INTERVIEWS

Sundance Interview: 'The Imposter' Director Bart Layton & Producer

by Alex Billington
February 2, 2012

One of my favorite documentaries I saw at Sundance 2012 was The Imposter, about Frédéric Bourdin, known as "The Chameleon", who successfully pretended he was a 16 year old missing boy and was brought home to a Texas family back in 1997. It's a fascinating nearly-unbelievable doc (read my review) about how this guy could convince authorities and this entire family that he really was their missing son now found in Europe. At the end of the festival, we caught up with the doc's director Bart Layton and producer Dimitri Doganis for a discussion on how they made the doc, how it came together, and their stories along the way.

We filmed the interview on location at Sundance (apologies for the brief background noise) and spoke with Bart and Dimitri about various aspects of the film that we found so interesting. This is our full chat in uncut form. Watch the interview with The Imposter producer Dimitri Doganis (L) and director Bart Layton (R):

Thank you to Bart & Dimitri for taking the time to speak with us. It's a bit tough to find a perfect location to film an interview at Sundance, but we did our best. I felt like I wanted to speak with these guys immediately after seeing the documentary because it was so fascinating, and I wanted to hear the full story behind how they even found out about everything to start and why they wanted to tell this story about Frédéric Bourdin.

From the Sundance guide: "Like his canny subject, gifted filmmaker Bart Layton pulls off an astonishing coup. Buoyed by eye-catching dramatizations and an enthralling structure that crisscrosses time and place, The Imposter unfolds as a gripping thriller that leaves us dizzy, yet certain that truth is, indeed, stranger than fiction." The Imposter is one of my standouts from Sundance this year and I hope it gets released. The doc will also be playing at the SXSW Film Festival coming up this year. For more, visit their official website.

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