Chimp Crazy

Today on Art of the Cut we’re speaking with the ACE Eddie-winning team of editors for Best Documentary Series - for Chimp Crazy. With us are supervising editor, Evan Wise, ACE, editors, Adrienne Gits, ACE, Doug Abel, ACE, Charles Divak, ACE, and additional editor Sascha Stanton Craven.

Evan’s been nominated for multiple Emmys and ACE Eddies, including for his work on Q: Into the Storm, and The Circus: Inside the Greatest Political Show on Earth. He’s also edited on the TV series The Anarchists.

Doug Abel has been nominated for numerous Emmys and ACE Eddies. He edited the TV series Tiger King. He’s edited for The Oscars, and he edited the documentary Manda Bala: Send a Bullet.

Adrienne’s also been nominated for multiple Emmys and ACE Eddies including for her work on the documentaries and documentary series, Fearless, 100 Foot Wave, and Challenger: The Final Flight.

Charles has similarly been nominated for multiple Emmys and ACE Eddies including for his work on Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, and The Circus: Inside the Greatest Political Show on Earth.

Sascha edited the Jackass Forever Movie and Jackass 4.5. And cut the TV series On Cinema. 

Welcome everybody to Art of the Cut. It’s so nice to have you on to talk about Chimp Crazy and congratulations. You guys must still be buzzing from your ACE Eddie win. Congratulations to all of you. Please introduce yourselves and tell us about your role on the project.

GITS: My name is Adrienne Gits. I worked mainly on episode 103 and a little bit on 104.

WISE: I’m Evan Wise. I was the supervising editor and I worked across the whole series. Episode 101 was my personal episode that I shepherded across the line.

ABEL: I’m Doug Abel and I primarily worked on the last episode 104.

DIVAK: My name is Charles Divak. My episode was episode 102, but I also worked across the series as well.

CRAVEN: I’m Sascha Stanton Craven. I was brought on as an additional editor.

Tell me why that opening image was chosen and how did it help kick the story off.

WISE: The opening image was a pan across the stuffed monkeys, with the little monkey in the background.

I think it encompasses the whole series in one shot. It’s ridiculous and there’s a boundary crossing between real and not real and alive and not alive.

All of those animals are represented in innocence and a motherly sort of feeling that a lot of our characters have. It’s also just beautiful and a nice slow way to just get the ball rolling.

ABEL: It was an early directive to try to present owning primates and owning chimps as maybe perhaps  a positive thing so that the audience would get into this world and see some of the positive aspects.

That was a shot that was light and doesn’t scare you away and doesn’t make you run for the remote. It seems like, “This is gonna be light and palatable. I can handle the pink tones and these little stuffed animals.”

DIVAK: Our director, Eric Goode, emphasized a lot was that he wanted it to feel like the coolest thing ever to own a chimp, to set it up like that. With this world that would be so cool. It’s the most amazing thing. Then we get into the dark side. Hook you with that then reveal all the bad stuff and all the stuff that comes after that.

At the ACE Eddie Awards, March 14, 2025, Doug Abel, ACE, Evan Wise, ACE, Sascha Stanton Craven, and Adrienne Gits, ACE.

One of the reasons why I thought that Chimp Crazy was a great choice as an ACE Eddie winner is that the structure is so interesting. You could have easily told this story: Here’s the first chimp that started off as a public animal then went bad, and here’s the second chimp that went bad. Instead, it was done in a very interesting way, hopping back and forth between stories, intercutting, flashbacks, flash forwards. How much of that structure was an upfront thing with a script, and how much of it was the editors diving into a scene or a story or topic?

WISE: None of it was upfront in a script. In the beginning, the good people at Goode Films had been shooting for two years without editing anything. They just had all this great stuff and they were looking for chimpanzee stories and shooting whatever they could.

Any person who had a chimpanzee that would talk to them, they would film. Ultimately they found Tania. I was the first person on. I’m just looking at all this and losing my mind! Everyone has a chimpanzee, but they’re not connected. How do we tell this story?

I didn’t know what to do, but it was very obvious that Tania was the “A story” and the tent pole because she’s such a strong character and we had such great access to her, so we knew she was going to be the main focus.

Then it took a long time of watching the footage from everything else and a lot of brain power to figure out how to weave in the other stories and when to do that appropriately. We realized that there were themes that bubbled up.

The themes that we saw in the Travis story - which was in episode two - was fear and danger. Ultimately, he really hurt someone. Then we had to think about when do we want that theme to be most prevalent in the episode?

