By Danielle Neftin

As a young documentary filmmaker, Erin Lee Carr, 32, has found a niche for herself in investigating the stories of complicated women and the crimes they commit. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Carr, who is immunodeficient, has retreated from her Brooklyn apartment to an undisclosed location in the Poconos.

In her brief career, Carr has directed six feature documentaries for HBO and Netflix. Earlier this year, she also received a Television Academy Honor for her Emmy nominated film, In the Heart of Gold: Inside the USA Gymnastics Scandal. Carr is now working on six new projects from her hideout in the woods. 

Carr welcomed me to an obscure corner of her cabin through Zoom. Slanted wooden ceiling beams hung closely above her, and a wide streak of sunlight ran across her camera view. Her pink cheeks didn’t resemble those of a woman with chronic illness, running from the greatest health crisis of the century. Her hair appeared disheveled, barely contained underneath her backward baseball cap. Carr smiled at me through the camera, her soft gaze conveying the peace and productivity the last few months have brought her and her work. 

“I’m immune-compromised so I have to be away from New York,” Carr told me. “There is so much that is easier about my life right now just because I’m not near other people. So that a lot of my fight can exist within the work.”

Even before the pandemic, Carr tells me that her recent work is about “the fight.”  Whether it is the fight to understand mental illness in her 2019 documentary, I Love You, Now Die, the fight for truth and advocacy in 2019’s At the Heart of Gold: Inside the USA Gymnastics Scandal, or most recently, the fight for a deeper look into the criminal justice system in her 2020 Netflix docu-series, How To Fix a Drug Scandal. No matter where the fight is, Carr wants to make sure she’s shining light on complicated women in the midst of national scandals. 

“This woman, Leah Carroll, who worked at Refinery29, said to me that I’m the patron saint of complicated women,” Carr remarked. “She said it once and I loved it so much.” 

Two subjects from her documentaries have been adapted into different scripted series: Michelle Carter of I Love You, Now Die, a young woman who was jailed for eliciting her boyfriend’s suicide by texting him to kill himself, is being portrayed by Elle Fanning in Hulu’s upcoming series, The Girl from Plainville. Gypsy Rose Blanchard of Carr’s 2017 film, Mommy Dead and Dearest, was also adapted for TV in The Act, also on Hulu. 

“A complicated woman is neither good nor bad,” Carr reflected. “She lives in the ambiguity, the grey. Has done something but there’s a reason why she’s done it. I think there is a long tradition of the femme fatale in cinema but it’s typically created by males, so it’s all about mystery, being an enigma, and being incredibly beautiful. For me, it’s less about how people look and more about their interiority.” 

Carr’s documentaries don’t provide easy answers. Whenever asked about her own point of view on whether one of her protagonists is guilty, she will respond by saying: “I just gave you 140 minutes to decipher that. I am never going to answer that question.”

Carr was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and raised, along with her twin sister Meagan, by her father, the celebrated journalist David Carr. Carr grew up knowing she wanted to be a journalist. Her first job though was waitressing in an ice cream parlor. 

“After my first day [working], I realized there’s this amazing kinetic energy in waitressing. It’s quick. It’s dirty. It’s hustling,” Carr said of her experience.

Today, Carr credits her love for hard work and her ability to effectively communicate the lessons she learned from waitressing. 

“I could not make a friend to save my life,” Carr admitted. “When I started waitressing, I finally learned social skills. That it’s not about me. It’s about the other person. It’s not about saying something strange to get attention. It’s about getting your job done.” 

Carr still finds herself juggling multiple tasks. She advises emerging filmmakers to keep at least six projects at a time, as she does. 

“I don’t focus my bets on one thing because it doesn’t work,” Carr mused. “You can basically be doing something for a year and have nothing to show for it. I’m just unwilling. Because I’ve dealt with loss, grief, and chronic illness, and I’m just not going to waste my own time. So many things can happen. The financing can fall apart. The distribution doesn’t work, or that executive doesn’t get back to you. Every single documentary film is a miracle.”

In 2019, Carr departed from documentary filmmaking by releasing a memoir, All That You Leave Behind, which details her grieving process after the untimely death of her father, as well as the lessons he left behind in archived email exchanges the two shared when Mr. Carr was alive.  

“My dad was a well known reporter for The New York Times, and he said in 2013, either in an email or a conversation, ‘find a beat and stick to it, and then become the best person on that beat.’ I always took that advice to heart. What can I contribute? I’m a young person. I understand technology, I understand communication, and I understand sexuality. [In search of stories], I try to have these Venn diagrams of criminal justice and legal stuff because that gets an audience, as well as weirdos because there’s this ‘what the fuck factor’ that you have to have.”

