Criminal mastermind Gerald Blanchard is taking Hulu viewers inside his life of crime in The Jewel Thief – and while the details might sound like a Hollywood heist movie, Blanchard is the real deal. Ahead of the July 13 premiere of the true-crime documentary, director Landon Van Soest opened up to PopCulture.com about capturing the unbelievable first-hand account of Blanchard’s crimes – including the 1998 theft of an Austrian crown jewel.
Blanchard made international headlines when police discovered that he had not only stolen one of Sisi’s stars, a jewel once belonging to a 19th-century Austrian empress, but that he had replaced it with a fake – a ruse that went unnoticed for days. It was only the grandest heist in Blanchard’s long criminal resume, which dated back to his teenage years as a poor kid in Omaha, Nebraska and included the thefts of half a million dollars from a bank before it even opened.
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Van Soest was “intrigued” by Blanchard’s story the first time he heard it – especially since it hadn’t gotten more play in the media. “I think when I just started getting into the layers and everything else that just made up this decades-long criminal career and crime spree, each escapade wilder than the last, and just building to this dramatic conclusion and everything else … it’s like, ‘How have I not heard about this? How is this guy not the star of something? How have movies not been made about this man?’” the director told PopCulture.
Blanchard, who has fully embraced his reputation as a criminal mastermind, “didn’t take a lot of convincing” to tell his story on camera, and while Van Soest knew from the beginning that he would be “working with a con man” and someone who has a vested interest in fostering his status as “a larger-than-life mythological figure,” he was shocked at how much of what Blanchard said ended up being the truth.
“I have to say that as I got deeper into this, so many of the stories that I thought were … just complete bulls—, very hard-to-believe outlandish stories, weeks later, I’d be sitting in front of a police officer, and they’d be saying, ‘No, that’s exactly what happened,’” Van Soest recalled, adding that it “was just shocking to me that the most outlandish things are almost across the board undeniably true.”
Blanchard’s impressive criminal creativity may have sparked with economic motivation, but Van Soest thinks it’s clear that the jobs he was pulling off “very quickly outpaced” his desire for money. “I think at the end of the day, I really came to believe that so much of it was about gaining that respect and that recognition,” he theorized. “I think that desire to be recognized for being so good at what he was doing was very strong. I think that he wants that level of recognition, he wants that notoriety.” The Jewel Thief is now streaming on Hulu.
