‘Making Manson’ Director Reveals The Most Shocking Bombshell That Came From Unearthing Charles Manson Recordings: “We Think We Know So Much About Manson”

Director Billie Mintz came into his newest documentary project, Making Manson, with a colossal task ahead of him: finding a new way to frame the story of infamous American cult leader Charles Manson. 

Since the media frenzy that followed the Tate-LaBianca murders in the late 1960s and early 70s, Hollywood creatives have periodically revisited the crime, often with diminishing results. Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood stands out as a rarity within this strange subgenre; often, audiences are subjected to the crime’s retelling in the form of low-budget B-horror films, such as The Haunting of Sharon Tate.

The question “What else is there left to say about this guy?” loomed over the docuseries and weighed on Mintz’s mind. He found his answer in over 100 hours of recorded conversations that Manson had with prison pen pal John Michael Jones during the last two decades of his life, prior to his passing in 2017. Over the course of a year, Mintz and his team painstakingly sifted through the never-before-released footage, trying to make sense of an incomprehensible man.

Of course, the research and storytelling couldn’t end there. While the team was eager to explore the controversial figure, they knew they couldn’t simply allow him or his friend to speak for themselves without oversight. To provide balance and multiple perspectives, they assembled a diverse roster of individuals with something to say about Manson—former members of the Manson Family, prosecutors, cellmates, journalists, and others who had direct knowledge or insight into his motivations.

In an interview with DECIDER, Mintz offered insight into the production process and his approach to integrating these new puzzle pieces to create a focused, more nuanced portrait.

DECIDER: How familiar were you with Charles Manson, and what drew you to covering the subject? 

BILLIE MINTZ: Okay, well, me personally, I did not know much about Charles Manson outside of the Helter Skelter book by Vincent Bugliosi. So, there was an education process. I mean, it’s one of the longest trials in American history, trial history, so it takes a lot of time to get into it. Plus, we had 20 years of recordings to go through. So, we had a team of people up at Renowned Films that went through everything. We listened, we eavesdropped on this friendship of 20 years, so I learned a lot. Maybe I’m among a small population of the experts of Manson in the world — there are a lot of people who [have more] expertise. There’s a whole community of “Mansonphiles” in the world that know so much about this case. 

Listen, we are fascinated with true crime. Manson is like the grandfather of true crime. He was the first cult leader that we knew about in the media, and I don’t think you ever forget your first cult leader. So, he made a huge impression on us. And this story has been told so many times, but it has never been told through a 20-year relationship and perspective of Manson himself. Up until this show, everybody has heard the same interviews from Manson, and there’s only a handful of them, and they only go on for an hour, each interview. And none of these people who interviewed Manson knew Manson the way John Michael Jones knew Manson over 20 years. It was almost like a very new way to look at this story that’s been told so many times. You get revelations on this story that nobody’s ever heard before, nobody’s even thought of before. 

I wasn’t familiar with it at all, so I came in with a fresh mind, but I still appreciated everything you did. 

It will be interesting for you to go back, now, and watch other documentaries on Manson, before hearing from Manson himself, and see where the stories differ. Because most of those stories were told by the very same people. And the people we have in our documentary are the storytellers, the Manson storytellers, but they’ve never been questioned before, because the story is such a good story. Why try to poke holes in it? But now, you got Manson posthumously coming along and saying, “Hey, I got a whole different version of events.”

And just commenting on your work earlier this year you had the Selena documentary, Selena and Yolanda: The Secrets Between Them, come out. What particularly interests you about this sector between entertainment and true crime? 

You know, as a society, we evolve and become more conscious, and we look back at these stories that we’ve been told, that were told to another audience. They were told to an older audience that was much younger then, and I think that we have this opportunity to look back at these stories through fresh eyes, through a lot more sophistication thall we had, through a lot more resources than we had before. When the Selena story was told and the Manson story was told, they didn’t have the internet, even, let alone TikTok and Instagram, and social media. And so now we are just connected in a way that we were not connected back then, and we’re way more conscious now.

And there’s a similarity between the Selena story and the Manson story, where there were gatekeepers to what we knew about this story and I think the press and media played a role at the time of just — Linda Deutsch says in the story, like, “When you have a good story, why mess with it?” She doesn’t say exactly that. I don’t remember what exactly she says, but it’s like, “Nobody wanted to mess with this great, sensational story.” But, you know, sometimes truth gets in the way of a really good story. That’s what she said.

