'Profoundly Moving': Director Eva Orner on the Making of 'Surviving Ohio State' Documentary

On Monday, the HBO documentary Surviving Ohio State premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City. Based on a 2020 Sports Illustrated feature story from Jon Wertheim, the film closely examines the Ohio State abuse scandal surrounding Dr. Richard Strauss, a physician for numerous OSU sports teams who sexually abused hundreds of young OSU athletes and students from 1978 to 1998. With a runtime of 108 minutes, it features testimony from sexual abuse survivors, largely from Ohio State's wrestling team, and delves deeply into their ongoing legal battle to hold the university accountable. Wertheim is an executive producer, while David C. Glasser, Grant Heslov and George Clooney produced the project along with 101/Sports Illustrated Studios and Smokehouse Pictures.

Eva Orner was tapped to direct the documentary nearly four years ago. The Australian Academy Award-winning director admitted at the premiere she was unsure she was the right person to lead the project when first approached due to her lack of familiarity with college sports in America. But after speaking to a few survivors at Wertheim's behest, she chose to accept the role and the responsibility of telling their stories.

With the documentary set to stream on HBO Max on June 17 following its Tribeca premiere, Orner spoke to Sports Illustrated about what went into the making of the film, her experiences working with survivors of Dr. Strauss's abuse, what she'll take with her as she moves forward and more.

Sports Illustrated: How did you get involved with Surviving Ohio State?

Eva Orner: The project came to me through my agents at WME from the producers who had optioned Jon’s incredible article in 2020. They reached out to me and I was very hesitant because, I mean, I've lived in America for 21 years. I'm a citizen. But I identify very much as Australian. I sound Australian, I am Australian and I grew up there and I went to college there and I don't know anything about college sports. I don't actually think I knew what OSU was. I certainly didn't know what Buckeyes were. This is so embarrassing, but I think it's really important as far as how this all happened.

I spoke to Jon Wertheim. I read the article. And I said to Jon, I think I'm the wrong person to do this. I'd recently done an abuse film called Bikram that's on Netflix about Bikram Choudhury, the yoga guru sex offender. Jon said, "I think you're wrong, I think you should talk to some of the guys." So I spoke to, I think, three of the men. And at the end of the conversations, they all said to me that they had told me things they’d never told anyone before, and they were just phone conversations. And that floored me. I wondered what it was, and I thought it might be because I'm a woman. It might be because I'm an outsider. It could be my accent. People always respond well to Australians. And I kind of came back to Jon and we talked more and then I thought, maybe I should do this. That's kind of how it started. Now it's been three and a half years. It's been an incredible honor to know these men and know their families and to know the community and to have been trusted to tell this story. It's something that is not taken lightly at all by me. It's profoundly moving.

SI: How did you handle the weight of this subject as you went about making the film?

EO: It's really interesting. I think when you start a project and you're in, it's like a journalist and it's like lawyers and attorneys, it's the same thing—my favorite part of film-making is the discovery phase when you're just saying yes to everything, talking to everyone, following every lead, reading everything you can, watching movies. You're just in it and trying to find the story and trying to find who's going to tell that story. And so to me, you're just in it. You don’t even realize [the weight].

But there was something about this project… I've done so many difficult films and I always joke that, you know, I know how to deal with this stuff. You do therapy, you learn how to deal with stuff. You're dealing with trauma, you have to learn how to compartmentalize and how to still live your life when you're dealing with so much trauma. And I've never had a problem with it except maybe a bit of PTSD in war zones. But there was something about these stories and these men. There were a couple of times during the making of this film that I cried and it shocked me. It really shocked me to the core, and it still does. I think it's probably because, I think Jon says this really well in the film, he says, "How could this happen to these grain-fed tough guys?" We're not used to seeing men talk like this and having gone through things like this. I think this is something we haven't seen a lot of. We're used to seeing women talk about this. And I think that's one of the things that's really challenging in this film and very surprising.

SI: What was it like to work with the survivors?

EO: They're amazing. It’s been one of the longer films that I've worked on. It's been three and a half years since I've known them. They're mostly Midwestern, not all, but a lot of them. I often work with the same crew, and my cinematographer Nick Higgins knows sports more than I do. As we're driving around, mostly Columbus but we shot in other places, we would go to people's homes to do very difficult filming, you know. To do these interviews that were very difficult. We all noted straight away, their partners, their wives, girlfriends, husbands, were so warm. It was such a cliche of the Midwest, but I've never filmed in people's homes before where they have food prepared for you when you arrive. Sometimes they would have little party favor bags of, like, homemade cookies for us or to take when we left while they're going through what they've gone through. There was this real warmth and this real connection.

A lot of the partners, you know, they've been through this for a very long time. They've lived through this. Some of them didn't know until 2018 when they first spoke out. Some of them knew before. So it's been a really big part of their relationships and I also spoke a lot with them. They're not in the film, but they were very much part of it. And also the kids, you know, some of these people have families and the kids [have known] from an age when it was appropriate knowing about what their fathers had been through and that was very painful as well, and very difficult. They put a lot of trust in me to tell their story and they didn't know me. And I think they all watched my films to vet me before they spoke to me. Some people were really willing and ready to do it and other people needed a lot of coaxing. But there's a real bond between everyone and they've formed a real support group, and I think that's really powerful too.

