A Goggler Exclusive! We speak to director Zach Heinzerling and go behind the scenes of “The Man at the Top”, his episode of Netflix’s Dirty Money, featuring Najib Razak and 1MDB.

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The following transcript has been edited for both length and clarity.

Umapagan Ampikaipakan: Alright Zach, I have a ton of questions for you, but before we get into the episode itself, just give me a little bit of an overview about Dirty Money. I’m always curious as to that decision process behind which global scandals make the cut for every season of Dirty Money. I know you just directed this episode, but I was wondering if you had any insight on the whole process and the considerations behind it.

Zach Heinzerling: I would say I am less privy to the conversations that Alex (Gibney) is having with his staff about the episodes. They had been talking about doing the 1MDB episode in Season 1. That would have been in 2018 when that aired – so they probably would have been working on it in 2017 – but just not enough had come out yet, the investigations had just been announced, they obviously didn’t have the elections yet. And they called me probably in March or April of last year and it was the final episode of the season that they had been working out. I think, the fear of it is, that it’s just such a giant subject matter, and to do it in an hour would be tricky.

The Kleptocrats film, I felt, was one piece of the story. A lot of it concerning the journalist’s efforts of breaking the story, of following it and chasing it, and obviously with the participation of The Wall Street Journal reporters, it sort of lacked a Malaysian perspective. To me, it felt like there could be a story which was about what was happening in Malaysia right now. So, I sort of pitched that in response to them saying: “What do you think of 1MDB?” My initial reaction was, well, it seems like a lot has been done on that already, but, if we could go to Malaysia and talk about the election and what’s happening politically, and also actually try to see the victims of this crime – that are a lot of times invisible in financial crimes – then we can get something compelling, emotionally. To get you invested in a story that, for a lot of people, is too complex and too concerned with dollars and cents. Let’s go to Malaysia and see if we can find people on both sides of this story and see why there are people on both sides. What was sort of going on amongst the poorer class of people that were affected most by this but didn’t necessarily know it? That was what we set out to do.

As far as the other episodes, they had already been chosen by the time I came on board. Ours I think was the last to shoot. And I think that’s because we were still kinda waiting to see what was unfolding. And I’ll also say that it (Dirty Money) is very much focused on filmmakers who wanted to make their own film. It wasn’t a series that had a sort of formula, even stylistically or topically. Alex (Gibney) really wanted individual filmmakers to take ownership of the film,