Blake Hodge on Chapelboro.com recently interviewed Bradley Bethel who is promoting the premier of "Unverified: the Film" in January 2016.
Along with the trailer, the interview provides an advance hint about what the film will be about and what story it will seek to tell, in contrast to the story the general public has gotten from other media outlets.
I've transcribed Bethel's comments about the film without my commentary. (I'll do that later.)
01:27 Bethel: "It's a very human story. It's about people who, I believe, were misrepresented and how they dealt with that misrepresentation and my effort to stand up for them and to, in a sense, set the record straight about this scandal -- what is a complicated story."
02:10 Bethel: "The idea for it came when I was watching another documentary about the Penn State scandal - it was called "Happy Valley" [see note below] - and I found that so compelling and it so challenged the way I had looked at that scandal -- the Penn State scandal -- that I said to myself 'documentary film seems like a good venue to kind of clear up some of the muddiness that has been part of the coverage of the UNC scandal.' "
02:47 Bethel: "Unverified is not going to answer every question. That would be a boring film if we tried to just answer every question...we really committed to keeping it under 90 minutes. But what we do is we take some questions and we try to answer those. But even more importantly, what we try to do is give people a way of thinking about the story differently. so that as they move forward as other questions are raised they kind of have a different set of assumptions with which to approach the questions about this scandal. And so I think that in that way it really will help clear up, like I said earlier, some of the muddiness of this situation."
04:08 Bethel: "My take and what I think people will come away with is that this wasn't an athletic-driven scandal. I've gotten away from the sort of dichotomizing athletics or academic...it was a university scandal. The question for me is what drove it and it wasn't athletics that drove it. It was some misguided efforts to help struggling students is what drove it. but in the process of sorting through it and trying to report on it it got turned into this very sensational story of athletics corruption. But I think when you kind of peel away some of the sensationalism you see that it's not so dramatic. It's not so scandalous. It's not so much about corruption as it is a couple of people who were just misguided in trying to help others. And so I think it's getting down to that human element that, again, is going to make this film a compelling, engaging story."
05:35 Bethel: "I think that the public narrative matters insofar as how to move forward...how the university moves forward; what kind of solutions we come up with are going to depend on how we define the problem. And so, I think the university has done a great job in athletics reform, because the public perception has been that this is so much about athletics. I would like to see there be more discussion of the implications what this scandal...what this said about the way academics...the way that teaching quality -- the educational quality -- is addressed at prestigious universities like UNC; you know, what is the university doing on the academic side to make sure that teaching quality is valued enough so that something like this doesn't ever happen."
06:40 Bethel: "I think overall UNC has done a good job moving forward. Now that isn't to say I'm without my criticisms and some of my criticisms come out in the film. I don't want to give any spoiler alerts...but I think it's important for people to understand this too, that I do have my criticisms and my criticisms are in the film, and that's what makes...this film is not propaganda, this film is not trying to whitewash UNC's guilt or fault or anything like that. From the very beginning we were really committed to having an honest film and one of the ways we did that was including criticism. Another way for example -- and again I'm not going to say too much because I don't want it to be a spoiler -- but there is one interview that I had for the film where it really didn't go my way. It was bad for me. And we could have just not included that interview in the film, but we did include it because it was part of the process of making the film and we wanted to be honest and I put myself out there and I don't want to present myself as better or smarter than I actually am. And through and through I think it's a really honest film and I think that viewers are going to appreciate it for its honesty."
08:42 Bethel: "[The film's story] did change. And that was part of being honest. Making this film honest is showing how my understanding evolved. Again, because I don't want to give it away, and I don't want to say exactly how it evolved but know that my kind of feelings and beliefs at the end of the film were not the same as they were at the beginning, and I think people are going to really appreciate seeing that development because what it was was honest character development, which is sometimes hard to get in a documentary. In narrative films you script...you write character development. You don't know if you're going to get character development in documentary because you don't know if the person is going to develop in this case I did develop and my ideas evolved and became more sophisticated, I think, and so we put that in the film and I think it's really interesting."
Note:
It is unclear whether Bradley Bethel is referring to Amir Bar-Lev's "Happy Valley" or Eric Proulx's "365 Days: A Year in Happy Valley." The producer of "Unverified" Conni Lo Ferrara was an executive producer for the latter.
