SXSW.COM | F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 0 | SXS W O R L D 1 3
who was a journalist at The New
York Times and a huge South By
fan," she says. "I just grew up around
storytelling. I read books. I watched
movies. I watched documentaries.
We talked about cinema. I think that
there comes a fair amount of privi-
lege — I understood at a basic level
what good storytelling is because I
was surrounded by it."
Although Carr knew she didn't want
to follow her father's footsteps into
journalism, she found documen-
tary filmmaking and decided on an
approach that sets her work apart
from the standard true crime format.
"I'm going to participate in some-
thing called radical empathy," she
says. "I'm going to look at these crime
stories, not from the perspective of
the perpetrator or what happened.
It's really about what happened the
days before the crime? What are the
days after the crime happened, and
what does that mean? What is the
sum total of those actions?" Carr
refers to radical empathy as her
North Star, guiding her to listen more
to her subjects during interviews and
informing her research.
As of early January, Carr hadn't
yet settled on a keynote topic, but
she mentioned that she wished
more filmmakers would talk about
the financial hardships of getting
a career off the ground. "You are
not going to make money the first
couple of years," she says. "How
are you going to do survival work?
How are you getting money into it?
Understand that if you put in this
work now, it is the best job in the
world. It's so much fun, because you
get to talk to people for a living."
Erin Lee Carr will be a Film
Keynote Speaker at SXSW 2020.
See schedule.sxsw.com for
more information.