Supervising editor Evan Wise, ACE

Then with episode three, the theme was pressure because the authorities were closing in on Buck and Tamara Brogoitti, who owned him. Where do we need that? Where’s that gonna serve the story best? That ended up being episode three when we realized Tonka is in the basement and the authorities are closing in on Tania.

GITS: Episode three was also the Monkey Mom episode. We really paralleled this caring aspect of these women - or at least their perceived caring aspect for the animals - and getting more inside that pathology, in addition to ratcheting up Tania’s anxiety with Tamara’s story.

ABEL: This is my second large project with Goode Films - the first one being Tiger King. It’s a backwards way from how most documentaries are made. Most documentaries start with 800 hours of all this stuff then you start to whittle it down but both of those projects evolved.

There was a central story that you latched onto then you realized, “We can’t spend all our time on this one story. It’s just too much and it’s too intense. So you start to explore these other avenues. So some of those other chimp stories were developed, six months or more into the process of realizing that we need to figure out ways to thread the needle.

And those stories were filmed somewhat with this idea in mind. So it perhaps helped guide the director in terms of what he’s gonna ask, thinking in the back of his head, “How can this connect to this ‘A story?’”

CRAVEN: I came in when there was already some sort of structure to the whole story. I came in and watched through to the end of the second episode. It just felt like such a lightning striking thing.

Originally, Eric was trying to get to Connie Casey, and Tania was a volunteer who happened to be there who was an in. Then Tania became the story while they were filming. But while you’re doing that, you’ve also done all this other background research of what is this world of chimp moms and chimp owners and everything else?

How do we expand into the whole ecosystem of what private chimp ownership is, but also - because Tania is so compelling - how do each of these things get woven in so they underpin the drama of Tania’s situation - the danger of it, and the nurturing part that it connects to?

I think that everyone else here did such a good job of pointing to where those things happen and where you’re stepping back and getting the wider world and then when you’re diving back in and burrowing into Tani a’s specifics again.

Editor Charles Divak, ACE

DIVAK: Sascha was super helpful to have on because we were all immersed in our own episodes - across the four episodes - and there was so much footage. Sascha was not restrained by the episodes.

He had seen them all so he was just spinning back through all these years and all this footage then sating, “This could be cool for your theme that you’re building in episode two,” or, “This would be cool in one.”

Stuff that we hadn’t been able to grab yet or we’re seeing it in a different light now that it’s been constructed. It was really helpful to have somebody go through and do that.

How did the  day-to-day work happen?

WISE: Early on we wrote a broad outline of the series, so we generally knew what was going on. Then we were able to assign people to sections and be say,  “Okay, you watch everything from here to here and do this story.

Once we figured out where the other chimp stories would go, that was helpful too, because then you could just immerse yourself in that and you wouldn’t have to worry about the other stuff.

ABEL: There were a lot of blocks, like rough outline ideas, that Evan had worked on. Sequences that were sometimes just three minutes, sometimes they were 15 or 18 minutes. I’ve experienced this on almost every project.

You have to start somewhere, right? So you start finding some thing that piques your interest, and you build a little scene out of it. Sometimes you’re doing it completely in a vacuum, not knowing what it would connect to. But you had a nice collection of rough sections by the time I joined

WISE: I had a lot of “vacuum scenes.” I just saw something that I thought was cool - that inspired me - and luckily I had the freedom and the time to just try it. I made the 2001: A Space Odyssey scene as an example of that.

I watched that and thought, “I have to cut this! I have to cut this right now! This is so cool!” We just picked random things and a lot of them ended up staying in the show.

Avid timeline screenshot, Chimp Crazy

The 2001 montage really built into a climax.

WISE: The chimp and the music and Stanley Kubrick did the heavy lifting in that one.

You gotta give Stanley a little bit of credit there.

CRAVEN: It’s always nice when you can have Stanley give you a solid.

That and King Kong at the end!

WISE: Oh yeah. That was Doug. I remember when he showed us that and I just couldn’t stop laughing. It was so much fun.

ABEL: One of the big themes is the love story - and is it a love story? A lopsided love story perhaps, and that’s kind the extreme version of it. King Kong. Yeah. I have a bad habit of choosing very expensive clips that people like.

On the Mix Stage of Chimp Crazy

I would not have had the courage to put that in the show for that exact reason.

ABEL: People should know that before they hire me. It might cost you a lot of money.

