Making of 'The Real Anthony Fauci' Movie

The Writer-Director's Perspective

It was the summer of 2020, and we had all been on lockdown for the coronavirus over the previous five months. I was using the time to finish up my documentary film on my grandfather, and was really only keeping one ear to the news circulating in the background. All of a sudden I noticed all news outlets were heavily parroting each other. They were all saying the same things, the same terms, no varying perspectives, all voices were in lockstep. They were drumming in the fact that if we listen to the wrong voices we may be brainwashed and transmute into dangerous members of society. During this time of course I thought a lot about The Brainwashing of My Dad.

I had spent almost three years working on the documentary, The Brainwashing of My Dad, with award-winning indie director Jen Senko and actor Matthew Modine. It was a political documentary about how the media influences and manipulates our minds. Although the movie was pointing the finger only at right-wing media as that is the experience Jen’s father had along with many other Americans, I became acutely aware of the propaganda methods that our entire media system uses to keep both political audiences in a constant state of fear, anxiety, and distraction, crippling them from having clarity of thought. Now I was noticing how even independent media sources were complicit in this, and it became more and more obvious to me that something big was going on.

So that really started me on a path of researching and re-educating myself over the next year on our country’s history, our health system, the dominant social and political narratives, and why certain voices were being censored. What was this cancel-culture really all about? Well-meaning health professionals, prominent doctors, Nobel Laureate scientists, award-winning journalists, were all being silenced. This led me to know more intimately the people whose voices had been suppressed now for decades. Important voices such as Kary Mullis, the inventor of the PCR test that was actively being used to detect the coronavirus. And this led me to truly independent journalists who were providing links to official documents and sourcing their works every time that they wrote an article or did their independent newscasts. I switched from DemocracyNow to The Defender, and from political satirical commentators like Jimmy Kimmel or Trevor Noah to listening to comedian-journalist Lee Camp, or investigative journalists Aaron Maté and Max Blumenthal from the Grayzone, Glenn Greenwald from Intercept, Spiro Skouras, Saagon and Krystal from the Hill, and many others. The journalists I went the deepest with were Ryan Cristian from The Last American Vagabond, James Corbett of the Corbett Report, and Whitney Webb from Unlimited Hangout. Their research was so extensive, so thorough, complete with show notes in the description that gave me the ability and motivation to seek out and read the official documents they were reporting on. These were government documents, intelligence reports, health charts from our government agencies, books, documentaries, interviews. And I jumped all the way in. I would hold up the mainstream media talking points to my own background checks, comparing government websites and archives to what was being said. I also felt it was so important to save these documents, to download these files, documentaries and videos and old news clips. Something needed to be done with all of this, but I didn’t know what it was yet.

Then came Bobby Kennedy Jr’s book which really tied it all together in one gigantic encyclopedia, with unrelenting footnotes and more sourced material. I started to read The Real Anthony Fauci book in November 2021 and it felt like a movie to me already, a real life mystery-thriller. With all of the research that I had been doing over the previous year, the research from his book went even deeper, a wealth of information broken down in a way that I thought would make an amazing documentary. I saw that Bobby’s organization at the time, Children’s Health Defense, had opened their fellowship program and the deadline to apply was about a week away. I quickly applied and pitched the idea of doing a documentary film of the book along with other ideas that I had, and I was accepted into their media department. I was thrilled to connect with the most extraordinary fellows from around the world, as well as from all professional backgrounds.

Then about one month into the fellowship, as fate would have it, CHD said there was a studio ready to produce The Real Anthony Fauci movie. I immediately asked to be connected, my CV was forwarded to the studio, and right away the studio had me start writing the script. In February of 2022, the producer that contracted me to write the movie script told me that he usually uses another director who shoots interviews and just sort of intuitively develops a story afterwards in post-production. But naturally in order to make a film adaptation of Bobby’s book we would need to have an actual script. He said his studio had never worked off of a script for his documentaries so he asked if I could do it in three to four weeks - read the book, break it down into chronological order, (it is not written chronologically but I needed to create a chronological storyline), while obviously staying true and faithful to the book. He also asked me to identify all people in the book that needed to be interviewed, and write up all of the interview questions for each of them. The producer said he doesn’t do voiceovers in his films and so he would need the interviewees to tell the entire story.

THE OUTLINE.

