Why is the director of ‘The Staircase’ docuseries so upset by HBO Max’s dramatization?

In the more than two decades since Michael Peterson’s wife Kathleen was found at the bottom of a staircase in their Durham home, the plot has thickened over and over and over again, so often that the whole story probably should have long ago hardened into a big block of cement.

All these years later, however, North Carolina’s infamous true-crime saga keeps cranking out wildly unexpected twists and turns.

This month, the director of the acclaimed 2018 Netflix docuseries “The Staircase,” which entered the case into the national pop-cultural lexicon, alleged that the creator of a new “inspired-by-true-events” HBO Max limited series — which is also titled “The Staircase” and dramatizes both the case and the making of that docuseries — is unfairly depicting how his docuseries was made.

Or, to put it in simpler terms: Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, the director of the documentary, says Antonio Campos, the creator of the dramatized series, is telling a story that could tarnish his documentary’s reputation.

The cause of all the fuss? Her name is Sophie Brunet, and in real-life, she did work as one of multiple editors on the docuseries for de Lestrade. She also becoming an eyebrow-raising though relatively minor part of the behind-the-scenes story after a pen-pal relationship with Michael Peterson turned into an in-person romance.

But in Campos’s “Staircase,” a fictionalized version of Brunet is a major character who figures heavily in the fifth episode, which debuted Thursday on HBO Max. She’s depicted not only as the sole editor of the docuseries, but also as having an ulterior motive that looks an awful lot like a conflict of interest.

It’s something de Lestrade calls “a misrepresentation” and “a huge damage on my work.”

It’s a kerfuffle that could get ugly. “It may be interesting to explore a legal way to (deal with this),” the French documentarian told The Charlotte Observer in a phone call from Paris on Wednesday.

And — just like everything else related to the story of Kathleen Peterson’s death, and to the 2003 trial that ended with Michael Peterson being sent to prison for her murder, and to the quirky machinations of the justice system that led to his being set free years later — it’s complicated.

Very, very complicated.

A brief history of two ‘Staircases’

After winning best documentary at the 2001 Academy Awards for directing “Murder On a Sunday Morning,” de Lestrade decided his next project would be one that would “document the criminal justice system in America.”

With significant help from producer Allyson Luchak, he settled on Michael Peterson’s murder trial as the focal point, and struck a deal with key stakeholders that would grant him and his cameras access to them.

The original eight episodes, released in 2004, provided a detailed examination of Peterson’s relationship with his family and his defense team (the prosecution’s side initially was cooperative but dropped out early on in the process) and chronicled the trial as it unfolded over the course of several months, using the verdict as the climax. In 2006, that version won a Peabody, the prestigious award honoring excellence in storytelling.

In 2013, de Lestrade assembled two additional episodes centered around Peterson’s efforts to get a new trial due to revelations that one of the prosecution’s key witnesses may have misled the jury.

Five years later, he put together yet another three episodes documenting the events that led to Peterson taking an Alford plea that allowed him to assert his innocence — as well as to avoid another lengthy trial if not more jail time — despite technically being considered by the state of North Carolina to be guilty. It became a hit for Netflix.

Campos, meanwhile, had long believed a different type of “Staircase” could be a hit for him, too, ever since being introduced to de Lestrade’s docuseries in 2008.

“It just felt like one of the best true crime stories that I had watched,” Campos told Variety in an interview this spring, “in part because I recognized that there were so many things in it that were unknowable.”

De Lestrade says he met Campos that same year to discuss the young filmmaker’s interest in a possible feature film based on the docuseries; that he was impressed by a film Campos had written and directed that got a premiere at the Cannes Film Festival; that he found Campos to be both “nice” and “smart;” and that “I got the feeling that he understood all the different layers in the story.”

So de Lestrade says he was inclined to believe Campos could make a sure-handed adaptation.

Eventually, de Lestrade sold the rights for the documentary to the production company for which Campos would be making the film. In an original draft of the contract, de Lestrade says, there was a clause indicating he would be credited as a co-executive producer, and that it was possible he could be involved in the writing process.

The film idea was later expanded to a limited series for HBO’s streaming service. But de Lestrade says that not only did he never work on any of the scripts, he was never clued in as to how Campos planned to tell the story. Still, he says, he had total trust in him.

So he was completely blindsided by scenes in Episode 5 that show both the Brunet character (played by Juliette Binoche) and the de Lestrade character (Vincent Vermignon) promoting editing choices designed to make Peterson (Colin Firth) look more sympathetic — and, as a result, perhaps more deserving of winning a planned appeal.

De Lestrade has long contended that his series was never about trying to prove Peterson’s innocence or guilt.

“They are so far away from the truth, from life,” de Lestrade says of the on-screen depictions of Brunet, himself, and also his longtime producer Denis Poncet (Frank Feys), “that I think that it was strange.”

What he also found to be peculiar is this:

He says Campos had indicated from the start that he had no plans to include Brunet in his series.

Sophie Brunet’s professional role

Prior to “The Staircase” documentary, Brunet had worked as an editor for de Lestrade on four other French documentaries.

He says she edited footage of Peterson with his family and with his defense team, which was led by Charlotte lawyer David Rudolf. When the trial began in July 2003, de Lestrade hired another editor, Scott Stevenson, to work on all the courtroom footage. Shortly after the trial ended, he says — roughly five months before editing was completed and a full year before the first eight episodes were released — Brunet left the project to work on another film. A third editor, Jean-Pierre Bloc, was hired to replace her.

Ultimately, de Lestrade says, Brunet “didn’t really cut an episode. She cut many scenes, but these scenes, we have to reduce them, we have to cut them again, because they were too long.”

