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Q&A with Savanah Leaf, Tia Nomore, and Erika Alexander

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Earth Mama.

Congratulations and thank you for this beautiful and very moving film. I must ask about your background as both an athlete and a photographer. Can you talk about making the transition from athletics to a visual and creative artist?
Savanah Leaf: I feel like it sounds a lot crazier than it is because when I look back at the transition, I went to college and I studied psychology and I played sports and I was the team captain. In a way, I think a film is this combination of working in a team environment. I really dove into psychology and then also artistic expression. Then when I got injured playing sports in Puerto Rico, I had to figure out what was going to happen next. I had only envisioned myself as being this athlete because that’s where the opportunities laid for me. And when I got injured, I just started exploring and I found this job opportunity where I could watch directors specifically in a commercial music video space. It enabled me to see how they write and it made it all feel a lot more achievable to me. I had always wanted to express myself with more than how my body moved. I wanted to express what was going on in my mind, and it felt like a lot of people weren’t paying attention to that while I was an athlete. That transition really felt like it was very enabling for me as a thinker, as a creator.

it became more about the present decisions than previous decisions

I felt very much like I could see the teamwork in this film. How did you work with the members of your team, specifically your DP? The look of the film is so appropriate for the story you’re telling.
SL : Our cinematographer was actually one of the people I had worked with the most before we made this film. I had worked on two projects with him before. The cinematographer is Jody Lee Lipes, who I had admired for years. I had recently seen I Know This Much is True, a TV show that I thought sensitively captured really difficult subject matter. And the way in which they shot was so wild to me because [director] Derek Cianfrance is shooting oftentimes without any blocking. So he’s very much reacting to the people in the scene. We’re collaborating and thinking about most of the shots ahead of time, where we basically blocked out most of the scenes and tried to figure out a way in which we would shoot it so that a lot of our new actors could just live and breathe in the space from the start to finish of every scene and it would not feel like they had to repeat themselves just to get a different camera angle. Jody does this so well. We created this language in that way. And then on the day, sometimes he would do something as simple as a subtle pan in the camera or move a little bit further on the dolly track just to get a different angle. Those things are very much in response to what’s happening in the moment. It’s so subtle and oftentimes you might need to watch it again just to feel some of them. But I think those responses were very much due to what was happening in front of the camera and his sensibilities. With the dolly track we were constantly thinking about how do we use just one shot and go. It almost feels like she’s trying to escape.

You mentioned new actors and you have a lot of new actors but also seasoned actors. How did you all balance working with one another?
Tia Nomore: That was a very unique process, I think, and a very balanced one at that. It felt like there were a lot of safety nets for free falling. That was a huge situation for all of us involved. It’s very unique and very much giving safe space—you can learn here, you can fail here, you can excel here, you can exceed here. That was probably the most ideal situation to be in for the first time. It’s Savanah’s first feature as well. All of us were kind of in that world, in that zone together.

Erika Alexander: Many of the them may have been less experienced at acting, but they were mature in life lessons and that’s what they brought to the film. If you create a dynamic where people who have the courage to agree to use their life experience in a fictional space, then you can get real connections. Savanah was really using a lot of intuition when she chose people. I think in a way they’d already chosen her and she’d already chosen us and we agreed to meet, to do it and do our best. And it didn’t matter if we didn’t know exactly what the result would be, but that we were going to give it our best effort and throw caution to the wind. Tia was already a very accomplished musician. She’s a mother, and also a boss. She’s her own boss, and yet she’s giving up control to Savanah. I’m used to being in those spaces where I’m a tool and she’s the toolmaker. As a veteran, I am around people who are less experienced and may not know their way around a set. But I’m looking forward to that. You can forget yourself and do what you would naturally do if you were a child playing with each other. You just play for a while. Everybody’s agreeing to play house for a little while, but in a very dangerous space because it deals with real emotions. And I think the result is beautiful and powerful and I’m really happy to have been a part of it.