Something I learned from working at the big television networks is that there is a formula that is pretty much guaranteed to engage your audience. Basically my favorite takeaway is a focus on the beginning and the end. The beginning needs to pull in your audience right at the get-go. It has to hook them in. And the ending of the movie, or the ending of the episode, the ending of the show, the ending of whatever it is, the ending needs to be memorable. The ending has to have an impact. And then I find that everything in the middle just sort of falls into place. I work that in intuitively. So, once I have the opening in my mind then I can sort of break down the rest in an outline format.

WRITING THE OPENING.

The title of the book sounds like a smear campaign against the man. Rather, it’s about the transformation of our entire health system over the past century. So I thought, there needs to be another way to invite in audiences from both sides of the conversation. The first thing that came to my mind is Bobby Kennedy’s personal experience which he touches on in the book. It is very raw and authentic and relatable, the fact that he himself was blindsided by the corruption and corporate capture of our government agencies. It was an especially hard blow to him because his own family had made great strides over the decades to ensure safe and secure health policies for all Americans. I thought, everybody has gone through some kind of trial or challenge or personal shock in their life that has brought them to another level of awareness. So this is a common denominator with all people. And I honed in on that. Then I had to think visually, what did I want that to look like. I had written down to the producer and the production manager my thought-process on the opening sequence with Bobby. Here’s what I wrote: “In the book, just like real life, more is constantly being revealed to us. So I had this idea for the opening of the film. Visually I imagine it can open with extreme close-ups on random objects - a letter, a stack of papers, details of the room, family heirlooms, a photograph. They’re so close up that they’re sort of obscure, maybe out of focus. Then little by little, more is revealed. The mood in the room is slow, thoughtful, quiet, like you are anticipating something. The camera eventually shows Bobby he puts on his glasses and starts to read an excerpt from his book’s introduction. It feels like you’re sitting in the room with someone you know well who is about to to tell you something meaningful and he begins to say: ‘This book is a product of my own struggle to understand how the idealistic institutions are country built to safeguard both public health and democracy suddenly turned against our citizens and our values with such violence…”

I selected a few passages from the book that I thought really encapsulated what you’re about to see and experience. The production team loved it and gave the green light. What was exciting to me at that time was how the producer instructed his crew to create the look and feel of the opening scene that I had put down on paper, and clearly a lot of care went into the set design. I thought it looked beautiful, from the warm lighting, to the thoughtfully selected stage props, to the soft camera movement around the various heirlooms, books, and other objects.

WRITING THE END.

So it starts off with this sort of awakening. And then at the end, the “memorable end” that I wanted to build, it is all about solutions, hope, empowerment, motivation, what we can do with this information in a positive way. In other words, to take the darkness and turn it into something light, something powerful. You can hear these dystopian stories and it could just make you fearful. It can be sort of paralyzing. But that would never be the message that I would want anyone to walk away with because it’s also not the message of the book. Even in the book, Bobby Kennedy’s last paragraph brings in the inspiring words of Martin Luther King Jr. in a powerful message of hope and change. And the last sentence in the book was Bobby saying, “I’ll see you on the barricades,” which he has also said live to crowds at health freedom rallies across the world. Even just reading those words in the book was quite impactful.

PART ONE.

Staying faithful to the book while creating a chronological outline, I arranged it into four parts. Each part spanned approximately twenty years.

Of course, because of the fact that Fauci was the Director of the NIAID (National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Disease) for forty years leading up to the worst pandemic we have known in over a century, I made the decision to start Part One with the beginning of his career. I thought the events from the turn of the century could come in as flashbacks within the belly of the script. Plus I couldn’t pass up the dystopian connection to George Orwell’s 1984 book with the very year that Anthony Fauci became director of the NIAID.

The year was 1984. As soon as Fauci took the position as director the country was hit with the AIDS epidemic. And as the country pours millions into the development of an AIDS vaccine over the next twenty years, government officials and pharmaceutical companies build alliances.

PART TWO.

Part Two begins with a twist. The year is 2000. Fauci has a secret handshake deal with Bill Gates. An audio recording of Fauci speaking about an intimate gathering at Gates’ home with other International Global Health leaders. Gates is a billionaire businessman who saw his 100 billion dollar estate drop in half the year before and he was looking to invest. Thanks to this new business partnership with the health sector of our government, Gates finds this venture even more lucrative than his Microsoft empire. Fauci explains that their interactions and collaborations became closer and closer with each disease over the years. Coincidentally, starting in 2001 there was a brand new epidemic scare almost every other year leading to more funding that was needed for gain-of-function lab research.

PART THREE.

This begins the year 2020. Finally, the threat of a deadly pandemic that was predicted by Fauci in 2017 has been realized. Here we see in ever-developing realtime how the response to Covid is causing more harm than help. The solutions being implemented come directly from the annual global pandemic-preparedness meetings that are held by financial and military and intelligence leaders across the world.

