HBO
- Directors Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick told Insider it took a while for Dylan to agree to show them the footage.
- “Suddenly as we were leaving she had a change of heart and said, ‘If you guys want to watch we can all sit down and watch it now,'” Ziering said.
- Visit Insider’s homepage for more stories.
In Sunday’s episode of HBO’s “Allen v. Farrow” we are presented with the powerful home video footage of Mia Farrow recording her then 7-year-old daughter Dylan describing how Woody Allen sexually assaulted her (Allen has denied ever abusing Dylan).
It features a shy Dylan saying that Allen, her adopted father, brought her up to the attic of Farrow’s Connecticut home and abused her, saying on the video that Allen “touched my privates.”
It’s the first time the video has been seen by the public and “Allen v. Farrow” directors Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick admit it wasn’t easy to get Dylan to agree to let them see it.
After a year of gaining the trust of Dylan and even getting her very reluctant mother, Mia, to agree to be interviewed on camera, the filmmakers started to work on trying to see Dylan’s video talking about the abuse.
“We asked Dylan if she would mind if we looked at it and she initially was not interested,” Ziering told Insider. “And then one time we were all at her house, we were finishing up an interview and had asked again if we could see the video and she declined, then suddenly as we were leaving she had a change of heart and said, ‘If you guys want to watch we can all sit down and watch it now.’ That’s how we came to see it. It was hard to watch.”
Farrow shot the video with her home video camera over two days beginning on August 5, 1992 whenever Dylan would begin talking about the incident with Allen, according to the documentary. This followed incidents that concerned Farrow about Allen's behavior towards Dylan, including one friend telling Farrow that she walked into a room to find Allen's face in Dylan's lap.
Farrow handed over the video footage she shot of Dylan to her daughter when Dylan grew up.
HBO
Looking back at it now, Dylan, 35, said in episode one of "Allen v. Farrow" that as a child Allen "was always hunting me."
Dylan went into more detail about Allen's alleged abuse in a CBS interview in January 2018.
"I was taken to a small attic crawl space in my mother's country house in Connecticut by my father," she said.
"He instructed me to lay down on my stomach and play with my brother's toy train that was set up. And he sat behind me in the doorway, and as I played with the toy train, I was sexually assaulted," Farrow continued. "He touched my labia and my vulva with his finger."
Ziering said it was much later during production when they asked Farrow if some of the footage Mia shot could be used in the series.
"She said, 'If you use it for good, and it helps other children, you can use parts of the tape in the documentary,'" Ziering recalled.
After episode one of "Allen v. Farrow" aired, Allen and his wife, Soon-Yi Previn (one of Farrow's adopted daughters), said in a joint statement:
"These documentarians had no interest in the truth. Instead, they spent years surreptitiously collaborating with the Farrows and their enablers to put together a hatchet job riddled with falsehoods. Woody and Soon-Yi were approached less than two months ago and given only a matter of days 'to respond.' Of course, they declined to do so."
"As has been known for decades, these allegations are categorically false," the statement continued. "Multiple agencies investigated them at the time and found that, whatever Dylan Farrow may have been led to believe, absolutely no abuse had ever taken place. It is sadly unsurprising that the network to air this is HBO - which has a standing production deal and business relationship with Ronan Farrow. While this shoddy hit piece may gain attention, it does not change the facts."
"Allen v. Farrow" airs on Sunday nights on HBO and is available on HBO Max.
