“If We Wanted To Visualize This at All, We’d Have to Do It Ourselves”: Steve James on A Compassionate Spy

Steve James’s A Compassionate Spy is an unexpectedly charitable portrait of a man who betrayed his country for a higher cause. Specifically in the case of physicist Ted Hall — still a teenage undergrad at Harvard when, in 1944, he was tasked to help develop the atomic bomb — the greater cause of world peace. But unlike far more famous contemporaneous “traitors” Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed in 1953, Hall managed to do something even more remarkable than simply smuggle secrets to the Soviets — he escaped accountability for his actions. FBI surveillance aside, he went on to enjoy a surprisingly normal life with his adoring wife Joan and their seemingly well-adjusted daughters, right up until his death in 1999. Interestingly, though perhaps not so surprisingly for a director who’s made a career out of crafting intimate portraits (from Hoop Dreams to Stevie to Life Itself), it’s this family aspect that James turns his lens to, represented by Hall’s widow Joan, an unwaveringly unapologetic champion of her husband of 50 years. Indeed, as James has acknowledged in a director’s statement (from the film’s world premiere in Venice back in September): “What first drew me to make A Compassionate Spy was Joan Hall who, in her 90s, still carried the torch for Ted Hall, the love of her life and a man who, for her, took incredibly courageous risks as a young physicist on the Manhattan Project.” This immediately led me to wonder: How exactly does a filmmaker shape a documentary about a controversial figure around a protagonist wearing a pair of permanently rose-colored glasses? In search of answers to this big picture question and several more — including why the veteran director (who followed up his nonfiction blockbuster Hoop Dreams with 1997’s Jared Leto-starring Prefontaine) chose to weave dramatic recreations into this latest — Filmmaker reached out to James a few weeks prior to the doc’s January 9th screening at the Palm Springs International Film Festival.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.