It was the prospect of the Sandy Hook shooting being contested in a court of law that caught Reed’s attention. “I’m really interested in how we get to truth, as we enter this sort of post-truth age. What are the levers available to an ordinary person to get to the truth if they have to. These families felt a desperate need to establish the truth and have that acknowledged.”
The cases were filed in the spring of 2018, and were finally settled, by two separate juries, in October last year. “When you stretch a film over four or five years, you’re stretching everything, all your resources,” Reed says, “we make sacrifices and stick with it to see it through to the end.” The filmmaker does all the interviews himself, including with the families, who come from across the political spectrum, he points out. “Neil Heslin, one of the dads in the case, he’s an NRA member and a Trump supporter, but has campaigned against how crazy easy it is to get an assault rifle.”
In the film, Reed studiously avoids polemicism but he does allow the families to demolish some of the most egregious arguments put forward by Jones, such as the shooter’s “incredible” “99.9 per cent kill rate”. Teacher Lauren Rousseau tried to hide her class of 16 in a tiny bathroom at the rear of their classroom, into which the shooter fired 80 rounds, with only one pupil surviving.
Jones would not agree to be interviewed, yet Reed scrupulously gives proponents of the hoax theory, such as Wolfgang Halbig and Kelley Watt, the co-author of Nobody Died at Sandy Hook, the opportunity to make their case. Watt had sent an email to Irving Pozner suggesting that he exhume the body of his six-year-old son Noah to prove that he really died. “I’ve watched a lot of true crime and they exhume bodies all the time,” she says on camera.
“They’re utterly convinced and completely devoid of empathy,” Reed says. “They’re a different species to Alex Jones. I think he knows full well that the lies he’s telling are lies. He’s not an idiot, and he’s not mentally ill, as far as I can tell. He is just very keen to make a lot of money.”
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