On Monday October 16th, we got the chance to sit down with Amy Berg to talk about her film, Deliver Us From Evil (You can read our review at this link).

"What really makes this more than a talking head affair, is the unprecedented access to an admitted pedophile priest. O'Grady's candor is both unsettling and frightening. Deliver Us From Evil is a disturbing expose into the Catholic Churches. A must see for any Catholic, past or present."

Peter Sciretta: Hi, I loved the film, it was really great.

Amy Berge: Oh thanks.

Peter Sciretta: Okay, I'm set-up, do you wanna start?

Amy Berg: No off the record talking today ::laugh::

Peter Sciretta: One quick question, while doing my research I found that their is another Amy Berg out there that writes for The 4400, any relation?

Amy Berg: No, this is a whole thing, this is like, my issue. We're both in the writers guild and her name is Eileen Amy Berg and she didn't want me to use my name. And I was like, 'Your name isn't Amy Berg!' The only thing I did was this on imdb, because I think they have another thing listed with my name, but that's not me.

Peter Sciretta: That happens all the time on there [imdb].

Amy Berg: And she's got all these websites where she communicated with writers, and I can't take credit for any of that.

Peter Sciretta: ::laugh:: Well, that's good to know. Well, first off - Are you religious?

Amy Berg: I'm not religious, I think I'm very spiritual. But I don't find myself to be traditionally religious.

Peter Sciretta: Okay, and you weren't born into any religion?

Amy Berg: I was born Jewish.

Peter Sciretta: Okay ::laugh::

Amy Berg: And I still consider myself jewish, but I've kinda expanded beyond the confines of the temple.

Peter Sciretta: And how did you first meet Father O'Grady?

Amy Berg: I got his phone number from an attorney, one of the plaintiff attorney investigators that was investigating him.

Peter Sciretta: You make it a point in your documentary not to include your own opinion or viewpoint. What is your assesment of Father O'Grady?

Amy Berg: It's hard to make an assessment on somebody who is, well, I think that he's a very sick man. I think he's somebody that reached out for help a number of times and he was turned away. And he clearly disassociates what he's done from what's happened to him. The crimes, he doesn't seem to show feeling towards what happened. So I think that he's a sick man.

Peter Sciretta: O'Grady makes a point to blame the church and Cardinal Mahony for not removing him sooner. That they had chosen to ignore his condition rather than risk career advancement. Do you think this is an accurate assessment or do you think it's part of O'Grady further trying to disassociate himself from the problem?

Amy Berg: Well, I think that he's not the only one that's angry at the church. Tom Doyle has a valid reason to say that this is what happened, because, we look at his career and how he's been trying to fight for this since 1985. All the evidence points to Oliver O'Grady's story. I mean, I interviewed him for five months before he went on camera, and I checked every single thing he said with legal documents, letters... there is a massive file on this man. There have been numerous civil cases, numerous attorneys who have done endless hours of discovery on the facts of these cases. Everything he said has a document to show that it's true, and we see that in the film. He wrote a letter of confession in 1976. He got in-trouble by his bishop for writing a letter to the family, not because he abused a child but because he wrote the letter. And from then on, there were numerous parents that called and complained to Mahony, there was a police investigation that clearly states that he shouldn't be around children, and it was ignored. And the churches best response today is to say that the investigation did not prove, that their was not a victim in the investigation in 1984. Didn't they have a police report saying keep him away from children? What else did they need? A hammer over the head? And meeting him, you know, he's very candid. And I can't imagine that he wasn't as candid with his superiors as he was with me. Cuz this is who this man is.

Peter Sciretta: You said you did like five weeks of interviews...

Amy Berg: Five MONTHS...

Peter Sciretta: Sorry, Five months...

Amy Berg: And then he went on camera.

Peter Sciretta: Was the five months just research on your part or did he have reservations about going in front of the camera?

Amy Berg: He didn't want to go on camera. He agreed that he'd let me tape record our conversations until he was possibly ready, and then we were going to decide what to do with it. There were discussions of possibly a book. And then he decided to go for the film.

Peter Sciretta: Were any of the tape recorded conversations used in the movie, because I noticed there were parts with his voice over?

Amy Berg: No, that's all from the interviews that I shot in Ireland. The quality wasn't very good on the tape recorder, so. It wasn't film quality unfortunately. There was a lot I wanted to use but it wasn't very good.

Peter Sciretta: One of the victims says "He was a perfect example of that you would think a Priest would be.""He was the closest thing to God that we knew." Do you think that O'Grady's charm was an act of manipulation?

Amy Berg: That's hard to know because if it was an act, he was acting for eight days to me and that would be a real hard performance.

Peter Sciretta: And never once in the 8 days did he express anger or...

Amy Berg: I didn't see anger. Anger at the institution. He said, I wish they would have taken me out of the ministry. He said the happiest time of his life was when he was in jail. That shows that he would prefer to be locked up or monitored.

Click here for Part 2 of the interview.

Deliver Us From Evil is now out in Boston, New York and Los Angeles, and expands this Friday October 20th to Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, New Jersey, Washington DC, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco and St Louis.