ACE Eddie nominee Monique Zavistovski, ACE discusses - among other things - staying true to the emotional journey of the characters, the difficult choices in killing your darlings, and using empathy to time reaction shots.
Today on Art of the Cut we speak with Monique Zavistovski, ACE about editing the documentary Will & Harper. The film was nominated for a BAFTA, and Monique was nominated for an ACE Eddie and a BFE Cut Above award for Best Documentary Editing.
Also this year, she edited The Only Girl in the Orchestra, a documentary short that won the Oscar for that category. We’ll speak with her about both films.
Thank you so much, Steve. It’s been absolutely fabulous. I’m bottling this moment.
I’ve been doing this for about 25 years, o to have these two films back to back, which are so near and dear to my heart for very different reasons has just been phenomenal. It’s been a great year in that regard.
We tried a few different openings to this film, but ultimately what we decided to do was stay as authentic as possible to Will’s and Harper’s journey. So what unfolding is an opening that is very different stylistically from the rest of the film.
It’s just a very different pace organically to where they were in their lives at that time, before they met in New York and hopped in the Jeep together.
So we ultimately decided we would edit the opening in a style that was authentic to their actual experience. The first five minutes of the film is precisely what happened in the timeline of their friendship together.
Yeah, there were a few iterations where we dove right into being in Harper’s home, discovering who she was right off the bat.
The point of view was different. It was Harper’s point of view, not Will’s point of view. We were concerned actually, to be honest with you, about making a big reveal of the “coming out” letter. This is a trope about revealing the trans subject of the film and we didn’t wanna do that.
So we thought maybe we’ll just lean into where we are in present day and hop right into Harper’s story as she is. Ultimately we felt that we needed to give the audience - for better or for worse – an on-ramp into the story because there was an intimate shared space amongst all the crew, so we’re a ahead of the story compared to the audience, so we felt that it was best to give them a little bit of an on-ramp. In test screenings they appreciated that.
We started from ground zero in Will’s office. He just tells us a little story about his friendship and this email that he got, which was the inciting incident of the film.
We crafted and recrafted that reading of the letter several times. To the best of my ability, I was trying to emotionally connect with what it was like for Harper to send the letter - which was very difficult for her.
She tried several iterations and almost pressed send several times, didn’t quite get there, and for Will then to open it and to process in real time what he was reading.
Something that’s fundamental to their journey and their friendship is that they are very connected and they do have a sort of a shared emotional language and we wanted to establish early on. This is a journey of the two of them together.
This isn’t a story of Harper’s transition and it’s not a story of Will’s allyship. This is a story of their friendship, so establishing that language of the two of them together, even though they’re not in the shared space yet - they haven’t climbed into the cab of the Jeep yet - was important visually and emotionally.
Ultimately, that balance is something that we wanted to achieve in that letter reading scene.
It always gets a laugh, this idea of a guy and a girl, and they’re both getting ready for a trip.
It’s a wonderful back and forth that I had so much fun with. There was a lot of footage to play around with and Will’s figuring out how to pack his alto sax and Harper is choosing between pumps.
It was so much fun to edit and at that moment in their journey they’re in their anticipation stage and the giddy excitement of it. So that was great fun to edit and intercutting that one was one of the easier scenes, I will say.
We knew we would have it in the movie. There were a lot of scenes that gave us a hell of a headache, but this one we knew we would have in the movie. It was safe for all of us. It’s pure fun. Visually fabulous.
Harper’s former home in New York with the water coolers and her shed and everything was super fun. Structurally that was something that existed from day one.
I think it’s a tool in an editor’s toolbox that - at least for me - is one of my favorites. I get to play with the space-time continuum. The beauty of it is it’s very musical. You have to lean into it. You have to commit.
You’re either creating a dissonant moment in the edit, or you’re trying to make an invisible edit, even though you’re jumping through time. Either way it’s musical and it’s great fun to do.
I’m sure somebody has done a great study on how the brain interacts with jump cuts. I would love to read that study. it’s one of my favorite devices to use in the edit.
So I tried to do it when I could. Getting ready for their road trip and packing was one of those instances where I was able to utilize the jump-cut because Harper was trying on 30 different outfits and deciding what to pack, so it was just made for the jump-cut.
