Erin Lee Carr’s Criminal Mind

Erin Lee Carr has made a career in crime. When I arrive at Vidiots, the DVD rental store, hangout, and art-house cinema in Eagle Rock, Los Angeles, I find her thumbing through O.J: Made in America, Hoop Dreams, West of Memphis, and Capturing the Friedmans and The Jinx, both by Andrew Jarecki. “He tries not to take sides so the audience has to decide what they think happened,� she tells me. “So that shows up in a lot of my work.�

Since 2015, she has been a director or producer (and sometimes both) on more than a dozen different true-crime projects, most of them documentaries ripped from the tabloid headlines, starting with Thought Crimes: The Case of the Cannibal Cop, about Gilberto Valle. On October 15, HBO will debut a two-part documentary produced and directed by Carr titled I’m Not a Monster: The Lois Riess Murders, which tells the tale of a Minnesota grandmother who killed her husband and went on the run. Three days later, Hulu will release Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara, a documentary she directed that investigates the 2011 file hacking of the Canadian indie-pop duo who became popular in the mid-aughts.

It’s all a bit … dark, although Carr herself, with her Hollywood teeth and hair extensions, comes across as pretty happy and successful. Things are clearly going her way — the black car waiting to take us to lunch after Vidiots was paid for by Hulu, she tells me. “I think I’m an incredibly lucky person and unlucky person,� she says. She is the daughter of the late journalist, media columnist, and former crackhead David Carr, who died shockingly, suddenly at 58 after collapsing on the floor of the Times newsroom in 2015. In his 2008 memoir, The Night of the Gun, he wrote about his drug use while working in Minneapolis in the mid-1980s, and how he went from drug user to drug dealer, eventually moving in with Erin’s mother, Anna O’Leary, an accomplished dealer herself with connections to Colombian drug cartels. Erin and her twin sister, Meagan, went into foster care before they were returned to the custody of their father and, later, his new wife, Jill.

Carr has had her struggles with sobriety, and staying sober (which she has been for nine years now). Maybe some of this has helped her in making films about people whose lives have gone horrifyingly off the rails.“I think I’ve had a lot of life experience from my origin story to now. A lot has happened, even though I look like a fairly put-together person. No one would ever suspect I am a crack baby and grew up under pretty intense circumstances.�

“I think I was always happy-go-lucky as a child though,� she shrugs. Her dad wrote in his book: “Erin is a reflexive bright-sider and a bit of a sensualist. When we went for a ride in the car when she was little, she would say, ‘I love this world because there are so many things I love in it.’ She is a kid, by now a person, who has always seen the glass as half full, and when it’s empty, simply finds a way to fill it herself.�

She wishes he had lived longer to see all that she has accomplished. “It has been ten years since my father died and it’s really sad he only got to see one movie I made and it was my super grotesque first film about a cannibal cop,� Carr says, referring to Gilberto Valle, a.k.a. the cannibal cop, whom she began visiting in prison prior to his conviction being overturned. While it received a handful of warm reviews, it didn’t make a huge splash. It was more than enough, though, to put Carr’s career as a filmmaker in full gear. “That’s the amazing thing about the boon of streaming,� Carr says. “Once you have a hit, you will be trusted. Unless you’re the worst to work with. But I can do things on a budget and on schedule.�

The car and driver takes us to the Golden Dragon, a Chinese food restaurant where Carr celebrated nine years of sobriety this past August. We’re seated at a table close enough that we can hear the (off-key) karaoke from the backrooms, even though it’s barely 5 p.m. She orders enough food for about ten people. Dumplings, noodles, some kind of eggplant dish. “We can always take it home,� she says. She later exits with two plastic bags of takeaway.

She had credited much of her success over the last nine years — her projects have included Stormy, At the Heart of Gold: Inside the USA Gymnastics Scandal, The Ringleader: The Case of the Bling Ring, and Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini — to her mentors, including Sheila Nevins, the 85-year-old former head of MTV Documentary Films and the former president of HBO Documentary Films. “She’s now a cross between a mother and confidant,� Carr says. “She’s a very scary person, but she’s sweet.�

Nevins is, in a roundabout way, a connection through her father. The elder Carr initially met Nevins through Andrew Rossi, the documentarian who made the 2011 film Page One: Inside the New York Times, which her father was featured in. Rossi set up an initial meeting between Erin and Nevins. The older woman wasn’t impressed with Carr’s initial documentary pitch but did think her cannibal-cop pitch had promise. She urged her to explore it more, which lit a fire in the aspiring filmmaker.

But it wasn’t till she later saw Carr become ill (she suffers from interstitial lung disease) that the two became closer. “She said I want to take you to my doctors,� Carr explains.

