Debra Granik On 'Conbody Vs. Everybody'

We talk to the Oscar-nominated filmmaker about her five-part documentary, how it took up a decade of her life, and why the definition of true crime needs to change.

Debra Granik is best known for directing Jennifer Lawrence to her first Oscar nomination in Winter’s Bone, a drama that also earned the filmmaker recognition as a screenwriter. In addition to writing and directing two other acclaimed fiction features, Down to the Bone and Leave No Trace, she helmed one of the best documentaries of 2015, Stray Dog. Now she’s back to nonfiction with Conbody vs. Everybody, a five-part film she worked on for about a decade. The documentary follows a formerly incarcerated man who starts a fitness gym based on the exercise regimen he developed behind bars. This business also only employs other former inmates.

Almost 12 years since Granik gave then-fledgling Nonfics a shoutout in the New York Times, I finally made her acquaintance. We got on a Zoom call to talk about Conbody vs. Everybody ahead of its streaming debut on The Criterion Channel on May 1, 2026. We discussed the fiction script that led to the documentary, her initial expectations for the project, and why she finally had to stop filming her subjects. She also broadened my perspective on what the true crime genre should focus on, while confirming what we all know are the mainstream media’s definitions and interests. Below is a transcript of our entire 30-minute conversation, edited for clarity.

Warning: Spoilers for the finale of Conbody vs. Everybody are discussed.

When Nonfics last interviewed you in 2015, you mentioned that you were working on a documentary about reentry after incarceration. But I understand the initial idea was different from what the project became. How and when did you meet Coss Marte and then decide to make the film about him and his entrepreneurial efforts?

We were thinking about a project that was actually a fiction, about the revolving door of the carceral system of the U.S. In 2014, this concept was getting a lot of attention. It was blown up as a public phrase that we all were interrogating: mass incarceration. So it was not compelling to receive a fiction script idea about this. The research led really quickly. For me, the suspense and intensity were all with firsthand experience. It wasn’t really, for this film, going to be with fiction, the way I was seeing it and touching base with it at that time. It was going to be a person actually coming home, performing this intense process that we call reentry, which is reintegration into civilian society from your pariah status as a person behind bars.

When you find someone interested in trying to explore that — not explore; he’s going to live it. But he wants to implicate other people. He’s so savvy. He’s like, “This has to implicate people who are not just as involved too. We won’t make so much headway if people who haven’t been in the criminal justice system don’t care at all. They have to know what’s happening. They have to want to understand this other part of American life.” This is kind of how he pitched it back to me. There was a really positive, I don’t want to say serendipity, but a strong… You know, two trains are going to find each other on parallel tracks and say, “Let’s travel together.” That I feel was Coss and me and my team.

And then he built a team pretty quickly. He wasn’t doing this alone. He started building out a narrative, if you will. This is where nonfiction gets so scintillating and conflating. He’s creating this scrappy urban novel in front of my eyes. He’s saying, “I’m not going to go through reentry by myself. I’m going to build a family around me. This is how we survived on the streets. This is how we’re going to do this part of our life.” He proceeds to do that. The odds are against him. It’s New York at its cinematic height. It’s having contact with life on the streets. It’s architecture, its infrastructure, its vicissitudes. It’s all that made Coss and his brother and his peers, and it’s a pretty large set of vital, high-stakes life issues. Can I make it? I don’t have money in my pocket. Am I going to jump this turnstile? Am I going to risk getting re-ensnared in the criminal justice system?

You can see that, in front of me, maybe at times in a very hectic way, it was like the cards were being dealt to me really quickly. Here’s a set of compelling individuals, New Yorkers who are going to do their damnedest to survive. Here’s a neighborhood that’s rich as heck to photograph. And here is an American set of themes that you can’t walk away from. What are you going to do? Film for a lot of years, I guess.

From what I read of the fiction project, the film’s ending would have been tragic, with the main character back in prison. I’m glad that with the documentary, we instead get a positive story of people succeeding after reentry, defying not just the odds but the stereotypes. Was this something you were consciously rooting for?

It’s not conscious, but it does it to me. Without sounding like this is hooey, people who defy stereotypes basically — this is graphic — they smash all my ribs and enter my internal cavity where my heart is. It hurts because you’ve lived with expectations for a long time of who someone might be. We, as a society, Americans, prefer “or.” This is just a hallmark of our culture. We prefer clarity or black-and-whiteness. Or, if you want to call it “or” or binariness instead of “and.” The exact definition of defying the stereotype is “and.” Someone is very intrepid, and they care a whole heck of a lot about this aspect of their neighborhood, this aspect of their family, this aspect of sharing profound emotions with other men, whether they’re inside the prison system or outside. And they whack you upside the head.

They are problematic because they are usually complex to portray. It’s easier to portray black and white, “or.” Stray Dog did the same thing to me. That sounds passive. I had a very parallel and intense response to encountering someone like Ron Hall, “Stray Dog.” There was north/south. There was red/blue. There were a lot of encampments that he and I stood in that were not opposing but quite separate. For two people to walk from their camp and find all the ways that theirs aren’t separate is messy, but it’s worth it.

This happens in class. I am a person who comes from a middle-class background. The number of times you step out of your social class is limited. Your class background, your class socialization, what people normally do within the confines of your class, the education you’ve received, the types of work you try to do in your life, when you meet people who have come up differently or been dealt a very different hand, there are a lot of reasons to have a very intense conversation over many years.

I think documentary filmmakers are built with a very intense tic in their brain, and the tic is often a set of questions. How have you navigated? What’s it been like? What do you need the most in this life? How are you going to get it? I’ve said this a lot of times because it feels very true: on a bad day, it feels like a really weird voyeuristic approach to living your life. Like my life doesn’t seem parsable enough, so I have to go running to someone else’s life. The voyeurism feels like, god, why do I have so many questions about everyone else’s life? But I do.

On a good day, it feels like, oh my god, we’re born into a very limited path, and it’s very enriching, and it’s a draw that doesn’t go away, to say, oh, you are empirically my neighbor. I live 11 blocks from you. The only way I’m ever going to get to know you is if we have this conversation. Otherwise, we will remain in separate spheres. Even though it is less than one mile as the crow flies from where you dwell and where I dwell.

That reminds me of the scene late in the film when Coss’s brother talks about bringing the neighborhoods together as one community.

Christopher is pretty magnificent at trying to bring that idea up to a whole variety of people across a lot of lines. Not just linguistic and ethnic, but a lot of lines. I appreciate that you saw that in the film.