you a fan of true crime and how does No Man of God fit into this current true crime craze that’s been growing the last couple of years?
Sealey: Am I a fan of true crime? No, I’m not. I’m not a true crime person. I like some of it, but I don’t go and seek it out. I think if there’s a true crime story, film, documentary or whatever that has something new to say, an interesting twist or just something different, then it’ll come onto my radar and I’m like, “Oh yeah, that looks interesting to me.” I think just the genre in general, it’s not one that I particularly gravitate towards. Which is a large part of why I thought it was interesting for me to come onto this project. I really liked that I wasn’t a natural fit. I wasn’t somebody who had made a bunch of true crime thrillers, and then, here I’m just making another one.
I was interested because I was like, hey, I am an outsider. One thing I do know is what it’s like to be a woman and to be scared of things like this happening to you. I do know what it’s like to walk down a dark alley at night and hear footsteps behind you and being worried. I just thought that was a really interesting thing. I know film, I know how to make films, but I bring this whole other side of a set of fresh eyes, if that’s not too cocky to say.
Elliott: No, not at all. That’s a great perspective because, like you were saying, coming at it from an outsider’s perspective is very helpful in telling tricky stories like this. Can you talk about… some of the most thrilling scenes in this film are actually just two dudes in a room. How do you keep that intensity when really it’s just two dudes in a room, but then when you watch it, it’s just so intense. Can you talk about directing those scenes and designing them?
Sealey: I had those same worries, and I was like, “Oh God, it’s two dudes in a room.” Not only just a room, a really boring room. Interrogation rooms by their very nature are meant to be plain and empty and there’s nothing on the wall. We had an amazing production designer, Michael Fitzgerald, who first of all, created a room that was really… we had to have the walls fly away so that we could re-ventilate the room and bring fresh air for COVID safety into the room every 15 minutes. He also added a lot of lines and texture, giving us a little bit of something back there.
The other thing is that to me, the human face is just constantly interesting. I can look at anyone’s face almost forever. It’s watching somebody go through something that is powerful. Whatever it is that they’re… whether it’s joy, pain or confusion. Whatever it is. To me, the human body and the human face is just really watchable. I had to sit back in that a little bit and go like, “You know what, it’s interesting just to look at people.” I love sitting on the bus and the subway and just looking at people. The other thing is that we’ve really worked on crafting this, having there be a shape, a narrative and a visual style to the scenes.
The first scene is about… we don’t know who Bundy is. We don’t see him clearly. To me, if that’s the motivation, then it’s really clear that the shots that we set up were going to be about hunting for Bundy, trying to figure him out. It’s looking through things, looking around things, having his eyes not being completely lit, seeing just half his face, not his full face. Then, as the relationship shifts and changes, so do the shots and so does how you approach them. For me, it was about looking at their four meetings and how their relationship had changed, and using camera lighting and visual style to represent the changes in the relationship emotionally.
Elliott: Can you talk about the casting of these two chameleon-like actors and what your collaboration looked like with them? That’s the meat and bones of this whole story. There’s other stuff going on, but can you talk about casting and collaborating with the actors?
Sealey: When I came on, Elijah was on board already as Bill (Hagmaier). He’s one of the producers, so he was on board and I was thrilled with it. I was like, “Great! I’ve been a fan of Elijah’s forever.” I was thrilled to be working with him, so he was on. Then, it was up to me to find the right Bundy. We had amazing casting directors as well. Danielle Aufiero and Amber Horn, casting directors. I really wanted Luke, and he was basically it. We saw a lot of amazing actors for the part, and so many of them were so talented. I was like, “They’re so brilliant, but they’re just not what I have in mind for this.” I really thought Luke would be amazing.
We had offered him the part and he had turned it down through his rep. You offer the part through the rep. He had turned it down and I was like, “I’ve just got to meet him and talk to him and tell him what my take is.” He might think this is going to be a schlocky thing or something where we’re all about showing the violence or perpetuating the myth that Bundy was a real rock star, genius, gorgeous guy. I met him and we had a great conversation and really bonded over what we thought was important to do and not do with this film. Aleksa Palladino, who plays Carolyn, the female lawyer, Bundy’s female lawyer. Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. Lawyer!
Elliott: I know. I still do it all the time.
Sealey: I said female. I was going to say she was the only female in the movie, which she is the only speaking female in the movie. She’s friends with friends of mine and had been in another friend of mine’s film that I’d seen. I was a fan of hers. When she came in to audition, I was like, “Oh yes, her. I love her.” She really captured the vibe, that working 80s woman energy, that I was trying to bring in. She was great. Robert Patrick, I’ve been a fan of his forever, as well.
Elliott: So great.
Sealey: It was really exciting to work with him. It was a great… W. Earl Brown, another great guy. Gilbert Owuor, who plays Decker. We had a really great group of actors.
Elliott: I loved the stock footage used as establishing shots and chapter markers. Can you talk about the choice to use stock footage like that, and the process of sourcing that? If you had someone to do that for you? Was it really intentional, all of the visuals or if it was more mish-mash.