I did have to make some tough decisions in that because Zoe White’s cinematography was so gorgeous. She was getting these beautiful shots through doorways that had that idea of intimacy.
Harper was in her bedroom changing and trying on different things, but also it played out like a verite moment that you just don’t wanna break.
So I did let some of that stuff play longer initially, but it was a 17 day road trip and we gotta get on the road. I couldn’t linge.
That diner scene was one of the most authentic scenes in the whole movie from an editing perspective. Harper’s kids knew about her transition. They were part of the process of her transition.
But the transition in terms of the timeline of one’s transition was still very early when Will and Harper dropped into that diner to have waffles with Harper’s kids.
There were, I think, still some unspoken feelings and this was still unchartered territory between Harper and her kids, and we were watching that unfold in real time.
We were also witnessing at the same time Will getting comfortable asking questions. This was definitely Will’s first moment where he had to dive into the water, put his toe in and lean in and ask some tough questions.
And it happened to be in the middle of a family moment.
Editor Monique Zavistovski, ACE
This was hard for all of them to an extent. There were some things said that I think Harper was surprised by and that Will was surprised by, and the kids certainly had the floor.
It was important that Will and Harper were just listening to them in that moment. I don’t know if Harper and her kid had the conversation about losing a masculine role model before, or if this was a bombshell, but certainly I wanted to make sure to cut to Harper in that moment and give that moment the screen time that it deserved in terms of what it would feel like in real life if you heard that from your kid - whether that was an unfinished conversation that you were in the middle of having, or one that was a concept that you heard for the first time.
It was a bit of a bombshell to be dropped, I think.
Part of the long timeline of the process of transitioning. I’m sure they’ll have that conversation again several times and it’ll evolve, but I wanted to capture everybody’s experience in that moment: Will’s, Harper’s, and the kids’ and give them all equal screen time.
Honestly, the cutaways were authentic to what happened in real time.
I hope so. That’s a good question. I think being very mindful editing this kind of subject matter where everybody is sitting with their emotions in any given moment.
This is a road trip movie and road trip movies are full of adventure and all of that, but it’s never about the adventure. It’s always about the psychological and emotional growth that somebody’s having facing their fears along the way.
And in order to edit this successfully, I had to sit with everybody and track where everybody was psychologically and emotionally during the journey. This was one of those early opportunities to check in with everybody
There are a couple of things that go into that. One of the key principles for me in editing this film was the idea of creating dynamics. We’ve got these long road moments.
Then Harper and Will pull over and sit on the side of the road and they have a conversation, then we enter into some sort of scene at whatever stop or in whatever city we visited. And we have some montages along the way.
It was super important for me to never sit in one tempo or conversation too long. When we got to SNL, we knew we weren’t gonna be there for a very long time. This was just a stop along the way. Harper and Will created the itinerary - mainly Harper.
“Oogam Boogam” - in terms of dynamics - in that moment, I was just playing around with some temp songs and when I played that for Josh, he said, “Oh my God!”
He had temped “Oogam Boogam” for one of the scenes in his previous movie, “Strays” so it was something that was whimsical and fun and the idea of clowning around, which I think is in the lyrics. That something that we wanted to connect to at SNL.
Knowing that we were about to go into a conversation between Will and Harper about how challenging it was for her to work as somebody else, so to speak, for the decade or so that she was at SNL and to be in those offices and then to come back not knowing how her former colleagues perceive her.
Is she Harper in her full self or do they perceive her as her previous self, only wearing a dress? I wanted to make sure to add some energy inside - some dynamics - and remember the fun of what they were doing first before we dug deep into the emotional challenges Harper had faced while she was working at SNL.
In early iterations of the film, every single day had a graphic and it got to be rather tedious, so we played around with how many times do we wanna mark the day. How many times do we need to show a map overlay?
We knew that the journey was not about the destination. It was about all the discoveries along the way and how their friendship unfolded along the way. That’s asking a lot of an audience: to sit in on a 17 day road trip.
We wanted to make sure to let them know that there’s forward momentum and there is progress being made, and there is an end to this journey, but we also didn’t wanna overwhelm them with graphics, so we arrived at the idea that we would mark the journey, a third along the way.