Yet in HBO Max’s series, there’s a clear implication that she was the only editor on the film, and was heavily involved in editing trial footage. In a key scene, she is shown strongly objecting to including testimony from a witness for the prosecution that suggested Peterson may have strangled his wife.

In response, both Stevenson and docuseries producer Luchak issued statements backing de Lestrade’s assertion that Brunet had no involvement whatsoever with any courtroom footage.

On her personal relationship with Peterson

It is true, though, that Brunet started writing letters to Peterson in prison shortly after leaving the project, and that she eventually began traveling to the U.S. to visit him. It’s also true that she spent three months in Durham in the summer of 2007, de Lestrade says, working on Peterson’s appeal.

(In an email to the Observer, Brunet said she didn’t immediately have time to respond to questions.)

And it’s true that de Lestrade invited her back both in 2011 to work on Episodes 9 and 10, and in 2018 to work on Episodes 11-13. He says Brunet and Peterson were romantically involved before she started working on Episodes 9 and 10; were broken up while she was working on them; eventually got back together; but ended things permanently before she started working on the final three installments.

Asked whether he had concerns about whether her personal connection to Peterson might influence her work on the newer episodes, de Lestrade says:

“Sophie is a great editor, a very smart woman who can put her feelings outside the editor room. ... She knew Michael in a way I didn’t know and I thought it may help me in the understanding of that complex character. And, looking back, I believe she was the right choice to do that job.”

Adding further intrigue to all of this is Peterson’s 2019 book, “Behind the Staircase,” which heavily documents their relationship.

Describing a letter from Brunet, Peterson wrote that she told him: “I really wanted to do something for you. Maybe I felt that as an editor I had been taking care of you, trying to tell your story in a compelling way, trying to build your character so that the viewer would find it as fascinating as I did, trying to make your love for Kathleen noticeable, and hoping that my work would contribute in finding you innocent.” It’s unclear when exactly he received the letter.

This seems to be echoed in Episode 4 of HBO Max’s “Staircase,” when Binoche’s Brunet reads a letter to Firth’s Peterson in which she’s written, “While you wait for your freedom, your story will be told. I will tell it for you.”

Yet Peterson, when contacted by The News & Observer for comment, insisted that the passage from his memoir was “misused” by Campos, without elaborating.

As for Campos’s viewpoint, HBO stopped responding to requests to interview him after initially offering to make him and his co-showrunner Maggie Cohn available for interviews before the premiere earlier this month.

In a companion podcast to the show, though, Campos talked about his process for dramatizing the story.

“We had to take creative liberties,” he said, “because if we didn’t, we couldn’t create a drama, and the only thing that I can say to that is that at the end of the day, though, the essence of what’s there when it comes to a character, or when it comes to a story point, is probably 99.9% based on something. It comes from something we learned, and then from there we would let that fuel us creatively and see where that went.”

What’s reality and what’s fiction?

De Lestrade says he gets why Campos would want to explore Brunet as a plot point.

“If I would (be) in Antonio situation place, of course, as a filmmaker would insist to have that part of the story,” he says. “Because it’s a fascinating story and it’s really amazing, and quite unusual, and it adds a new twist in a story with so many twists.”

But he says Campos asked to speak with Brunet early on in the writing process only to get her insights on Peterson, and that Brunet agreed only after Campos had told her she would not be depicted in the show.

Therefore, de Lestrade was shocked when he received a call in April 2021 from Binoche, who told him she had been tapped to play Brunet in HBO Max’s series and was trying to get in contact with the real-life Brunet.

The fact that Binoche is one of France’s biggest movie stars, and a former Oscar winner, was a huge tip-off to him that this “will not be a minor thing” in the show, he says.

Despite having a co-executive producer credit on the show, and despite giving Campos full access to his own vast collection of “Staircase” material, de Lestrade says he was not invited to the premiere.

Instead, 10 days before the May 5 release of the first three episodes of the dramatized series, de Lestrade says, he received an email from Campos saying: “I hope you enjoy the series we made and also appreciate your portrayal of you, Sophie and Denis, that were performed with a lot of care.”

De Lestrade said he did not watch the first four episodes, but was able to view a copy of Episode 5 in advance. He says none of the scenarios depicting the making of the documentary accurately represent how their film was made.

Since the show’s debut, other key players in the real-life story have gone on the record to say it has played fast and loose with the facts.

Rudolf, Peterson’s defense attorney, has pointed out numerous inaccuracies throughout the first four episodes in multiple conversations with the Observer. Peterson responded to scenes of his children screaming at each other by saying, in an email, “What family is this? I wondered. Not mine. There was NO discord among the children.” And in an interview with Vanity Fair, Luchak, the docuseries producer, expressed resentment that the HBO Max series attributes her work to the late Poncet.

“I know that an audience watching fiction can only handle so many characters,” she told Vanity Fair, “and I have no desire to be fictionalized or be in it. But I did find it surprising, in 2022, that so much of a female producer’s work would be attributed to the character of an older white man.”

(Also interesting: The actor who plays de Lestrade in the dramatized series is Black; the real de Lestrade is white.)

After seeing Campos’s depiction of his and his fellow documentarians’ editing process, de Lestrade says he sent an email back to Campos to report that he was unhappy with what he saw, and that “I am going to do things he won’t like.”

He says he understands that the episode is finished and that “we can’t change the way that it’s been edited,” but he contacted HBO demanding a disclaimer be added to the beginning of each episode stating that the series is a fictionalized version of actual events.

Episode 5 was released on the streaming service Thursday morning with no such disclaimer.

At the very end of the credits, there is a title card that reads: “This film is a dramatization based on certain facts. Some of the names have been changed and some of the events and characters have been fictionalized or composited for dramatic purposes.”

It appears on the screen for less than one second.