Season 6 · Documentary First: Conversations on Documentary Filmmaking

When Is Silence Wisdom and When Is It Complicity? I Deep Dive on Ep. 279

11 Jun 2026 · 7 min

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Episode notes

When does refusing to repeat a lie become complicity in it? The hardest question in documentary filmmaking is not how to find the truth. It is how to handle a lie. When a false story is already loose in the world, you have two choices that look almost identical on the page: refuse to repeat it, or amplify it by debunking it. The discipline of knowing which is which can decide whether your film tells the truth or makes the lie stronger. In this Deep Dive on Documentary First Episode 279 with Brian Pocrass , host Christian Taylor digs into the question Brian asked on tape about how much oxygen…

Transcript

Read the transcript · about 1,770 words

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The devil doesn't care whether you believe the lie.

He cares whether you're talking about it.

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[Documentary First theme]

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Recently, I sat down with Brian Pocrass, an attorney out of LA.

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He's also a filmmaker, and his new documentary is called She Was Here.

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It's about Heather O'Rourke, the little girl from Poltergeist.

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And about 30 minutes into our conversation, Brian asked a very thoughtful question.

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I'm Christian Taylor, and today I want to talk about that question.

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But first, take a listen to Brian.

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[Brian Pocrass clip]

And just once we realized how false they are, this is again a documentary producer

decision.

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The question is how much oxygen do you give it?

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When you've learned it's completely false, do you sit there and present it or do you just

kind of let the truth speak for itself and not really wave the flames for this false

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narrative, this disgusting false narrative?

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Now, here's what Brian was up against.

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Every single production company he pitched Heather's story to wanted him to tell a

different story.

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They wanted the Poltergeist curse.

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They wanted the conspiracy version.

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Now the internet had been running with that story for 30 years.

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It draws clicks, it draws audiences, it draws money.

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And Brian could have made that movie.

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He could have built the whole film around the curse, set it up, knocked it down, made the refutation the spine.

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Plenty of documentaries work that way.

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The audience is already warmed up.

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You ride the rumor in, and you ride the correction out.

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Brian refused.

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And I have been giving his choice a bit of thought.

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So I'm gonna share my thoughts with you.

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There is a book by C.S. Lewis called The Screwtape Letters that I think gets at this same idea.

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Now, if you don't know this book,

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C.S. Lewis writes about Screwtape, who is a senior devil, talking to Wormwood, a junior devil, writing all letters, advice on how to corrupt a human soul.

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And one of the things that Screwtape is doing is he's teaching Wormwood that attention is currency.

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The devil doesn't care whether you believe the lie. He cares whether you're talking about it.

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That was what Brian was tracking.

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He could have used Heather's film to debunk the curse, and in the doing of that, he would

have made the curse stronger.

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He would have given it screen time.

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He would have repeated the speculation in order to argue with it, and the speculation

would have walked away with a brand new piece of footage to point at.

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So he refused.

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Now we do have to be careful here because there is a problem with this principle if you

take it too far.

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And the man I keep thinking about where this is concerned is Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

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Bonhoeffer was a German pastor in the 1930s.

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He watched the German church surrender to the Nazi regime.

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He watched pastor after pastor stay quiet from the pulpit because they didn't want to

ruffle any feathers.

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They didn't want to feed the fire.

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And Bonhoeffer wrote against that silence his entire adult life.

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That is, until the Nazis hanged him for it in 1945.

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His most famous line about this is silence in the face of evil is evil itself.

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Not to speak is to speak.

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Not to act is to act.

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So we have to hold these two things at once.

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Brian's wisdom on the one side, don't repeat the lie, don't give the rumor airtime, and Bonhoeffer's wisdom on the other.

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Silence can also be a betrayal.

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The discipline of refusing to speak.

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can turn into a cover story for cowardice.

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So how do you tell them apart?

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I'm gunna give you another name on this, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Russian writer, survived the gulag, spent his life writing about what happens to a country when everyone

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agrees to repeat the lie.

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In 1974, on the day that he was arrested by the KGB and deported, he released an essay called Live Not By Lies.

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His argument was the cleanest version of what we're talking about.

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He said, you may not be able to stop a lie from being told.

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But you can refuse to repeat it.

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And refusal is the action.

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So which is it?

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When do you confront the lie, and when do you refuse to repeat it?

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There's a passage in Proverbs that has been bothering people for two thousand years

because it appears to contradict itself.

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Chapter twenty six verses four and five.

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Verse four says, Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you will be like him

yourself.

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Verse 5 says, answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes.

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For centuries, people have tried to figure out which one is it.

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The Talmud has whole debates about it.

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And the answer the rabbis settled on was that the two verses apply to different kinds of

stakes.

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When the fool is talking about something sacred, you answer.

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When the fool is talking about something mundane, you don't.

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The wisdom is in knowing which kind of stakes you are facing.

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I had to make that kind of call myself once on my film The Girl Who Wore Freedom.

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Let me share it with you.

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On D-Day, a young Frenchman named Michel de Vallavieille, who happened to be the owner of Brecourt Manor off of Utah Beach, was shot in the back by an American paratrooper from

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Easy Company.

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He survived and he went on to become the mayor of Sainte-Marie-du-Mont.

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He also built the Utah Beach Museum

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To honor the G.I.s that liberated his farm.

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He spent the rest of his life telling the story of D Day with grace toward the men who

liberated his farm and his country.

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Those are the facts.

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The gossip for decades has been that the paratrooper who shot him was Bill Guarnere, Wild Bill, the one Band of Brothers fans all know.

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The story goes that he learned his brother had been killed by the Germans the night before

he jumped, and that he was trigger happy on D Day to kill the Germans, and that one of the

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men he shot was de Vallavieille.

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That story is the cursed version of D-Day.

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It would have given my film a hook.

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It would have lit up a certain kind of audience.

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I chose not to put it in.

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My rule when I made The Girl Who Wore Freedom was to stick to the facts.

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The facts were enough.

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They're always enough.

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So Brian made his call.

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I made mine.

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The question I want to leave you with is what is yours going to be?

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Because if you're making documentaries or if you're telling stories of any kind, you may

have to face this one day.

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There may be a sensational version of your story available to you, and the choice of

whether to give it screen time or not is going to be yours.

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Now I can't tell you which way to go.

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I think the discipline of the choice is in the work.

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But here are the questions for you to ponder.

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Ask yourself if I engage in this story, will I make it more solid or less solid in the

world?

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And who's my audience?

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The people who already believe the lie?

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Or the people who deserve the truth.

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You decide.

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If you found something helpful in this episode today, text it to one person, just one.

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And if you're new to the show, follow or subscribe wherever you listen or watch two

seconds of your day.

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A real difference in ours.

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And if you want to support our work, the link to our Patreon is in the show notes below.

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I'm Christian Taylor.

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You've been listening to Documentary First: The Deep Dive.

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And I'll see you next time.

Transcript supplied by the publisher with the episode.

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Documentary First: Conversations on Documentary Filmmaking

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Conversations with the people behind documentaries and how the work changed them, from Ken Burns and PBS American Masters creator Susan Lacy to first-time directors finishing their first film. Documentary First is a weekly podcast for anyone who loves a true story, and for the filmmakers who tell th

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