Deaf President Now

Today on Art of the Cut, we speak with BAFTA, Emmy and ACE Eddie-winning editor, Michael Harte, ACE about the SXSW Audience Award-winning documentary, Deaf President Now, currently streaming on Apple TV+.

Michael’s been on Art of the Cut before for his ACE Eddie-winning show Beckham. He won an ACE Eddie and was nominated for a BAFTA for Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie. He won a Grierson Award and was nominated for an Emmy and an ACE Eddie for Three Identical Strangers. 

I’m interested in the schedule of when things happened. When were you brought into the process of this documentary? What order and timetable were things delivered to you: interviews, re-creations, and archival.

It felt like everything went backwards than how it usually does because I came on at the start. I came on as the editor.

I was handed a drama script that they were initially talking about doing. Jonathan King was a producer in Concordia. I had just worked with Davis Guggenheim - one of the co-directors on Still: A Michael J. Fox movie.

Then I worked on Beckham for a while, and as I was working on Beckham, they sent me a script. It was a good script. And I remember thinking, “Could we look at some of the archive that they have for this story?”

There was talk of maybe integrating some archive material into it, like they do in the movie Milk. They really do it successfully in that.

I remember looking at the archive thinking, this is this isn’t stuff you just want to drop into a drama, because as soon as you see this archive, you’ll want to stay with it. You won’t want to go back to actors because it’s so strong.” It was so rich and so strong.

To see protests in sign language was so unique. I’ve never seen anything like this before. The thing with the archive is it’s always so noisy and loud - especially protest documentaries. The noise is just almost overwhelming and never that well captured.

But on this it was the opposite. It was really quiet and you could hear footsteps and we could hear the car driving past. I told them, “This archives too strong to not make a documentary about this story.” Luckily, Nyle DiMarco and Davis Guggenheim, the co-directors, were thinking the same thing.

They said, “Let’s do it. Let’s make a documentary.” I joined as a producer and an editor at that point. I said, “Just get me all the archive. Gallaudet University had their own TV station, so there’s a couple of guys just walking around with cameras all the time.

When the protest kicked off at Gallaudet that first day, they had already been focusing on this because initially the students thought that they were going to have their first deaf president, but the protests began. We had so much footage. Over seven days it was hundreds of hours of material.

The next problem I had was that I don’t know, sign language. My M.O. is usually to just lock myself away for months and just watch material, then come out ten times paler, but with a couple of ideas of what I think the material could do. So we had to get everything subtitled. We got a team of people in to do the subtitling, translating all the American Sign Language.

Then I started to watch through material. We jumped in the edit once I got through everything. I said, “Let’s just cut these seven days down into about three hours of the chronology of the protest.

It was pretty incredible just to watch that. Through that process we could start to see where the story beats or the moments where things really started turning either for or against the students. Normally when you do documentaries, your starting point is the interviews.

They tell you their story, then you go and get imagery or archive to back that stuff up. But in this case - because we went the other way round - it was just better. It felt more natural.

We were in the edit and we would watch this arc back and think, “Who are our characters and what are the story bits?”

But ultimately, the most important thing is, what’s this about? What are the themes? It’s not just about seven days.

They was very clear from the start and we could see it in the arc. This is this is more than just a protest. This is the revolution.

It speaks to hundreds of years of history in the deaf community. That’s when we decided on our characters. We call them the Gallaudet Four. They were easier to identify. But when we watched the archive of I.

King Jordan, it felt like we really need to interview him, too.  He’s a pivotal character - not just because he becomes the president, but because of the arc that he goes through. That is really important to the film.

If we had started with interviews I think we probably would have focused entirely on the four students and maybe figured that out later.

Then we get the interviews, and at that point, I kind of started from scratch again - takinge all my archive and all my interviews and started to edit like a madman.

When did the recreations come in?

That’s a good question, actually. Right at the end. We did a similar thing on Still. e used recreations in that, but we assembled the first cut and then we figured where the re-creation stuff was needed.

