Four years ago, the British director Michael Winterbottom flew to Italy and joined me and a handful of journalists in the Perugia wine shop that had become our home from home. We had been hanging out there for months, covering the murder of British student Meredith Kercher. Over large glasses of red, hacks could be found swapping notes, arguing about the guilt or innocence of suspects Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, and listening to Knox's laywer hold forth after hearings as he propped up the bar.
The result of Winterbottom's reconnaissance visit to Perugia, The Face of an Angel, premiered at the Toronto film festival – giving the maverick director's side-on view of a murder case that gripped the world. The cast is stellar – Kate Beckinsale, fresh from her roles as a vampire in the Underworld films, Daniel Brühl, who played racing driver Niki Lauda in Rush, and Cara Delevingne, the young model who has single-handedly relaunched eyebrows.
But the premise is unusual. Winterbottom does not focus on the murder of Kercher in Perugia in 2007, but on the journalists who covered the case, who chased lawyers down the medieval alleys of the town, who waded through reams of court documents written in punctuation-free legalese, and gleefully pounced on the sex life of suspect Amanda Knox.
Winterbottom's producer was back in Italy to hold a sneak preview of the film for a few of those journalists who, like myself, followed the four trials that helped turn a grisly stabbing into a long-running soap opera that has yet to end as Knox and Sollecito await a supreme court decision on their latest conviction.
Watching the film, I recalled the many occasions I parked my car at the foot of the rock on which Perugia sits before taking the escalators that thread up through shafts in the rock, emerging into Perugia's elegant Piazza Italia, with its stunning views over the Umbrian hills. I always felt it was an apt way to enter a world that often defied logic and seemed detached from the reality of politicians and popes I left behind in Rome.
"Perugia is off the beaten track, because none of the Roman roads came near here," local prosecutor Giuliano Mignini once told me, managing to conflate ancient history and the modern day in the way Italians do. That all changed on Friday, 2 November, when the British press descended following news that the body of an exchange student from Coulsdon, Surrey, had been found in a pool of blood, covered with a duvet, in her Perugia flat.
Outside Kercher's house, a well-informed local journalist told me as I arrived that she could not share information with the Observer because she had just been bought up by a rival Fleet Street paper. In a crowded piazza, a tabloid journalist was herding a group of students into a quiet corner. "These are my vox pops, get your own," he said.
By Saturday night, as the hacks gathered for dinner, a reporter from the Sunday Mirror proudly revealed she had by chance met and interviewed a student called Raffaele Sollecito, who was first at the scene of the crime. Days later, he would be arrested.
Reporters under orders to stay in Perugia and chase scoops were looking frayed a week later. "I went up there for a day and saw two British reporters in a piazza," an American journalist later told me. "They were tense, harrowed-looking and unshaven. As I approached to say hello, one of them said, 'Look! A lawyer! Let's get him!' And they ran off." Nick Pisa, the tabloid reporter who won notoriety for publishing Amanda Knox's leaked prison diary, was the inspiration for a journalist in the film, Joe, who when his actions are criticised, says simply: "I'm a tabloid journalist, everyone thinks I'm a bastard anyway."
In real life, the US TV networks were soon on the ground in numbers, with one offering to babysit Knox's younger sisters when they visited Perugia, in the hope it might win them an interview with Amanda.
Winterbottom first got interested in the Kercher story after picking up in an airport a book about the case by Barbie Latza Nadeau, an American reporter with the Daily Beast website. In the film, Latza Nadeau is played by Kate Beckinsale, who came to Rome before filming to get a close look at the foreign correspondents working at the office they share behind the Trevi Fountain.
The Face of an Angel spends less time dealing with the Italian journalists who really made the running in Perugia, even if some of them never seemed to take any notes in court. I was hugely impressed by the local reporters, who knew everyone in Perugia on first-name terms, from the police investigators to the court clerks.
That's why, early every morning, I would load up on the Umbria papers at the news stand in Piazza della Repubblica, often filing a story based on their reports by lunchtime as London editors increasingly demanded quick copy to feed their burgeoning websites. In 2008 and 2009, foreign editors were beginning to understand the huge appeal the Kercher story held for online readers, who were rapidly dividing into vocal advocates for and against the innocence of Amanda Knox. If an editor turned down the offer of a Kercher story, on the grounds there was no room in the paper, a website manager might call back and say: "Actually, give us 500 words just for the web – this story always goes nuts online."
As Marco Brusco, Sollecito's lawyer, told me at the time: "With an American, an Italian and an African as suspects, it's like a bad joke, and because nothing seems clear, it is so compelling."
Perugia was also a ground-breaking story insofar as social media provided much of the sensational material. Winterbottom's film accurately depicts the moment the press pack first Googled the names Knox and Sollecito and discovered a short story Knox had posted dealing with the rape of a young woman, as well as her nickname – Foxy Knoxy – which would delight headline writers for months. In the film the names of the victim and suspected murderers are changed – Foxy Knoxy becomes Jessica Rabbit – and the action switches from Perugia to Siena, creating a mix of reality and fiction that runs throughout the film. Daniel Brühl, the central character, plays a director arriving in Italy to make a film about the murder after he reads Kate Beckinsale's book about the case, just as Winterbottom decided to make Face of an Angel after he read Latza Nadeau's book.
Haunted by a broken marriage and missing his daughter, Brühl battles personal demons as he is sucked deeper into the twists and turns of the murder case, only to discover that when the appeal trial is over the journalists around him find it easy to disengage, to casually shut their laptops and move on to other assignments.
Proof of that in real life was the bawdy quiz night, held by correspondents back in Rome – with prizes – featuring tricky questions about the case.
For most journalists, myself included, years of covering the case meant the tragedy of the murder was shunted aside by the sheer weight of the facts and figures of the myriad trials. And the passing of time.
That was neatly summed up when I returned to Perugia for a follow-up story in 2012 and knocked at the door of the house Kercher shared with Knox to find it occupied by a group of Asian migrants earning money selling umbrellas on the streets. They had never heard of Meredith Kercher.
This year Kercher's family claimed Meredith had been forgotten during the media frenzy over Knox's guilt or innocence. So when Winterbottom's film finally steers the plot firmly back to Kercher and her death at its conclusion, it serves as a wake-up call. A long moment where the Kercher character stares into the camera neatly evokes the sadness of her death.
Last week Winterbottom said Kercher's brother Lyle had watched the film. "We dedicate the film at the end 'In Memory of Meredith Kercher', I didn't want to do that unless someone from her family had seen it," he told Screen International.
"Meredith's murder becomes a vehicle for another story in the film, and it was important that the Kerchers were not offended by that," said Latza Nadeau. "That said, it ends on the character inspired by Meredith, and on what her life could have been, which means this story cannot have a happy ending."
