Interview with Kerri O’ Kane, Director of The Gits
Director Kerri O’ Kane first discovered Seattle punks The Gits through the documentary Hype!, and was simultaneously taken by the passion of their music and devastated by tragedy of what became of the group. On July 7, 1993 singer Mia Zapata was raped and murdered; her death would go unsolved, and would slowly drive apart her beloved music scene, for more than a decade until advances in DNA technology helped authorities to determine that her killer was a transient fisherman named Jesus Mezquia.
Saddened that the mysterious and gruesome circumstances of Zapata’s death had overshadowed the vibrancy of the group’s music, O’ Kane sought to tell the story of the Gits, from the group’s formation to the relief the remaining band members felt when her killer was caught and convicted. O’ Kane had directed a documentary about her and other women’s experiences battling cancer (she says she is currently cancer-free) as well as videos for groups such as Tilt and Cinderblock, but says that she was still learning as she went while making the film, which features archival performance footage and interviews with the group’s surviving members, Matt Dresdner, Steve Moriarty, Joe Spleen (a.k.a. Andy Kessler). The Gits will be released via Liberation Entertainment on July 8, and will also tour American theaters around the same time. O’ Kane recently talked with CMJ about making the film and the obligations she felt to tell Zapata’s story.
Why did you decide to make this documentary?
I had cancer and I was working on another documentary at the time (Walking Wounded), I found out about Mia Zapata through chance by just doing some research for my own documentary. And when I read that this woman was murdered and her killer was still out there, I just really wanted to see the film that had been made. And my research just showed me that there was a film called Hype! that Doug Pray (Surfwise, Scratch) had done. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it?
Yeah.
The Gits are in it and it’s an amazing set, and Mia just blew my mind, and I couldn’t believe that this girl was murdered and they still hadn’t found the killer. And so I went and I got some of their music and I was so impressed and it was hard to believe, again, that she was gone and I thought it was egregious that they weren’t able to find this person after so many years, and I felt like a film should be made to celebrate her life and the band because they were such a good band. I mean, for me if I didn’t like the music I wouldn’t have been so inclined to make the film, but I felt that Mia… she deserved more than to be known as the woman who was brutally raped and murdered. She deserved a legacy that dealt more with her music and that’s what I hope this documentary can accomplish.
So, you were working on a documentary about women with cancer, and family members dealing with grief before you made this film. Did you make any sort of emotional connection between what you were going through with the people from your previous documentary going through and the Gits one?
Definitely there was a connection in terms of the loss that people were experiencing, although it was on a different level because having an illness and losing somebody to murder are two different things, and I think that through my own emotional grief of what I experienced, I was able to connect with the guys in The Gits. Because I don’t think they were really willing to have strangers come in on the outside, because they had been doing all these different TV shows and I think that people were trying to sensationalize what happened to Mia. And I came from a different point of view, like I said earlier, that I just wanted to celebrate the music because I thought it was so good and celebrate Mia but also that I had gone … through a life and death experience myself and had witnessed people dying around me. And although it was different than a murder, I was able to relate to them in terms of the loss.
What was making this film like?
It was intense because at the time nobody knew who did it, and not a lot of people were really willing to talk about it because they didn’t know if it was one of them, and after so many years of going on the shows like Unsolved Mysteries and America’s Most Wanted and type of things like that, I think that they just felt that there was no hope. For the guys in the Gits they really wanted it to not be explorative in terms of investigation, they wanted it to be more celebrating the music.
What was it like working with the guys?
Awesome. It was awesome because all three of them are amazing people who have suffered such a great loss, and obviously their lives have taken a traumatic turn since Mia’s death. Because they were going to probably continue playing music, for how long nobody really knows, but the fact that Mia was taken in such a brutal way and the violence that she suffered was just so shocking… it was just really empowering to work with these guys and to be able to be let into their world was a great honor.
Did the group give you access to a lot of live footage and archival things of that nature?
