Netflix found creative ways to bring Gabby Petito‘s voice to life with the use of AI in their newest docuseries about her and Brian Laundrie.
American Murder: Gabby Petito, which premiered Monday, February 17, added a message in the first episode, which read, “Gabby Petito’s journal entries and text messages are brought to life in this series in her own voice, using voice recreation technology.”
Filmmakers Julia Willoughby Nason and Michael Gasparro exclusively spoke to Us Weekly about how they decided on using AI as a tool to amplify Petito’s presence in the doc.
“We had so much material from her parents that we were able to get. All of her journals since she was young and there was so much of her writing. She documented her trips and most of her life from a young age. We thought it was really important to bring that to life,” Gasparro noted. “At the end of the day, we wanted to tell the story as much through Gabby as possible. It’s her story.”
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Gasparro and Nason got permission from Petito’s loved ones before involving voice recreation technology. “We reached out to the family to get their blessing and then we worked diligently to represent it in exactly how it was written,” Gasparro added. “That allowed you to hear it through her own words.”
American Murder: Gabby Petito is a three-part docuseries that utilizes interviews with her loved ones to break down the final months before her 2021 death, which her fiancé confessed to after dying by suicide. The travel vlogger’s journals, texts and footage were used to offer her side of the story in addition to showcasing her tumultuous relationship with Laundrie.
“In all of our docs, we try to go for the source and the people closest to either the victims who are not alive or the people themselves who have experienced this,” Nason explained. “That’s really where we start in terms of sifting through all the data and information that comes with these huge stories.”
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She added: “So her parents were the source for us that was key to uncover really what was going on. They had access to her personal archive of video and artwork. We were able to really bring her to life through her own perspective, which we were very lucky to have.”
Gasparro and Nason wanted this to be Petito’s story despite spotlighting Laundrie as well.
“His point of view speaks for itself through the footage that Gabby took of them together. Then reflecting on what the news and different law enforcement covered around his parents, that also speaks for itself,” Nason told Us.
Gasparro added, “It’s important to us to unpack a little bit about Brian as well.”
The true crime special found ways to offer different perspectives by bringing in Petito and Laundrie’s mutual friend.
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“She was somebody that had a very different relationship with Brian than others did. So we did try to humanize him. But with murder cases, it’s usually the killer who gets all the attention. There’s tons of docs about different murderers,” Gasparro explained. “It’s usually a guy and it’s usually talking about them. It was important for us to actually tell a story about the person that was murdered. We did want to lean into that, and she had a voice.”
Making the docuseries allowed Gasparro and Nason to see highlights from Petito’s life instead of only focusing on her tragic passing, with Nason adding, “I was just in awe of Gabby and how industrious she was around building this YouTube channel and this focus on her career. She was such a talented artist and designer. She really created that world from top to bottom. I was in awe and that was something to admire. It was inspiring to see how high functioning she was.”
Gasparro felt the same way about platforming Petito’s creativity. While not all those details made it into the final edit, Nason hoped viewers still feel like they learn more about who Petito was outside of her relationship with Laundrie.
“We really didn’t want to oversaturate the viewer and we wanted to balance it out with the actual scope of the crime, the ins and outs of the investigation and how national this case was,” she concluded. “We wanted to balance it out, but if we could do a whole doc that was just Gabby’s journals, we would.”
American Murder: Gabby Petito is currently streaming on Netflix.
