Saturday is HBO’s Madoff film “The Wizard of Lies.” Based on Diana Henriques’ book, the only factual writing to which Bum Bernie actually participated, it’s superb. Turn it on. It’ll beat your drink, your snack or your sex — the kind most people get, anyway.
And, sitting in the same row, I watched Robert De Niro watch his movie. The guy’s terrific. Playing Madoff, he even looks like Madoff.
So Henriques, who plays herself in the film, how did she get Madoff to talk?
“I was at my NY Times desk 4:15 when he was arrested. I’d covered him before and knew his defense lawyer. Our business editor said, ‘Go for it.’ I pursued the story nine months. I asked for interviews. Beginning when he was in the Correctional Center, I wrote letters making my case. I never gave up.
“When he went to federal prison, I kept at it. I heard nothing. I had his prison address, but you can’t be sure he received the mail. Months later, he answered.”
Diana’s diamond earrings and black sequins twinkled as she spoke. “At first, he appeared amazingly well-managed. Took care of his appearance. Immaculate. Low-key. Earnest. A master at what he’d say. His biggest lie being to himself. Two hours. No tape recorder. Only a notebook. We traded letters and e-mails.
“After his son Mark’s suicide, it changed. Shirt open. Badly shaved. Disheveled. He wouldn’t talk about Mark or disrespect him.”
Alessandro Nivola, who plays Mark: “Chris Cuomo, who’d done a piece on the family, gave me this son’s best description. Although the script said he’s a hothead, Chris said Mark’s ‘fragile … There’s a delicacy about him.’
“He and his brother, Andrew, great fishermen, had kept a digital camera on a shaky boat. I saw their snippet of visual. Again and again I kept looking at Mark, checking facial expressions to get him in my head.
“He had an emotionally abusive relationship with his father. There’s no definitive answer to, did he know. But the note he left read, ‘F—k you, Bernie.’ What kind of psychological, emotional being — with his own little son sleeping in the next room — can do himself in with a dog collar?”
Andrew died of an illness. Nathan Darrow on playing him: “People believed both sons to be guilty, but the country didn’t find them so. That says a lot. The case was global. Even a British magistrate said for sure they knew. You kill yourself when you’re tormented. If they’d been in it, they’d have ended up someplace else.
“The story worked on me. I thought a lot about Andrew’s character. I feel for what he went through.”
Its producer/director Barry Levinson: “I think we should tell Richard Plepler, HBO’s CEO, to put HBO in Bernie’s prison.”