I saw Anna Broinowski’s Forbidden Lie$ at True/False in 2008 and was blown away by the filmmaker’s fearless experimentation with construction and story structure. The film is a portrait of Norma Khouri, a Jordanian living in exile in Australia who became a literary star when she published a purported memoir of her best friend’s honor killing. The book was eventually revealed as mostly or entirely fabricated; Khouri admitted to embellishment but insisted that the core of the story was true. Broinowski followed the disgraced author back to Jordan in the name of clearing her name, but inevitably uncovered a massive web of lies. Khouri reveals herself as a con artist for whom publishing a fake memoir (and the year of adulation and celebrity that ensued) waas jsut one act in a life-long performance; Broinowski reveals just what makes that performance work, and how Norma gets away with it.

I named Forbidden Lie$ as one of the Best Undistributed Films of last year; now, thanks to Roxie Releasing, the film is opening at the Cinema Village in New York this Friday, and in Los Angeles on April 10. Via email, I talked to Broinowski about her ongoing relationship with her subject, the inherently artificial tropes of documentary, and the natural symbiosis between a filmmaker and a con artist.

How did you discover Norma’s story, and how many of its twists and turns were you aware of when you started working on the film?

I was aware of Norma when her book first came out and she was a Jordanian celebrity in Australia, having chosen to live in exile here with the help of the Australian government, who gave her a special protection visa to help her escape the blood-thirsty Muslim terrorists who had supposedly put a fatwah on her head. But I had no interest in buying Norma’s book because the whole thing stank of anti-Arab propaganda, at a time when we were being encouraged to support the illegal invasion of Iraq.

I became keenly interested in Norma about a year later, when journalist Malcolm Knox exposed her as a hoax and a Chicago fraudster on the run from the FBI. I was hooked: what kind of woman could be so brilliant that while on the run from the FBI she could reinvent herself as a 32 year old virgin from Jordan, write a “true story” that became a best-seller around the world, and go on a book promotion tour pretending to be seeing the West for the first time, convincing the best minds in publishing and the media that she was telling the truth?

That’s when I emailed her. I said I am a filmmaker and I want to hear your side of the story. Obviously she agreed.

Norma claims after the fact that her book was “not fact, not fiction, [but] faction.” In regards to the book, of course, this sounds somewhat ridiculous, but your film seems to sit on a similar line, in that it uses the techniques of fiction film to tell a true story about the fuzzy territory between truth and fiction. Can you talk a bit about how you formulated the film’s style? I’m particularly interested in the digital effects, as well as the device of revealing the staging of the interviews, showing that Norma is on a set, etc.

Yeah, the whole faction thing is key to my approach to the film. In fact Forbidden Lie$ is not really a film about whether or not Norma lied: it is a film about the nature of Truth itself. We should walk out not just questioning Norma, but questioning our own judgment, the system that created Norma, and indeed the filmmaker herself. Trust no-one. Think first. Believe nothing you are told, especially if it is being presented as a ‘documentary’, which in my opinion is one of the most constructed and artificial genres around.

I also love to find a style in my films that mirrors its content, and with Norma, a gifted dissembler, I had carte blanche to do to the audience what she did to her readers. Hence all the CGI trickery and sleight of hand. I want the audience to be in on the con, however, which is why I often pull back wide to show them how it’s done. I actually think that this approach was the most honest one I could have taken: the relationship between filmmaker and con artist is totally symbiotic - both of us use a million tiny deceits to manipulate the way people think and feel; both of us are in the business of making illusions real.

How much of Norma’s ability to get away with her schemes do you attribute to cleverness/calculation, and how much do you think is charisma?

I think Norma is not a long-term schemer in the classic shyster sense. rather, she’s an opportunist, a gifted confabulator who thrives on the adrenalin rush of having to make things up on the fly.  She’s one of those people who is so intelligent she’s bored with living life at a normal pace; she embraced the cat and mouse game of making the film with me because she knew I might catch her out at any second, and she enjoyed the challenge. She has huge personal charisma, which 95% of the time enables her to get away with every lie she tells. If you could bottle the pheramones she puts out when she enters a room you’d make a mint. I once walked through the Castro with her on a Saturday night and gay men were asking her out.

When I saw the film at the True/False film festival last year, you said during the Q & A that you’d had an ongoing relationship with Norma. “Neither of us trust each other, but we’re gonna be friends forever,” you said at the time. Do you still feel that way?

Yes I do, and we’ve stayed in email contact. If I ever visited Chicago I’d definitely look her up. We still don’t trust each other but it doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy each other’s company. there’s this mental chess game we play when we’re together that is immensely enjoyable, and we make each other laugh. Besides, she’s a fun chick! She’s still promising to tell me the real Dalia’s story and says she’ll send me some tape she kept from me. I’ve promised I’ll never film her again, and would like to know the truth, but I am not expecting that tape any time soon.

Over two years have passed between the film’s Australian festival debut and its US theatrical premiere. After seeing its reception in various countries and and festivals, is there anything you’d do differently if you were making the film today?

No I’m 85% happy with it, which is not bad going considering how much input you have to incorporate from investors when making a film. The one thing I would change is re-insert a beautiful little sequence I used to have towards the end, where I got a great actress, Miranda Otto (Lord of the Rings, Cashmere Mafia), to assess Norma’s ability as an actress. Miranda said she was an Oscar contender and also showed us how easy it is to cry on cue - which we cut against Norma crying. It was provocative and electric - but at the time, I was fighting a battle to keep it in. I should have stuck to my guns. It’s in the DVD extras though if you can access a copy!

What are you working on next?

A Black political comedy/drama about Australia’s own Sarah Palin, Pauline Hanson: a redheaded fish+chip shop lady who set the country on fire in the 1990s with her incendiary views on race, and almost led a revolution. She went to jail and ended up on Dancing with the Stars.  It is one of the strangest stories I’ve ever come across. I am looking forward to working with actors who actually acknowledge they are actors for a change.