Father Martin served with the Pope back in the 60s.
He's a very learned man.
He's very experienced in the area of demonology,
possession, and exorcism.
He has written many books.
And the book that means the most to me,
that he had written, I have read it,
covered to cover five times, a stitch to the devil.
It was only until I went back home,
and I chatted with my own father about a potential project
that was on the cards.
At this stage, it wasn't a guarantee
that it was going to be attached to this
Maliki Martin project.
But it was when I brought up the fact that
Maliki Martin was an exorcist, a very famous exorcist,
in the East Coast of America from the 70s onwards,
that he sort of pricked his ears up
and he mentioned when he was an Anglican minister
in Liverpool, and he actually performed an exorcism
on a 16-year-old girl in his own parish.
And you'd never known about this?
I'd never, ever heard about this story at all
until he brought this up after that.
I knew I wanted this project 100%.
And when I got the official call-through from you guys,
then I was just like, you know,
I'm throwing my heart and soul into this project.
It was such a vast story that we needed to boil it down.
And we had hopes that when the A-director came in,
which turned out to be yourself,
you would be able to sift through what we had done,
as well as add to it.
For me, I was just flabbergasted at how nothing had been done before
about this guy and trying to prove certain elements
and incidents in his life was difficult from day one.
But trying to get through all that
and come up with some sort of narrative
was initially for the first year or two,
was extremely difficult.
I probably won't believe this,
but I learned things from Father today.
Even I learned things too.
We all did.
You know, I first went into the area of demonology
and I started interviewing a lot of priests.
The very first thing I would say to those priests was,
are you a real priest, Father?
And they'd look at me, puzzled.
And I'd say, a real priest.
What do you mean a real priest?
I mean, do you believe in the things that you preach?
And I know that Father here is one of those real priests.
Exism, it's been a hot topic for a long time now
and it doesn't seem to go away.
So for me, choosing that one strand of his life was important
because you could have just made six documentaries
about this man's life.
Every interview or every Skype conversation,
every phone call I have,
the story starts to sort of evolve
and just keep molding into something I didn't know at the time,
which is what it was now.
It was an ongoing molding process.
Now, do you remember getting the email
from Maliki's driver out of the blue?
Do you want to take us through how Robert became part of the project
because he's ongoing quite a lot during the documentary?
The actual real friends of Maliki
were very, very, very protective of his legacy
and also of his stories and his life.
He went from being just Father Martin's driver.
He would drive him to and from his priestly duties to his exisms.
We soon found out that Robert wasn't just his driver,
he was his best friend.
But also, he himself had a secret past.
But it was when I went to interview Robert in 2013 in New York
where he really came out of himself
and the stories were incredible.
And particularly a story of Father Martin's last exism of a four-year-old girl.
We just stuck in my mind and I couldn't get her out of my head.
I knew it would work on camera.
It was such a powerful story
and how Robert told it as well.
He was very engaging himself.
We got to the psychiatrist's house.
We had to drop him off there about an hour before the family arrived
driving in from Michigan.
And by unfortunate coincidence,
we both arrived there at the same time.
And I will never forget to the end of my days
the assurance, the self-confidence of this child.
She walked up to Maliki and she spoke to him in the third person.
And she just looked right up and she said,
your father Maliki and you think you can help her.
Having never laid eyes on him in her life.
And then the other thing was,
she just radiated something bad.
I mean, I wouldn't look at her and say,
you know, she was possessed by the devil.
I'm not competent to make that judgment.
But I'd seen a lot of crazy things during my time with the U.S. government.
And I knew when, you know,
that sense was tingling going off saying,
this is not a situation you want to be in.
About sort of 30 minutes after the interview with me in New York,
when I left, he left to go home and he was in a horrific car accident.
He turned out to get too sensational in himself
and too carried away with stuff like that.
But this is a guy who 100% believed that
his now physical involvement in the project
is now a cause of concern for his own safety.
And he believed it was powers not of this world
trying to stop him from being involved in this.
In his eyes, there's something was trying to kill him
or was trying to get him away from the project
that he was going to stand up.
Whether you believed it or not, he certainly emanates a belief.
He retained so much knowledge that Maliki had passed on to him as well.
So for me, that was a great source to tap into.
Because they had multiple car journeys together.
A young, dark, head Italian looking CIA officer
driving around with a very small, wirey framed Irish
former Jesuit priest in his religious garb.
He just couldn't get this very powerful image of these two characters in a car.
And Robert told me, he talked about everything from the third secret of Fatima
to normal conversations.
I just knew the audience would find him fascinating.
Sometimes find him over the top.
For me, he was just credible.
And like you said, he was a believer.
He was a believer in Maliki. He was a believer in the antagonist that Maliki faced on a daily basis.
I was just fascinated by the guy.
I didn't want to write like a typical horror score.
There wasn't going to be any jumps, but it was about setting the overall tone
and the atmospheres for this one.
I wanted to make it feel like, you never want the audience to feel settled.
So initially it was about finding the sound.
You know, we sat and recorded hours and hours and hours of really weird noises
and generate all these new textures and build music on top of that.
And here we are.
Robert approaches the house in the car and he's talking.
We started off with that under tone and the guitars and stuff just sitting in the atmosphere.
And I didn't want to do too much because at that point, you know, dialogue is king.
You want to hear what he's saying.
And so we just kept that under the surface.
Then as the sort of scene unfolds, strings start coming in.
We've got the opera singer saying what happened at the house and stuff.
The funny thing is I just thought I'd be a whole lot calmer.
My heart's racing like a goddamn drum.
Even with the music plan, there's still that like ambient undertones and discord
that gives you the sort of tension that you want waved through the whole picture.
At that point, I just knew by the look on his face, that was them.
