Following perhaps the most controversial execution in Texas’ history, “Incendiary: the Willingham Case” spotlights the many downfalls of a trial bogged down by unreliable scientific evidence and the political turmoil that followed.
The film’s directors, Joe Bailey Jr. and Steve Mims, talk exclusively with The Daily Campus about how the film came to be.
Mims, who was Bailey’s professor at the University of Texas at Austin, recalls how the movie got started.
“After deciding to make the film, we started collecting interviews organically,” Mims said. “The first interview was with Gerald Hurst, after his interview, we were convinced that there was enough story there to make a movie.”
After Hurst, the Austin filmmakers collected scores of more interviews, craftily weaving the narrative into the movie leaving little to be speculated about the case.
“The scientist got more screen time than they usually do in movies like this,” Bailey said. “We wanted the film to be as objective as humanly possible.”
With thousands of hours of interviews under the belts, the directing duo had to weave narrative into the movie as early as possible.
However, the case began making headlines in January of 2010 after Rick Perry fired three key members of the commission overlooking the controversial case.
“The story evolved from what we thought was an emotional retrospective on an issue into an ongoing and big, formal, conversation,” Mims said.
While most documentaries get a bad wrap for being two hours of talking heads, “Incendiary: the Willingham Case” manages to stay compelling with interjections of aesthetically pleasing shots of fire and flames, exemplifying the motif of the feature.
“While fire may be sometime hard to grasp in story. In film, fire is quite captivating an charismatic,” Bailey said.
Bailey, who was a law student when he took Mims’s production class, was surprised that he never heard of the Willingham case, it wasn’t until Mims passed on a article in
“The New Yorker,” that it finally caught his eye.
A major turning point in the film occurs when the documentary’s focus is shifted due to Ricky Perry and his controversial dismissal of three key members in the commission monitoring the case.
Now that Perry is in the national spotlight in the GOP presidential race, the film could be used as political ammunition.
“We set out to make this film with complete objectiveness,” Mims said. “We tried to be very careful to not make a film that preaches to the choir, we want people to draw their own conclusions.”
Political quarrels aside, the film garnered a lot of attention at this year’s South by Southwest Film Festival.
Critics praised it as a token to true journalism and the directors ended up walking away with the Louis Black Award, one of the festival’s highest honors.
“This story was really compelling to us,” Bailey said. “The case essentially makes science a matter of life or death.”
“Incendiary: the Willingham Case” opens at the Magnolia Theater in Dallas Friday.
