Photo by Rob Batzdorff

From the moment he met Betty Anne Waters nine years ago, Tony Goldwyn has been committed to telling her story on the big screen. Though the road was bumpy, thanks in large part to the recession, Goldwyn and his team managed to power through what seemed, at times, to be a financial situation impossible to overcome.

But all the all the while, Goldwyn knew he would see Conviction through to the finish, especially for Betty Anne. As he said to an Washington, D.C. audience on September 29, “I couldn’t break her heart again, because her heart had been broken so many times.”

Rachel Cicurel: So it was your wife who first introduced you to Betty Anne’s story?

Tony Goldwyn: Yeah, when Kenny was released, it was all over the news, and she was watching 60 Minutes and saw the piece and was calling me into the room and I missed it. And she told me the story and said this would make a great movie. What really got me was the relationship between Betty Anne and Kenny. I thought, what kind of faith does it take in a person to spend 18 years of your life on an act of faith. I mean, what if she had been wrong? What if he had been guilty? And I decided that wouldn’t have mattered, that that’s what the movie was about to me, was that love. So that’s what I decided to explore and then I found out all the rest of the incredible story and became conscious of the work that you guys do.

RC: Did you work much with Barry Scheck?

TG: Barry’s been such a godfather to us on this. Barry was sort of like a de-facto producer, in a way. Not that he insisted on anything creatively but he was constantly–his doors were open to us, and I ran all the casting by him to make sure he felt comfortable with it, particularly the casting of Peter Gallagher. He was really pleased with that one, I couldn’t understand why, but you know, Sam and Hilary and everyone. He was on set a lot, and just is a very unique person. Aside from being a genius, and a powerhouse, he’s an incredibly kind and just human person, humble, really. I mean, talk about somebody who walks with the walk. Wow. The ego—you’d sort expect him to have a big ego but mm mm, it’s all about others. It’s a very rare thing to see these days.

RC: Were you able meet Kenny before he passed away?

TG: No, right when I get involved is when he had his accident, and I didn’t get to meet him. I met Betty Anne about three months after he died; I was going to go right up and meet her but she needed, obviously, some time to recover.

RC: It’s amazing how positive she is about the outcome, and at peace with the fact that he died a free man.

TG: It’s funny, what I’ve mentioned to you before about the love she had for him, that they had for each other—really for me what the film is about is that love is sustained. It transcends … struggle and hardship and tragedy. When I first met Betty Anne, I was sort of blown away by that same thing, and this was three months after he died, and I was having a talk with Aidan, you know, who owns the pub and is one of Betty Anne’s closest friends, and Aidan said to me, ‘You know with all that suffering Betty Anne has endured, with all the struggles, you haven’t heard the half of it, of what she’s been through,’ he said, ‘She’s the happiest person I know.’ And it’s because of that—Betty Anne understands about love, and she really commits to the people in her life, and that’s why she’s able to rise above whatever suffering she encounters.

RC: Do you have siblings?

TG: I do, I have five. I’m close to all of them, but when I growing up, I was especially close to my nearest brother in age, my brother John, and I remember as a little kid, maybe 6 or 7, thinking to myself morbidly, what could I survive without in my life? If I lost my parents; if we had no money; if I lost my home, I don’t know, whatever, and the one tragedy I realized I couldn’t survive was my brother’s death. I had a sort of panic attacks, like ‘If he died, I’d have to die. I couldn’t make it without him.’ And it was very conscious. So that sibling relationship has always really resonated with me, and I’ve always wanted to tell a story about it—and that clearly is what I think was the case with Betty Anne and Kenny. They were the closest in age and they just had this unique connection. You know, I believe Betty Anne would have done this for any of her other siblings, as well. But she did share a very special connection with Kenny.

RC: Have you met her other siblings?

TG: Yeah, most of them. I think there’s one or two I haven’t met, but I sort of know the whole family now.

RC: You must spend a lot of time together after all this.

TG: You’re right, I’m probably an honorary cousin or something.

RC: You spoke at the screening about the struggle to get this movie made. How difficult was it?

