Edward Zwick has directed 13 feature films, across many years and a wide variety of genres. They include "About Last Night…," "Glory," "The Last Samurai," "Legends Of the Fall," "Defiance," "Love and Other Drugs," and "Jack Reacher: Never Go Back." He's created a long list of TV shows, among them "thirtysomething," the 1980s series about a group of friends that was set in the Philadelphia area.
He's worked with stars like Tom Cruise and Denzel Washington, and he has an Oscar, which he won in 1999 as one of the producers of "Shakespeare in Love."
PhillyVoice spoke with Zwick when he was in Philadelphia last week to promote "Trial By Fire," his newest film, which opens Friday.
The film was based on an acclaimed 2009 article from The New Yorker by journalist David Grann about Cameron Todd Willingham, a Texas man who was accused of the murder of his three daughters after they died in a house fire. Willingham was tried, convicted and executed for the crime, although it's since been established that he was most likely innocent.
"Trial by Fire" tells the story of Willingham (played by English actor Jack O'Connell), and his quest to clear his name, along with help from poet and professor Elizabeth Gilbert (Laura Dern.)
Zwick first got the idea of making the film after reading Grann's article, and when he looked into the rights, he realized that an old friend of his, Ellen Stewart, was also interested. So they teamed up, later hiring Geoffrey Fletcher, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of "Precious: Based On The Novel Push By Sapphire," to write the screenplay.
The project took several years to come up with financing, but Zwick and his partners eventually got some investment from Alex Soros, the son of the famous financier George Soros.
"The Soros Foundation has done a lot of work in criminal justice reform, and he then asked why it was taking me so long to get the movie made… and he said maybe we can help."
Asked if "Trial By Fire" has been subject of any lurid conspiracy theories in relation to the Soros name, Zwick said, "I hope so."
The film debuted last fall at the Telluride Film Festival, and is getting a national theatrical release this week.
On the death penalty, Zwick said, "I think my feelings were a pretty typical casually liberal understanding of it, which is to say I was against the death penalty but had no particular understanding why except a vague sense of its moral complexity. Obviously what I've learned has only made me more passionately opposed."
"The story [of Willingham] was a veritable microcosm of everything that's wrong with capital punishment, and the criminal justice system as a whole," the director said. "Junk science. Withholding of exculpatory evidence by prosecutions. Snitches who trade false testimony for reduced sentences. And maybe the most and significant reason, poverty, which is to say that this man couldn't afford a proper defense. And in the absence of that, if you are poor or black or both, the likelihood is [if you're accused of murder] that you're going to die."
Zwick is from Chicago, but he has a couple of important ties to Philadelphia: His wife, actress and producer Liberty Godshall, is a native of Bucks County, while his longtime writing and producing partner, Marshall Hershkovitz, is from Bala Cynwyd. In fact, he said, "thirtysomething" was set in Philadelphia as a result of a "coin toss" between him and Hershkovitz, and while the series did not film locally, it made multiple characters graduates of Penn.
"What's interesting is that when we made it, everybody on television was a cop or a fireman or a lawyer, and we decided that it was interesting enough to just think about these people and their relationships," Zwick said of "thirtysomething,"which aired on ABC from 1987 to 1991. "When I look at television now, everything seems to be about a group of people who are loosely affiliated by their relationships. So it's interesting to have maybe created a trope."
Zwick's first film, 1986's "About Last Night…," starred Rob Lowe, James Belushi, Demi Moore, and Elizabeth Perkins. The film, based on David Mamet's play "Sexual Perversity in Chicago," was remade a few years ago, with Philly native Kevin Hart, although Zwick said that he's never seen the remake.
The director's film "The Siege," which came out in 1998, was prescient for more than one reason: It featured terrorist attacks on New York City, as well as civil liberties abuses against Muslims.
"I've been talking to some very smart people, I was talking to people in the Department of Defense and the CIA, and it's not as if I was inventing it," Zwick said of his preparations for that film. He added that some of the things that have happened in real life since that film, "like Guantanamo, and this demonization of immigrants," are beyond what he imagined at the time of "The Siege."
The director in 2010 made "Love and Other Drugs," with Jake Gyllenhall and Anne Hathaway, a film about a pharmaceutical rep who falls in love with an early-onset Parkinson's patient. Zwick said that recent headlines involving Big Pharma have added to his perspective as well.
"If you think about what was revealed about the Sackler Family and the opioids, and Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, those abuses that we thought were terrible only anticipated abuses that were scaled up and magnified. There's gotta be more regulation."
Zwick says he has done 15 movies, factoring in everything he's directed and written, and produced over 200 hours of TV. He has moved frequently between the two, though he said that "when I'm doing movies I want to be doing TV, and when I'm doing TV I'm want to be doing movies."
"Trial By Fire" opens Friday at Ritz at the Bourse and other local theaters.