Erin Lee Carr worked at VICE Media from 2010 to 2013 (where I overlapped with her). As most established media companies were trying to set up their in-house video departments, producers like Carr were creating short form documentaries in a matter of months. Carr’s pivotal piece, Click. Print. Gun, about the new movement to self-manufactured firearms using 3D printers, received 5 million views in its first week of being released on YouTube, reaching a larger audience than it would have in a standard theatrical release. As a point of comparison, Fahrenheit 9/11, one of the highest grossing documentaries in history, only played on 2,726 screens during its opening weekend.

“I would not be here if it were not for VICE,” Carr said. “I would not be able to make Click. Print. Gun as a struggling Brooklyn kid. When I graduated from college, VICE was the place to work, and I peed my pants of happiness when I got a job there. I feel really strange about how that story played out. VICE is an ongoing question mark. What is going on with the company? While they make incredible content, I think that they lost a lot of that audience to SVOD [Netflix, HBO Max, Hulu].” 

The media landscape was far different in the days when Carr was just starting out at VICE: “I got to VICE at a time when the [digital] market was exploding. But what we’ve seen towards the last couple of years specifically is that the market is gone and advertisers have caught wind of that.” 

After leaving VICE, Carr was determined to leave corporate culture for good. 

“I’ve also found that as a strong personality, I have a difficult time in corporate culture. I’m a director. I think I know best. I went from VICE to a company that fired me within four months. Then I ended up pitching the head of HBO Docs, Sheila Nevins, and she said, ‘I don’t like your ideas, but I like you,’ and she gave me a twelve-thousand-dollar development deal. That’s for an entire year, so that year I made zero money. But I ended up making my first feature.” 

Carr started working on that feature, Thought Crimes: The Case of the Cannibal Cop, in 2014. At this point, she had been struggling with alcoholism for a few years and she had entered Alcoholics Anonymous. After a few relapses with alcohol, Carr now finds herself five years sober. 

In a quick instant, Carr grinned at me through the camera and pulled out a laminated AA chip to share her progress, as if she keeps the token on her at all times as a powerful reminder of her journey. 

“If I was being truly honest with you, I don’t think about alcohol. After you get a certain number of years under your belt, the urge to drink sort of goes away. But I think there are trigger points and a lot of people relapse if they are not working in spiritual programs. If they are not helping other alcoholics. I engage with an alcoholic every single day. Sobriety is a part of my identity. I try not to put work in front of it,” Carr continued to speak with certainty and without taking a pause, “I care a lot about sobriety. If I drink again, all of this will combust.”  

An hour into our conversation, the sun started to set and a web of tree branches shadowed across Carr’s face. She closed her eyes for a brief moment before opening them wide, her crystal blue irises unblinking. Carr firmly looked into the camera and said, “I am very clear that I am an alcoholic, and if I drink, then I will not get to do what I do for a living, and I love doing what I do.” 

Carr staffs her projects with mostly female-led teams. One of her creative supporters, Isabel Evans, also left VICE to later work for Carr on one of her upcoming documentaries. 

“Her instincts are the sharpest,” Evans told me. “She knows if someone’s lying or if the storyline will bore the viewer. She shows the deepest respect for her subjects by preparing for each interview like a senate hearing.” 

Evans, like Carr, also comes from literary legacy and is the daughter of Tina Brown and Harold Evans. 

“We both feel a deep thirst to prove ourselves in part because we’ve had ambitious journalist parents,” Evans said. “I think Erin has totally become her own name. She has proved this to a global audience.”

Carr’s core team has been growing. Her staff is currently made up of eight women, including Evans. However, when questioned about her visions for expanding her production business, she is certain that she wants to focus on directing. 

“I specifically don’t want my own production company because there’s a lot of legal risk in the types of films that I make. I just love directing films, and if I create an empire, then a lot of energy would have to be focused on building this thing. I am building an empire but through other people’s companies where I can have a perch legally and financially. I have a bookkeeper and a financial advisor. They sent me this thing, “P&L”, profit and loss, and I thought about framing it because it made me feel so,” she paused and held her hand to her chest. 

“If my dad could see that. He sent me this beautiful email once, he said, ‘oh my god, you’re being paid…as a filmmaker!’ And so I have to remember, every day, just being paid for my ideas is the true dream.”