Yeah, totally. I was wondering about the interviews; you have all these different people, some of them are more defensive of Manson and some of them hate Manson. How did the team assemble all these different perspectives?

We have now Manson speaking posthumously about what happened and you don’t want to take Manson’s words on his own. There’s no way to question him, so you want to bring people in that knew him, in order to have a proper discourse around this. In past storytelling around this topic, it’s been sort of one narrative. And so what we wanted to do was build a bridge between the people that have one perspective of what happened, and the people that have another perspective, and the people that are in the middle and have this conversation that was never really possible before, because we never really heard — the only time we heard Manson, he would talk in this kind of crazy “Manson talk” that he did in these interviews and now we have him 20 years, totally unguarded, talking to a friend. So I think it was a really amazing experiment to bring the tapes and bring Manson into the room, bring these people into the studio, and have them engage with Manson and engage with the story. And then ask these people questions in a way they’d never been asked before.

A lot of the people who, you know, Ivor Davis and Linda Deutsch felt, in a joking way, that I was interrogating them. These journalists had never really had other journalists engage with them before. It was more, “Let’s tell a good story. Let’s tell a sensational story.” But we were looking for the truth because Manson is saying something. We couldn’t just let Manson say something without being questioned. And that’s why these guys were brought into the room. 

Was there a specific interviewee that you were most excited to get on the project?

As a younger journalist than the ones that we were able to talk to, I mean these were like — Ivor Davis, Linda Deutsch, even Stephen Kay. I mean, Stephen Kay is one of the most famous prosecutors, probably in the world. I mean, all the big cases he was involved in. So to take this American mythology, this American true crime mythology, and then just dive right into it — and there was very few people in the room with us. Just to have this time with these people: Linda Deutsch, a trailblazer in journalism, Ivor Davis traveled with The Beatles. So, I was equally excited about all of them, and then the Manson family members. I mean, to have some of the Manson family members there and get to not just talk to them, but form some — because the tapes were these intimate tapes, we got to have these intimate conversations with the people that were involved in the story, and I think that’s a new way of telling this story through such relationships.

Were there any bombshells that surprised you most during the whole process of this?

We think we know so much about Manson. We are told by Manson himself that we think we know about the killings that he was involved in, or whether he says he wasn’t involved in. But then for him just to say that there were killings we didn’t know about, being the ones in Mexico, that he left some dead bodies on the beach in Mexico. This was not an interview with like, a famous journalist, this was an interview with his friend and an intimate — to hear a bombshell like that go off and just be listening in to this intimate conversation and hear him talk about how he’s killed some people. I mean, the world’s going to know it, but very, very few people knew that before this show comes out. So that was pretty wild.

And I think also just hearing the perspective of what happened, because we all want to know how these people ended up killing these people in such a brutal manner. And I think the story gets told over and over again, because it’s almost unbelievable that the version that we’ve been given, and to hear Mansion’s vision. I think the one that sticks with me the most is the fact that, I didn’t know this, but the only person that heard Manson give this order to kill — we know this story of, “Manson told them all to do these terrible killings.” Yet, when you break it down and you really learn the facts, the only person that says Manson said to do the killings was Tex Watson, who did all the killings.  So it wasn’t like they all got in a group and Manson says, “Hey, I want you all to go kill these people.” It was, “Tex said that Manson told him to do that.” And that really changes the way to look at this.

Definitely. A big part of this documentary is the time period. It’s late 60s, early 70s California — how did you and the team go about recreating that and evoking that?

Well, we had amazing archive of that time, and we really brought our subjects back to that time. We weren’t just focusing on these brutal murders, we were focusing on the “Why?” and “What was the context?” and “What was the situation like?” Linda, that was her last interview, she’s passed away since.

This is maybe the last time they tell this story, and to bring them back to that time and watch them transform in the interview — because you can see it. You can see them transform to remembering their youth and remembering what was going on. I think it offers a lot more explanation into the tragic events that happened based on what was going on in society at that time, and why Manson had sort of an impression on these people.

Are there any other crime or entertainment-related stories you’d like to explore in the future?

I think all of these can be re-looked at. There’s this “golden age of serial killers” that happened around that time, and the story of Manson kicked it off. And then all these brutal things happened afterward, during this time. And I think a lot of that needs to be looked at. I think we focus on the murders, what happened, but we don’t focus as much on why it happened. And I think they all have something in common. I think that’s something that would be very interesting to explore further of, “What is related between all of them? Why did they happen so similarly and in the same time?”

Making Manson is currently streaming on Peacock.