GITS: If I remember correctly the 2001 scene was one of the scenes that moved around quite a bit within that episode. That was always a feeling thing of where is the best place for this? Now it seems like, how could it have been any other place?

WISE: Yeah, it moved around a lot. I think HBO said, “You guys should try this at the top.” As soon as they said that, it was like, “Oh yeah. Of course.”

There was a bit of non-linear storytelling. There’s a raid on the compound to take the chimps, then in the middle of the raid, we cut back to showing cameras being installed at the compound so that the raid could be observed.

WISE: Initially that wasn’t in the cut. Every time we showed it to someone, they asked, “Where are these cameras? Is this Tania’s security system? Where is this coming from?” People were really curious about that.

We knew we had probably 10 minutes of footage of them setting it up, so I just cut a quick montage to that. I thought it would be better to do it as a reveal after the fact.

One of the things that I want people to understand about documentary is that how the story is revealed is a decision. You could have shown the cameras being assembled and then the seizure happened, but instead you showed the seizure of the animals happening, then - before the seizure happened - we set up these cameras so we could watch it.

WISE: Yeah. It just felt like the more interesting way. Sometimes a question I ask myself when I’m working is: “What is the most normal, straightforward way to do this?” Then you figure that out, then you think, “Alright, how do I do the opposite of that where it still makes sense?”

It’s just storytelling. We’re sitting around at a bar over a beer telling a story. You rarely tell it straight from beginning to end. You can start with the end or you jump into the most interesting place ‘cause you know you want to hit a big punchline or something,

WISE: You wanna get people interested. Put something interesting at the top.

CRAVEN: If I remember correctly, it’s “Oh, the seizure’s happening, but the cameras aren’t allowed in.” Then it’s “Here’s how we got that.” It gives you a little tension and release.

There was a great transition story-wise of the FBI or whoever it was - the local cops – saying to the cameraman, “You’re trespassing. You can’t bring a camera in here.” And that’s when it’s revealed that the cameras are in there already.

WISE: That one was really difficult because watching animals get darted and dragged out unconscious is really heavy. I was trying to think how can we play this in a not sad way, but still have it be poignant and still have it be emotional?

I tried some silly versions. I think I had Eddie Money’s “Take Me Home Tonight” in there at one point. Then that James Brown song just seemed perfect because it had pace and movement so you didn’t get bored and you didn’t get sad, but it still had an emotion to it, and it shifted the focus onto how Connie was feeling ‘cause she was losing what she loved, even though most people would agree she shouldn’t have it.

Amongst the five of you, how do you like to work with music? Do you like to cut with music or do you say, “No, I cut everything else and then we put music in later?”

WISE: I’m very proud of the needle drops in this whole show. I really think we have a killer needle-drop soundtrack as well as composed score, too. We just got to have a lot of fun with music.

ABEL: It’s a shared media system, so there was already lots of stuff in there from previous projects. I think all the Tiger King stuff was in there and there were bins and bins of endless music. It’s a weird method, but sometimes I’ll say, “Gosh, I need a cue that’ss a minute and 20 seconds long,” so I’ll just sort by that column.

You aren’t the first person to tell me that! If you’ve got an edit that is x long, search for a piece of music that is that length. Oddly enough, they work because when you think about it, somebody has composed that for that length and just because of the story structure, a lot of times it works.

ABEL: Hit or miss, but I find you get lucky more often than not, or it’ll be something weird that you would never would’ve picked. But we started working with a composer fairly late in the process, so he was working mostly off of stuff we had grabbed and slogged in just from sitting on the drive or people are bringing stuff in constantly as well.

GITS: 103 I think was all temp and there was nothing that I felt like we had to be needle drop except the end credits with the Violent Femmes. I think that’s the only needle drop in 103.

WISE: The Cranberries.

GITS: Oh, that’s right. You put that on. That section went through a lot of different needle drops. It was “Hotel California” for a while

WISE: It was “Hotel California,” which I really loved, then the Eagles said no, so then we had to pivot.

GITS: The first one you put in was Rick James.

WISE: “Give it to me, baby” by Rick James. That was a little too silly. We put that in, then they shot the “recre” stuff for that. It seemed like the tone of the “recre” and the tone of that music were just completely wrong for each other.

Then I thought to try it slower and put in “Hotel California,” which was wonderful, then we had to change it. I think Jeremy McBride, our executive producer, recommended the Cranberry song?

GITS: No, it was Lissa Rivera. Sorry to Jeremy if it wasn’t.

