Eliza Hittman (‘A Friend of the Family’ director) on bringing ‘shades of color’ to ‘vivid’ characters in true crime drama [Exclusive Video Interview]
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“The truth is, I knew nothing about the real story,” reveals “A Friend of the Family” director and producer Eliza Hittman. “So I came to it really with fresh eyes. I received the script from the writer, showrunner Nick Antosca, and it was just so exceptionally written, and the characters were so vivid on the page, and the world was so beautifully rendered that I just kind of devoured the script immediately.” We talked to Hittman as part of our “Meet the Experts” TV directors panel. Watch our exclusive video interview above. Click the CC button on the video for closed captioning subtitles.
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“A Friend of the Family” tells the disturbing true story of Jan Broberg (played at different ages by Mckenna Grace and Hendrix Yancey), who in the 1970s was abducted multiple times by Robert Berchtold (played by Jake Lacy), a neighbor who had ingratiated himself into the lives of the Broberg family. The story was previously told in the 2017 documentary “Abducted in Plain Sight,” but “there’s so much missing and omitted from the narrative based on how compressed the documentary was. So I think that what the show does is it really opens up the 10 years of their lives and shows how he was able to manipulate and sort of get control of her life.”
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True crime dramas like “A Friend of the Family” have been popular in recent years, and Hittman has “thought a lot about the ethics” of the genre, but in this case Broberg herself was onboard as a producer, making this “a rare scenario … where the victim has given consent.” Beyond that, “what Jan did was bring a level of depth to the characters that maybe we wouldn’t have had, had she not been on set.” It’s not just the story of a crime, it’s the story of a family, and “Jan’s perspective on her family, on who her parents were as individuals, on who they were as parents really helped bring shades of color to all of these characters on screen.”
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