SI: In retrospect, how do you feel that your unfamiliarity with the nature of college sports shaped your approach to this subject?

EO: It seems that I was able to look at it really clearly as a story and I wasn't influenced by other stories or by other sports stories. I think I looked at it purely as a documentary, not a sports film. I think that's probably the reason. I wasn't overwhelmed by the whole Big Ten thing or the college sports thing. To me, it was about what happened. When you make a film, when you write an article, it’s about character and story, right? To me, I treated it like a film, like every film I make. The size, the scope, the size of OSU, the power of OSU, I don't think any of that factored into it because… I mean, I knew as I got into it all of those things, but it wasn't important to me. It was really about what happened, why it happened, why is this different, and where are we now?

SI: How did the experience of making this documentary differ from your past projects?

EO: We had a private screening for all of the survivors and their partners on Sunday. It was very important to me that they didn't see the film for the first time at Monday’s premiere. I think it would have been overwhelming and irresponsible. And HBO are incredible partners and they supported that. So we brought them all down and their partners for support, and we showed them the film and it was just them and me in a screening room together and I sat at the back because I wanted to watch them to make sure they were O.K. So I didn't watch the film. I watched them. They all obviously had a very emotional response and it was really powerful. That’s one of the things that was really important to me as a filmmaker: how you treat your subjects. Then we had time afterwards, a few hours to sit and talk and reflect. And we also had a mental health professional there as well, in case. I think that was a very good experience for them all. And I think it made the premiere a lot, not easier, but not as difficult for them because they'd seen it before.

It was also overwhelming because I was also terrified I hadn't told their story the right way and they were all really, really pleased. That was a really powerful day and it made the premiere a lot easier for everyone, I think.

Every film's different. Some of the HBO executives that I've been on this ride with for three and a half years, they were talking to all the guys and the partners and just saying they're just extraordinary. [The executives] obviously watched all the cuts over the long process and felt like they knew them all. And I was saying to them, this is what I love about my job more than anything. I meet people I would never normally get to meet and I go to places I would never normally get to go to. I've gotten to know these guys. I would never have known Midwestern wrestlers. And I love that. I'm curious. I think that's one of the gifts and one of the things I'm really grateful for about what I get to do. And I'm sure Jon can relate to that as well. It's been a real honor and I have so much respect for these guys. And the families and their partners and their kids. I mean, they're brave, they're really brave.

I think I spoke to about 100 survivors and most of them are not ready, they're not comfortable going public. A lot of them are John Does. A lot of them, their families don't want them to. It's such a big thing to do this. It's a complete life disruption and it can go in any way. It can really hurt you. I totally understand. I don't think I'd be able to do it. There’s absolutely no criticism in that. I respect them and I loved that they wanted to talk to me. But I always come back to this core group of men who put it all out there, knowing what the repercussions could be to a degree. I have so much respect for them. It is absolutely remarkable the strength of those individuals.

SI: What will you take away from the experience of making this documentary as you move on?

EO: I think the hardest thing is that my work is pretty much done, but they're still in it. It’s been seven years. When they started this, I think nobody would have thought it would go for more than one or two years. You know, you look at the Larry Nassar story and I think that was resolved in about 12 to 24 months. The girls came out, the world believed them, they were on TV, everyone thought they were heroes, which they were, and they were incredible. They got their day in court because he was alive, they got to stare him down and tell him what he did. And then they got massive payouts, which they deserved, and went on with their lives. And they were young. It wasn't 20 or 30 years after it happened.

These guys have had none of that. They came out and they got questioned and they were called liars, and people made fun of them. The school on the surface did the right thing and did an investigation. It was much worse than they thought. As Ilan Margalit Maazel, one of the lawyers in the film says, behind the scenes, they're fighting [the survivors] tooth and nail. This has gone on now for seven years and it's not resolved. And there's a lot of men who have not settled. OSU put out statements saying they have acknowledged this. They have offered settlements. It looks like they've done all the right things, but when you look at the settlements, the settlements are problematic for a lot of people. They're very low. And that's all in the film. The settlements are, on average, $250,000 per survivor. Penn State and Michigan State’s settlements are $1–1.5 million per survivor. That says a lot. They have fought it using the statute of limitations all the way to the Supreme Court. Now it's going back to court. There's no end in sight.

We pointed out in the film, this is not a poor school. This is a rich school. The end of the documentary says, since this started in 2018, they've generated revenue in the athletics department of $1.2 billion. To up the settlements for these few hundred remaining survivors, I don't believe would hurt this school particularly. But it's hurting a lot of people. And they were people that were athletes for your school. You know, they are Buckeyes. They're all still Buckeyes. They all still wear the shirts and believe in it. I mean, they are Buckeyes. I think the film asks the question of, why is this happening? Why is this going on? Why are the survivors feeling the way they're feeling? And I think there's a solution to it, but it doesn't look like that's coming anytime soon. This is going to continue. I think that's one of the most heartbreaking things ever. You watch the film, you finish the film, everyone thinks they're heroes and they're amazing. But is anything going to change? How long is this going to drag out? Because it is painful, and you can see that when they talk.

They just want to be acknowledged properly. And OSU will say they've done everything right. But that's the question we ask in the film: Are male athletes worth less than female athletes who are survivors of abuse?