WISE: Somebody said, “See if it works with the Cranberries and I tried it and I thought, “This is it.”

What was the purpose of showing Tania in the massage chair getting her lips filled? What was the point of that scene? I’m not criticizing.

DIVAK: That’s the beginning of episode two. It’s not like we asked her, “Hey, can we shoot you getting your lips injected?” It’s something that she does all the time. It reveals her character. She’s a very complicated character. It’s important to see all the aspects of her.

This is certainly an aspect: the vanity kind and there’s a little bit of selfishness there… a lot of selfishness. Then you see later, she takes care of these animals because she thinks she’s helping them.

In her mind it’s for a good reason, so I think it’s important to show her in the chair: who she is and the cracks of that personality.

The other reason too is that it’s one of the times where she was lying to us about what was going on and she was lying to the lip injector at the same time. You see her on camera, processing this lie and actively lying.

The audience doesn’t know yet that she’s lying, but you’re wondering, “Wait, is she lying? Is she not?” And she’s outwardly doing it. I just find it fascinating watching people lie, then learning about it and seeing what’s happens.

It’s just so fascinating. Then the last thing is, she tells you exactly what has happened to Tonka in the first 30 seconds! She says, “If he’s in my basement, I told PETA to just come down and look.”

The symmetry of that is that the lie starts the episode and the episode ends showing that he is actually in the basement. I just love book ending the episode with that.

I also noticed was when she drinks the water with the chemicals on her lips, she says, “You’re not supposed to do drink with this stuff on, but I’ve been doing this forever so I know I can do whatever I want.” So that attitude is also part of her personality.

CRAVEN: Totally. I think that’s such a core insight into the entire thing. “They say you’re not supposed to, but I know what I’m doing and it’s fine.”

ABEL: What’s funny about Tania is it applies to almost everything she says. We shot a lot. I don’t know how many interviews between the sit-down sessions and the on-the-fly interviews. There were probably 30 or 40 separate sessions with her.

WISE: Overall, I think we had about 1500 hours of footage filmed over four years.

Let’s talk about revealing the truth of a statement by holding after someone says something. That happened a bunch of times with Tania. I think you even do it in the opening credit sequence. She says something and she stops  talking, then you leave them on camera.

WISE: It’s a great way to - like you said - reveal who they are. The one that I love is when Tania’s in front of the courthouse in episode one, and she’s talking to us and she says “Oh, I’m just really sad that they’re gonna be gone” and there’s a long pause and she makes this little quirky face.

Tania’s really funny and she was really feeling emotional there. If we didn’t hold that, you might not realize it. The other one that I love in episode one is when Alan is giving his plea to camera to find Tonka and he puts down this little picture of Tonka and he walks off camera, but he does this little skippy hop.

That’s who Alan is. Alan is just joyful. He’s like the human embodiment of skipping. It just felt right to include that so people could try to understand more who he is.

GITS: I remember when I came on to do the show, they had sent me some scenes and I noticed that exact thing and I just loved it so much. Doug, you did it a little bit in in that scene in the hotel when they’re breaking down the set. Then I just remember you held for just a beat where the antlers fell over. That always gets a laugh.

ABEL: They don’t have to make sense. A lot of those also are just about taking a breath and thinking, “I need the audience to stop and process this. What am I gonna use to cover that moment? Oh wait, I don’t have to worry about it. I’ll just keep the camera rolling.”

So it often comes out as just organically from what you wanna do to get to the next scene. Often great things happen anytime anybody thinks filming’s over. That’s usually when really good stuff happens

That was a really interesting scene. You’re listening to the end of the interview, but you’re watching the crew break down the set and put the hotel room back together again after the interview. What was the purpose of leaving the interview to show the crew? I loved it. I thought that was a great little montage and a really interesting visual way to end the interview, but why do it when you could have had her on camera the whole time?

ABEL: Part of it is just that there are these set pieces with Tanya throughout. Sometimes you see her and she’s in what looks art directed. Then there are the moments that are a little bit more being a fly on the wall in the life of Tania.

I think it was just a little bit of a nod that there’s this whole other side to the story where it really is real and it makes you key into those moments even more, I think. I also just enjoyed it. I just thought it was just a strange, odd moment that made you think.

And there’s something about the deer head thumping on the ground that’s just inherently funny. Injecting a little humor into what was actually a pretty intense scene is helpful in terms of the rhythm of the show. We have some pretty dark scenes, but you don’t go more than 15 minutes without  something that makes you giggle.

