Of all the murder cases in recent years, none has held the world in such a tight clasp as that of British student Meredith Kercher in the Italian city of Perugia in 2007. Synonymous with the killing is of course Amanda Knox, the American student with whom Kercher shared an apartment, and who, along with her former lover Raffaele Sollecito, was charged with the murder. Both spent four years in jail before being acquitted, then later re-charged and finally re-acquitted just last year. It was an extraordinary case, filled with twists and turns; the Italian forensics made a mess of the murder scene, evidence was contaminated in the laboratory, wild insinuations were made by all.

The media spiralled into an unprecedented frenzy: a beautiful young American implicated in the murder of a vivacious young English girl, with rumours of sex games and opportunities for flagrant slut-shaming thrown into the mix – what more could they want? Meanwhile, the general public weighed in on the case with glee with one question occupying their minds: is “Foxy Knoxy” (a self-appointed nickname taken from Knox’s MySpace account) guilty or innocent? Both prospects are equally terrifying: as Knox herself puts it in forthcoming Netflix documentary Amanda Knox, “Either I’m a psychopath in sheep’s clothing or I am you.”

The film does not attempt to solve this riddle (there is, after all, still the possibility that Knox is guilty – the final verdict being that the evidence was so mismanaged that a fair trial was impossible), instead swerving away from the hype and hysteria to re-present the facts (including new, previously unseen footage) and hear from the story’s protagonists in their own words.

Its directors, Brian McGinn and Rod Blackhurst, spent five years gaining the trust of Knox, Sollecito and prosecutor Giuliano Mignini, all of whom we hear from at length. Knox is, for the most part, sardonic and inscrutable, Mignini proud and irrational but each interview allows the speaker to reclaim control over their part in the tale, telling it as they experienced it and fulfilling the American filmmakers’ goal of finding the “humanity behind the headlines”.

It also features discussions with the less-than-likeable but indisputably honest Nick Pisa, a correspondent for The Daily Mail who compares getting a frontpage headline to sex, and who serves as the ideal spokesperson for the media’s role in propagating rumours and transposing tragedy into entertainment. Meredith Kercher’s family is prominently absent, but McGinn and Blackhurst go to great lengths to include footage of them at various stages of the case as sobering reminders of the most tragic, and most overlooked, victim of the story. Here, ahead of the documentary’s release, we speak to McGinn and Blackhurst to find out how they got such unprecedented access to the case’s key players, making Amanda Knox cry and ever-blurring line between tabloid media and ‘hard news’.

What prompted you to make the documentary?

Rod Blackhurst: We started working on the film in the summer of 2011. We saw that a lot of the TV programmes and media coverage at the time were being devoted to this question of guilt and innocence and the forensic examinations. We decided that we wanted to make more of a ‘why did this happen’ versus a whodunnit. We wanted to examine why this tragedy had been reduced to all of these headlines – why people were so fascinated by it – and also to hear what it was like to actually be caught up in the headlines. We wanted to understand all the complex elements at play that related to the personal experiences of those involved, on both sides of the courtroom, and not to approach them with judgment, regardless of how we felt about them as individuals or the choices that they made.

So when did you first meet Amanda Knox?

Rod Blackhurst: About a month after she and Raffaele Sollecito were acquitted in 2011. Brian and I flew to Seattle, Washington and spent a couple of days with her, explaining the type of film that we wanted to make. We told her that as filmmakers we would be there, ready to listen, if and when she decided she was ready to talk, and it wasn’t until the end of 2013 that she felt like she needed to say something. Of course, we noticed that at that time she and Raffaele Sollecito were facing a new verdict – the second appeals trial. Likewise, it wasn’t until the summer of 2015, after the Italian supreme court had released its final motivational, that Giuliano Mignini, the prosecutor, decided that he had something to say at that moment; that he had a position that hadn’t been considered.

What was your first impression of Knox?

Brian McGinn: It was honestly quite odd for us meeting all of these people because they had become celebrities – albeit unwanted celebrities. We’d read so much about Amanda, in particular, that sitting down across from her to do an interview was a daunting task. You have to figure out, what’s the point of connection going to be? There’s not really a natural entry point. But what we found was that by letting Amanda, and each of the others, feel comfortable talking – by almost putting the ball in their court – they started to reveal themselves to us and we saw elements that we could latch onto and behaviours that we actually understood. And that’s all you can really ask for – people trusting you enough to open up their emotions and allow you an entry into their world.

I remember in particular with Amanda it was when she finally broke down crying – the last time we spoke to her. Before that she’d really been hard to read emotionally, probably because she’d done so many television interviews where the main goal for her had been to not show emotion and to project intelligence. But I asked her a question about the first time that her mom came to visit her in prison and all of a sudden she just lost control of her emotions; remembering this moment when she had just been arrested for murder and she felt like she really needed her mother. That was the first time that I could understand or connect with her, regardless of thoughts of innocence or guilt.

What discoveries surprised you the most while making the film?

Brian McGinn: I got a text message from Rod when he was in Italy and I was in New York editing with an image of all these audio recordings that the police had made of Amanda’s telephone calls – he’d got access to the court records and found them. There was also footage that Amanda Knox had filmed of Meredith Kercher while she was still alive – that features in the film. We didn’t think that any of that stuff had ever been seen before so all of a sudden we realised that we’re going to be able to provide a different perspective for people on a story that they really thought they’d sucked the marrow out of.

I remember the first audio recording that we listened to was when Amanda called her friend Brett a couple of days after the murder and Brett tells her, ‘Oh don’t worry, this is all terrible but you’ve got this Italian boyfriend and you’re going to look back on this year as the best year of your life.’ What a crazy moment! The process of making the film was filled with the constant discovery of these moments when the reality of the truth seemed stranger than fiction, one time after another.

Did you ever find yourselves trying to solve the case?

Brian McGinn: Of course, it’s impossible not to. Even though we set out from the very beginning not to make a whodunit, it was so hard. We would watch edits of the film and we would go, ‘Are we trying to solve this?’ But although it’s hard to stop yourself from jumping to conclusions one way or the other, all you can really go on is the fact that the supreme court has ruled that there was not enough evidence to go on to justify putting these people away for life.

Tell us a bit about the role of Nick Pisa in the film. He seems to set himself up to embody everything that’s wrong with tabloid journalism, which must have been useful...

Brian McGinn:Nick was the ‘king of scoop’ on this particular story: his job was to churn out as much content as he could possibly get his hands on and for us he really stands in for the way that journalism and the media were evolving around that period – the rise of social and digital media which necessitated that ‘as many headlines as we can get’ mentality. It’s fascinating to track the evolution from 2007 to today because you can see the line between tabloid news and hard news almost completely dissolving. Our presidential election is being talked about almost entirely as if it was a reality show and in the UK, the day after the Brexit vote, the number two Google search was ‘What is the European Union?’ The discussion has become so much about the feeling and emotions – not about facts.

Nick was the perfect character to pull back the curtain on the way that that media system works and I think that it’s important for us to point out that, as he says in the film, his job only exists because people buy the stories that he’s writing and so it’s really a self-propagating situation – our fascination with a scoop, with reading it first and being the first to comment or the first to Tweet about something. It’s deeply ingrained in our culture now and of course played a pivotal role in this story in particular.

Amanda Knox is available on Netflix from September 30.