Filmmaker Erin Lee Carr On All Her Dad Left Behind

Tell Me About Your Father

For our latest episode, Erin and Elizabeth talk to the two-time-Emmy-nominated film director Erin Lee Carr, whose work features several acclaimed true crime titles for HBO, including Mommy Dead & Dearest, At the Heart of Gold: Inside the USA Gymnastics Scandal, I Love You Now Die: The Commonwealth V. Michelle Carter, and Undercurrent: The Disappearance of Kim Wall. For Netflix, Carr directed Britney Vs. Spears, about Britney Spears’ quest for freedom from her conservatorship controlled by her father. Erin Carr is the daughter of the esteemed New York Times media columnist David Carr, who died suddenly in 2015 at the age of 58 when Erin was just 26. David Carr had experienced what his daughter describes in our interview as “the rise and the fall and the rise,” grappling in his twenties with a crack cocaine addiction amidst the beginnings of what would become a meteoric journalism career. The premature births of Erin and her twin sister helped him get and stay sober, all of which is chronicled in his bestselling 2008 memoir The Night of the Gun. In Erin’s own memoir about her father, 2019’s All That You Leave Behind, she writes about the special bond she had with him over their shared career ambitions. And, as Erin would realize in her later twenties, their shared addiction to substances. Six years sober and engaged to a Washington Post media columnist (a similarity she thinks her father would have a field day with), Erin talks about the constant encouragement her dad bestowed on her—his toughness and tenderness—and shares the email he sent her after she was once fired that should probably be anthologized in parenting manuals.

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