The maps were super helpful for people, we discovered in early test screenings so “less is more” was our rule.
That conversation was so important. It was the first question Will asked Harper along the road. Will asks her how she chose her name. It’s such a foundational moment.
It’s another sort of litmus test for Will: to see how he is going to go about engaging Harper in peeling away all the questions that he has for her and how Harper is going to respond and how the conversational dynamic between the two of them was established in that moment.
So Will wanted to know how Harper chose her name and she wanted to know how he feels about his name. So this is a kind of parity that is really important because it established their conversational dynamic. Bless Will for just falling right in.
This isn’t about a cisgendered person asking questions of a transgendered person. There’s nothing formal to it. It’s two friends having a banter. I love Will’s response.
I love that he wishes that he had been named Mike or Steve. It opens the door for the audience to just relax and enjoy the ride. It’s a super important conversation.
I won’t give everything away, but we had to move things around for sure. There were a couple of things we wanted to establish - a kind of natural order of conversations that would make sense given the fact that over the course of a 17 day road trip, if you were taking a road trip with your buddy you’d get deeper as the road trip went along.
So it just didn’t feel authentic to have some of the deepest questions - the toughest stuff tackled - early on in the conversation. So we took some liberties there.
Not too many to be honest, but we did have to fudge the chronology a little bit in order for it to make emotional sense.
Absolutely.
Yeah, we had the DC stop in and out of the movie a million times. It was like an accordion. It was long. It was short. It became a drive by. It was one of the scenes we worked on probably for the full nine months of the edit over and over again.
Harper and Will set the itinerary and will wanted to go to DC. As an editor I wanted to get them on the road into the heartland. They wanted to go to DC and something that Josh told them early on in production, I think informed our decisions there.
That was that it’s gonna take them a couple of days to get used to the cameras and all of the activity around them. That certainly held true for the first two or three days of filming. When they stopped in DC it was just a rolling bunch of bits.
Will and Harper went to the spy museum and Will was crawling around the air ducts and Harper crawled around the air ducts.
They were prank calling the front desk at the Watergate Hotel. It was just like that over and over again. It was a lot of them just getting comfortable and a lot of what they were doing is what comedians do:
They lean into their bits, and so we honored their stop in DC but It was a little bit of a drive by. They were able to get some jokes outta their system. It was a little bit of a release, get them in the car and then hit the road to the heartland.
When they landed in Indiana there were a couple of days the crew was getting comfortable with the visual style of the film.
We felt like they really settled into the emotional part of the road trip when they stopped in a parking lot in the Walmart in Indiana, pulled out their lawn chairs and sat and had a beer.
So the rest of it we felt like it was superfluous to the emotional arc of the film.
Monique’s editing room
I don’t think so. It was a lot of getting comfortable with the concept of this road trip and the documentary itself for the two main characters and a lot of hilarious bits.
Our first assembly was five and a half hours long. It was an hour of jokes.
Documentary editors aren’t accustomed to editing comic material, just the documentaries aren’t always very funny, and so I had to get used to not. Giving as much weight to the comedy bits as I was at first, it was a lesson that Josh taught me.
So there was a lot of slapstick stuff early on that was unrelated to their emotional journey. If the comedy doesn’t have a purpose, and if it’s not part of the emotional arc, then it’s probably gonna go.
How come it’s the governor of Indiana when Will and Harper went to attend a Pacer’s basketball game? The goal was really a bit of a coming out moment for Harper to sit courtside at a basketball game and any NBA game with cameras trained on her.
And as she says in the movie, you don’t usually see like Leonardo DiCaprio sitting courtside with his trans friend at an NBA game.
So this was a big moment for her. What they did not expect is to run into the governor of Indiana, who he was excited about meeting Will Ferrell, but fairly uncomfortable with the idea of meeting Will’s trans friend.
He had just signed an anti-trans, bathroom bill and Harper and Will had no idea the political backdrop, the context within which they were doing this road trip of a country that is, increasingly leaning on anti-trans rhetoric.
The anti-trans violence is on the rise, harassment, bullying.
It was the elephant in the room and this was the context within which they were taking this road trip and it couldn’t be ignored.