Can you talk about the kinds of emotional support you found yourselves needing during the different stages of this film?
TN: I think support is a huge deal in general. During pre-production I definitely needed just a space to be vulnerable. I had had my daughter the year before starting this and it was quite literally my first time outside as a pandemic parent and being around more than five people at a time. I had a lot of social anxiety especially taking on a role that was very different from my life. I needed a lot of space to be vulnerable and aware of the things that came up in my body in real life and how to place those things. When it came to being on set, there was a lot of silence and a lot of space. I could literally just sit there and cry and I could be okay. Or I could walk off. I didn’t do that often. Often when I felt like walking off, I would just sit there and let things feel or feel me and maybe pour out a little bit. And everybody was just holding space for me. Whether they were in the room or just right outside, I could feel it and I felt like everybody was willing and able to be there to support me. And then by the time that I got to meet Ms. Alexander, it was like SOS, okay? We didn’t have a lot of time together in pre-production to learn one another, but when we did, it was very natural. And we call this like, hauntingly familiar, so it was nothing for me to fall into her arms. And she’s like, yeah, just play. I remember you saying that too. I’m like, how do we play right now? Even right now, she’s holding space for me in a way that I don’t even think she knows. She’s a meditator. Savanah as well. They’re much stiller than I am and it’s still going on. You’re seeing it right now.

EA: I’m a free-range actor, whatever that means. I’m largely left alone most of the time. Savanah allows me to mind myself, and in that way, I can be supportive and be supported. If people don’t get scared that I’m not talking about a scene or not looking like I’m thinking about a scene, I’m probably not. Because I don’t believe that inside those spaces I should be burdened with that, and at that time it’ll be enough to walk in to that room and trust that we can all come in and reconvene and go on. Through my life I have learned that having to carry heavy roles was something that was almost excruciating. You go home with it, you wake up it, you’re thinking about the scene, you’re thinking about whether you can do that in the scene. Let me just let go. It is what it is. They can’t eat me. Now, let me see what I can do. If I was to show it by doing it, then they’d see that they could also trust their own instincts, that they could walk in and still be able to act. And you can also laugh in between takes. That it’s appropriate to let somebody go and sit in the sun and relax and talk to people, and then walk straight in there and be that mother who’s in that pain. But you yourself could give yourself a break and your body would know what to do when it was time. It would understand what the assignment was. Savanah allowed for everybody to just be themselves and then round themselves up and it was a really wonderful experience in that way.

I’m curious to know for the actors how much research you felt, if any, you needed to do to give such dynamic performances.
EA: Well, both my parents are orphans and my mother’s a social worker. My father was a preacher. Both were public servants in a way that comforts people in difficult situations. My sister is a social worker who worked in adoptions for years in Philadelphia. My brother worked here in Brooklyn in social work. I’m bleeding off their experience; there’s no doubt about it. I spent my life in churches. I spent my life after church. I spent my life in people’s homes. I spent my life waiting for my mother outside, doing things, keeping notes, all the things she had to do, going over and over, making sure that she didn’t miss anything, didn’t miss an appointment because the child’s life could be at stake with one mistake. I had that, but I didn’t really think about so much research. Maybe that sounds a little bit high-handed. It just seemed to me, again, more direct to get out of my own way, and stay out of their way. They were young, but they were experienced and they knew what they were doing, so they didn’t need me to be telling them what to do. Just being there and being confident in myself was something useful, but so was not knowing. I had no idea what would happen. And sometimes the only thing you can do is say, I have no idea how this will feel once we get in the space, because this space hasn’t been invented yet. It’s in Savanah’s mind and it’s on the page and we’ve all decided to do something with it. But once you’re there, then something happens and that is magic and you just leave it alone.

TN: In the beginning before filming, Sav shared a lot of literature with me. And, I did my Google search of her cause she was like, not on Instagram and it was weird! I’m like, who is this? All I had was Sav’s previous work. I don’t even think I had a picture of you yet. I saw your work, but I think just being from Oakland, you see moms like this all the time. These are the moms that I help off the bus. Like, let me get your stroller for you, or they might be a couple of dollars short in the line before you so you give them five dollars. They’re the moms that are in our communities very much still. I think on top of that research, there was quite a lot of literature. We were constantly exchanging. Here’s a link to this video—this is really tough. Did you watch it? Did you read these? There would be short, not stories, but voices. We were constantly at exchange about different voices and hearing them out. When I did meet the moms—I don’t know if they were particularly from Chasing Crisis—that Savanah has been previously working with, I was like, damn okay we’re all in one room now and it’s vibrating with this energy. So just being present and looking around and realizing that these things are not too far off was a lot of the emotional research for sure.

