I’d like to revisit your filmography. Beyond Tyra Banks, how did you move from the Demjanjuk documentary to The Devil Next Door, and from Operation Paperclip to the Bin Laden film? 

Dan: Me and my partner and wife—we’ve been doing political and historical documentaries for 20 years. We did Censored Voices about the Six-Day War and The Oslo Diaries about the peace accords between Israel and Palestine. We’ve done lots of political films.

Then we started working with Netflix, trying to make history into something that is not for history lovers—it’s for people who would never tune in to see a film about the Second World War but would want to see true crime. We want to bring the big topics we care about in an entertaining way—so people come back from work, watch the documentary not as something highbrow but as something compelling. And then the debate stays with them.

With Top Model, it’s exactly the same. From the outside, it looks fun. It’s colorful. It’s full of gossip. It talks about pop culture. But when you let it sink in, it raises stories about body image, sexual misconduct—call it rape, call it sexual harassment. It talks about the entertainment world we live in today, where you tune in to see someone being humiliated on television.

For us it’s always about that—how to tell a story that is exciting, compelling, engaging, with twists and turns, without feeling like a lecture, but raising bigger issues. We never give answers. With Operation Paperclip—the recruitment of Nazi scientists—we didn’t say whether it was good or bad. It’s a conversation for the viewers to have.

Right now there are tens of thousands of TikTok and Instagram videos debating the legacy of America’s Next Top Model. That’s the point.

It began with Demjanjuk as well — the idea of allowing viewers to decide for themselves whether the trial was a success or a failure.

Dan: Exactly. And we had the same feeling with Bin Laden. He was shot in the head—some people thought it was triumphal. Others said, what the hell, they put his body in the Indian Ocean, he should have been put on trial.

You give back to the spectator the liberty to form their own opinion. The whole war on terror is one big contentious topic. Even in our Middle East films, we always want people to have the conversation.

Personally, I thought the Tyra Banks story was more complex. On one hand, the models were humiliated and treated wrong—100 percent. Nothing changes that. But on the other hand, Tyra Banks is the only person who did reality TV who was asked to say sorry.

When you look at........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)