The filmmaker and the lone wolf: an interview with ‘Eye for an Eye’ director Ilan Ziv

by Andrew Parker

Veteran Israel filmmaker, documentarian, and journalist Ilan Ziv has covered a wide array of difficult subjects, from the holocaust to capitalism to religious zealotry to human rights abuses, but few have been as personal of a story as the one contained within his latest film, Eye for an Eye, opening this weekend in Toronto at Canada Square and next weekend in Quebec City at Le Clap.

Beginning in 2004 as part of a larger intended project, Ziv began following the story of Mark Stroman, the first man in Texas to be convicted of a hate crime post September 11, 2001. A troubled man who came from an abusive childhood, heavily identified with white supremacist culture in his youth, struggled with drugs and alcohol, and twice divorced, Stroman became – in his own words – “a blindly angry patriot” in the days following 9/11. Acting as a “lone wolf” bent on avenging American lives lost, Stroman killed two Dallas area convenience store workers and severely wounded a third. Unrepentant at first, the prosecution of Stroman was easy and the man was sentenced to death.

Ziv, unaware if he could even contact Stroman or let alone get a Jewish filmmaker to talk to him, intended to make Mark’s narrative into a larger piece about the nature of hate crimes around the world. That all changed the more he got to know Mark and understand how his monstrous crimes were conceived and carried out. Through visits and writing letters to Mark, Ziv began to notice a change in the mentality of the convicted murderer, at one point agreeing to be the witness to the man’s eventual execution in 2011 and setting up a blog for Mark to share his feelings, fears, poetry, and observations about what he has learned.

Ziv’s look back on Mark’s past took a further turn when the survivor of the attacks, Rais Bhuiyan, came out publically to not only forgive Stroman for what he did, but also to ask for the justice system to spare the prisoner’s life.

Eye for an Eye is a sprawling, complex and affecting tale of how a monster can be created, understood, and in some select cases, is forgiven. We caught up with Ziv via phone earlier this week to talk about how the project evolved, the issues at hand, his relationship to Mark Stroman, and his impressions of his subject.

 

Looking back on your career, you’ve made films that have talked about how people are affected by warfare, terrorism, and zealotry in the past, so how does the approach change when you start dealing with a single subject like Mark Stroman instead of a larger group of people being profiled?

Ilan Ziv: I’m always fascinated by the way huge social and political process and realities are reflected in individual lives, and the interaction between the two of them. When I first heard the story and I looked a bit deeper into that, I felt that it was a way for me to deal with all these issues that I had become interested in post-September 11th, and to do it in a way that’s a captivating human drama. I didn’t know at the time that the drama would unfold in this way. At first, I thought this was going to be a story about hate and the origin of hate, and the relationship between hate and propaganda and social and national moods. It obviously evolved tremendously over the years, but that was the impetus, if you like. I thought originally that it was going to have a different approach. I’m always interested in bigger social issues, but I’m more and more finding myself these days interested in how they fit into an individual story.

Looking back on some of the blogs that you wrote on your website since you started making the film back in 2004, I did see that this arose from a much larger project that you had planned that was supposed to deal with how immigration was tied to hate crimes in the U.S. post-9/11. I know you were always dead set on following Mark up to the time of his execution and making that part of the film, but at what point did the subject shift more and more towards Mark?

Ilan Ziv: I really wish I could talk to you about a rational thought process of how it ended up that way because to this day it’s still mysterious to me how this evolved. Now, after all these years and the film’s out and I’m speaking about it, more and more I have found myself for the first time able to delve and probe into how it turned out that way.

It was never meant to be Mark. The woman who got me going on him was the wife of one of his victims, Vasudev Patel, when she said that she couldn’t hate Mark. I remember vividly in that moment being taken aback. Here’s a woman whose life has been turned completely upside down through an act of hate, yet she could say this in a completely genuine way. I felt that I probably should look deeper into that. I was on another project in India at the time, and I even started following up in that direction to see what I could find. I tracked down her old house there and family, and I tried to see what I could find. Then I interviewed an Indian psychiatrist who interviewed Hindu and Muslim perpetrators of hate crimes, and that was when I thought that I was going in a right direction.

Then I did what people normally would have done, which is that I wrote a letter to Mark since he was a part of this woman’s story. He said no, and at that point I was really looking for something that would cross the film out from only being about a victim experience and into something larger about hate. Then, Mark, about five months later, said yes. It’s a bureaucracy to try and interview someone on death row, so I paid my first visit a few months after that.

For the first interview, I was taken on a personal basis. It was much more forceful for me, that first interview, because I was there to interview a monster. That was how the prosecutor described him, and I had already interviewed many of the families of his victims before. When you hear these stories, what else more could you say that would make me change my perception of him in a completely different way? He was a pathological killer.

