The Untold Truth Of Faces Of Death

Editor Glenn Turner (who worked under a pseudonym) was approached by Schwartz to help construct the movie. Speaking for a special feature included with the 30th anniversary edition of Faces of Death, he said he needed a little bit of convincing before jumping on board. "I'm all for it, so long as it's a legitimate documentary," he said.

In making their original version of the movie, they didn't use reenactments or special effects at all, instead stitching together "a tremendous amount" of real footage which they bought directly from news stations. This meant that originally, the movie was just a long reel of dead bodies, which in addition to being upsetting, isn't very narratively interesting or fun. "We knew it was very difficult to watch," Turner said. 

It was upon this realization that the filmmakers decided to take the approach of recreating scenes. It was the only way to have the movie's individual vignettes tell complete stories, rather than just showing the gory aftermath. To get their movie scenes, they painstakingly recreated real accident footage such as a massive train accident, taking care to get details such as lighting as realistic to the original shots as possible. 

"We would study the shot of somebody leaping out of a window, and we would look at the kind of stocks they were using for film and the type of camera person that they happened to be using at the time, if they were very shaky in their moves or whatever," Turner said.