In ?Stillwater,? director Tom McCarthy questions America?s moral authority through the lens of a red-state hero

Indeed, it’s possible to see parallels between Bill Baker’s journey and McCarthy’s own. He had visited Marseille almost a dozen times on research trips, he says, before realizing in 2017 that he still hadn’t been to Oklahoma. “I was on a plane the next day,” he says. Over the course of a week, he traveled from Oklahoma City to Tulsa and Stillwater, hanging out with oil workers and executives, embedding himself as much as he could, and reporting his impressions back to Bidegain and Debre. He was supremely self-conscious about being a “filmmaker from New York dropping into what was arguably one of the reddest states in the country.”