The brutal kidnapping of Mary Barnes and Michael S. always seemed destined to be made into a movie when their assailants fashioned themselves as movie stars, referencing each other by the same nom de plumes used in “Reservoir Dogs.” All that was missing was Stealer’s Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle With You” playing in the background when they took the pot dealer and the guest staying at his house out to desert of Kern County, California and asked for a million dollars in exchange for preserving Michael’s manhood. The threat was strange enough, but when Michael hardly had that kind of cash from his modest business, things get far stranger in “Dickweed,” in which the man convicted of the assault and attempted robbery can’t help but going in front of the camera.
Although the wild nonfiction thriller revolves around a single night, director Jonathan Ignatius Green brilliantly shows the psychic hold it has had on all involved from Michael, who is game to recount the traumatic evening so long as his identity is obscured, to Newport Beach Detective Ryan Peters, who knew something was up when called upon to investigate though his normal beat was homicides, to Hossein Nayeri, the charismatic criminal who maintains his innocence but is clearly guilty of being an attention hound. When it seems like who did it is answered relatively quickly, the why becomes the film’s driving force as well as how it continues to live on in the minds of all of them who can so vividly recount the night in question that the recreations that Green deploys to trace the investigation become seamless and the oddity of the case brings out a host of colorful characters.
With the film becoming the talk of Austin since its premiere over the weekend at SXSW, Green, who previously brought the insightful influencer doc “Social Animals” to the festival in 2018, spoke about hanging on for dear life in capturing the twists and turns of the crazy crime saga, corralling everyone that was a part of it to do interviews and how the process of reenacting the situation could allow a window into what actually happened.
How did this come about?
My producer actually pitched me the story [after] reading an article somewhere back in 2019, and we decided to pursue it as our first true crime project. [We] wrote a letter to Hossein Nayeri and he responded and we eventually went down to the jail and met him. Eventually, we sat through his trial for four weeks, virtually every day and then we were off to developing it into a story.
One of the things that is so great about this is how you’re able to keep a limited number of voices despite how sprawling a tale this is. Was that obvious?
We talked to a lot of law enforcement, and once we talked to Detective Peters, we really let the procedural journey he went on to track down Nayeri for a couple of years be our architecture of our story, because for so long, the victims and Detective Peters didn’t know who had done this, and obviously any kind of crime [story] benefits from a mystery. I’m always looking for my storytellers to be people that were directly involved, and that have some emotional stakes in it [where] it’s not just a job and I also think documentaries can suffer from having too many voices, so I really wanted to anchor into a few characters and really get to know them. It was really important to me to have the victim’s perspective because it’s just such a shocking and bizarre story that it gave it the heart that I think it needed to remind the audience, this isn’t just a crazy thing to happen, this is somebody who lived this experience.
When you’ve got a couple anonymous people at the center, was it a challenge?
Yeah, of course. We obviously spoke with Mary who you can see on camera and she was comfortable with that. On the other hand, Michael’s prerequisite for being involved was to maintain his anonymity, and we’re obviously very respectful of his wishes and even though you don’t see his face, it’s still powerful to hear that firsthand account and, in some ways, it actually gave his account and the events of that night even more intrigue because he isn’t totally visually present to the audience.
It’s such a seamless blend of the recreations and the actual evidence that was involved in the case, how much of that needs to be planned out to figure out what you need to add in between to make it all work?
Yeah, I’ve taken the lead from my producers, Bryan and Amy Storkel where in the films that they’ve made and the films that I’ve made now, we do our core interviews and cut a radio edit of the film to really know that the story is working just strictly on the level of it being told to someone. Then we cut and [do] archive on that to see where are the visual holes, and then where we could amplify the emotional experience for the audience by showing them something that’s not just archive or interview.
Because Detective Peters was going to be our main storyteller, I was really interested in leaning into the neo-noir visual style, so we cut the whole film as a story with archive and then I went away and wrote a script of what I thought needed to be shot visually to support that story, so there were really two very separate phases of production that were only brought together at the end.
When you’re filming recreations, but you’re going to the back to the places where it actually took place, is there anything that you can figure out about the case that you may not have gotten from either interviews or evidence?
What probably fits the most with that is we filmed the night of the crime not in the actual desert where it happened, but in the area and it happened to be in that heat wave last summer, so it was 109 degrees out in the desert. We were having our actors basically replay these events and when our actors were bound with gags on and laying in the desert [playing the victims], a number of our crew were really emotionally impacted. We’re all there to do a job and we’re all professional, but you’re just realizing in a more tangible, visceral way what the real people actually had to go through, let alone suffering injuries of the degree that they did while just being bound in a desert and having to claw your way out. That was probably the most profound experience, really seeing and suffering the kind of conditions of the desert and then thinking about what they had gone through.
There’s so many crazy twists and turns just within the story, but was there anything that changed your thinking about this or took it in a direction you might not have expected?
Yeah, I wouldn’t say there were revelations about the facts of the case but really about the lived experience of those that were for whom this is their story. A lot of that came from just the level of detail that we were able to [get from] Detective Peters. We did a six-plus hour interview with him and he had really re-familiarized himself with a lot of the details as I got to ask a lot of questions that I’d had for years that aren’t in a court transcript or a crime report. Part of that was the lived experience of what it meant to have to be hunting this person for so long and how he had to constantly pivot and where his frustrations were, where it was just like waiting and waiting and waiting at so many times and then when he found out that Hossein had effectively left the country to a non-extraditable country, how he basically had to start over.
What it was like to hear Hossein’s side of the story?
Without giving too much away, it was complicated. He agreed years ago that there would be a scenario where he would entertain [the idea of an interview], but he only finally agreed to do that a few weeks before we had to picture lock the movie, and as is often the case with documentary filmmaking, you’re not done making it until it’s on a screen, so all the way up to the day where we had to be done editing, we were still integrating him in and pushing it all the way to the edge. But I’d talked to Hossein for on and off for five years, so the rapport and comfort level was there and it was just the mechanics of how to do it and then also the permissions that are needed to do it, and then him being finally willing to do it.
These are my words and not yours, but I know this is a triumphant return after “Social Animals” at SXSW, so what’s it like to get back?
It’s great. I loved premiering “Social Animals” back in 2018 and I’ve produced and written some documentaries since then, but this is the next time that I’m premiering a film that I’ve directed, so I’m super excited to go back and get to premiere with that audience. It’s the right festival and the right place for this particular film to premiere, so I was very excited that they invited us back.
“Dickweed” will screen again at SXSW on March 12th at 6:45 pm at the Violet Crown Cinema 2 and 7:15 pm at the Violet Crown Cinema 4 and March 14th at 5:45 pm at the Violet Crown Cinema 1 and March 14th at 6:15 pm at Violet Crown Cinema 3.