The Southern scandal that has rocked the media for years with its endless twists is getting the Lifetime movie treatment next weekend. Murdaugh Murders: The Movie premieres in two parts — on Saturday, Oct. 14 and Sunday, Oct. 15 at 8/7c on Lifetime — as part of the network’s “Ripped From the Headlines” series of films. The film gives dramatic life to many elements of the story, with Bill Pullman portraying Alex Murdaugh’s journey from a well-respected attorney to a convicted murderer.
Ahead of the film’s premiere, The Messenger caught up with its director, Greg Beeman, to find out how he approached bringing such a gobsmacking true story to screen life and what fans can expect from Pullman’s portrayal of the now-infamous Murdaugh patriarch.
On how the ‘Murdaugh Murders: The Movie’ screenplay drew him to the project…
Greg Beeman: As a director, what you hope for is a good screenplay, and Michael Vickerman’s script was very strong. It would have been very easy, I think, to write a script where the character was just an absolute villain where everything he did was evil. But the script gave me insight into what made him tick, and how and why he became the way he was, and how it got worse…
What the screenplay brought out was that he really was a corrupt person from the very beginning — that was multigenerational, they were running the town, they were running the judges — but it didn’t strike me that at the beginning, he was capable of that level of evil. So something changed. What happened? How did he get from one to the other? And I think I was interested in that story of like, who is this guy? How could this have happened? And how could he go from a point where he [killed his wife and son]? I believe the court testimony says it, his lawyer said it over and over, and I think it’s true: He loved his wife, he loved his son. I think that was true. So how do you go from one to the other? That was interesting to me, and I was interested in the journey of that character, as dark as it is.
On Bill Pullman’s portrayal of Alex Murdaugh…
Beeman: We were all very excited when we got the news that Bill was interested, but of course, he wanted to have a conversation with me before he signed on to see if we were on the same page. And it was a really exciting conversation. I think both he and I felt the exact same way. We saw that same thing that I just mentioned — how did this guy go from where everything was going his way, he loved his family, he was the toast of the town, everything was up and up and up… What’s the journey of that character? So at the end of that conversation, we both knew we’re going to do this together and it was exciting.
I kind of think he did his own exploration of [how to portray Murdaugh]. He was so in it. He was so in his character, but I didn’t really direct him that much, to tell the truth. He really worked on his own mannerisms. He worked on his posture. I saw stuff right away like he knew Alex. He must have done the research to know that Alex had had an injury to his leg. He walked with a very slight limp, which he kept consistent throughout the whole project.
On using darkness and color to accentuate the dark descent of the central figure…
Beeman: I wanted directorially, visually for the movie to take the same emotional journey that Alex takes. I wanted it to start very pretty, very warm, feeling comfortable, a little bit more traditional, very pretty frames, cinematography… and then as things unravel, I wanted the cinematography and the colors and the lighting to sort of reflect that sense of the walls closing in and the noose tightening, and it gets a little bit more edgy. So I think myself and the cinematographer and [executive producers] Stacy Mandelberg and Tim Johnson and all of us, our whole team, we all accepted that that was going to be what we were going to do.
I didn’t have to work against the script or work to make the script support things that weren’t strong enough. It was strong. Bill obviously came in guns blazing like he had a vision of what he wanted to do and it was a really, really nice relationship for me because he, at the same time, also really trusted me. Like I would say, “Here’s how I see the scene,” and, “Here’s how I see the blocking,” and “Here’s how I’m planning to shoot it.” And he was always great. He did his thing, and I did my thing, and we were just in a kind of harmony from the very beginning. And here and there, he’d say “I think this,” and I’d go ahead and try to adjust this a little bit, but it was so little that he would give ideas to me that adjusted what I was doing and I would give this to him. So it was just quite a harmonious experience, very pleasant considering how unpleasant the material is.
On the network giving him the freedom to make creative choices…
Beeman: Lifetime really, really supported us. They made it very clear what they cared about, which was very much that pressure cooker [aspect], and they also really cared about feeling the Southern quality of it. So I felt like I I tried to honor that, and they let us take some chances. I never got second-guessed.
There are a lot of long takes. Bill was so good. As the movie progresses, there’s actually less and less coverage in a weird way, and there’s long masters and long takes, and I just was interested in watching Bill act and not chopping it up with a ton of coverage. So I find that exciting that we were allowed to do that.
On actor Curtis Tweedie’s eerie resemblance to Paul Murdaugh and the choice not to sugarcoat Paul’s flawed personality…
Beeman: He auditioned, and I mean, it helped that he looked exactly like Paul — the red hair, he really looked like Paul. But it’s funny because when he was talking to his girlfriend [he said], “I think I could get this job. I’m exactly right for this.” He zoned in on it, too. And I wanted to feel empathy towards him, but I didn’t want to make him — he was kind of a brat, right? He was a privileged brat. He didn’t deserve what happened to him, but also you felt that he was under his father’s thumb the same way his father was under his father’s thumb. So it’s complex. The drama is complex, and I liked that we were allowed to explore the complexity of emotions and character.
On taking creative liberties and knowing when to make a clinically accurate reenactment of real-life events…
Beeman: I think the only reason that liberties were taken is because of how much the time was compressed. In real life, it took place over years, and we had to tell the story in four hours. Four hours is a lot, but still, it had to be quite compressed and so things had to be put in, just practically, a little bit different order and sped up and moved around a little bit. But I felt that anything that was well known to the public had to be replicated as closely as possible.
The thing I felt was most well-known to the public was that night, the night of the murder, footage from the cop, the body camera. So I tried to replicate that as spot-on as possible. That was very important to me, and also that footage that everybody had seen in the dashcam footage with the two agents interviewing him — now of course, one character was taken out of the script that was in the hot seat, but as best I could, I wanted to replicate that angle and the trial. We didn’t replicate the way the trial looked because I needed to make it a little more dramatic. The lighting needed to be a little more dramatic than the way the court was, but that is an area where long stretches of the dialogue are just taken out of the transcripts. There is a lot of actually subtle editing. Even within that, the words are all what was said in court, but there’s a lot of editing that happened to pull it up.
On taking extreme care to get the murder scene as accurate as possible…
Beeman: There were a whole bunch of people, including most of the crew, who had been watching [the trial] every day, especially once they knew that they were going to be making the movie. So I was guided by a lot of people who knew a lot of specific details, and I tried to make sure that we got all the details right of the body positions in that area of the movie. More than anything else, we tried to make sure it was as close to reality because I felt like that was the most seen and the best known. Anything that was very well known by the world, I tried to marry it to reality as best as I could.
Murdaugh Murders: The Movie airs in two parts on Saturday, Oct. 14 and Sunday, Oct. 15 at 8/7c on Lifetime.
The Messenger spoke to the director of Murdaugh Murders: The Movie about what audiences can expect from Bill Pullman as Alex Murdaugh