But we didn’t also, we didn’t wanna make this a political movie and we wanted to stay. In the friendship zone with Will and Harper and just, it is the very simple thing of these two friends rediscovering their friendship and strengthening it.
And so we didn’t wanna interrupt the film with a whole lot of political stuff and the choice to use the nighttime drive. Shot from the back of the Jeep to hear a montage of the onslaught of anti-trans bills that had been proposed in leg.
Mostly Republican legislatures across the country at the time was a way of, giving nod to the historical context, but also not imposing it on Will and Harper.
So we don’t see their faces in that moment. This is what’s happening in the external world. It’s, yeah, it’s maybe a minute long montage and, we just didn’t want it to overwhelm their story.
And what’s not in the film - What didn’t make the cut - is that after Will and Harper left the arena, they were checking their phones, they were reading about all this legislation, and the, on into the following morning, they were still having a conversation about it in the car.
So there’s no artifice there. This is, what happened in the timeline of their journey,
Timeline in situ
Josh was certainly sensitive to making sure we didn’t hold the audience’s hand and add music where music wasn’t warranted.
I’ve never been so lucky to have a music supervisor who was able to clear all of the temp needle drops that we had in the movie. I was like a kid in a candy store. I was able to play with such amazing music.
We certainly had no shortage of needle drops, so we didn’t feel like we needed to lean on music.
A lot of the movie is about listening to Will and Harper in their conversation, and if you have the bandwidth to sit and listen to what they’re saying, we didn’t need music to help us along.
The film was supplemented by the brilliant score done by Nathan Halpern, who I’ve worked with before, who created Harper’s theme, and some themes that had to do with tension.
It was another question of dynamics. I wanted to make sure not to overwhelm the film with wall-to-wall music.
And if we’ve just heard Bob Dylan, I think we can sit in silence for a little bit. Also I was sensitive to when the audience really did need to listen to what Harper was trying to say.
She had something she wanted to get off her chest or will had something he wanted to get off his chest, and I didn’t want to interrupt those moments.
There was also a lot of important silence in the movie. It’s those road trip moments where you’re just processing what’s just happened, so I wanted to make sure to honor those moments of silence as well.
Sometimes we put a little bit of score underneath just to keep the forward momentum, but sometimes they were just silent.
When you’re processing something really heavy, you can either choose a Band-Aid of putting some music in there and not really processing, or you just sit with it heavy on your heart for a moment.
I think one of those moments was after the Oklahoma bar and raceway scene which was super emotional and both Will and Harper encountered unexpected responses from the people that they met in Oklahoma.
It was not at all what they expected, and I think that they had maybe steeled themselves. They expected to experience more hate than they did in the middle of the country. Instead, they were welcomed.
I think sitting with that the morning after was a very heavy, silent, emotional beat where they were emotionally drained. I tried to reflect that in the edit.
In a lot of the footage you can see the crew’s trepidation. They entered that bar with a preconceived notion about what they were about to encounter.
You don’t typically see Confederate flags and the rest and expect a warm welcome for a crew following a trans documentary character. The crew vetted the bar before Harper went in and they said, “We’re not going in there.
This is not happening.” And Harper insisted, she said, “Yes, we are. This is where I would go. If I can’t go here, what’s the point of all of this? This is where I would go when I road-tripped for the last 40 years of my life. We’re going in.”
So I think a lot of what you see - the shots on camera and the camera positions - those were the crew trying to feel out the space and maybe freaking out a little bit, but Harper disarmed the people in the bar so comfortably.
It’s just a testament to her personality and how wonderful she is and how easy she is to talk to. So I think what you see there is the crew really getting settled in the bar, then Harper just folding herself in nicely into conversation with the people there before Will even steps foot into the bar. Those shot choices reflect my trepidation about Harper being in that space
Josh and Monique at Sundance
That scene was such an emotional release. What Harper goes through is very relatable for a lot of the audience members who had preconceived notions going in and were pleasantly surprised to discover that all the places that Will and Harper went in Oklahoma were so welcoming and warm and lovely.
I by proxy and the audience by proxy are going through a moment there and the morning after we’re still thinking about it. I didn’t wanna disrupt the emotional arc the audience was going through ‘cause we’re on the ride with them.