Nyle and Davis came up with the idea that it should all be about the deaf point of view. You are experiencing that part of the story without sound.

How do we do that? Initially we thought we’d just take out the sound at different points in the archive, but you still see the archive, but it wasn’t working and it felt like a mistake. It just felt like the sound dropped off in the film. For a while we couldn’t figure it out.

How do we do this? How do we make sure that this feels intentional? Then we realized that if you use the archive as the perspective of a hearing person - because it’s news items and you hear the traffic and you see it, so the archive would be what had sound on it.

But then when you cut to a re-creation shot, that’s when you take the sound away. So there’s a big distinction visually between the archive. Then it just made sense. It just helped create these two perspectives.

So we imagined where these re-creations could happen - where these deaf point-of-views would come into the story. You didn’t want to do too many times because it loses impact. We would watch the cut back a lot.

When the alarms go off in the school and Spilman says, “It’s too loud in here! You can’t hear me over all the noise!” That was the first place - the perfect place - to put a moment of deaf point of view. It wasn’t the first one as you watch the movie, but it was the first time we decided we could use it.

We have this guy in Barcelona whom I’ve never met even though I’ve worked with him on two movies. We give him the full cut, but then we’ll show him 20 or 30 seconds and leave a blank space and say, “We’re thinking here that you’ll see signing.”

And - in front of us - draw it out. We’re watching a screen and he’ll draw. We’d say, “Actually, put the hands to the left a little more and put a light in the background.” And he’ll do storyboards for us.

Over the course of the whole edit we would constantly change that. We were creating storyboards that we’d add into the film and they’d change.

We got to a point where we felt like we had a version of the film with storyboards that is picture locked. It’s finished.

Everybody that’s done re-creations falls into the exact same trap, which is, “We’ll get the re-creation shots and we’ll just slap them over the storyboarded placeholders” almost like it’s an afterthought. It never works like that. It just doesn’t.

Davis and Nyle shot really good material, but inevitably, you get it back into the edit, and as much as you think you picture-locked things, you start to change your shots. The footage works slightly different - on a different emotion - or they’ll just do something that you weren’t expecting.

For months, even though we thought it was only going to take a day and there were moments where we thought, “This stuff isn’t working.” It just wasn’t working rhythmically at some points, and we were using it too much.

Then we had a cut that the re-creations weren’t in enough. It just felt weird. You always try to find that balance.

So the Barcelona guy is a storyboard guy? A visualist?

He didn’t shoot anything. He never comes on set. He just stays in Barcelona the whole time. It’s a really good, cost-effective way of doing re-creations. Ultimately, there’s a tendency for people to start shooting a lot more than they need to because it’s a fun thing to do.

It’s almost like you’re making a movie and you kind of get to feel a bit like Steven Spielberg. I’ve been there. I’ve done it. I’ve directed before. But what the storyboards gives us is discipline. We know exactly what shots we need when they go shoot it.

Davis and Nyle were so good, they make it even better. It’s really satisfying when you get that stuff back. The shots can tell even more of a story than initially you’d even thought about.

One of my favorite of those recreation shots is when someone is signing at the front of the bus, and there’s somebody with a flashlight, and the shadow of the signing projected big on the front of the bus.

That’s all Nyle’s idea. What Nyle always brought to the table was a completely unique perspective on the story that we would never have had. There were so many small things I just totally take for granted.

The first few days I hung out with Nyle and we went for a couple of drinks at a bar. The bar was packed and we were having drinks and his interpreter went to the bar to order a drink.

Then I decided I wanted to change whatever I’d ordered, so I got up to tell the interpreter. Nyle stopped me. He said, “You don’t have to walk over there.”

Nyle just signed to the interpreter across the bar. It was such an advantage in that situation. Nyle would jokingly say that I was deaf-impaired. That I didn’t understand the deaf experience. And he’s right.

