The documentary takes viewers on this emotional journal-what Brittany’s life was like at the beginning to the very end, and all of the emotional struggles along the way. A lot of folks that you don’t see on camera in the doc were willing to speak off the record to help pave the road. As I built relationships, one person would call another on my behalf…and so on. I think that being from the outside helped me a good bit, because I wasn’t coming to the story with the baggage that comes along with being in Hollywood.
I’m not used to having to develop relationships that quickly, especially Hollywood relationships, where I think there’s a lot of mistrust.
But we did do this super fast-from start to finish this took about seven months. At what point during the process did you get their perspectives? And then the other reason, I think, is that there is still a good bit of regret around what happened to her and people feeling some guilt around it…“What could we have done?”īut when you finally landed those interviews-I’m thinking of Amy Heckerling and Kathy Najimy specifically-I was surprised how candid they were with you about Brittany’s struggles. So I think they were mistrusting of what the outcome was going to be. I think it’s, “What hell is she going to do with this story?” It’s always been treated as such tabloid fodder. Why do you think people were so reluctant to talk, even though it’s been over a decade since her death? But most of the folks that knew her in the end, it took a good bit of work to get access to them. She also found her older friends in New Jersey who hadn’t been in touch with her in recent years. And Andrea Weibel, who works with me, who started out as an investigative reporter and is now a producer with me, she went into the coroner’s office, the pathologist route, and tried to find out all of those kinds of details. There were folks who were connected to the story that didn’t have as much of an emotional connection to her that we were able to reach. But we just kept getting no after no after no, and were like, “What in the world?” Even with the Blumhouse clout in the industry, that still didn’t seem to get us very far. Not a lot of folks wanted to open up initially…I had a list of folks that I wanted to talk to-family members, managers, agents, costars, the ones that seemed to have the closest relationship with her. There are also enough bizarre, dark twists about Monjack to fill several episodes of Dateline-and those were only the revelations that made it on camera.ĭuring this phase of getting to know her, who were some of the first people who knew Brittany that were willing to open up to you? The film features candid interviews with Clueless director Amy Heckerling and Murphy’s King of the Hill costar and friend Kathy Najimy never-before-seen video of Brittany as a child actor with a megawatt smile and personality and heartbreaking footage of Murphy, so drug-addled that she cannot remember her lines, on the set of one of her final movies, Across the Hall.
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The filmmaker also traces Murphy’s emotional journey-as a woman who suffered a string of professional and personal heartbreaks that left her vulnerable to Monjack, a manipulator whose own mother describes him on camera as being “economical with the truth.” But the project, from Emmy-winning director Cynthia Hill, focuses equally on Murphy’s life and career, remembering the ebullient actor who first charmed audiences in Clueless and earned accolades for her performances in Girl, Interrupted and 8 Mile. These are some of the questions addressed in HBO Max’s fascinating two-part documentary What Happened, Brittany Murphy?, which premieres Thursday. Was she poisoned? Was her slick-haired screenwriter husband Simon Monjack involved? And how do you explain Monjack’s own death five months later, which was eerily attributed to similar causes of Murphy’s passing: pneumonia and severe anemia?
Twelve years ago this December, the actor Brittany Murphy died under circumstances mysterious enough that lingering questions about her death still overshadow her career.
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