We’re not physically in the car, but we are emotionally on the ride with Will and Harper, sso we thought it would be a good moment if I was in the car with them… if I was at the bar with them sitting in silence the following morning.
It would be a good moment for Harper to read another journal entry. That was the decision that was made there. I just felt like it was less about what Harper and Will were going through than it was about what we were all going through collectively after seeing that scene.
Also, there are plenty of scenes that were dropped from the cut where everybody was just open to having Will and Harper there.
Kevin, Monique and Hunter at Sundance
There isn’t a fade to black. But one of my most satisfying edits in the whole film is editing from the firework scene, which is such an extraordinary release. Harper has released so much when she goes to visit that dilapidated house in Trona, California.
She has released this internal sense that she was a monster, that she was unlovable, that she needed to hide away, and that in order to be a woman and to be her full self, she needed to disappear from society and hide away in this house that was an external representation of how she felt about herself.
She releases that and they set off some fireworks, which is a metaphoric release. We’ve got Holocene by Bon Iver playing and the music climaxes, and we cut to a very wide shot - an extraordinary landscape shot on their last day on the road to California.
They’re in the middle of the Mojave Desert. The car wipes frame and it’s the morning so it’s darker, and the producers and Josh, and everybody always loved it.
The musical timing of it was always so satisfying, so no matter how much of a mess I had made prior to that edit, it always felt like a gift at the end of the Trona scene.
We were warned in advance when we temped in that piece of music that we would never get it cleared. Josh wrote a personal letter to Bon Iver and they were a hundred percent on-board so we were able to clear it. Another one of those extraordinary gifts in terms of needle drops.
Early on it was quite long. Nobody on the crew was the wiser. We were enjoying the hell out of it. Then when we realized that the whole movie was pushing two hours we realized that we had to make some sacrifices, so we cut it in half.
But for the longest time, the firework scene was very self-indulgent. It was just marvelous. Nobody had any issues with it, and it was something that we probably trimmed in the last week before picture lock.
Next to my wall of index cards in my edit suite I had a wall of 8.5 x 11 printouts of Harper’s journal entries. It actually covered two walls at one point/ They’re so lovely… the aesthetics of them.
She had typed them out on an old typewriter. She types all her scripts on an old typewriter actually, and there are a lot of typos and you can see the texture of the paper and the ink.
Aesthetically I thought they were so beautiful and such a wonderful device to break up the long road trip and to also give a window into Harper’s emotional state in the many years prior to this journey.
I had a lot of journal entries that I wanted to put in there. Early on - in the 5.5 hour long assembly - I had so many journal entries, but we also just knew we could only have three or four journal entries maximum. It’s the rule of threes, and it turned out to work really well here.
So we wanted to identify areas where Will’s and Harper’s conversations along the road had gaps - maybe questions that Will didn’t ask or something along the line of Harper’s transitional process that we didn’t have on tape. So we leaned on the journals to fill in those gaps.
That was another one of those shocking, eye-opening moments along the road trip that Will and Harper did not foresee at all. Will was participating in this road trip to be Harper’s ally, warts and all. He was going to make a lot of mistakes.
This was one of those mistakes. He thought it would be super funny to walk into the steak joint dressed as Sherlock Holmes and eat a 72 hour ounce steak in front of an audience, but neither of them expected that they would be on a raised platform in the middle of the restaurant.
The restaurant was packed and it was a very unwelcoming environment, and everybody took out their phones -not to document this celebrity who had walked into their restaurant - but the phones were really, I think, used as a weapon - a social media tool for anti-trans harassment and bullying.
I think Harper quickly got this feeling of being “othered” and Will - being extremely attuned to how Harper was feeling - felt that he had put Harper in a position where she was “othered” and the overwhelming sense of guilt and maybe naivete that went along with that is something that nobody expected going into that scene.
Especially after Oklahoma, I think the whole crew felt like this would be smooth sailing. We can stop anywhere in the country and we’re gonna be welcomed with open arms. And that was certainly not the case.
The social media backlash was extraordinarily painful and there was a flood of anti-trans social media posts after their appearance which made it into the news and was all over the place, so it was just a devastating, horrifying experience for Harper and Will.
He felt legitimately horrible. They were concerned, of course, in development about what sorts of things they would encounter on the road, but they didn’t see that coming.
