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We recently reviewed a documentary, Lake of Fire, whose filmmakers claimed to have made an objective movie about abortion, allegedly giving a fair depiction of both sides of the debate. But the movie depicted prolifers as crazy fanatics and prochoicers as reasonable, well-mannered intellectuals.

But now along comes another documentary, Unborn in the USA: Inside the War on Abortion, that is not only fair and objective, but focuses solely on the prolife movement. The 101-minute film does depict some radicals—including those who advocate bombing abortion clinics and killing abortion providers—but for the most part, it depicts level-headed, intelligent movers and shakers in the prolife movement.

Stephen Fell and Will Thompson began making the movie five years ago as a class project at Rice University, a project that ended up taking four years, travels to 35 states, and more than 70 interviews. The result is arguably the most objective and fair-minded documentary yet of the prolife movement.

CT Movies interviewed Fell and Thompson, whose film released to DVD last week.

How did this film grow from a mere student project into a full-fledged film?

Will Thompson: We were taking a course at Rice University on Documentary Production. The first project was to do a portrait on an individual. Stephen and I were looking for an interesting person, and there was a man, this anti-abortionist, near where I'd grown up in Cyprus, Texas. He had set up what he called a "cemetery to the innocent," and we'd never seen a display like it before. It was a thousand blue and pink crosses, and …

Stephen Fell and Will Thompson

Stephen Fell: And he put billboards up amongst the signs with messages from aborted fetuses to their parents: I wouldn't have eaten that much, Mom. Or, Do you want to go play catch, Dad? Oh wait, you killed me. It was some obnoxious stuff, and we were thinking whoever put that up there would be pretty loopy and make for a good little short film. And when we met him, he was actually pretty normal guy, and he felt this was the only way he could express himself. To us, that was incredibly fascinating—just the lengths different people were going to express their prolife views in contemporary society.

Thompson: Then he was like, "Let me put you in touch with some people if you're really interested in learning about the prolife movement. Let me help put you in touch with some people who I think are really making changes."

Fell: That was when we were 20, and I just turned twenty-five. So most of our adult life just circled around making this project.

And where did you go from there?

Thompson: He introduced us to Elizabeth Graham at Texas Right to Life. And that's where we learned about a lot of the legislative policy changes that the local and state-level right-to-life organizations were working on. And then our research expanded to a national scale.

Signs along the street placed by Missionaries to the Preborn

Fell: We took the class into a second semester, and at that point, we went to the March for Life in Washington, D.C. When we went there, we thought there would be a lot of other journalists and filmmakers there covering it. But we were practically the only people there; it was a huge event, but nobody was really covering it. We weren't seeing it in the news or in the newspapers. And we just really felt like there was an opportunity there to tell a story that hadn't been told before.

Before you started working on this film, what were your impressions of the prolife movement?

Thompson: I'd grown up in a pretty conservative community, but I don't think I would have said I was either prolife or prochoice. I just didn't feel educated enough, and I had never been indoctrinated either way. My parents had never really explained the issue to me in a way where they expected me to have a certain opinion. Stephen and I had been brought up in a Roe v Wade world, but I never really had any extreme opinions on the issue. So it was a learning experience.

The prolife movement has often been portrayed in the media as a bunch of fanatics who want to kill abortionists and burn down clinics, but you guys …

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