GITS: And at that point - as far as the breaking down of the set - also the production team was part of the story at that point.

ABEL: Yeah. That’s a good point. We pull back the curtain on the production. In fact it comes after a whole scene where we actually interview the director, so it seemed appropriate in that world to do that little nod.

You mentioned the need to - after a heavy scene - to laugh or at least have the audience think. An example of that is a lovely little breath after the terror of the chimp attack 911 call. Sometimes you just jumped right to the next thing and sometimes you decided, “We gotta give the audience a minute here.”

DIVAK: Particularly in 102, it’s such a brutal, awful thing. When you give something space it actually has way more impact ‘cause it just sits for a while. It just resonates. It lets you think about it as you hear the call echo off and it just lets you reset. It’s just too hard to process things if they’re all just jammed together.

There are commas, there are periods in sentences. There’s new paragraphs and you have to mimic that in how you’re cutting.

CRAVEN: The show is balancing so many tones. There are things that are just absurd and silly and ridiculous, and you want those things to play as absurd and silly and ridiculous, but you can’t jam that right up against something that’s  traumatic because then the audience doesn’t know how they’re supposed to react.

With something like the Travis attack, the audience is so tensed up watching that, like, “How much of this is am I gonna see?” You are protecting yourself a little bit emotionally because it’s so brutal.

And the moment where it goes back to Tania with just some silence and some quiet it allows you to just unclench and realize, “Okay, now it’s over. I don’t need to be protecting myself anymore. I can now process.”

But you’re also seeing Tania, so you’re thinking about that entire situation, but now you’re back into her story, but going forward with this attack and danger in your mind.

ABEL: It’s a pretty complicated structure. It was extremely challenging; especially threading through the flashback to the Travis’ story and Buck - and Chance for that matter.

So there was a tremendous amount of trial and error that involved all of us because sometimes a story or scene would move from episode or we’d split a story.

It took a tremendous amount of brainpower. We’d have two-hour Zoom sessions at least once a week. There’d be 12 little Zoom boxes.

GITS: It never felt like you were an island. There was such amazing collaboration and whenever I hit a wall or felt like I had painted myself into a corner, there was always just such a great wealth of talent to talk to and everybody was so generous. There was no weird competition. There was a general feeling of everybody having ownership of the whole series and just wanting it to be the best that it could.

DIVAK: It was definitely one of the more collaborative projects I’ve ever worked on. When we were at the ACE Eddie Awards it felt like we were a family.

I don’t really work with a lot of these guys anymore now, and it was nice to just be there together because we’d formed this really close bond and honestly that’s what made it so special was to be able to share it with your friends - these people that were really an important part of your life.

How long were you all on this project?

WISE: I was on it for two years and one month.

GITS: I think I was on it for a year and maybe three or four months.

DIVAK: About a year and a half for me.

WISE: We were all working remotely. Chuck and I are in New York. Doug is in Louisville, Kentucky. Adrienne’s in LA. Sascha’s in LA. Our fellow producer/writer, Tim Moran, who was very critical to the whole process, lives in Argentina, so we were very spread out, but we had a really special week after about the first year of edit, where we all flew into LA together and worked outta the office.

That first Monday we were together, the first thing we did was sat down and screened the whole series and it was the first time we had all watched it as one piece.

Then we spent the rest of the week really cranking away. That was such a critical part of the process for us where we could push the show from pretty good to excellent.

Since you mentioned the complex structure, and that was one of the first times you watched it in total. I was thinking of the importance of how something like the Travis story impacts the viewer, so that the viewer’s listening or thinking about the fact that Travis nearly killed someone and how does that affect the way they watch the rest of the story? You could have led with this famous Travis event, but you put it in a very specific place.

Another thing that I thought of in the same way was a montage of Tania where it’s almost a “Save the Cat” thing, where she talks about how many children she’s fostered. You realize she’s very motherly. She’s been kinda weird up till then. Why wait to show her in that light that late in the series?

DIVAK: The first cut of two, Travis was like a five-minute story I think. We didn’t really have a lot of access to footage at the time, so it was just some newscasts. I knew it was important to cover Travis somewhere.

I really wanted to cover Travis in episode two because there’s this idea that she’s potentially hiding this 250 pound chimpanzee somewhere. Particularly when it’s revealed at the end of the episode two that she has this chimpanzee in her basement, you have to know the danger that’s associated with that.

