When Joseph Emerson, an off-duty pilot aboard Alaska Flight 2059, was taken into custody in Portland, Oregon after seemingly trying to switch off the plane's engines while it was 30,000 feet in the air, Carmen García Durazo was only a few miles away.

This was in October of 2023. Now, less than a year later, the team at "The New York Times Presents" has rolled out "Lie to Fly," a new documentary film — for which Durazo serves as director — on FX and Hulu that structures a broader investigation into pilot mental health around Emerson's story.

"The public doesn't understand the real story."

For several years before his in-flight episode, Emerson had been silently grieving the death of his close friend and fellow pilot Scott Pinney. Though Emerson was struggling mentally, he hesitated to seek medical treatment — doing so would mean he'd have to disclose his situation to an aviation medical examiner (AME) during a routine check-in. If he was deemed unfit to fly, he could be grounded for months — leaving his wife and two children to live off of only one salary in the interim.

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Instead, during a grief retreat with Scott's father and a few friends, Emerson tried psychedelic mushrooms. The experience, which Emerson found to be deeply overwhelming, ultimately led to existential fears on the flight a few days later. While sitting in the jump seat, Emerson grew restless and anxious, leading him to believe, "this isn't real, I'm not actually going home . . . until I became completely convinced that none of this was real," per what he told ABC News in a recent interview. Then came his frightening actions, which saw him subsequently charged with 83 counts of attempted murder: one for each passenger and crew member on board the Alaskan Airlines flight.

Though Emerson is no longer charged with murder — he is now charged with one count of endangering an aircraft and 83 counts of recklessly endangering another person — "Lie to Fly" reveals how his mental-health predicament is not an original or isolated case. Less than a month after Emerson was arrested, he spoke to The Times' Mike Baker about the incident. For Durazo, that conversation "honestly raised more questions than it answered," prompting her to delve further.

"Perhaps this isn't a story about one man who had a struggle one day on an airplane. Perhaps there's a bigger system involved here," she told Salon.

"It's a way of telling a bigger story and it's a way of interrogating a system," Durazo added, referencing the Federal Aviation Administration's stringent and largely outdated guidelines and policies around pilot mental health.

Check out the full interview with Durazo, in which she discusses the "delicate dance" of approaching sources who have been through tragedy and broader public misconceptions of pilots' perfectionism.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did you first come upon Joe's story and what was your reaction as a director but also as someone just as a news consumer?

I think it's funny because I approached it the story from all of those angles, but also like the unplanned landing in Portland is in my backyard. So in addition to the headline about like an emergency landing in a plane . . . the fact that this one was happening a few miles from my home immediately caught my attention, just because the first instinct that comes up is like, "This is something out of the ordinary, something aberrant or abnormal must have happened."

So right away my curiosity is piqued there just as a resident I suppose. And it's not until more trickles of information started pouring out in dribs and drabs that I started to wonder, "What's the bigger story here, and what actually happened?" So I think that engaged the natural curiosity again, just as a resident, then as a journalist. And then Joe, as people will see in the film or if they were following the story immediately after that event in October, as his charges were pending, he was immediately obviously taken into custody and held awaiting the grand jury. So again, I just had this feeling of, "He's so close to me, and the person who could probably answer all of these questions that I have is just a few miles away."

The access question is always very tricky just because there's a lot of celebrity-authorized stuff, a lot of people are savvy about wanting editorial control, which we do not allow. So fast-forward a few more weeks later, Mike Baker — who's the national reporter for the New York Times who's based in Seattle — published a story that was the first long-form interview with Joe when he was still incarcerated. So this is prior to his release. And that interview — both the print and online story and then later the full audio, which I was able to listen to — honestly raised more questions than it answered, which again makes my documentary spider sense tell me that there's something even bigger going on. Perhaps this isn't a story about one man who had a struggle one day on an airplane; perhaps there's a bigger system involved here. And the reason I say that is because Mike's interview with Joe revealed someone who was very calm, very logical, very intelligent. It seemed — from listening to him speak — very aware and competent. And basically, when you read the first headline of this person threatening the lives of 83 people on an aircraft you think, "Oh my god he's crazy," right? And I think Mike's article revealed someone who was certainly not and also planted........

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