(Continued...)

It sounds like the coverage disturbed you, how it played out in Seattle.
Not really. That would paint me as a much more noble person. It was an examination of my own reaction as well. I was not exempt from feeling great titillation and all sorts of things that everybody else did. I was no different. But when you think about it for a second, it becomes a great opportunity. Any journalist or artist is looking for a way to tell a unique story, trying to find an in. The initial thing was, let's find the most positive things about this guy and really make it a portrait about him and see how this thing sits. It was difficult building a portrait of him. It wasn't like everybody was saying he was just the greatest guy, and so thoughtful, you know? He was a complicated guy. He was a complex guy.

Everybody has walked out of the house and done something that they don't want the world to know about I thought it was interesting that there were candid descriptions of some of the things they didn't like about him. A lot of people said there was a certain intellectual arrogance about this man that they didn't like. And that to me just reflected a human characteristic, as opposed to being out in the barn with an animal; you're not dealing with intellectual arrogance there.

How did you get them to trust you? How did you track them down?
They were pretty much impossible to track down. They came to us. My partner's a journalist and he writes for a weekly in Seattle and he has that beacon people can connect to through the paper. And so, a few people would send him e-mails and one day we got one that made us feel that this was a person who was possibly there with him that night, and I took a shot at thinking he was and we corresponded anonymously—he was anonymous, I wasn't—and eventually he came forward and said, This is who I am. So I met one of them in person and we had a good rapport and he seemed to trust me and he was a friend of them. And it went from one person to the next and then to the next.

He had a son, right? How will this film affect him?
His child is autistic. One of the small silver linings in this is he might not have a clear perception of the way his father died. But there's also, let's say he wasn't autistic, without this film there would only be all of these blogs and stories out there ridiculing his dad. And so, we thought that we could get in some positive things that might start to barely crack the surface of what will probably be a very complex man that I will never know. But that I believe had some very positive feelings toward his son and his son's mother and was a responsible dad in many, many ways, and somebody who cared about his kids. If that ever kind of helps to create that perception that this wasn't just a guy trying to get his freak on in the farmlands, that would be a good thing.

Is it your case that there's something wrong with looking at him as a freak in the woods?

I'm kind of straddling those two camps. Because there are all sorts of different people in the world, they're all going to have their opinions. I'm not trying to change that or tell them that they're wrong. But everybody has walked out of the house and done something that they don't want the world to know about. And you can either sympathize with that situation and not be hypocritical about it on some level—but this is an extreme thing. My responsibility is to expose people to different ways of thinking, and my next responsibility is to the people who are in the film, to not disrespect them, because they're talking to me.

Have they seen the film?
Not yet. I'll be nervous when they do. I really think you couldn't have much more of a sympathetic portrait. I'm sure they'll think I overromanticized it and things. But I'm a storyteller right now.

What did you romanticize?
I have them walking through blooming rhododendrons just to symbolize desire, as a contrast to a very sober thought process. The two people we cast don't look like them for a purpose, so that their identity will not be confused. I hope they won't think any of these guys are caricatures.

You dramatized some scenes of Mr. Hands's brother dealing with all this. How would you react if you learned that your brother was into that sort of thing?
It depends on how my brother would say it to me. Of course, I would think about the things everybody else thinks about, How is this possible? Aren't you hurting any animals? I'm not a very judgmental person. If you're not hurting somebody and you're trying to be a decent person, how your sexuality is defined is not the way you should be judged. The real question is if you're harming someone.

READ MORE
• The World's Most Offensively Named Restaurants
• The Biggest Scandals in Super Bowl History