By the time he arrived in town he, like many others, assumed he was covering a murder, though at that stage nothing was proven. “And so immediately I’m going, ‘oh my God, this is a creepy small town’. You bring so much baggage and perception. You bring a lens that you’re viewing that community through.
“That really ended up informing how we approached the series, understanding not just how the media spotlight traumatises a town and forces a town into hiding in some sense, but also how [it shapes] how we perceive truth.”
Director Gil Marsden, left, on set.Credit: Stan
There are multiple tellings of this story in the works in print and on screen, with the ABC/Matchbox dramatisation Toxic perhaps the most eagerly awaited (and potentially fraught). And while Marsden’s film will be the first to emerge (other than a Spotlight special on Seven last month), that wasn’t the guiding ambition in making it.
“Obviously, there’s a version that we could have done where we had something dropped on the day of the verdicts, but we weren’t really focused on that,” he says. “We wanted to come out while the audience is still clamouring for more information, but we wanted to be best – ethically and creatively – not just first.”
Making a show about a story as it’s evolving is tricky. In fact, Marsden says, “it’s the most complicated project I’ve ever worked on”. There have been “five or six” different versions over the past two years, he reveals.
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“Not only is there a version of this where she’s acquitted, but there is a version of this where it is an accident,” he says.
Ultimately, the decision of the jury is what guides this telling, and in that version – the truth as established by the judicial process – Erin Patterson is a killer.
She was found guilty last month of murdering her in-laws, Don and Gail Patterson, both 70, and Gail’s sister, Heather Wilkinson, 66, and the attempted murder of Ian Wilkinson, who was 68 at the time.
“But I think we wouldn’t have been doing our job right if we didn’t engage with all possibilities through the entirety of the process,” says Marsden, “including up to minutes before the verdict.”
Erin Patterson is to be sentenced on September 8.
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