Doug Pray actually helped us out a lot. He gave us the outtakes of some of the live performance stuff that didn’t make Hype!. I mean, he was amazing to us and then a lot of the fans actually gave us footage that they had recorded. Luckily, a lot of people had recorded The Gits. Doug Prey filmed them on 16 mm and the other folks shot it on high 8 and there’s a lot of crappy footage, but it’s all worth it for the story. One thing that I got from Steve Moriarty was a super 8 tape that he hadn’t developed, and on it is Mia with her Gits sweatshirt on just acting goofy at a party, and it’s amazing that we have that because you just don’t have Mia offstage. Most of the footage of her is onstage and that is the only footage we have of her just being a person hanging out.
Just as a goofy young person?
Yeah, exactly, just being how we try to describe her in the film, that she was just fun and she was more than just this rebel-rousing lead singer of this punk rock band. She was just a really funny and fun to be around girl, and you really get that from the footage.
It’s one of those things that because of the way she died, it would be easy to think of her in terms of this great tragedy. But that’s only a small sliver of who she was as a person.
Right, right. It’s the way in which she died… it’s something that’s hard to comprehend and the randomness of it is hard to swallow, but it’s also when you’re talking to all her friends, and the people that knew her best it’s like she really…I knew that I didn’t want Mia Zapata to go down like that. I didn’t want her to go down and die in vain, meaning that I didn’t want her legacy to be about this brutal rape and murder. There was so much more to her than that, and unfortunately the media really focuses, or did in the past, on that. That’s what the Gits are known for, is the lead singer who was murdered and they should be known for so much more than that, I believe. It doesn’t mean to say that they were going to be the next Nirvana or Pearl Jam or anything like that, it just seemed to me that they just influenced and touched so many lives as a group. That’s a shame that that’s all we hear about is the brutal rape and murder.
Obviously, this story is overwhelmingly sad. Was it ever hard to push through some days and get it done?
Yes. Definitely. Especially when I was working on it and we didn’t know who the killer was and there were fights. There were fights with us and the guys because I became frustrated that we didn’t know who did this and people were really hesitant to talk. To some people I’m like, “Do you think that Mia’s lyrics, because she sang about rape and serial killing in a few of her songs…” and I’d ask these people if these songs had anything to do with her death and people said, “I don’t want to go there. I don’t want to talk about that, I don’t know.” Because people really didn’t know and I think that the pinnacle moment was when I had—it’s a long story but I’ll try to make it short—it was Christmas time about 10 days before they caught the killer, unbeknownst to us, and I started talking to Steve Moriarty, the drummer, and he talked about the investigation a little bit and Andy, the guitar player, found out, got angry because he didn’t want, again, to talk about the investigation so much and it was very frustrating. So I come home to LA and then I get a phone call from the guys…and they’re very upset. And then they called back two days later to say, “Turn on CNN. They caught the killer.” So it was pretty incredible.
Wow.
It was after this fight that had occurred and then it was within the next several days, I can’t remember exactly how many days, they caught the killer. Andy told me “you’re never going to know who killed her.” I mean that was going through their veins, “We don’t want you to talk about the investigation because you’re never going to know who did it, just forget it and move on.” And they had become resolute in that and you could sense the frustration, and then it was days later and I said “I don’t believe that, on my grandmother in heaven. I don’t believe it and I believe that that guy is out there and he will be caught.” It was just something that I said, and they caught the guy days later.
That’s amazing.
Yeah, I swear to God. They caught the guy, I got the phone call it was over the TV…I don’t know if you saw it, it was on some of the news channels, MTV had posted it.
I actually did an article about this and I talked to Joan Jett and her manager and figured, he mentioned because they didn’t know who did it, a lot of people thought it was someone she knew or someone in the scene and it seemed really seemed to drive people apart. When they found it was some random transient person who did it… I don’t want to say make it better, but did the trust come back or was it just too far gone at that point?
