How Netflix Filmmaker Seth Porges Finds the World’s Biggest Thrill-Seekers
Seth Porges follows his instincts when he comes across a good story. Image courtesy of Porges.
Six years ago, journalist and documentary filmmaker Seth Porges was looking for stories on money laundering when he found a Reddit thread about this crew of bank robbers who laundered money by going to casinos in Vegas and betting half their money on one sports team and half on the other. He thought that was clever, so he looked into these guys and discovered it was Scott Scurlock, the infamous Seattle “Hollywood bandit” and his friends. And the money laundering was only the tip of the iceberg.
A few things stood out to Porges. One, none of the key figures had spoken about Scurlock’s robberies for 25 years. Two, Porges felt that something was off about the way the story had been previously reported. The narratives were inconsistent, and it felt to him like key voices were missing from the story. So he dove into researching what really happened. As it turned out, his intuition was spot-on, so he set out to tell the whole story instead of the half-truths that existed out there. It took him six years to find the group members who were still alive (Scurlock died by suicide in 1996) and earn their trust to participate, but the years-long effort paid off. Porges has just released his latest documentary, How to Rob a Bank, on Netflix, which he produced and codirected with Stephen Robert Morse. (His previous film, Class Action Park, is streaming on HBO.)
Here, Porges shares the lengths he went to make How to Rob a Bank, how he stress-tests story ideas to see if they are worth making into a long-form piece, and how his neuroscientist parents and their work influence his creative pursuits.
It’s 1990s Seattle and Scott Scurlock has the charm, the wit, and the thrill-seeking mindset that could change a city. Image: Netflix.
First, the obvious question: How does one rob a bank?
The first step is, Don’t rob a bank. Robbing a bank is not the hard part. The hard part is living as a criminal within this web of lies. As we investigated Scott Scurlock, “the “Hollywood bandit,” we found that the deeper he got into this criminal enterprise, the more trapped he became. And there is this incredible irony to that, especially considering his character: a free spirit who ran around naked, spinning on zip lines. His friends called him Tarzan. He would have done anything in the world to not be tied down by the responsibilities that normal people deal with. But in this grand scheme, to avoid being a responsible member of society, he was trapped, suffocatingly alone, and very sad in the end. Hollywood movies about bank robbers are often this glamorized mystique of this noble outlaw. But if you were to actually become one in real life, what would happen to you? This story shows somebody who watched a bunch of Hollywood movies, thought it looked like fun, and decided to do it. But what he found on the other side of that was horrifying.
What elements do you look for in a story like this that signal it will be great?
A great story follows a compelling narrative arc; it is much more than just an interesting topic. Scottie’s story was so compelling because it felt like a Hollywood movie. He started robbing banks, and when he failed, he learned and adapted, and then he got better at it. There is a police chase, and it culminates with one last score. And you watch this, thinking, Don’t they know that you should never do one last score? The story followed the playbook of a Hollywood movie to the extent that, as a screenwriter, people would laugh at me for being so cliché. But what is cliché in a scripted film is so enticing in a documentary.
Scott Scurlock stole millions before he was caught. Image: Netflix.
Tell us about what you had to push for, and potentially fight for, to make this film.
The hardest part about this project was getting the participants to talk. These are people who, for their own reasons, didn’t trust that some filmmaker from Netflix was going to give the story a fair shake. I can understand why. People might fear they could be edited in an unfair way, or that they are going to be ambushed. There are consequences that come from participating, especially if you live a quiet life. There was one person in particular in this film who had been living a quiet life, and I knew his voice was crucial to the story. So I asked him to go hiking with me for a few days. Eventually, he began spontaneously telling me stories about Scott, the robberies, and his crazy tree house. I realized that this story wasn’t just important to me as a filmmaker, but also to those who would be in it who have struggled with the fallout of these events. I sincerely hope and believe that making this film was a healing process for the people involved.
Whether you are telling a story about an insanely dangerous amusement park in Class Action Park or a band of bank robbers here, what is your narrative viewpoint and the through-line between your projects?
Both of my films are about the promises and perils of living a life of no rules, a life outside of society, or a life only for yourself, without responsibility for others. I had a hard time making Class Action Park because people would say, “Why would anybody outside of New Jersey care about this amusement park?” Those people didn’t understand that the story was really about growing up in the ‘80s, about wanting to live this large existence that is both thrilling and terrifying at the same time. Class Action Park is about the appeal of a place or thing that is so dangerous. Once the film came out, people realized they could relate to a park they had never been to, and they could see their own childhoods reflected in that feeling.