So the first night of the protest, when they were figuring out how to do what they wanted to do over the next week, they would flash a torch (flashlight) and hold it further away from their hand so that the shadow of the sign would be big enough on the wall of the bus so everyone could see it. It’s just fascinating.

It was really cinematic and it’s really unique. That kind of set the tone and for the different things we can do in storyboards. Every time you see a re-creation shot it has to say something. A shot can never just be a shot just to kind of cover a couple edits. It has to speak to something unique.

Why start it the way you started it, which was kind of setting up the interviews and getting ready to be interviewed, intercut with shots of Washington, D. C., where Gallaudet is located?

 These four people are signing. You’re watching them get ready to talk. There was a  Will Ferrell documentary that just came out.

Will & Harper.

Yeah. Will & Harper. Will (and editor Monique Zavistovski, ACE) used that idea and almost made it so that none of us could do it anymore! I’ve done it in a lot in films. It is done a lot. “Okay! The clapperboard and cut the sound out and stuff.”

But we wanted to to do it because immediately you’re seeing sign language. We have to orient the audience and meet the characters. And you get to hear the interpreter. If you wait too long to do that, it might throw the audience off.

I watched them set up for those interviews and I thought, “This is fascinating.” Like, the moment the Brigitta pointed to the microphone over her head and said, “What’s that for?” That moment kind of says everything!

It just says everything about what the film is about to be. It’s funny. We’re not trying to hit the audience over the head with anything. It’s a very small comment, but speaks to everything else in the movie. It’s has huge thematic implications.

Then Gerry is explaining to the camera operator the size “box” that he will be signing in, then he says, “But when I get emotional, I may go outside this box a little.”  These are small things that speak to their character.

You get to kind of understand who they are, and each of them has their own introductory line. Then, intercut with these character introductions, we had shots of outside Gallaudet - the plane landing, and the underground train running, and  traffic outside Congress.

But we used those shots with the audio as loud as possible. So we entered with our main characters to set up this idea of two different worlds, two different perspectives. We wanted to do that immediately.

Then at the end of that opening sequence, we had a shot outside the Gallaudet gates with the sound really loud, and as you move through the gates we want to really show the idea that when you move in to this place, it’s different from outside in terms of sound.

It’s quieter, so the sound drops off as soon as you move through those gates. Once you get to that point, the audience can understand the grammar we’re going to use. The sound element of the film will be a character in and of itself.

I always find with interviews in documentaries that you’re going to see a lot of them and you don’t want it to feel like just an interview space.

You want to create a feeling that they’re almost verité. It’s important for an audience to feel like your main characters are not just people giving you information.

Talk to me about what it was like to deal with either or two directors or, you know, you’ve talked a little bit about having a deaf director. That’s got to be a different experience.

It was initially, but it’s pretty incredible how quickly you start to communicate with each other through the interpreter. There’s a kind of initial orientation period. But working with two directors is hard regardless of circumstance. I’ve done it before and it has its challenges. It starts to become a bit of a numbers game.

If somebody has a good idea and the other two don’t like it, it’s majority rule. More often than not, the directors are more closely aligned than they are with the editor.

I’ve worked with Davis before. You’re always trying to get into flow with the director. There’s a moment in the edit where you start to really think like each other. There’s a kind of language that starts to happen between the director and the editor, and you almost don’t even need to say anything anymore. It’s just been harder to get there with two directors because you have to basically do it twice.

As an editor, I think what you do is you spend the first couple of weeks trying to figure out their personality. You’re pretending to watch material, but what you’re actually doing is watching the director to see how he responds to the things you’re doing or to the material. Also,  “let’s go for a drink” or you come in in the morning and you chat about the game the night before and “How are the kids?” Eventually you get through that.

With two directors it’s harder because it’s just double the job and double the time. I’ve been very lucky in my career with directors that I’ve worked with. I’ve been so, so blessed. The older I get the more I realize that I never had a bad director. Maybe they say the opposite of me. What’s the expression: “If you’ve never worked with an idiot, you’re the idiot.”