No, I think it did, I think you could really, especially in the courtroom, you could see that there were so many people that… when we started to do the film, which was one year before the killer was caught, Andy would say, “You could talk to so and so I haven’t talked to them in a while but you can talk…” and we would talk to so and so and then so and so would say, “Oh, tell Andy I say ‘hi,’” and they’re all living a few blocks apart in Seattle, yet I would come to realize that these people had really not spoken to one another in such a long time. And I think that this movie brought people together in terms of, “Oh, tell him I say hi,” or “we should hang out,” and then once things started coming together, and especially when they caught the killer, it was like I felt for these people, it was a sense of relief that it wasn’t one of them. It wasn’t somebody that they knew, it wasn’t Mia’s old boyfriend, it wasn’t somebody that was hanging out at a bar or a crazed fan. I think it was something that put a final stamp on that, that it wasn’t somebody that was in our group. Which I think gave some relief, and I saw the euphoria in Andy and Matt and Steve. It was incredible to get this guy and I think it really brought people together through an unfortunately very sad tale.
How long after this movie was filmed did it take to get released in theaters?
It actually didn’t take that long to get distribution, it took us a long time to finally say when the thing was done. We went through a whole host of editors, and it was a very difficult process because we screened in the Seattle International Film Festival and the thing was nowhere near done. We should have never have submitted it, but we were being pressured to show it there because the killer had just been caught, so it was the buzz in Seattle at the time. But I really regret having it released at that time, because it just was more of a rough cut than it was anything near being a finished piece, and now I feel that after we started it in what 2002, 2003, its now…it’s 2008, six and a half years in the making and if I had more footage and more time I’d still keep working, because like I said I was a rookie in this whole thing, I still am, but it’s my passion and trying to get Mia’s story out there I just couldn’t let her go down like that. Again, I feel very fortunate because there’s a whole heck of a lot of people out there who have a lot more experience than I have… but I came in, I think, at the right time and luckily for me is that these guys are very genuine and they didn’t care about my inexperience or whatever, they knew that I was coming from the right place and that my heart was in the right place and that I wouldn’t let them down.
It sounds that you came at the right time just because it sounded like they had just given up.
They had just given up, from my impression they had resigned themselves to the fact that they were going to go through their lives never knowing who killed their friend. Once I was in that world, I felt that I wasn’t gonna find out who killed her either, and it was sort of a feeling of claustrophobia. Somehow, I got wrapped up into that and thinking, “God I’m going to go to my death not knowing who killed Mia Zapata.” And I’ll tell you, it was one hell of a shock to see who actually was the last person to see Mia alive. It was the most stunning and shocking thing. I think it one of the most horrific things, more than my cancer, to see that guy walk in that courtroom. He was big. He had to bend down almost to walk into the doorway and there was all these news cameras flashing and it was incredible and just, people were shaking and crying, it was just all this, all these years and this was the person that did it who looked into Mia’s eyes, the last person on the earth to see her alive. It was incredible. I don’t think anybody in that courtroom that knew Mia, and of course I didn’t know her, but those that did it was like, “Oh my God, after all this, this is the person that took our friend away.” It was amazing, in a good way and a bad way.
So how did you know when the film was done?
It’s never done. I think once we got the killer, that gave a different ending to my movie but it was really when I felt the story was flowing more, when it was really getting to the heart of who Mia was and you get to feel that. Because I think the problem is that we don’t have any interviews with Mia herself, it’s just of her performing and people talking about her. I think once it was able to be conveyed who Mia was, just as an everyday girl from Louisville, Kentucky and how much fun she was and fun to be around. She had a ton of friends and everybody claimed that Mia was their best friend, but Andy was her best friend, the guitar player, they were truly best friends and soul mates and that, I believe, comes across in the film, and I think that’s another part that I wanted to be conveyed. And I think once those things, those important things relating to Mia and the group as a whole, the family connection, once I felt like that was being conveyed, I think I felt that I could stop editing. Even though I still feel that I want to edit some more.
-Michael Tedder
Related: Read about The Gits documentary tour here. For more information about the Zapata case, please check out this week’s CMJ online feature.
Tags: The Gits
