SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
A new Netflix documentary examines one of the most widely publicized acts of deception in recent history - recent weeks, really.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "INSTADOCS: THE DECOY PLANE")
GRAM SLATTERY: (As self) We're told by the White House staff that we should lower our window shades. I'm like, why? They said, Secret Service says to. Like, OK - (vocalizing) - close it.
SIMON: "Decoy Plane" tells the story of President Trump being smuggled out of Air Force One in Turkey, inside a catering container that delivered him to a second plane. All of this happened after the President's plane received a threat from Iran. You might wonder, didn't that just happen? How do they already make a documentary? "Decoy Plane" is part of a new Netflix show called "Instadocs," a fast-turnaround documentary series that harvests stories from the current news cycle. Josh Tyrangiel is the executive producer of "Instadocs" and joins us now from New York. Thanks so much for being with us.
JOSH TYRANGIEL: Oh, it's my pleasure.
SIMON: A documentary, I think, historically, has suggested something definitive. Is this too soon after whatever happened to be definitive?
TYRANGIEL: It's a great question. I think that in these times, it's hard to be definitive about anything. And so part of our mission is actually to just be as clear as we can be. And we try to do it at the sort of crossroads of urgency and finesse. Urgency, obviously, you know, there is a story that a lot of people are talking about. They have unresolved questions. They're very curious about it. News sort of approaches it as rapid fire, and they share little bits and details as they come along.
And the finesse part of what we do is, really, just waiting a minute - not long - but waiting long enough to understand what's been missed and trying to craft it through documentary production techniques so that it coheres and so that people actually have a better understanding of what happened.
SIMON: How do you do that so quickly?
TYRANGIEL: I mean, the truth is, I don't. We have a great team full of absolute lunatics who like to...
SIMON: (Laughter).
TYRANGIEL: ...Work really, really fast. And part of our job is to find stories that are percolating right now and have people who are effectively these kind of, like, triage doctors, right? What can we know? Who can we talk to? How can we elevate what they do? And we do not have a huge team. But truly, everybody on that team exists to move fast and make quick decisions. So that's how we do it.
SIMON: There's a sequence of the president telling reporters as they begin to question the sequence of events in Turkey.
(SOUNDBITE OF PRESS CONFERENCE)
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Were you aware of any credible threat by Iran against Air Force One?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, I had a threat all the time. I'm No. 1 on their list, before you. But if I go, you go.
SIMON: As "Decoy Plane" shows us that it's not true in reverse, is it (laughter)?
TYRANGIEL: I think you need the accumulation of the story to appreciate why that's not just some throwaway line. It may have been in the moment. I mean, the president was, you know, traveling long distances. There's jet lag. I'm not going to ascribe any ill motive to it. I'm just saying when you tell the full story, when you see it over the course of about 30 minutes, which is what the length of the documentary is, you realize all these things that you don't when you just are gathering information piece by piece or, you know, social media post by social media post. And so that's kind of our goal, is for these things that sort of glossed over to actually land when we're doing our storytelling.
SIMON: You do interview a lot of great reporters in this short documentary, and with respect to what you've produced, are you just harvesting their work?
TYRANGIEL: I mean, I, as a reporter myself, yeah. I mean, we're paying tribute to the reporting that they do. Obviously, we're not stealing their reporting. We have them in the story. They're willing participants. And I hope we do their reporting and their experiences tribute. But in this instance, yeah. We really needed them because they were not only the chroniclers of the story. They were the subjects of the story.
SIMON: You've also done "Instadocs" on the Alex Murdaugh murder case and prediction markets. How do you decide that's got "Instadoc" written all over it?
TYRANGIEL: We're really looking for pieces that have a fair amount of depth, a fair amount of confusion so that people are seeking to understand something. Our goal is just to make it sit still long enough so that you come out of the story and you feel like you have an emotional understanding of what happened. I'm really proud of - that we've been able to do so far - is just through the use of the people we talk to, you understand what it's like to experience each piece.
So in the Murdaugh case, we have two jurors, both of whom really went through a very, very tough time just trying to do their civic duty. My main takeaway from it was, boy, we are making it tough - through the promulgation of true crime and this sort of media focus on these things - for people to do a pretty important job in our republic. And you can see the strain on their faces. I love the fact that we get to put people in the kind of empathic space of the people in the stories, and that's what documentary really thrives at.
SIMON: Josh Tyrangiel is the executive producer of "Instadocs" on Netflix. Thanks so much for being with us.
TYRANGIEL: Thanks for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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