Similarly, even if you’re not from the Seattle area, we can all relate to Scott’s struggle between the light and dark sides of him. As a filmmaker, when I can find the underlying humanity behind somebody who might have been labeled as a monster, I can better understand and convey these same instincts within all of us. It’s important to understand how a “normal” person could end up doing something that you view as monstrous.
And by telling their stories, I can hopefully remind people of what happens when we are dismissive of our human compulsion. They remind us why we need other people.
Seth and his father, Dr. Stephen Porges, co-wrote a book together on trauma.
Once you commit to a story, what’s it like to dedicate years to a single project? And how do you know when it is “done”?
Film is a medium where, once it’s done, it’s done, unless you’re George Lucas editing your old movies. With video games, they can put patches in content and fix things. But film is like a sculpture — if you made a mistake, that mistake is always there. If you didn’t tell the story in the best possible way, you have to live with that. It is nerve-racking and intimidating to finally put your work out there.
Throughout the process, you’re constantly thinking to yourself, Did I miss something? Did I forget to make this better? The biggest struggle when you work on a movie for four, five, or six years is that you can lose track of what it will be like for somebody to see it for the first time. When you edit a film and you hear the same joke 100 times, it is no longer funny to you. When you try to make something feel suspenseful but you know how it ends, it can be hard to test whether it is still suspenseful for somebody else.
How do you preserve your interest in the original story?
Maybe I just have a naturally obsessive personality, but the responsibility to the people in the story keeps me going. When people trust you to tell their story, I take that trust very, very, very, very, very seriously. And that keeps me up at night, wondering, How is their life going to be different when this movie comes out? I don’t want anybody to be worse off because of something I’ve done.
The other thing is that if this story isn’t interesting enough for me to attach myself to for years, then it won’t be interesting for somebody who watches it for the first time. The production part is a simple act of making the movie and recognizing that I'm still having fun watching edits of it and doing interviews. I’m still doing things that are holding my interest. If one-thousandth of that interest and passion translates onto the screen, I’ve got something good.
You began your career as a journalist and now make films. How do you view the evolution of your career path?
I would say I never left the journalism world. I view documentary filmmaking as a form of journalism. At its core, you tell a story that comes from research and reporting, and that is what journalists do better than anybody. But I love that documentaries allow you to spend more time telling a single story. In the journalism world, especially these days, writers are under a lot of pressure to churn out a lot of content.
That creates a crisis in journalism, in terms of the lack of great investigative reporting or local reporting that still exists, because everything has become clickbaity or AI-driven. But with documentaries, you investigate a single story and put in the time and the resources to tell every facet of that story in the best possible way. And that is exciting as a journalist. I encourage more journalists who feel disillusioned by the current state of print or media to look into documentaries. Producers would be better served to include journalists in the process, and journalists would be well served to be forceful about being the ones who tell a story.
Your parents are neuroscientists. Where and how does their science influence come into your creative pursuits?
My father, Dr. Stephen W. Porges, is best known for something called polyvagal theory, which is the prevailing model for how our bodies respond to the world around us. It is the basis for many modern approaches to trauma therapy. I actually wrote a book with him that came out this past September, called “Our Polyvagal World: How Safety and Trauma Change Us,” which, to me, reminded me a lot of the process of making a documentary. It was a work of translation taking these advanced clinical, scientific, and academic topics that had been written about, but written about in an opaque way. I worked with my dad to translate the research into something that more people can understand and benefit from reading about.
My mother, Dr. Sue Carter, is best known as the scientist who discovered what oxytocin does in mammals, which is the molecule largely associated with love, pair bonding, and connection. There is something beautiful about their work, which largely has to do with the science of how we rely on each other. That is sort of what a lot of my movies are about. How to Rob a Bank is largely about how we need each other, what happens when we are dismissive of that, and how dark it gets.
Have you ever felt a similar way to how your film subjects feel in these stories?
I think we all feel that way and have fantasies about disappearing or saying: What if I didn't do these things that they tell us we have to do to be a functioning member of society? Why am I getting up in the morning? Why am I going to work? What if I decided I was just gonna live on the beach?
When you live in this stressful world that we all live in, there is something romantic and appealing about these ideas. But what happens when you act on them? The reason Scott is such a compelling person is because he took these things that a lot of us think about and actually did them.
For me, making these movies feels like a form of exorcising my own demons and my selfish instinct to see what it is like to live outside of societal obligations or interpersonal responsibilities. By telling the story of a bank robber, it allowed me to cope with what was on the other side of that curtain. Oftentimes, we are blinded by the romance of freedom without understanding the consequences of what happens when we stop caring about other people and try to live outside the rules of society.
If you’d like to read more from Creative Factor, find our latest stories here. Or looking to tell your brand story? Introducing Creative Factor’s Storytelling Studio.