There was a section one of the characters is talking about walking down the hill and there’s tons of people going to a field to protest. You used archival and photos. I’m sure that if you wanted to, you could have used archival for the entire scene, but you used some very specific photos at specific moments. I want to understand from you what the power is of using a still over archival.

It’s a really good question. It’s something I’m not 100% sure that I’m conscious about when I do it, but there’s an instinct. I’ve never thought about it, actually.

Why are we cutting to this still? I think there’s something to be said about stopping time… just release. The other thing is that not only were the guys at the TV station on Gallaudet such good videographers, but there were a couple of photographers who shot photos the whole week.

It’s a moment to reflect as well. Sometimes story isn’t everything… not as much as we tell ourselves in the edit. Davis and I would always talk about this when we were on Still. Why are we afraid to just stop and take a moment.

Sometimes it is hard to do that because archival footage doesn’t stop. It’s just constantly going. And there’s nothing worse than freeze-framed archival footage. Video is the worst. I also don’t like slo-mo. That’s just my preference.

If you’ve got the exact moment from the video archival that you cut, and you can cut to a still from that exact moment, not only is it kind of visually very satisfying, it allows you to break away from story and then just talk about something else.

Not even about the character. It’s a moment to definitely give the audience a minute to make up their own minds about these things. We can spoon feed them a lot, but it also just allows you maybe to go somewhere else.

Some stills are more thematic and some are more provocative. It just gives you space to breathe and to do whatever you need to do. I just think it’s easier to do that with stills.

Let’s talk about the use of news bites and how you either organized that or how scripted that stuff was as you were trying to build – for example - a story beat about the students marching to the hotel to confront the board. How would you decide that you’re going to use news bites or how would you know there’s a news bite about this thing?

I had a timeline for each day. Each day had 11 or 12 hours of material that they had shot themselves, which is just the dream for an editor. Then on the other side of it, I had an archive producer, and once the story was picked up by the news, there’s a lot of coverage from different news outlets, initially just in Washington, and as the story grew nationally, it was all across America.

So I had a “Day 1 Archive Timeline” then a second timeline: “Day 1 News Items”  that would only be about an hour long.

You would geta blow-by-blow description of what happened that day. Here’s the big thing with this: is that the worst thing you can do is to get your characters to tell you what happens.

Try to get those parts of the story across in another way. What you want is when your characters show up that they only ever talk about things that are emotionally insightful, or they may contradict what’s just been said before them by another character. When I hear the words “I woke up…” I’m switching channels.

What’s great about news, especially in this, was that the news clips could just get across a lot of the nuts and bolts - the exposition. They would set things up that would just get us into the more important things quickly.

The news conference outside the board meeting was set up by somebody standing outside with a microphone. It’s more urgent when you see somebody with a mic. So then, when I go to Greg, he talks about something completely different.

You know, he starts to talk about his family, because the news bites let me know where I’m at in the world. It gives you a license to say whatever you want, then go somewhere more interesting. It frees you up as a filmmaker or as an editor to think about what you want them to say.

You can get caught up in putting down all the beats trying to get your characters to do it.

A lot of people do these assemblies with interviews and they don’t use news items to do it. I spent ages making these characters tell you exactly what happened and you end up cutting it all out anyway because a news item can do it much fasters.

But when you start to think about is I don’t need him to tell me that story, I need him to tell me about himself, or I need him to tell him about something that I’ve never thought of before. That’s why I kind of use the news items. If you if you watch it back, it’s pretty nuts and bolts exposition.

There’s a great quote that sets up a little montage. Somebody says, “Were you born that way?” Then you do a very fast baby montage, with no sound. Can you talk to me about that montage? You could have put that baby montage anywhere. That baby montage could have been where the film started! Let’s talk about why that baby montage went where it went.

