Writer, director, and producer Edward Zwick‘s filmography may not be as abundant as some of his industry peers. However, his breadth of work is characteristically dense, exalted, and versatile. “Glory,” “Legends of the Fall,” “Courage Under Fire,” “Shakespeare in Love,” and “Traffic” are but a handful of the many celebrated films from the veteran filmmaker. His latest directorial effort, “Trial by Fire,” penned by “Precious” scribe Geoffrey Fletcher and adapted from David Grann‘s New Yorker article, explores a true story of corruption at the highest level within the prison industrial complex.

“Trial by Fire” follows Cameron Todd Willingham (Jack O’Connell) from his wrongful conviction of murdering his three children, to his desperate fight against time to prove his innocence, his relationship with playwright Elizabeth Gilbert (Laura Dern), who fought equally as hard to earn him an appeal with The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the mounds of evidence proving his innocence, former Texas governor Rick Perry’s (now the United States Secretary of Energy under the Cabinet of Donald Trump) astoundingly unscrupulous dismissal of said evidence to serve his sinister political agenda, and, ultimately, the tragic end of the saga. The film is a fascinating, but somber, look at the harsh realities of the antiquated state of the U.S. criminal justice system.

At the recent San Francisco International Film Festival, I sat down with Zwick to discuss the lengthy process of producing films, his tried and true strategy for creating that paramount bond between director and actor, O’Connell’s tenacity, his passion for criminal justice reform, and more.

In choosing your films, you’re somebody who emphasizes quality over quantity. What do you look for in a project?
It’s a very personal response. You have a response to a piece of material, whether it’s a script or, in this case, a magazine article. And it evokes [a] feeling that you has to be strong enough to sustain you for, certainly the two years of making it, but often for the years that precede that when you’re hustling to try to get the money to do it. And nobody these days is guaranteed of doing a thing they wanna do.

Read the rest of the interview at The Playlist.