I think Will understood that being an ally also comes with a great amount of responsibility and anticipating that Harper wouldn’t always be safe, especially not in this climate in this country.
Will & Harper team at Sundance
There’s a paradox there. I think that this happens in a lot of documentaries that deal with this subject matter.
It’s a heavy subject matter and oftentimes dealing with the very real issue of suicide and self-harm is something that we wanted to talk about, but it’s a testament to Harper’s character that the point is not that moment in her life.
The point is that when she transitioned, she felt nothing but joy.
Divine joy. So this idea of them getting to this hot air balloon in this divine moment and Will really gloms onto that.
Will is a very optimistic person, and the idea that the point of Harper opening up to him about her walking into a gun shop knowing that she couldn’t have a gun around her because of the dangers involved in that and her emotional state - her psychological state moments of deep depression before she had transitioned - but then saying that the lesson, the takeaway is how utterly joyful she is now in her life, being herself.
Will is almost talking over her and he’s experiencing that joy and he gets a little bit breathless and he is saying, “My God, the joy of just being able to be yourself!”
Then they go up in this balloon and it is literally the one year anniversary from the time that Harper sent out her transition email to her closest friends, including Will Forte, who joins them in the hot air balloon.
Making that the point of the scene was another one of those surprises along the way. It was for me in the edit, dealing with that sort of darker subject matter and making the point of pure joy. It was just a wonderful gift to edit.
It was one of my favorite scenes. It’s a little bit superfluous, but I think very important in terms of the emotional arc.
There’s this thing that comedians do - that Will and Harper did - if you notice, if you were to ever watch the film again and look for the pattern, it’s something that they do where if things get a little bit too deep, they will release with a joke.
They’ll always break away with a joke. I think that’s what happened there when they had the conversation with the therapist.
I think that the retired therapist expressed an enormous amount of regret having not treated her trans patient from many years ago with the kind of care that she maybe should have.
That was a really heavy moment for Harper because she had seen therapists who didn’t listen to her and didn’t honor her feelings many times in the past. Will was prepared - especially on day 14 or 15 of their road trip - Will was prepared to really dig deep, but Harper just wanted to tell a joke.
It’s their safe space. Their safe language. So she just wanted to bring out her beer coozy and start a bit about naming their beer cans Cornelius and Dolores. It’s part of the pattern. They do this throughout the film. They release the tough stuff with a joke.
A lot of that has to do with Harper’s personality. Harper puts one foot in front of the other and she doesn’t dwell.
I don’t wanna speak for her of course, but that was a choice and that pattern that we established in the film and in the edit was a pattern and authentic to the way she moves through the world.
She wasn’t gonna hold a grudge and she wasn’t going to crumble after that meeting. I think she really appreciated having that honest conversation with that therapist.
These are tough conversations to be had, tough realizations, and if I had not shown the joke that they engaged in immediately after, I think that would’ve been inauthentic to the way Harper moves through the world.
It’s one of my favorite moments, and there’s not a single edit in it. We call those “lawn chair moments” where they pull up the lawn chairs and they stop on the side of the road. It was a long, unedited lawn chair moment.
I know! She looks gorgeous. Will’s genuinely gotten to a place where - after knowing Harper as her former self for almost 30 years - he has come to internalize Harper as she is today, and that was a journey. It’s a process.
I think a lot of people, friends, family members are stumbling through it and it takes time and that’s okay. I love that moment too. It makes me cry thinking about it. It’s a gift that Will gives to Harper and it’s a validation of this crazy road trip that they took together.
It was Will’s idea to do this and I think he was hoping to get to a point where he transitioned as much as Harper did.
They often talk in press interviews how this wasn’t just Harper’s transition. Will transitioned too, and that moment at the Vegas restaurant exemplified that Will had fully come into his transition.
Technical workflow wise, yes. I had long 20 minute assemblies for each stop along the road and for each day, but we were very strategic in the structure in terms of knowing that we wanted to build the film out from the core emotional inflection points.
The midpoint being that stop in Oklahoma at the bar. Later on the stop at Harper’s dilapidated house in Trona, California.
And early on the packing scene and hitting the road. We have these core inflection points and we knew we needed to build around those, so I think we knew how we wanted to fill in the blanks in between.