If you don’t see Travis before that, I don’t think it’s gonna have the same level of impact. “Oh my God, the same thing could rip her face off!” So I think it’s really important that Travis happens before then. Production stumbled on this thing with Travis that they were able to open up these two big interviews and have access to a trove of archival and that entire section just ballooned up.

Evan’s talking about the first time that we all came together and watched for a week. That was the first time that the Travis section was fully assembled with all the new stuff, and it was about 35 minutes long and we all thought, “This is way too long. This does not work. There’s good stuff in here, but it’s not working.”

I cut it down to about 15 or 16 minutes, and it landed the sweet spot so that it didn’t take away from Tania’s “A story.” It helped to buttress it. As long as the theme was that Travis was dangerous and that having a chimpanzee could result in extreme danger and everything leading to that served that purpose, then the rest of the stuff fell away.

GITS: That scene was in 102 at one point - the background, the foster children, it wasn’t always in 103, and I think we decided at one point that needed a home at that point in the series. Hopefully the audience was feeling one way about Tania at that point. At this point, she’s taken Tonka and he is in the basement, so most people are probably not too sympathetic towards Tania at that point. And Tania’s very complex and extremely likable.

There is another side to her, so it seemed much more interesting to challenge the audience to see this other side of her. Had you put it up front, or if it was in 101, you would have forgotten about that for the rest of the series. You wouldn’t have remembered to see her through that lens.

We had - at that point - gotten that other interview with her son Justin in the basement. When we got that, that was huge ‘cause that was such a good interview and it really mirrored - as the scene went on - what he was saying, it mirrored what she was doing in the hotel room, which had been cut as a separate scene, so cross-cutting that - it just landed. I felt great empathy for Tanya when I saw and heard how lovingly her son talked about her. I do think it softened her a little bit.

I loved the montages of Tania talking about hurting the PETA lawyer.

DIVAK: That was one of my favorite things to cut. As I was watching dailies, she just kept making all these threats or insults against Jared, so I would just save them in a little string: Tania insults. I knew I wanted to include it somewhere.

I had no idea where, but I just kept building this string. I finally called Evan and said, “I’m gonna try it in this spot here.” He said, “Sure. Go for it.” I cut it really fast and sent it out that night, then he called me right after it went out and said, “Oh my God! This is so funny!”

Episode three starts with an armed raid on a home that you don’t complete at that time. Why start there and end it at the end of the episode?

GITS: I think we were hoping for a bit of a misdirect. We’d just gone down into the basement at the end of the previous episode and discovered Tania had Tonka in the basement, so the nature of that bodycam footage is that they’re creeping up on this house that you don’t really know what it, where it is or who’s in there, and you hear a chimp.

The hope was that people would have this anxiety that it might be Tonka.

Then the rest of the episode, you want them to carry that anxiety of when is that gonna happen? How’s that gonna work out? Then of course it converges, at the end with Tania’s story

Another great little montage with the Ozark footage with kind of very mysterious music.

GITS: [Director] Eric Goode was always wanting to make sure we showed a sense of place. They were constantly shooting great B-roll of all those places.

WISE: A lot of people had favorite shots of the Ozarks that they wanted to get into the show, and that was one of the places that we were able to do it, so there’s a lot of scrutiny in the shot choices for that section.

Another great montage was the “Tonka was dead” montage.

GITS: Evan passed that on to me. I was so excited that I got to take that for my episode. Evan also worked on it.

WISE: Like Chuck said: we had been watching Tania lie so many times and in episode 2 you’re not sure if she’s lying, but you think she might be. But at this stage, she’s coming clean and I just remembered thinking, “Oh my God!

She’s been lying to us on camera so many times and we should just put these together. It was really funny, and it just felt imperative to do it.

I do wanna talk about ethical considerations. Did you have discussions about what you could and couldn’t, or didn’t want to do with this series?

GITS: There were images of Travis that were a lot more graphic than what we used. Those were always off the table.

DIVAK: Going through those police photos was really rough. That was hard to look at. I didn’t wanna put anyone else through that.

One of the things I love talking about is transitions between scenes. I loved at the point where it cuts to the proxy director as a clown, and you don’t even realize who or what you’re looking at. That’s a pretty hard cut from whatever’s before it directly to that. You don’t quite know what you’re looking at until a phone conversation happens and you realize, “Oh my gosh! Wait a minute! That’s the proxy director!” At least that’s how I felt as an audience member.