TG: It’s just miraculous whenever a movie gets made, particularly a movie like this. These are very tough movies to get made because if you think about it, a movie like this could be made very badly, very sort of conventionally, and be very sentimental and ordinary. So studios are nervous about that. My producing partner Andy Karsch who actually hired me to do this—he’s the one who got Betty Anne’s rights—said ‘You know, we have to hit the bulls eye on this movie or it won’t work.’ And that’s why the studio was always so tentative about moving forward to it, to the point where I asked them to give the rights back to us and we ended up raising the money independently. The studio kept trying to find a marketing hook, a kind of insurance policy—‘How do we know we can sell this movie?’ And they liked it, but it was just too hard and too expensive and all that. So I cut the budget in half and went out and we raised the money ourselves, and that was a nightmare but it worked out.

RC: Is that what led you to film in Detroit?

TG: Yes, definitely. I would have liked to film in Massachusetts, from the real place, and Massachusetts has a tax incentive that’s good, but Detroit’s is…Michigan’s is much better. And they were very happy to have us given the economy there. So I did shoot a couple of days in Massachusetts, just to get some establishing shots and like that, but yeah if hadn’t have been for Michigan, we wouldn’t have made it.

RC: Well, they need you as much as you need them. Did you use the prisons in Detroit?

TG: We did. We used the Jackson prison, on Jackson. And yeah, we were in the Detroit first precinct police station, and used one of the holding cells there for one scene. The cellblock there, that’s Jackson state prison. That’s actually no longer. There’s a whole half of that prison because of budget cuts, they emptied it out. And that apparently is a very famous prison, and that cellblock was I think built in the 20s with lots of, lots of bad things happened there, I think. They called it the jungle I think. When you’re in there, it’s really depressing. Any prison is. And just imagine if you’re innocent. It’s incomprehensible. You know, I’ve often thought, if I ever did something and got arrested and got put in jail, I wouldn’t make it.

RC: You actually have to get to an emotional point where you’re not even emotionally living in the place where you stay.

TG: And Kenny went through such a journey of depression, and despair, and he was sick all the time, and he had hepatitis. But once Betty Anne promised him she’d do this, I think it was better for him. And he promised her he’d stay alive, but I think it took Kenny about 10 years from what I understand to kind of find an equilibrium at which he really could function.

RC: Did working on this film change your perception of the justice system?

TG: I don’t think I had too many illusions about the justice system. I wasn’t aware of the Innocence Project’s work, and I think I wasn’t aware of the numbers, the percentage of people who are innocent. And of course, doing this made me understand the myriad of ways that things can go wrong. From a simple thing like witness misidentification to actual governmental misconduct like our movie, and so many variations on that, and just manipulations and people believing someone’s guilty.

RC: Like with Nancy Taylor.

TG: Well, Nancy Taylor is a weird case because I think Nancy Taylor may believe this but she knows it’s a lie too. I think there’s a pathology there that I don’t understand—she signed a document. As you know, Barry and Betty Anne found a letter with her signature on it, acknowledging that [Kenny] was eliminated as a suspect and having confirmation of that. So the fact that she’s denied that and convinced herself that he was guilty is I think very twisted and contrived. Betty Anne calls it evil which I suppose that is the definition of evil.

RC: What would you like the general audience to take away from your film and what do you hope Conviction says to the legal community?

TG: Well personally, I hope that people are moved enough by it to look at the relationships in their own life, and not what would you do for your brother but who do you love in your life and how active are you at expressing that love,. and engaging with those people in this way. We get very self-focused in our society now, and I think we miss so much because that connectedness with people that are close to us is, you know it’s a cliché that family is everything but it is, that deep connection is what life is about and taking responsibility for each other I think is a really, I don’t mean as a message but just a really important, rich, the richest part of life. And then in terms of the system, we have this all over the world but in this country especially, we like things to be black and white, and we like certainty, and we want answers, and we want accountability immediately. We want solutions and we want to move forward. We’re very proud of our democracy and our judicial system which perhaps is the best system we can come up with but I think that we don’t like questions and I hope that people see that a lot of questions need to be asked and while we’ll never get it perfect, we need to take responsibility and not just be so quick to paint someone with a broad brush and get them out of our sight or brush that off of our desk. I feel very lucky to have made a film that will have a broad reach, hopefully—which is what a movie can do.