PART FOUR.

This part speaks to the future. The WHO (World Health Organization) vows to do better during the next inevitable pandemic when it comes around. Bill Gates assures us the next one will be sooner than we think. But the voices that have been suppressed for so long speak out about a brighter future. Independent organizations are being built around the country and around the world, health education and alternative solutions bring a message of hope and strength and awareness.

INTERVIEWS.

So I put together the four parts into the initial script, the first draft, during that first month of the project, from February to March, 2022. During the following months, I continued to adjust the script to accommodate the interviews coming in, all while researching the careers of the interviewees and writing up their interview questions. Julie, the studio’s amazing production manager, set up the whole operation to run like a well-oiled machine. She was doing the scheduling for the interviews all around the country. I gave her a short list of the interviewees that needed to be contacted, she would get in touch with each one, schedule an interview, send me the dates, and I would research and write each one and send her the questions that needed to be asked. Because the producer had initially wanted the interviewees themselves to tell the entire story without voice-over narration, the questions for these individuals were very long and deep. In other words, they often spanned careers over four decades long, from the 1980s until today. In Bobby’s five hundred page book he uses certain individuals to talk about their experiences in the 80s, the 90s, and 2000s, and all the way up until 2020, so I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss a beat.

Selecting which people from the book should go into the movie was also an interesting process, because just like in a narrative film, I thought about the personalities in the movie. As I was selecting them, not only was the content important to tell the story from start to finish, but how to bring in a cinematic theme. If there was a personal account or an emotional component to the story, if that person had a dramatic story to tell, this was going to be really valuable. In other words, I had to think about how certain things that I read in the book would actually look visually and create sub-stories like mini-movies within the movie. I loved the works of Celia Farber, Vera Sharav, and Whitney Webb, and was excited for them to be interviewed.

It was also very important to include those journalists from my own personal awakening starting in 2020. Because these individuals were so thorough in their reporting and sourcing their material, many of them had been included in Bobby’s long list of footnotes in the book as well. I wanted their voices and names to be seen and heard on a larger scale. I was able to include James Corbett, Ryan Cristian, Spiro Skouras’ studious breakdown of the World Economic Forum’s pandemic preparedness meetings, and others.

This process of pulling together these voices, whether it was finding archived videos for the editors to use, or writing up interview questions to be used in my script, the whole experience was completely electric as I juggled it all. There was a realtime developing story still happening with Covid during this time in 2022, and I was keeping up with current events with Joe Rogan and Jimmy Dore adding their voices to the ever growing revelations.

It was enlightening to find that certain individuals that were speaking out on Covid and the MRNA treatments also had a long history dealing with the subject of pharmaceuticals and disease stemming all the way back to the ‘80s. Dr. Robert Malone was one of them. I was first introduced to him in 2021 during my own personal research for truth. When I found out that he was the original inventor of the MRNA technology that was being fast-approved as a solution to the Covid-19 virus, what I didn’t realize was that he was there behind-the-scenes in the 1980’s, helping to develop the MRNA technology as a solution for HIV. He also has deep connections with DARPA, with the DOD (Department of Defense), and so his knowledge was vast - from AIDS to Anthrax to Covid - all of which is covered in the book and the movie. Another individual with a unique voice was Holocaust survivor Vera Sharav. She explains the similarities between what we saw during the Covid pandemic and the early stages of the Holocaust. During my deep dive research into her career background, and through Bobby Kennedy’s book, I found that her human rights organizations were fighting against Dr. Fauci way back in the 1990s when toxic drug trials were used in orphanages on little children from poor neighborhoods in New York City. A lawsuit ensued but everything was eventually brushed under the rug. Dr. Michael Yeadon was another very interesting interview. He has a background working for the pharmaceutical companies over the decades, starting in the 80s, when he was at the Wellcome Research Labs in the UK which discovered the first possible drug for HIV/AIDS. Now he was a former employee and whistleblower of the Pfizer pharmaceutical company that developed the first vaccine to be approved for Covid.

Bobby Kennedy’s interview was the most extensive. Each of the other interviewees had to endure about two hours of detailed Q&A. But Bobby had twice as much. He came in for two separate interviews and he was incredibly gracious and professional. His first interview happened right after I completed that initial first draft in March. At that early stage of the script, Bobby’s only role was to talk about his own story, his family’s involvement in government health policies over the decades, and his own personal awakening to the corruption and capture of our government agencies in later years. But as the script developed and evolved, there were pieces of the story that could only be fulfilled by voice-over so it was decided that it would be alright for Bobby to be the one to fill in those blanks. Two months before the final release of the film, Bobby came to the studio in Utah for a pickup. I also flew in from New York to interview him directly.