WISE: Oh I’m glad to hear you say that ‘cause that was exactly what I was hoping would happen. That was really intentional because it was coming off of scenes that were really intense and really heavy and it just felt like a time where we needed to break the tension.

We had been sad and dark for a while and just needed to give the audience an emotional off-ramp. Fortunately we had that scene that was just ridiculous visually.

Then I was thought, “Okay, what’s the most disruptive way to, to come in here?” I wanted it to be just like a brick through glass, and a clown singing “Happy Birthday” was the answer.

It’s so much a part of our art: there are scenes where you definitely try to do the softest transition, like a prelap or something like that, and there are other transitions where you’re trying to be as hard and as impactful as you can.

WISE: Right before the birthday party and the clown, there’s a scene of Tania in the basement, then there was a scene of Alan talking about what’s going on.

At the time he doesn’t know that Tania has Tonka in the basement, and I saw those two scenes and thought that these could blend into one another.

Especially as you hear Alan saying, “If Tania has Tonka in the basement and if she’s got him captive…” Well, I thought, let’s show her actually doing that. So the audience is in on it and Alan is still in the dark. I thought that would be a very interesting juxtaposition between the two.

Let’s talk about transitioning back to Pendleton and Buck directly from Tania bringing up the euthanasia of Tonka.

GITS: The whole Pendleton thread in that episode was the idea of trying to parallel what was happening with Tania at the time. Their stories are very similar - as a lot of these women’s stories are that have the chimps - so at that point they were both just ratcheting up.

What happened in real life was that the production knew what happened to Buck and was concerned about that happening to Tonka as well. I think the transitions at that point actually got much quicker to parallel the urgency of the situation.

Director, Eric Goode

There was an interesting flashback situation where the proxy director asked whether Tania would be willing to meet the real director, Eric. Then you jump back in time, two hours, and there are a bunch of jump-cuts as Eric gets out of the car. Then you’re into this montage of Eric’s arrival.

WISE: That was the same idea as the hidden camera thing in episode one. When I was watching that footage, I saw the shot of Eric off to the side watching Dwayne [the proxy director] and Tania walk into the hotel, and I thought, “This is so awesome that they’re colliding here.”

Then how can we have their journeys happen separately, then see this moment where they connected but didn’t know? So that was the reason why we did it that way. It also builds the tension, and it’s a surprise for the audience as well.

ABEL: Yeah. You’ve seen Dwayne and Tania interact and it seems like maybe she’s forgiven or is okay with it, but Eric doesn’t know that because he’s a hundred feet away. It was kind of a cool moment like there’s a wormhole in the documentary and it catches up to itself.

Proxy director, Dwayne Cunningham

You’ve got all these stories that you could tell in order. How are you choosing when to get in and out of them? Like the Buck Story, for example. You tell it for a while, then you break out of it and come back to the conclusion of it later. If you’ve got a story that goes from beginning to end, when do you chop it in half and stick something in the middle of it?

GITS: I cut Buck and the Pendleton story separate. That was the first thing that I did when I came on. So it had its own arc separately and it was quite long.

Then I separately put together the scenes for 103, and it was a lot of trial and error, but you could see parallels in their story, so you just had to find the right on-ramp and off-ramp. It’s all about the emotion and what you want the audience to feel at that time to get a deeper understanding of each character through the other’s story. Doug, what about Alan Cummings in episode four?

ABEL: Chronologically it probably happened in a very different spot than we used it in the film. It’s just a very sweet moment with somebody who’s been on this journey to help this chimp, so it just made sense to help tie up the story. He is one of the earliest threads we have.

When he was in the movie in the nineties, so it just wrapped it up in a very emotional way.

WISE: That was our original ending. One of the things that was really unique and fun about this show is that the story was still evolving as we were editing. So we were in the plane and running outta gas and we didn’t know where the airport was.

(metaphorically) We can put Alan reuniting with Tonka at the end because that’s a really nice ending. It felt good ‘cause it’s a very powerful scene, but I think a lot of us felt like the way the rest of the series has gone, it feels like it put too much of a bow on it. It’s too perfect. It’s too fairytale.

We thought, “What? That’s the end?” We kept on working, then we got the call that Tania had been attacked. We knew that we had our ending to the show. That was our airport to land at.

ABEL: Everything we’ve learned about Tania I got to use in that last scene: when she’s describing how everything went down. You can see where she’s fudging things, then out of the blue she starts talking about wanting to build an island.