SL: Those testimonies where the moms are almost speaking to the camera, but not quite to the camera happened within the first two or three days of shooting. Both Erika and Tia were there with some people. That also kind of set the tone of the whole film experience for all of us.  

One of the things that I appreciated about this film is that we don’t really see the exposition or the background of the character of Gia. How did that come about?
SL: That was in the writing. There were different versions of the script where there were more moments where more backstory was revealed. And I felt like I was trying to justify in a way why she makes this big decision in the end, this relapse moment. Then that didn’t feel genuine, and I realized that it didn’t make the audience feel with her anymore, so I tried to pull that out and that’s what the script was left with. You can just be present with her through those emotions. You don’t need to know who the father was or why she’s in this situation right now. Because it’s really about, what am I doing with this baby and I’m very heavily pregnant. That’s the focus. And it became more about the present decisions than previous decisions. And I think that’s what excited me and what I think enables audiences to strip away their judgment a little bit further.

Q&A with Christopher Nolan and Emma Thomas

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Oppenheimer.

Subjectivity is very present in this film in many ways. The title is Oppenheimer as opposed to the longer, more academic title of the book. When you’re talking with Cillian about that and how you’re going to essentially be inside of his head for a lot of the film, what do you discuss about him embodying this man?
Christopher Nolan: I think the first and most important conversation was the one where we both agreed that we were not interested in some kind of impersonation. There’s a wonderful phrase from Ken Loach that he coined several years ago. He talked about the cinema of Madame Tussaud. There’s this idea that just by imitating or the facsimile of somebody, there’s inherent value in that somehow. And particularly with Oppenheimer, who was an iconic figure at the time. But the iconography is not even so well-known these days. I think Cillian slightly breathed a sigh of relief with that, that I was saying that we did not need an interpretation. We’re making a dramatic film, not a documentary. We’re not trying to impress people with the similarity between what you are doing and what you can see on YouTube archival footage. I think he found that freeing. That said, having all of these points of reference and having months to be able to work on that gave him something to sink his teeth into. Listening to the way the real man spoke, the way he dressed, the way he moved. I think for the best actors, after you cast them, there’s this period where we’re building sets, we’re traveling the world, figuring out how to do things. We’re very busy while they’re sort of left at home waiting. You know, there are hair and makeup tests or wardrobe tests, but it’s few and far between. Sometimes there’s stunt training. I believe that anything that gives an actor something to grab a hold of, to really work at will help them use that period productively. And he certainly came to set the first day with an incredible amount of knowledge and a very fully developed take on the character.

This is a film about consequences

Your physical sets are incredible and you’re well known to be someone who uses practical effects as much as possible. Emma, knowing that this is the case going in, what was your thinking about how to best produce these major set pieces? Especially the Trinity sequence. 
Emma Thomas: We had worked with an amazing visual effects supervisor before called Andrew Jackson. Particularly on Dunkirk, where we had many big sequences with explosions, but also with the planes and so on. We did as much of that as possible practically. We revisit perhaps slightly older methods of filmmaking. It works really well for us because the old becomes new again since the modern audience’s eye isn’t necessarily used to the way those effects look. On Dunkirk and then also on this film, the visual effects department very seamlessly integrates their work with the special effects department. In that pre-production period that Chris described, while Cillian was sort of getting his teeth into the character and we were location scouting and so on, we also had our visual effects and special effects departments working. Very similarly, actually, to the way it then ended up working on set. You know, anytime we would shoot makeup and hair tests, we would have the visual effects and the special effects department off in a corner working on their little miracles. It was almost like a whole other film was being made in parallel. And I don’t want to talk to you specifically about the way they did it because that, you know, you don’t want to know how the trick works. But it worked seamlessly and those were some of the first dailies that we looked at, and it was absolutely incredible. It was just magic watching this stuff that hadn’t been touched by a computer; it literally had just been shot in a corner on the stage. It was really miraculous.