Sealey: No, it was all very, very intentional. It was something that I had really wanted to use to be able to portray two things. One is the outside world. What does the world look like outside of this interrogation room? What’s going on? What are people’s hairstyles like? What music are they listening to? What’s the vibe? It’s a period piece. It’s very different from today. That was really important to me to capture. The other thing was I really wanted to see women outside of what we were having to sit and listen to. We are sitting and listening to this awful stuff, what happened to the victims. I wanted to see women also thriving, doing other things and being out in the world, a reminder of these are all the lives he cut short.
The other part of it is that I wanted to see what’s happening emotionally for Bill. It was a really conscious choice to not include him outside of this job. We see him in his office. We see him in this interrogation room and his car, that’s it. We don’t see him anywhere else. I wanted to have an emotional representation of what was going on for him without having to resort to adding a whole bunch of other scenes of here’s him with his family, here’s him where he’s at a restaurant and he has a breakdown or whatever it is. I thought there’s a way to get more creative with this and show emotionally what he’s dealing with, how everything is melding in his head.
It was that too. There were definitely… it was not a thrown together thing. They were consciously thought out. We spent a lot of time on the edit on those, actually. We had a lot of different manifestations of those. The footage producers and the editors, we all were scouring footage. Some of the footage came from… I have a next door neighbor and my cousin, both who I remember, had video cameras in the eighties. They were always filming at birthday parties and things like that.
I reached out to them and I said, “Hey, can you guys send me all your MiniDV and Hi8 tapes from the eighties?” They did and we had got just hours and hours and hours of tapes. We digitized them all, and myself and the editors watched through them all. We found these wonderful pure moments of life in the 80s. It was a mixture of that and scouring the internet for footage that we could use. Those are things like licensing music, licensing footage and you purchase it. It was a mixture of things, but it was very, very thought through and every shot has a purpose.
Elliott: It has a purpose. That’s what I thought and I had to ask. Another question I should ask is this definitely isn’t a meditation on the death penalty or anything like that, but you do fairly honor both sides of the argument without making a killer seem sympathetic at all. Can you talk about some of those themes and how you deal with that tricky subject matter and honor it without making Bundy seem sympathetic in any way.
Sealey: It’s so complicated. This definitely isn’t a movie that’s about the death penalty. I think that it’s impossible not to make this movie and not have some sort of comment on it. I try to really express just different viewpoints without being judgmental of either one. I think that Bill Hagmaier is in favor of the death penalty, the character, and probably the person as well, though I don’t want to speak for him. We have Carolyn Lieberman, the lawyer, who’s against the death penalty for anyone. She thinks it’s wrong for anyone no matter who they are, even the most hated man in America, Ted Bundy, at that time.
For me, it’s not a movie that’s about that, and that’s such a complicated issue. I think we can all be philosophically for or against it depending on what our own personal beliefs are. I wasn’t trying to make a huge statement about that. I’m trying to even think what… I think you had a second part of your question and I’m blanking on it.
Elliott: Not really. It’s like you said, it’s impossible not to at least address it. At the same time, you were saying, sometimes the story of Ted Bundy is sensationalized and he’s made out to be this rock star. I really appreciated the fact that you did not make him seem sympathetic in the least, but still honored that perspective.
Sealey: This was not Dead Man Walking where we’re like having sympathy for the killer who is going to be killed himself. This is not that. I wasn’t trying to do that. I personally don’t have any sympathy for Ted Bundy. I personally don’t believe in the death penalty, but I also think he should have been killed. I don’t even know what my feelings are about the death penalty in its entirety.
I’m against it because I think our legal system has so many flaws and so many errors. I think there are way too many people who are put on death row who, turns out later, DNA evidence proves they’re innocent. That just scares me. However, if somebody were to hurt my family or my children, I’d go and personally murder them. It’s really hard to say where I stand on that. I think this was not about trying to show Bundy sympathetically.
When you see anyone who’s about to die, you’re going to feel something for them. That’s human nature, so there are some sympathies that are going to come out no matter how horrible the person was that you’re looking at who’s going to be executed. To me, it was more about showing the real Bundy that I saw when I watch his interviews, and I listened to his tape recordings. To me, he was a deeply insecure, really narcissistic psychopath, and just completely self-absorbed. I didn’t see him as a sympathetic person at all.
That said, you can still feel sorry for somebody like that while still maintaining that he’s a really bad person. My feelings on it are really different from say, Bill Hagmaier’s feelings on it. I was trying to show like, “Look, I guess Carolyn Lieberman’s perspective maybe would have been more mine of being anti-death penalty.” I was trying to have her perspective exist with someone like Bill’s perspective and even someone like Bundy’s perspective. It’s all different. To me, cinema’s at its most interesting when it’s offering complexity and conflicting opinions.
Elliott: Absolutely. I thought you handled it really well and I just wanted to commend you on that, because it is tricky. You don’t necessarily want to take a stance, but at the same time, you don’t want to make a monster look any kind of innocent. Well I think that-
Sealey: It’s really hard, I don’t know. Better filmmakers than me can, maybe.
Elliott: They would be hard pressed, for sure. You did an amazing job. I want to thank you so much for chatting with me. I really enjoyed the film, and I wish you luck going forward with it.
Sealey: Thanks so much. It was great to talk with you.
RLJE Films is releasing No Man Of God in Theaters, On Demand and Digital on August 27, 2021.