Two things happened. First, I was taken aback by this enigma about Mark. Here was a guy who seemed to be lost. At that point, he was very lonely. No one came to visit him. He kept talking about September 11th, but I saw immediately that there was more to it than that. On a human level, he was very vulnerable, and on the other there is this convicted killer. He was charismatic, interesting, and seeking repentance that he didn’t quite understand at the time. I saw these glimpses of him feeling sorry, and I thought that wasn’t what I expected, so I stuck with it.

At the end of the first interview, I thought it was disastrous, though. He was crying and it was so unstructured. My whole scheme of questions fell through, and I felt like I was fumbling in the dark trying to think of new questions. At the end, I felt like I really screwed it up. I thought that was my only chance. Then, Mark asked for another chance because he felt like he screwed up, and I said to the people in the Texas correctional system that I wanted another go at it. They said I had to wait, and they really only allow journalists to return if something had changed in the case of a criminal who had been convicted, and there was nothing that was going to change for Mark. I pleaded and pleaded, and when I finally was able to go back, everything was a lot more organized.

It became more of a personal encounter between us. Let me just go back further. The first question that happened between us the first time he saw me for the first interview was when I asked him to sign the release. So he’s tense, and I’m tense, and he signed it and looked at me with this warm smile and said, “I like your barber,” and I just burst out laughing. What he did, which I never understood at the time, was the he put us on the same plateau, in a way. He tried to break that journalist across the glass. It was all very subconscious. In the second interview, I talked about giving the camera to him so he could talk to his kids, and that’s in the film and part of a much longer talk that we had. At that point, and I didn’t understand at the time, I was trying to break through that glass in another way. I wanted to get personal with him to get better material. I told him to forget the camera as an instrument, and use it as a way to talk to his kids.

After I did that, then twenty minutes later was when he subconsciously asked, “I know no one is going to come to my execution, so would you be my witness and come?” That was really the crucial moment, and it completely shocked me. You don’t know what to answer because you don’t want to insult him. I stood there struggling to find an answer that wasn’t an insult, like, “I’m going to be too busy, so I can’t.” But I heard myself saying yes, and that changed everything about the film. That was a very big decision that I made, and not rationally.

As a producer and as a journalist, I should not have said yes, but I did. As soon as I said yes, that meant I immediately got put on his friends list and taken off of the media list. Suddenly, I couldn’t visit him with a camera. I could only come visit him as a person. That changed the whole dynamic between us, and that made the film what it is. All of that flowed out of that. We had a much more intimate impact on each other, and I especially had one on him. I arranged a blog that Rais would read. The whole dynamic shifted because Mark trusted me as a person rather than as a media guy. I had a lot of, I wouldn’t say influence, but he did listen to me. That’s what made the whole process possible and made the movie what it is, but it was not a rational decision that a producer or filmmaker in this situation would or necessarily should do.

Eye for an Eye filmmaker Ilan Ziv

Eye for an Eye filmmaker Ilan Ziv

You touched on something in there that I wanted to talk about. In the film, you did include footage of a previous television interview that Mark had given where he seemed prepared and completely unrepentant for what he did, and in one of your blogs, you yourself said that for your first interview that you say went so disastrous that he also seemed overly prepared. Do you think that your own mistake in not allowing your subsequent visits with Mark to be recorded and the absence of a camera with you helped his ability to reflect on his life?

Ilan Ziv: Oh, absolutely. Suddenly because I wasn’t there with a camera and he had a blog to share his feelings and express his case to, it opened up a whole new world for him. He probably never would have talked to me if he were out of prison and walking around Dallas prior to 9/11. All of his “buddies,” the racists, the bikers, and all these guys he was a part of weren’t able to prepare him for how to deal with the people who would see the blog or how they would perceive him when he was in prison. No one could prepare him for how to talk to an Israeli Jew journalist. His family couldn’t prepare him. He had to leave his pre-crime world behind, and he had to learn a new world full of people.

I taught him about the holocaust and my family. We talked about my time in the army. We talked about different experiences, the kind of which he had never known or experienced himself. He never physically left Dallas before he was incarcerated and never finished elementary school. It was all new to him. That all contributed to his ability to reflect.

And again, you’re right about the camera because all of these conversations that we had weren’t structured interviews anymore. They were chats. When you come to prison for a visit, you sit for up to four hours and just talk. I didn’t come with questions for an interview. All of that helped him to open up and explore himself. All of that really culminated around the time that Rais came back into the picture and started his campaign. I think that allowed Mark to embrace things in a new way.

You’ve documented the holocaust before, which was a tragedy that bore with it a lot of powerful symbolic imagery. You look at someone like Mark who is covered from pretty much the neck down in symbols synonymous with white supremacy and Nazism, but he says he got them mostly because he thought they were “rebellious symbols.” When you talked to Mark, do you think he ever really understood how he was outwardly presenting himself to the world?

