CBS

Lawrence Schiller and Norman Mailer, who have collaborated on other projects featuring high profile/controversial real-life people, including the CBS mini-series AMERICAN TRAGEDY about the O.J. Simpson trial, the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Executioner's Song about Utah murderer Gary Gilmore, and Oswald's Tale about Lee Harvey Oswald, spent nine months researching and investigating the life of Robert Hanssen for this mini-series. Mailer wrote the script and Schiller directed it. Here, Schiller and Mailer, along with FBI consultant Rusty Capps, discuss the research and fascinating facts involved in the real-story as well as the accuracy and scope of the resulting mini-series.

"Larry (Schiller) called me a week after Hanssen was arrested and asked me if I'd be interested," said Mailer. "I immediately said yes… (Hanssen) was, on the one hand, an extreme right wing figure and on the other he was working with the Russians all those years. Since he had done it successfully for so long he, obviously, was not clinically insane. So, here was a man with enormous opposites who had managed to keep his sanity -- and that appealed to me. I thought that's someone who is going to be interesting to write about and try to understand."

Hanssen's opposites are what immediately intrigued Schiller as well. "I had read an article that discussed the betrayal of his family and his children -- and that he had betrayed them with more than his spying activities. He had taken photographs of his wife that were very intimate. He videotaped his wife in intimate situations and shared that with other people that his wife didn't know about… So to me, it was a psychological layer on top of another layer. And then there were a lot of other issues being raised. He belonged to Opus Dei -- that was a staunch enemy of communism worldwide -- and yet he was dealing with the Soviets. Was that a cover? Or was he bipolar? Was he like a pendulum, swinging back and forth? So that's what interested me, this psychological portrait."

Mailer adds that Hanssen's sex life is what surprised him the most about Hanssen. "It added a third element. On the one hand he was a technically excellent FBI agent, on the other hand he was spying for the Russians -- that's contradicting enough. But then to find out that he had this very bizarre kinky sex life -- without his wife knowing about it -- changed it to a three dimensional portrait. When I first came across it I thought, 'Oh my lord, how are we ever going to do that?'"