The Only Girl in the Orchestra was a full circle moment for me. My parents were musicians with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra for 35 years, and they knew Orin O’Brien, so when she was subbing at the Met in the early 1960s they got to know her.
My dad graduated from Julliard and she taught at Julliard. Kate Amend, who is my longtime mentor - who I apprenticed with back 20, 25 years ago - she knows my parents and she recommended to director Molly O’Brien that Molly talked to me about The Only Girl in the Orchestra.
Molly and I had worked together before, so we had a great time talking about what was basically a big part of our upbringing, Molly was around Orin and idolized Orin from a very young age.
I was lucky enough to grow up backstage at the Metropolitan Opera. My parents are very similar to Orin O’Brien.
This idea of the reluctant protagonist is something that I can relate to. I feel like I grew up with it. It was great fun working on that film. It took a long time to find out what the core of the film was. This wasn’t going to be just a plain old biopic about Orin O’Brien.
So what was the message? What do we wanna take away from this? It took a lot of figuring. We had to really listen to Orin and realize what lesson she wants to impart to the world. It’s sort of this anti celebrity message, which is so refreshing.
It’s this idea that if you wanna be happy, you should be okay with playing second fiddle: be the support to those around you. Don’t be front and center in the spotlight. Those themes kept popping up and Molly had this great idea to open the film with a spotlight.
She had gone to a club in Brooklyn where she saw LCD Sound System and they had a disco ball. They had a spotlight. So Molly decided, “Oh my God! We need a disco ball and a spotlight!”
And that became a metaphor for what we were talking about in the film:Molly putting her aunt under the spotlight and Orin wanting nothing to do with it.
Why put that in the movie? There’s great scenes like her happy birthday song that they make up for her and of course that’s gonna go in the movie for sure, but you probably had darlings that you had to kill. You had to choose other scenes - like do we show students, for example? Teaching moments. How much of that do you show? What were some of the creative choices to keep or delete things?
The Only Girl in the Orchestra was 180 degree opposite in its structural process from Will & Harper. Will & Harper had a built an arc.
It’s a road trip from New York to Los Angeles. There was no organizing principle for The Only Girl in the Orchestra. We had to discover it. We had a lot of story meetings, and we were constantly talking about what’s missing from this story?
What do we want this story to be? What lesson do we want to impart to the audience? Where do we even begin?
Those conversations took place over the course of a year and a half. We all were working on other projects and this short documentary was a labor of love that we were doing in between our feature documentary work.
Ultimately, we needed to find that core: the theme, Once we discovered that it was really about living your life as a second fiddle and being happy, being the support, not everybody can be the general, somebody’s gotta be a soldier, we wanted to make sure to establish that theme early on that Orin is a reluctant protagonist, this is that kind of anti-celebrity story.
The great artist who doesn’t wanna be celebrated. We needed to make sure to track that through the film and that helped us structure it.
It’s a sort of an artificial structure, but we wanted to track the fact that Orin was with the New York Philharmonic for 55 years and then went through that process of retiring and what does that look like for an older woman artist who’s known her craft and perfected it.
Tens of thousands of hours of becoming one of the best in the world, then letting that go. What does that look like? How does that feel?
I think that the dismantling of the piano scene and the moving scene is a metaphor for the dismantling of our skeletal structure: the habits, the things that we know so well, the movements that we do every single day.
It’s just a ripping apart of everything. Thank goodness they dismantled the piano on camera. That was the visual metaphor that I needed.
The structure was like throwing spaghetti at a wall and seeing what stuck. Ultimately we came up with a structure that I think feels natural to Orin’s story.
Thank goodness I was raised by classical musicians! I temped a lot of the music that I thought set the correct mood.
Then Molly and Lisa hired the brilliant composer, Laura Karpman, who created bass-forward, brand new, never-before-existed. arrangements for bass of a lot of the music that was temped in the film.
So that music that she arranged is going to be able to be used in classrooms moving forward. It’s this beautiful score. It was all classical. We tried to make it as bass-forward as possible. Laura hired a lot of Orin’s students to perform when they were recorded the score. It was a wonderful process.
Thank you. It was my pleasure.
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