When she was filming “At the Heart of Gold: Inside the USA Gymnastics Scandal," her searing 2019 HBO documentary about the Larry Nassar scandal, Erin Lee Carr arrived to interview Dominique Moceanu, one of the gymnasts who helped the U.S. team win gold at the 1996 Games in Atlanta. One of the techs on the set took one look at her and assumed she was the makeup artist.
“I am NOT the effing makeup artist,” Carr remembers snapping at him. “It was one of those moments that reminds you what you’re still having to deal with.”
The Minneapolis-born, New York-based documentary filmmaker and 2010 Communication Arts graduate went into “At the Heart of Gold,” which just won a prestigious Television Academy Award last month, looking to explore the parasitic relationship between coaches and athletes. In focusing her story keenly on the voices and stories of the gymnasts—Nassar only shows up in courtroom footage—she created a powerful, feminist narrative.
“Having the film morph into this really intense dialogue about what it means to be a girl or a woman and try to be believed—it was like true crime meets #MeToo,” she says. “The power of the testimony the gymnasts gave was so pure. You could hear a pin drop.”
Crime documentaries have become Carr’s calling card, carrying her up the shortlist for up-and-coming directors. In 2017, “Mommy Dead and Dearest,” her HBO documentary about the notorious murder of Dee Dee Blanchard by her abused daughter, Gypsy Rose, and the shady boyfriend she met online won raves from TV critics. In April, “How to Fix a Drug Scandal,” a four-part Netflix docuseries about a pair of state drug lab chemists who tampered with evidence and upended multiple criminal cases, made the streaming network’s top ten most watched list.
“I’m a populist. I want to make films that have the widest audience,” Carr explains. “If you want to do that, it’s basically food, sports or crime. And crime is a way to have philosophical discussions and still have an audience.”
Carr cut her filmmaking teeth in her twenties at websites like Vice and The Verge. Her work eschews the typical tawdry approach to true crime and the standard-issue, white-woman-in-peril narrative for something far more subtle and interesting. If you watch carefully, you’ll note that digital technology is a running theme in most of her work. In her 2015 directorial debut for HBO, “Thought Crimes: The Case of the Cannibal Cop,” a police detective’s wife installs spyware on his computer to catch him conversing online with some truly, um, unsavory characters. In “Mommy Dead and Dearest,” troublesome Facebook posts tip friends, neighbors and police that something’s amiss.
“Our identity is telegraphed in our digital communications,” Carr asserts. “That’s why basically, most of my stuff is set in the mid-aughts.”
Carr is an extremely driven artist, often juggling multiple projects at once. It’s one of several traits she learned from her father, David Carr, the famous New York Times media columnist who died in 2015, the same year Erin had her HBO directorial debut. In 2019 Carr wrote a book, All That You Leave Behind, about what it was like to grow up with him.
“It’s how I was raised,” she says. “You work, you work, and you work some more. All of this is very difficult. I can’t sleep at night, and my mind is always running, I’m just now coming to the point where I know how to do this.”
To relax, she hangs out in parks with Bonnie Jean, the mutt she adopted to help her relieve stress. She has described Bonnie Jean as her only hobby.
Carr’s drive and determination have always been a strong part of her character. She once convinced the strict sisters who ran the private religious school she attended in New Jersey to bend the school’s dress code, allowing her to wear a red Wisconsin sweatshirt as a good-luck talisman to help her gain admission to UW-Madison. (It worked, obviously—and she still owns the sweatshirt.) While she describes her time in Madison as more fun than achievement-focused, she recalls the city as one of the kindest places she’s ever lived.
“I would sit on the terrace and have no thoughts,” she says. “I was content. It felt more like what life should be like.”
Carr’s career continues to speed up—she’s currently working on another docuseries project for HBO, as well as a standalone film and an adaptation scheduled for Hulu—and the recent award win may smooth the way for even more opportunities. She’s keenly aware of the weight each of her artistic decisions now carries.
“I want to continue to be thoughtful about the subjects I’m taking on,” she says.
Last week, Carr spoke to UW communication arts students online about her crime documentaries. Generous with advice and encouragement, she describes it as a pay-it-forward “AA thing,” referring to her battles with substance abuse.
“I want to mentor future directors,” she explains. “The idea of potentially providing work for other people is something really profound. At the same time, I don’t need to become an empire. I just want to make films. I’m just a lady in a dark room having dark thoughts.”