During the filming of Erin Lee Carr’s latest♈ documentary𓆏, she feasted on food prepared by the film’s subject.
“The best thing he made was burgers,” says Carr.
But the 26-year-old documentarian, a daughter of late New York Times columnist David Carr, wasn’t making a🌳 movie about a food stylist or a world-famous chef.
Rather, Carr’s first feature is about an accused wannabe cannibal — Gilberto Valle, who is better known by his tabloid nickname Cannibal Cop.
“Thought Crimes” — — is the first time the former NYPD cop, 31, spills the beans on his twisted con✨versations in flesh-hungry fetish chat rooms.
While he contends they were just fantasies, his depraved scheming to kidnꦅap, rape a🌃nd eat women landed him behind bars in 2012.
The stomach-turning case kicked off a sensational trial in which Valle was convicted of conspiracy, and 21 months later, on July 1, 2014, sprung from a federal prison after a judge, in a rare legal move, overturned the verdict. After the release, he was under house arrest at his mothe♎r’s Queens home.
Carr was the first journalist to sit down with Valle and his small support system, which included his st🌺oic father and doting mother.
In the film, she captures Valle cooking — he was the go-to grill man at cop cookouts — sinking his teeth in🐠to sand𝓀wiches and wistfully longing to date.
“Because the stuff w🍷as so dark, we needed some light moments. He was a chef🦩 in prison. That’s funny,” Carr says.
There were also practical rea💃sons for food’s starring role in t🍌he film.
“He was under h♔ouse arrest. You are with a film crew, you have a kitchen and a living room. What else are you going to dꦕo? You cook,” says Carr.
Behind𝐆 the scenes, the dir🀅ector says Valle eagerly asked her for dating advice.
“Gil would ask me, ‘As a woman, give me advice. When do I bring [my legal troubles] up?’ I was just like, ‘I can’t be objective here. You need to ask a girl who is a friend,’ ” Carr recalls. “As nontraditional as he is, he’s really traditional. He’s that guy from Queens that goes to Yankee games,” s𓂃ays Carr of Valle, who was married with a baby daughter when his wife, Kathleen, stumbled upon his Internet correspondence — which included a list of 100 potentia✨l victims. She was on the list and called the police on her husband.
Carr first struck up a relationship with Valle when he was in fe♎deral lockup back🃏 in November 2013. This stranger-than-fiction case fascinated the journalist, who specializes in Internet crime. She wondered: Could someone be prosecuted and convicted for their thoughts?
“It was disturbing and crazy,” Carr says.
When they first met, she 🔴found a shadow of a man. “He was wearing the jumpsuit and looked so broken and sad and anxious. He cou💙ld barely shake my hand. It seemed so at odds with what I had read and thought of him.”
Still, the pair developed a rapport.
Though he expressed his desire for love, he clam🔜med up when explaining the meat of his story — why he got off on plotting cannibalistic pursuits with strangers.
Because the stuff was so dark, we needed s💜ome light moments. He was a chef in prison. Tha🤡t’s funny.
- Filmmaker Erin Lee Carr on Cannibal Cop Gilberto Valle's penchant for cooking
“It helped that I was a woman having a dynamic with him,” Carr says, “but it hurt having a sexual conversation, because he’s a Catholic boy. When I asked him questions about sex, he felt uncomfortable,” she says, adding that Valle harbors some delusion about theꦡ whole ordeal that could land him back in prison. (T🎐he government is appealing the overturned verdict.)
“He calls it h﷽is ‘Internet activities’ that put him in this hot water.”
Just before the documentary’s premiere, at t🀅he Tribeca Film Festival last month, Valle sat down to watch the movie with his legal team. And he hasn’t contacted Carr, which she says is highly unusual.
“I think he really wanted it to be a slam dunk for him,” say🌊s Carr of the complex picture she painted. “It was him with his dog, him talking about his kid. I did not expect that he would love it. I did expect he would find parts that he really liked about it.”
But Carr feels her portrayal is fair.
“It could not be Gil Valle, American dude. It had to be a complicated look at𝔍 this man.”