Ilan Ziv: Mark, for me, was a lost soul. I can not describe it in any other way. He was a man lost in life; a man who because of his prior past – he divorced two wives, lost the daughter that he loved – and he went from one personal failure to the next. His white supremacy was something I never took seriously because his cousin – who isn’t in the film because there was an issue with getting a release – said the most profound thing that could be said about Mark, which was that Mark always wanted to belong. He was rejected in his family. He was abused by his stepfather and had an alcoholic mother. There was always this desire to be accepted in some way. When he was in prison, he always wanted to be accepted into prison society. When he was out in the bars, he gravitated towards the bikers, but Mark never owned a bike! A real biker would take their Harley-Davidson out every weekend about two-hundred miles, but Mark hung out with them without even owning a bike. Yet, he considered himself a biker. He tried and tried and tried to find a community he could belong to. When Mark talks about love, I find that heartbreaking because he spent most of his life trying to be accepted and not having any ideas of how to be accepted. He just wanted to be accepted by somebody, anybody, and in the end he was supported by all of the people in this new world of people who wanted to help him. Everything before that was an illusion that he belonged with those kinds of guys, the so called white supremacists and then the bikers, and I felt right from the first interview that this man was lost. I told him in our first interview. I said, “Mark, to me you are a suicide bomber. You exploded yourself and killed yourself and many people around you.”

The reason why I keep calling him in the film a “lone wolf,” is that now if you take out of the equation what we know about extremists that carry out such attacks, it’s because they’re all very similar to Mark no matter what they believe in. These are people who need a narrative. They need an interest in their lives and reach an explosive point. For Mark, that happened to be, in his eyes, avenging 9/11.

By the way, the last two years of his life, he never mentioned 9/11. That was just a narrative. In order to kill and do something like he did, you need a narrative. Look at the man who exploded and killed all those people at the gay club in Florida. He called 911 and said he was doing it for ISIS, when you look at it, you know it wasn’t that because he was sleeping with prostitutes, taking drugs and eating pork. People in a position like that don’t say they’re a failure. They need to find a higher calling, and in Mark’s case that was saying that he was doing it all for America. That was the narrative he invented for himself.

Talking with Mark opened my eyes to a lot of the violence that we see now with so called Islamic terrorists. It’s all about a clash between a personal dimension and a person’s larger narrative that they create for themselves. They want to belong to something bigger. Every person who carries out an attack on a large group of people like Mark or like in Orlando wants that narrative that comes with a sense of purpose and belonging that’s fuelled by something missing.

And since you’ve looked at Israel and America now after various attacks, you can see pretty easily how patriotism and nationalism can create something that can foster a huge sense of belonging in people.

Ilan Ziv: Yes, and in Mark’s case, it’s even more complicated than that. Going back to the Indian psychologist I mentioned before. He was someone who interviewed perpetrators of massive hate crimes, and there was always a self-aggrandizing because they’re often carried out by people whose self-worth has hit the floor. Mark was going from job to job, he had a lot of personal failures, and trouble forging personal relationships or having real close friends. Your self-image is really horrible. You want to give yourself some sort of self-importance. I saw that in Mark, and it’s in the film, when he mentions that he wanted to go to a Dallas mosque and, in his words, “levelling a hundred people.” I was shocked when he said that because that’s mass murder. Then when I hear that I have to reconcile that with the human being I am talking to. When I asked him why he would do that, he would say it was to make a statement. I said, “What kind of a statement?” He said, “like Mohammed Atta made a statement.” At that point, he effectively compared himself pathetically to one of the most pathetic people on earth. Mohammed Atta had his own issues with thinking out how he was going to create this historically informed act of terrorism, and still there’s no comparison other than mentality to Mark going out and killing immigrants working in convenience stores. That was really pathetic, but I understood that these two figures aren’t very different. They didn’t see what they were doing as killing. They saw it as a higher cause, and that they would be important and people would talk about it. When people start referring to you as “the Arab Slayer,” you’ve become kind of an important person in your own mind. He thought he did what Americans were afraid to do. This all comes from a very damaged psyche and personality. Over the course of a few years and as he grew calmer and more reflective, he talked about less and less about 9/11. Over time, it came completely fell apart from his narrative. At a certain point, he stopped talking about it because he didn’t need it anymore.

eye-for-an-eye-rally

At what point did Rais become a larger part of the narrative, and how did that change your approach to the film?

Ilan Ziv: First of all, what Rais was completely autonomous and independent of what I was doing. It was a complete surprise to me. Mark had initially raised the issue of sending victims letters and asking for forgiveness when he knew the execution date would be set. He wanted to do that, and I said it was fantastic and the most meaningful thing he could do. He did that, and he didn’t really know what to say. When Rais started his campaign, he already had the letter from Mark and had already read Mark’s blogs. Rais was on his own, really.

I brought Rais back when I came to Dallas to document the last few weeks. What Rais did for Mark was always a huge surprise for me. When I first met Rais back in 2004, there was no way I would have seen the man that would emerge in 2009. He was young and traumatized. He was trying to crawl out of this hole he had been pushed into. He was trying to put his life back together, and for him part of that was his looking towards Islam as a symbol of peace and forgiveness. That transition for Rais was a huge surprise to me, but a good surprise. I never anticipated that.

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