In the end, eighteen people were interviewed for this two-part documentary. When the interview was complete, it was then digitally transcribed and sent to me to work it into the script. So the script was in constant flux for the next few months time.

THE BOOK.

Approaching this adaptation, not only did I feel an intense responsibility to do right by it, but I also didn’t want to make it my own. I wanted to really make it about the book. I wanted to make it loyal and faithful to all of the tremendous work that went into it. It felt like a personal book because of his family’s legacy and his own advocacy work so I really wanted to honor that. I wanted to make sure that while watching the film the viewer always remembers that this is an adaptation of his book.

I thought one way to do that would be to bring in the book as a sort of character itself. So we’ve got Bobby, we’ve got these co-stars which are the other interviewees, and we also have the book itself as a character. The way I envisioned it was a book-motion-graphic that comes to life with pages flipping and the animation dives into it as if it is an old treasure map or an old encyclopedia. The frame moving in and out through the words.

FLASHBACKS.

So the script was approved and it was full steam ahead. Still keeping with the request for a chronological story, I made some adjustments to accommodate the longer history, the origins that stem back to the turn of the century, which led us to the health system we have today.

In 1910, John D. Rockefeller took over medical medicine, specifically the medical schools. He redirected medicine to be totally focused on pharmaceutical interventions which lined the pockets of his empire as these medical interventions used the petrochemical products that were a significant part of his wealth. Only six years later, he became the world’s very first billionaire (1916). His influence and money was pivotal in shaping the modern science-based medical system that we have today, often dismissing more natural remedies. The Rockefellers along with other billionaire families have kept their influence over our health system for generations. Bill Gates’ family being one of them.

THE EDITORS.

The production studio I was working for not only outsourced by hiring me all the way from the east coast in New York to write and direct the film, but they also outsourced a husband & wife film editing team on the west coast in California. The producer’s intuition was on point when he hired the three of us. These editors were so professional, so in tune with the whole project, the script, Bobby Kennedy’s message in the book, the whole Health Freedom movement, that it was all quite seamless. And not only were they very much in sync with the look and feel of the script, they were also musically inclined so they not only edited the film but created the entire soundtrack which was so beautifully crafted. I was hooked as soon as they presented the opening sequence. They really brought the script to life in the best way possible. The sounds and the music they chose were thoughtful and sensitive. Truly artful.

The way it worked with the editors & I was a seamless and efficient workflow that really made the process move very quickly. We started working together in June, 2022. They worked on building the edit section by section. And as the interviews started coming in one by one, I’d quickly insert the soundbites and timecodes into the script and deliver each updated section to the editors, while also writing up any notes or feedback for them along the way.

POST SCRIPT.

I like to refer to the whole project as a very spiritual experience for me. I’ve said it many times that having this total awakening in 2020 has given me a deeper understanding of love. Even amid all of the tragic losses, the heartache, heartbreak, the devastating pain that was caused by either recklessly unintentional or direct & purposeful acts from our governments’ partnership with corrupt entities, the important thing to note is that fighting darkness with more darkness just brings us deeper into the pit of despair.

Over this entire process my relationship to fear was one that was overcome by my thoughts about the author of this book. If I ever felt scared or anxious in the writing and development of this project I thought about how Bobby Kennedy Jr. had already taken the bullet in standing up to the most intimidating corporations over the past few decades. From Big Agriculture to Big Pharma. And I thought about all of the individuals we interviewed, and those independent journalists that were speaking out online every day. I thought how incredibly courageous they all were to put their careers and lives on the line to speak the truth. This ignited that Greek mythological archetype in me that I had from childhood when I was a little Artemis warrior child of the wilderness. Granted, the wilderness for me was the concrete jungle of Manhattan, but the concept of standing up in the face of adversity resonated with me. And it inspired me to stand in solidarity with them all, to be brave as well.

From my perspective, I prefer to fight darkness with love. True and real and unconditional love. Everyone needs love. Especially those who you think don’t deserve it. What that means for me is that I bless those who have done harm. Specifically I pray for all individuals to have awareness of the pain they caused to others, and even to themselves, to feel true remorse, but then find peace and softness and love in their hearts to make renewed choices with joy, to transform and do goodness in the places where they have caused pain. To set themselves free, and live in love.

Love, Käla

June 4th, 2023