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Near the beginning of your film, Haggard's famous grin is constant, but through the film we see it less and less. Do you think he was getting progressively more discouraged?

Definitely.

Or was it just being more open with you and the camera?

I think he was being really open with us. I think he had nothing left.

Now that the film is coming out, people have been saying, "He's got a movie coming out. He's trying to redeem himself." I feel sort of bad for him, because in a way I put him in this position, because he never thought that anyone was ever going to listen him ever again. He was so down and out when I knew him.

The big moment for me in the movie was when he was moving into this little second-floor tiny apartment with his kids. It was October 5, 2007. I said, "How do you feel moving to your new house?" And he gives me this look like, "Just be quiet and leave me alone. Let me just die in peace." And then he walks away, and he turns around and says, "I just don't want my family to be poor."

You showed some of those sad moments when he was selling health insurance door to door.

Yes, like when he goes to that guy's house and he says, "I recognize you from the news. You're that fallen guy." And you can tell Ted's not amused that I'm filming. He's sort of like, "Why won't anybody just let me live happily ever after, unhappily ever after?"

What's most interesting to me is watching his family and his wife make peace with him. The Bible says forgive, and it's really hard. You go to church on Sunday and you hear these messages and you think it's easy until it happens to you. Gayle [Haggard's wife] is the unsung hero in this story. She's the one who actually lives the Bible and her beliefs and forgives him. She's not in the film much because I don't think she was that comfortable sharing all her personal pain with me, with the camera rolling.

Strangely now, they're really happy. They've made peace with it. He cheated on her. He deceived her. He destroyed his family. And still, the only ones standing by him are his family. It's so strange. Marcus and Christy, his kids, just have a great sense of humor about it, but they're aware [of what happened].

There was an AP story on Friday about another young man in New Life Church claiming he had an ongoing sexual relationship with Ted.

I'm not surprised. I mean, you never get caught your first time.

Are you going to put a tagline at the end of the film about this news?

It's too late. [The New York Times reports that HBO plans to add a brief statement at the end of the film.] I think that the point [with this news] is that Ted was a deceiver and a liar. But I wasn't so interested in Ted's sexual problems. What I think is interesting is watching the family and watching this man go through this private hell publicly. It's just sad for his family. But somehow he got his life back together.

I'm not a really religious person. We consider ourselves to be Catholics, but we think of it more as a cultural thing. But what I love about Ted's story, at least about Ted's family, is that the Bible got them through. They read the Bible. They would read these passages, and it moved me. I went out and bought a new Bible. When I was making Friends with God, everybody quoted the Bible, but I was never inspired to go buy one. But this experience with Ted turned me onto the Bible in a whole new way, because he would read these passages and it would really inspire me.

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January (Web-only) 2009, Vol. 53