Filmmaker Amy Berg finds fiction stranger to make than fact

After directing “Deliver Us From Evil,” her Oscar-nominated 2006 documentary chronicling sex-abuse cases in the Roman Catholic Church, Amy Berg set her sights on directing a narrative feature.

“Since ‘Deliver Us From Evil,’ I have been getting a lot of scripts and a lot of meetings with people,” the 44-year-old Berg said at the quaint Venice (Los Angeles County) home she shares with her dogs.

[...] the stakes are high for the characters in her dark first narrative feature, “Every Secret Thing.”

Based on the novel by Laura Lippman, the psychological thriller stars Elizabeth Banks as Nancy, a police detective racked with guilt for not saving the life of a baby who had been kidnapped by two young girls.

[...] eight years later, Ronnie (Dakota Fanning) and Alice (Danielle Macdonald) are back home from juvenile detention and are the prime suspects when another young child goes missing.

Berg was at the Sundance Film Festival premiering “West of Memphis,” her critically acclaimed 2012 documentary about the failure of the justice system in the prosecution of three teenagers for the deaths of three young boys, when she received a text from actress Frances McDormand suggesting that the two should meet.

The film’s screenwriter, Nicole Holofcener, who has written and directed such perceptively funny female-centric indie comedies as 2006’s “Friends With Money” and 2013’s “Enough Said,” was originally slated to direct the film.

“I read (the book) and thought it was a fun challenge to do this,” said Holofcener by phone.

“I was drawn to the material because I really liked dark stories and dark movies,” she said.

Once I thought about having to live with the screaming baby voice in the editing room for days and days, I couldn’t do it.

“It just seemed more interesting to keep her personal life out of the movie,” Berg said.

“Every Secret Thing,” which she made in 2013, premiered last year at the Tribeca Film Festival (early reviews were mixed).

“An Open Secret,” her documentary on child sexual abuse in Hollywood, is screening at Cannes and will open theatrically in June.

“Prophet’s Prey,” her documentary on Warren Jeffs, the former leader of the polygamist sect Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and convicted felon, premiered at Sundance in January and will open theatrically this fall before it airs on Showtime.

“It’s about her complicated life that was created by her fame and how she struggled as an artist,” said Berg, who has worked on the film for more than seven years.