CN: In very experimental conditions. Which, from Emma’s point of view, from a production point of view, it’s really tough to get any kind of experimentation into the framework of a big budget Hollywood film. It’s a strange paradox where the more money you have, the less you can actually just sort of turn up and go, well, what if we just experiment, we shoot a bit of this, or shoot a bit of that. The whole machine, the number of people you’re employing and everything fights that. We were able to find some very good ways because of Andrew. He’s done a couple of films with us—he won an Oscar for Tenet and he did incredible work on Dunkirk. For me, it’s the pinnacle of visual effects because everyone thinks we did everything for real! He’s getting away with all kinds of things that people just aren’t seeing. He knows computer graphics, but he also knows analog methods. He started in the special effects world like Scott Fisher, his partner on these films. He just wanted to be in a closet with his camera and some odd bits and pieces, but he knew that this was going to need to be him. I said, well, we can’t do quite that, but when we were shooting the security hearings, we were in a place with a very large parking lot next to it. So we put up a big tent and we let him kind of move in there and he’d borrow our cameras and give them back as needed, and they’d set all these kind of weird little things up and they’d just be shooting the whole time. It took many, many months of experimentation to get the visual language and the pieces that we needed to put together into the finish film.

When you read the book, what sort of small details gripped you about this character?
CN: Well, the book was written over about a twenty-five year period. The level of research and detail that Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin put into it is unparalleled. I’ve had an interest in Oppenheimer for some time. I included a reference in my last film, Tenet, in dialogue to the moment at which Oppenheimer’s fellow scientists at the Manhattan Project realized they could not completely eliminate the possibility that a chain reaction from the Trinity Test would destroy the world, and yet went ahead and pushed that button. And that’s the most dramatic situational scene that I’d ever heard of. After Tenet, Robert Pattinson gave me book of Oppenheimer’s speeches from the 1950s. Reading those speeches, reading the words of this person trying to wrestle with the consequences, the implications of something that he’d been a part of unleashing into the world was very frightening. And very moving. When I came to read American Prometheus there’s a moment relatively early in the book where you suddenly realize that Los Alamos, this place that’s so important to the history of the world—famous, or infamous, depending on your point of view—it was just a place that he and his brother liked to go camping. It was a place they would go pitch a tent and ride their horses around. And he thought it was one of the most beautiful places in the world. Realizing the relationship between the personal and the global, the massive significance of that, to me, that was uniquely traumatic. It hit me in a very profound way. And I think from that point onwards in reading the book, I knew that it was something I just had to do.

That makes me think of the moment in the film where he’s asked, what should we do with Los Alamos? And he’s like, “give it back to Indians.” It feels like that’s actually a thing he thinks could happen.  
CN:  Yeah, I mean the conversation with Truman is as best I can tell, pretty accurate to the actual sort of… I don’t know what you call a meeting of the minds that isn’t really a meeting! It’s a scene about misunderstandings and Oppenheimer has the type of naivete at times in this story that only really brilliant people seem to possess. You know, the intellect allowing him to sort of miss some really basic things. When he said that Truman, it wasn’t as a provocation. I was very happy with the way Cillian plays the scene with Gary. I was very happy with it because it’s not a provocation. I think this speaks to that earlier answer about the personal; he feels that Los Alamos is his place and that now that he’s done with it, they’ll give it back to him, give it back to the Indians, give it back to nature or whatever. He sees that the things will go back to the way they were. And there’s something very heartbreaking about that because this is a film about consequences. Unintended consequences, particularly.

Q&A with Paula Beer

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Afire.

What was it like, collaborating with director Christian Petzold for a third time?
Paula Beer: Well, working with Christian is just fun. And his way of working is different from everything I’ve experienced so far. When they asked me to do Transit, the first movie we did together, I was like, well, we are going see how it’s going to be in real life. But the thing is, he really takes his time for rehearsals in the morning. There’s no one there except the actors and the director. Then the DOP will come at the time we’re ready. And we go down to makeup, costume is already on rehearsal, and then they prepare the set. We come back, we shoot one shot for this angle, then the next angle, next angle, okay. Then rehearse again for the next scene. So it’s really focused and calm and it’s just easy to lose yourself in the story because you’re not interrupted by technical things. It’s really about the story. And Christian has this vibe of, he just loves cinema and he has this energy of telling stories and being like, “great, you know, I saw that movie. I want to show you that scene because it reminds me of what we’re trying to do here.” And so it’s like a dictionary of atmospheres and working now for the third time with him, of course I got to know him very well during the last two films, and now coming together again, it’s just a huge gift working with him because it’s so unique and so, so relaxed and you can really dive into these characters and be like, “okay, but what is it really about?” And not just the first scene, but yeah, it’s just, it’s really, really fun.