You mentioned that that montage had no sound. Every single editor -  especially documentary editors – will tell you that with montage, you lead with music. It’s not that the music is doing all the work, but it it helps you figure out a rhythm and the pace of it.

A piece of music is like a really good executive producer because: “This is a minute long and you can’t go past this because if the music’s too long, the scene is too long.”

In this film I couldn’t lean on music because for most of the audience, music is not as important as it usually would be.

I had to attack every scene without music first. When you struggle to to figure out even the order, just give me the music and weirdly, you’ll figure it out to the music. It just helps.

But sometimes it takes you down a road that feels like it’s right, but probably isn’t because music can be the devil sometimes.

There’s a real liberation when you can’t use music. You have to work entirely with the material that you’ve got. The problem is that the music has been written for something else. It’s not really true to the story.

I remember I spent ages looking for the right music, then realizing, “This is pointless. You have to trust the material and trust the silence. Trust that for some of some of the audience, that silence will be uncomfortable. It’s the most uncomfortable thing for an editor.

God knows what it’s like for the audience when you cut to the silence and just let it be and let the silence almost tell its own story. Then once Jerry’s voice comes in - his interpreters voice - you’ll be fine.

I thought each and every one of the characters’ backstories was fascinating. There were some that were just heartbreaking.

It was a constant battle against myself to not import music. Just keep iTunes off the computer and just with the arc, with the visuals and the interviews that we have. But with the baby montage, I think that was the first backstory, the first flashback.

Why did we put it there? If you start a film with somebody being born as a baby, once you set that up, you’re done because you can’t skip over anything. What I try to do with backstories is to tie them to parts of their life and the story.

This was a really good documentary to practice this technique that I’ve started using a lot which is just: let’s cut the seven days first, cut those down, make that work on its own, without any backstory, then we’ll take our characters and loosely assemble their backstories, keep it to 10, 15, 20 minutes - different scenes about different moments when they were children or when they grew up or they went to school or when they got into relationships.

Have those hanging around in the ether. Don’t worry where you’re going to put them, but know that they’re there.

Then we would watch seven days back. To steal a phrase from a soccer manager here in England, Mikel Arteta: “Trust the process.”

If you watch that seven day assembly, you’ll see the moments where you want the backstory. It’ll tell you. As long as you know what they are roughly, they’ll find their place.

A lot of the backstory stuff you won’t use, because it just doesn’t fit into the story. When we got to the point in the story with Gerry as a kid, I think he had gone up on a platform and he’s talking to the crowd.

It’s an incredible moment, but the three of us kept thinking, “The weight of this moment isn’t landing for some reason.”

The reason was that the audience didn’t know who this person was. Why is he so angry when he gets up there? I don’t have the historical context. I don’t have the personal context to his life story.

So right in the middle of his first speech we thought, “This is a place to go to his childhood for us to just get a small sense - not too much because it’s too early in the film to really dig into that - but to get a sense of why he’s got so much energy at this moment. Why he is the person standing on this platform.

There’s thousands of people there. Why is he the person that got up there? Then he tells the backstory about his perception of his father and how he felt his deaf father was treated poorly. His dad worked in a dental lab and he was kept in the basement.

The juxtaposition of his father and the basement then cut back to his son on a platform. Everyone’s listening. He’s the last person to be ignored.

Gerry will never be locked in a basement for the rest of his life. It’s just not going to happen, so that’s when backstory starts to work. We wanted to feel Jerry’s perspective at that point and to understand him.

The sound design is so rich. There’s wind noise and all these interesting things. How much did you have to do that in the picture cut to have the rhythm right of the visual cut?

 All of it. I didn’t do the sound mix, but I did the sound editing. I had to. Often, I’ll talk to directors and producers and say, “Hey, I’m not doing sound. There’s absolutely no reason for me to do any sound design.

I’ve enough to deal with.” because the sound isn’t going to tell as much of a story as you want it to in a documentary.