An important theme that we haven’t mentioned is just the pathology of these folks. That was always something that was on my mind because I come from a background where I’ve dealt with a lot of animal rescue stuff and I’ve dealt with people who are doing bad things to animals so it really is almost like a pathology.

I don’t know if there’s a psychological term for it, but you really walk away from this series thinking there’s just something not wired right with Tania. Her heart’s in the right place, but she’s not tethered to reality where she needs to be.

So that scene is amazing ‘cause you get to bring all that baggage along with you and use that to filter how you watch it.

GITS: It is amazing. Doug, you did such a good job with that. I remember when the footage came in and none of us could believe it. That was a complicated scene, I think. And I remember thinking that was gonna be a complicated scene, and I thought what you did with it was like so good.

ABEL: Evan worked on it as well. He added some good stuff into that as well, so it was a good joint effort. I can’t think of a scene that I was more anxious to cut than that one.

What do you do when you’re on a documentary - maybe not this one, but also maybe this one - to protect yourself from that kind of day in and day out dealing with a difficult topic.

WISE: I think you just compartmentalize it. I’ve worked on a lot of stuff in my career and I’ve seen a lot of horrible things because of work.

If you can view it  that this is important to the story, and as long as it’s important to the story, it’s okay, “I’m okay to watch all this awful stuff because it’s important for the audience to see it because it matters to the story.

So I think if you can put that badge on it helps me sleep better.

DIVAK: When I watched that stuff, it made me feel something. It makes you sad. You feel emotion and when I’m cutting something - when I start to feel that emotion - it comes across in what I’m cutting. I do a better job trying to convey what I’m feeling onto film. It’s hard, but it’s worth it.

ABEL: Obviously after the 50th viewing of the footage, you do become numb to it, but what happens later in the process is that you start having screenings and you see how people react to it.

This happened a lot with Tiger King too ‘cause we had a lot of stuff with baby cubs and you become numb to how people react to that. Same with this.

So then you start to watch it with people you get reminded - you get re-traumatized - but you realize, “This still has the impact it did when I saw it for the first time in the day-to-day editing.” It’s part of the gig. It can be tricky to manage.

As I mentioned at the top of the show, you just won an ACE Eddie. When you’re watching for something like the ACE Eddies or the Emmys how do you judge editing? What are you looking for? What do you think people saw in your editing that won you the Eddie?

WISE: That’s a really hard question. Sometimes good editing is editing that you don’t see, and sometimes good editing is good editing that you do see. For me, it’s mostly: how did this make me feel? My goal is really to figure out how I feel about the material and then I want the audience to feel that way too.

What can I do to convey the feeling that I’m feeling to everyone? If I’m watching something, I really feel for this character. I really understand this thing I didn’t before or this is really interesting and I can’t look away. Those are usually indicative of good editing.

CRAVEN: Something that really impressed me about this project - which was underlined in all of the discussions that we then had in like the weekly Zooms - was that it is both the clarity of the emotional through-line combined with the amount of information and the size of the world that is being conveyed.

It is juggling so many things and the sort of complexity of the timeline: how you’re going forward and back but it doesn’t feel jarring. It doesn’t feel showy.

To Evan’s point, I think it still does feel invisible in some way because it feels correct. It feels like you’re going through something which is really bringing in a lot of threads and giving you both an intimate character study, and also a dramatic thing, and investigation of this world.

ABEL: Often your job is to not be noticed. If you do a good job, nobody notices the editing. But I think because in this project we’re pulling back the curtain on the crew, so even though you have these long stretches where you’re completely sucked in.

There are these moments where you realize, “There’s a wizard behind the curtain.” So you do become aware that this is a process and there’s a crew and there’s people who are behind this.

It maybe worked to our advantage in terms of the editing award that people were thinking about the editing a bit more than they would have if that whole crew aspect of the story wasn’t in there.

GITS: At the ACE holiday party, I remember a lot of people noted that it was just such a ride. It’s the Billy Wilder quote of “grab him by the throats and don’t let go.” People really appreciated that. There wasn’t a lot of indulgence in it. It just moved.

CRAVEN: I think you really feel the construction of being led through the narrative, but scene-to -scene, you don’t. When you’re in a scene, it really feels like, “Oh, now we’re in this place and this thing is happening and we’re with it in a way that feels invisible, which I think is really good and impressive.

Thank you all for being on Art of the Cut. It has been so great to talk to you, and congratulations on your ACE Eddie.

GROUP: Thanks, Stephen.