She’s given her other advice, too. “At one point she  told me: ‘I’ve paid you enough money; it’s time to fix your teeth.’ And I did.� She runs her tongue along them.

Following her father’s death, Carr wrote her own 2019 memoir, All That You Leave Behind, about her relationship with her dad and her struggle with his passing and her own sobriety. “My lit agent has asked me if I would ever think about writing another book. I’m like ‘I don’t know,� Erin says. “It’s pretty tough. I feel like I’m pretty good at this movies thing. I think that I was really so in pain when I was writing that book and I was really angry and I was newly sober. The rawness of the book really helped it.�

As a high-schooler obsessed with movies, she wanted to be a film critic. Her father dissuaded her, explaining those jobs were few and far between. (She considered journalism school, she tells me, but didn’t get in. “Can you believe that?�)

While at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Carr interned at Fox Searchlight Pictures. After graduating, she landed at Vice as an associate producer. She left in 2013 and, after a brief stint at the Verge, became a freelance director for HBO Documentary Films. Her breakout was her sophomore documentary, Mommy Dead and Dearest, which not only catapulted Carr’s career, but also helped make its subjects — Gypsy Rose Blanchard and her deceased mother, Dee Dee Blanchard — infamous. The film premiered at  SXSW in 2017 and aired on HBO that May. She launched Carr Lot Productions that year, too. The same producers as The Act (also about the Blanchards) are behind her next project, a scripted series exploring Alex Murdaugh’s role in the 2021 murders of his wife, Maggie (who will be played by Patricia Arquette), and his son, Paul, for Hulu. Carr is a co-creator alongside showrunner Michael D. Fuller.

She tells me at one point that while what she does is journalism, she sees a staunch differentiation in the work of her and her late father. “There are obviously journalists that get very close to their subjects, but with documentary, you end up living with the people,� she emphasizes. “It is a very intimate relationship. And so I think that the amount of time I spend with somebody often leads to that authenticity.�

Carr says her subjects usually are happy with her documentaries. “It would be very upsetting to me if people didn’t like it. I always try to watch the film with the people who I made it about. So that helps too.� (To this day, she would do anything to meet Britney Spears, who she didn’t get to work with while making 2021’s Britney vs. Spears, which she directed and produced: “I wanted so deeply to do right by her that it would keep me up at night.�)

It is, she admits, not always easy — for her or the subjects. “It’s tough to watch things with people,� she says. “With Rachel Lee [the group’s leader in The Ringleader: The Case of the Bling Ring], there are times where I catch her in a lie and I very much show the lie. It’s not going to always be cozy or comfortable for the person, nor should it be.�

Carr is very open with everything about herself. She split with her fiancé, a Washington Post reporter, in 2022. She is now in a relationship with two partners, musician Mal Blum and Mish Bruton (Carr is in a relationship with each partner, but they aren’t in a relationship with each other, something she calls a “polycule�). “I recommend people dating multiple people,� she says. “You can’t get everything from one person, nor should you expect to.� Carr had been a fan of Blum’s music and when she noticed, on social media, that they were single, too, they struck up a friendship that turned something more. Then, a few months later, she met Bruton on a dating app. “They had a picture on a horse with their shirt off and I was like I have got to see this person!�

She gets very excited describing each of her partners, gushing about how “cute� each one is. Both of them live in Los Angeles, not far from the Highland Park home Carr shares with her dog, Bonnie, a beagle-Lab-pitbull mix she got through the court officer, Marianne, at the Michelle Carter trial while directing I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth V. Michelle Carter for HBO in 2019. Blum is openly transgender and queer and uses they/he pronouns; Bruton uses they/them pronouns. The Fanatical premiere in L.A. will be the first time that Carr plans to attend an event publicly with both her partners, she says. “I think we’re going to see how we travel together,� she explains. “The world is made for two people. You invite another person to dinner or you have a person next to you on the plane. It’s going to be interesting. And then I’m going to have to be away from them while I’m working on Murdaugh, shooting on location. So that’s going to be tough, too.�

Some of her father’s best advice, according to Carr, was, “be as ambitious and bold as you want and don’t let other people tone you down,� she says. “I had a very progressive dad. Very pro queerness. I was in love with my best friend in high school and everybody knew it and they were like … ‘Do you know it?’� She laughs as she scoops up noodles into her mouth with chopsticks. She knows it now.

As we wrap up our early dinner together, I remind her of a quote of her father’s that she cites in her book. It’s a journalistic premise that “you are not an intrinsically interesting subject� — yet, I have flown across the country to interview her. How does that make her feel? I watch her blush.

“It’s also making sure my career is not just about what my dad would have wanted or did. One time he asked, ‘Do you think you’ll be more successful than me?’ I said, ‘I hope so!’ and he said, ‘I don’t even know whether to laugh or cry.’ But I think he expected that answer.