In this film it was the complete opposite. This film is not going to work unless we attack the sound design in the middle of the off-line or even at the start of the off-line, because we have to come up with q transition when we go to silence. Is it a straight cut?

We started playing with this idea that there was a noise that would kind of ramp into a transition into the silence so then when you hear it, you almost expected it to happen. Those were things we had to play with in the off-line.

We had created a pretty clear roadmap as to what that needed to be. Then the sound team did a much better version than I did. It was almost like temp music - temp sound design. The other side of it is: do we have total silence?

Or is that not going to work? How can the audience feel this? If somebody bangs on the hood of a car, the deaf person may not hear it, but they can feel it.

This is a rare film that works maybe even better on the phone if you’ve got headphones than on a big TV set because you’re totally immersed in sound.

It almost works slightly better than watching it in your living room with the traffic outside, because there’s a space between the TV and the audience that’s getting in the way of the full experience.

When do you cut to an interviewee on camera? I definitely have rules about this. Cutting on camera for inteviews for emotional moments, for big beats, not just for exposition, but is it the same with a signed interview? Why did you go and when did you go on camera to the people signing?

A really good question. The signing is a whole new layer to the storytelling. There’s way more information. A signing person is giving you way more information than a speaking person.

There’s certain things within sign language I think that are way more nuanced. There’s a motion in the signing in the hands that you don’t get.

And it was just telling you the story, but the problem we had was that the archive is also so strong, so you’re in this constant fight with “where do we go here?”

Both of them had their strengths. You don’t definitely don’t want to cut to interviews if it’s just exposition. You want to go there for the emotion, unless there’s something happening within the archive that really elevates the emotional moments of interview.

Especially in this case, there were a lot of emotional interviews and the  were so strong in interviews. It felt like they’ve been waiting to tell the story for many, many years.

As much as the archive is fascinating and fun to watch, and it’s kind of really energetic, I think in documentaries, interviews are everything.

They’re just the thing. There’s something about seeing them today. It still means something. There’s a an extra layer that comes with that.

People are afraid of talking heads. We cover everything and never show them. That can really work, but I just love seeing people in an interview and how they are.

They’re reacting, and there’s nothing better than when somebody’s being interviewed and they’re telling you one thing and they actually mean something else and they’re trying to hold back tears, or they’re talking about somebody that they pretended they didn’t like, but they actually loved. You can only get by seeing the interview.

There are great moments of Gerry trying to decide whether he wants to say something.“Should I go there or not? Do you really want to know that? Do you really want to go there?” There are even great moments where you cut to the interview on-camera where they don’t say anything. They don’t sign. It’s literally just their expressions to a question.

Yeah, we did it a couple of time. I think it’s in the moment where Spilman says, “It’s too loud in here.”

Then we do something similar to what we’ve done in the opening, which is that we have these really loud moments of archive, then we’ll cut to their interview and it’s just silence. They’re just reacting and there’s no signing.

There’s nothing to be said but what’s in their face, and that just says everything. To be able to cut back and forth between the sound and the silence we really are in that moment.

Every time I embark on an edit I always watch Paul Thomas Anderson films. He’s my favorite. I like Boogie Night because there’s an energy to Boogie Nights in the 80s.

It’s like a primer, you know, just to get ready. But I was thinking that there’ll be no good Paul Thomas Anderson movie for this project, but sure enough, I watched There Will Be Blood. That was a big influence, because there’s a moment in There Will Be Blood when he strikes oil.

About an hour into the movie, when the Daniel Day-Lewis character strikes oil, and his son is up on the oil rig and he gets thrown off and he hits the ground. And as he hits the ground, he loses his hearing. He does this thing where it’s not total silence.

If you watch in the theater you still can’t hear anything, but you can feel the oil coming from underneath, because he’s lying on the ground just beside the oil well and it’s gushing. So that was the one I remember seeing and thinking that it was a technique that we need to employ.

It’s a feel and you can make it happen if the bass is low enough. It’s not that you’re hearing it. You’re feeling it.

