Liz Garbus has not taken her foot off the documentary pedal since she started her earnest push into scripted entertainment. Recently directing her first pilot, Hulu’s Natalia Grace miniseries Good American Family, the filmmaker was simultaneously working on documentaries about two of the most public murder cases of the century. Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer premiered on Netflix in March, two years after the arrest of a suspect — and five years after Garbus made a narrative feature about his victims, 2020’s Lost Girls. She’s also wrapping work on a University of Idaho murders project at Amazon. Speaking to THR, the two-time Oscar nominee talked about the tricky tone of making a scripted show about the real-life girl whose foster parents passed her off as an adult and what viewers can expect from the Idaho project that will premiere long before a verdict.

Tell me about the conversations you had about POV on Good American Family. It premiered after it’s been more or less accepted that Natalia Grace is the age she claims to be. That is the audience’s understanding by episode five, yet, in the premiere, Ellen Pompeo’s mother character is very much the victim. Were you worried that might turn people off?

When I first read the pilot, it was prior to the documentary [The Curious Case of Natalia Grace] coming out. So I read it in a very different way than the world would end up receiving it. Of course, [showrunner] Katie Robbins always had the concept to shift perspectives halfway through. But it would be assuming a much more naive audience. The slow realization that you’re being told a story through somebody’s rose-colored glasses, it was a journey of understanding how we judge based upon who is presenting their point of view. The goal is that you stick with the show. As a director, when I interviewed for the job, I said, “Please, if I am going to direct episode one, I need to direct episode five.” That’s another pilot. But I do also think in that first episode, there are clues that [Ellen’s character] is incredibly tightly strung. She has some rough edges. She can be casually cruel.

As someone who came up in documentary and remains in that world, what’s your take on the current docuseries ecosystem? It’s so diverse that I wonder if it’s even one genre at this point.

I don’t think we’ve developed the language yet. There’s a genre of docuseries that really borrows from the language of reality television. You have people speaking in present tense. The Karen Read documentary [A Body in the Snow] that’s on Max right now, for instance. That structurally mirrors the way in which a reality show tells its story. So, I think there’s a genre that is kind of borrowing the storytelling conventions, which really grabs you by the heart and pulls you through. In a lot of the more traditional documentary fare, people are speaking reflectively. Of course, there is a lot of present-tense storytelling because so many of these cases are not adjudicated yet.

What pulls you into a story when it hasn’t met its natural conclusion yet? The Gilgo Beach serial killings, which you follow in Gone Girls, haven’t been adjudicated. Neither have the University of Idaho killings.

It’s complicated. Obviously, I’ve lived with the [Gilgo Beach] case for 10 years, since I started working on Lost Girls. When the arrest happened in 2023, I reached out to the families because I felt that if somebody was going to make this documentary with them, I wanted to do it. There are a lot of sensitivities. There are a lot of relationships to understand and consider. There’s history. I wanted to tell this story that would do right by the victims and their loved ones. When sex workers are depicted in documentary, in any media, you never know how it’s going to go. In an ideal world, would you make this after the trial? One hundred percent. But in our media ecosystem, these folks were going to tell their story in this timeline, and I wanted to be the one to deal with it.

As someone on the more journalistically inclined side of the genre, is it challenging to be in the race to give some of these stories the doc treatment?

With Gone Girls, we took a year and a half. I’m definitely not competing with those strands that have much quicker turnarounds — the Datelines and those types. So I actually don’t think that’s the challenge. It’s more to your prior question about adjudication. At the beginning of my career, I was making films with folks who had been behind bars for 20 years [The Farm: Angola, USA] — the total opposite end of the spectrum. Part of the goal with those films was to argue against an over-incarcerating society. They were about the people whose stories weren’t being told, people weren’t being looked at as full people. That’s why Gone Girls is about the victims. The serial killer himself, he’s the one that everybody wants to know about. So many times when I told people we’re working on that case, people would be like, “Tell me about that wife. Did she not know that people were in the basement?” And of course we touch on it, but it’s certainly not the focus for me.

What can you tell me about the Idaho killings project?

I think what is special about our project is hearing from the people who lived through it. It’s not so much about a forensic detail that will be discussed at trial. It’s more about the lived experience of waking up that morning, going over to that house and living through that nightmare. You will learn some new details, but the larger journey is living through it with them and understanding what it was like to be on the inside.

What public figures out there are you curious enough about to embed yourself with for a documentary?

Madonna. I am a little younger than her, and I think it was entirely transformational to have her music as a soundtrack to those years of my life. I’m fascinated by the figure who’s behind that and how she developed her ideas around femininity. That really rocked my world. For similar reasons, I would love to make a film about Cher.

This story first appeared in a June stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.