Let’s talk about the intercutting of Zinser - her close up where it keeps pushing closer and closer on her mouth as she speaks silently intercut with the footage of a bunch of old medical archive showing “fixing their broken ears.”

She’s talking to them as if they have a disability and actually it’s not the case. They don’t believe that’s the case. It’s just another form of language. We speak in a different way, where we communicate in a different way.

We cut back from the archival and Zinser’s lips are moving. We’re totally on the side of the students at this point because we’ve not only got their backstories, but we’re at the point that we will understand all four characters.

Now we understand the community at large. So at that point, I think we earned the right to show Zinser’s mouth talking with no sound.

To feel like, “I understand this.” What Zinser’s saying doesn’t mean anything. We’re robbing the audience of the ability to hear what she’s saying, and you just get it.

I remember one of the first cuts that we showed, and that was the bit that Nyle loved the most. He just told me it was the funniest thing ever. He just said, “This is it. This is what it’s about. This moment is what it’s about.”

As King was turning as a traitor and tells the board, “The students should should give up” you had the choice to probably stay entirely with video archival, but you included a few stills. There were a couple of places where you cut to photographs of him at the podium. What’s the value of the photographs?

It’s a moment to pause because the course of the film is about to change. This is the moment that he moves away from the students to the side of the board. He’s asked whether the students should give up and he tells the press that they should.

The minute he says that everything falls apart because their guy changed his mind. That is without a doubt, a moment to stop and pause and reflect and go and take in what’s just happened. He continued to talk in the archive.

But if we continue to listen to that we won’t take in what’s just happened. There’s also a look in his face and you can see he’s thinking. It’s a devastating moment. You can see it in his face. Then when he turns back we do the same thing again.

He says, “I’m a dean now, but I will be deaf forever.” When he says that we do the same thing. We cut to a still. He seems totally at peace with his decision and he’s kind of accepted himself almost.

And again, the archive is great, but there’s the power of one image to tell a story. We’re actually saying in that moment that he has accepted himself.

He’s accepted who he is, and he’s realized that he is deaf. The still photo speaks to that more than video archive would have, because the camera keeps rolling on to the next thing that he said. Plus, it just looks really good.

Tell me about building tension going into the Nightline interview with the re-creation stuff. There’s a bunch of footage obviously shot by your crew with the look-alike getting ready for the interview. There’s such great tension and you’re using all this archival studio stuff, too.

There was more tension in the edit room than there was in the scene because that was a nightmare! The cut was so complicated. That guy who was playing Greg was actually Greg’s son, I think.

But in the middle of all the madness of that, it was all great. It looked amazing. I remember the one shot where he takes his earpiece out. It’s the moment where you realize - like with Greg - that he’s accepting himself.

He’s backing himself. He’s saying, “I can do this as a deaf person, and I don’t need to hear it.” I love that moment. There was one shot, I think, where the light just came in and it shone on his ear. It’s the weirdest shot but it just worked.

That’s a good example that we could never have storyboarded. There were a lot of versions of that scene. We weren’t thinking of what the dramatic turning point was: the moment where he says, “I took my earpiece out.” 

That was just a small off-hand comment. None of us picked up on it. But that’s the moment that the whole film almost hinges on. That’s a really dramatic moment. The other side of it is that I’m not the biggest fan of re-constructions.

Most films I’ve worked on have done them, but I always fight against it. But when it works, I love it. That moment particularly is one of my favorite shots I’ve ever had in a film because it’s a shot that says everything.

It’s not just that it looks good. It says more than any of us could by just using interviews or just using archive or it’s there’s something it’s something cinematic where you can just tell the story through pictures. It’s kind a rare thing.

Michael, I could talk to you forever, but I know you are a very busy man. You’ve got big projects going, so I want to let you go. Thank you so much for talking to us about this film.

A two year old and a four year old are the biggest projects I have right now.

 I remember those days. You enjoy your two year old and your four year old. Thank you so much.