you have to be really relaxed to laugh

I read that Christian was inspired by things like Éric Rohmer movies, Chekov plays, and so on. Is that helpful for you, as an actor, to engage with his the inspirations?
PB: It can help some, but I think sometimes for me, it doesn’t help to know the intellectual basis. Because being like, “okay, that scene, it comes from that scene, or it comes from that movie”… maybe that won’t do anything to me as an actor and I’ll just say, “well, yeah, even though now I know it, my heart hasn’t changed about it.” But what helps for me is to understand what Christian’s view is about the inspiration, or how he sees movies and what he sees in these scenes or in these books. And I think for me as an actor, it’s helpful to understand where his mind is because when he talks to me, I’m like, “okay, now I know what you mean.” And I can translate that into my actor language and be like, “okay, I need more this and that.”

How do you see Nadia’s journey? What was Nadia’s role for you in this story?
From the first time I read the script for Afire, I liked the story, but I didn’t know who was going to play Leon. And I said to myself, “okay, this is quite challenging. A main character that is all the time really, like with himself grumpy sometimes, really an asshole.” And then Thomas was reading Leon for the rehearsal. I thought he was amazing, because he brings this comedy to it. And otherwise, if there wasn’t a sense of humor, it would be horrible to follow this main character. And during the preparation, I was just wondering… maybe what Nadia does is, while Leon is grumpy, she brings the balance. And what I really love about her is that she’s so connected to herself, but at the same time in contact with people around her. So she’s in a very good way and… yeah, is just a really loving human being. And, and what I also like about how that she’s… because still in Germany at least, most of the female characters, it’s centered at male characters and a traditional character. When Leon says, “well, I’m in love with you,” a traditional female character would say, “oh, really? I didn’t know.” Or, “oh, thank you for, for talking about your emotions.” And she doesn’t do that. She’s like, “okay, but I don’t have time. I need to go.” And I love that, that she’s so… she’s just herself and not like, “oh my God, a man has feelings for me!” But instead Nadia just says, “yeah, but life is different… And life is like really shit right now. And you could have thought about that before you said that.”

In many ways, this is almost a ‘coming of age’ story. Did you discuss that aspect with your collaborators at all?
PB: The preparation conversations are a bit different than after you’ve seen the movie, because sometimes what we talked about during the preparation, even though it was probably important, I’m sure Christian has other things that he won’t talk about with us during the preparation. And then, for me, it’s like discovering the movie as you shoot: there are themes I didn’t anticipate being so strong in the finished film. And I… for me as an actress, I’m always like, concentrated about, okay, the connection, the emotions. And then seeing the movie itself, for me, the first time, I just think, “okay, I’m really watching a movie.” And seeing yourself onscreen is always weird. I think don’t know if humans are made for it. And to see yourself in a character, it’s like, “ah, okay, whatever.” But every movie with Christian is special because in a way he’s really intellectual and really emotional at the same time. And there’s so many topics in it. Umm… I think you could say this film is about a coming of age, but then again, maybe not at all. So I think it’s everything. and nothing. And that’s what I like about working with him and his about his movies that you can see all the things, and at end you can discuss so many things and so many topics, but in the end you can just watch and be like, “oh, that was surprisingly sad.” And then, then you’re, that’s it. And that’s fine as well.

Which scene were you most concerned about, when you were in preproduction? As far as how you were going to play it?
PB: Well, I think the the goulash scene at the sea when Nadja is falling down with her with her bike and then it’s written that she bursts out laughing. I was like, “oh, shit.” Because laughing for me is really difficult. Maybe that’s a personal thing. I don’t have problem like crying in character. That is not a big challenge for me. But with laughing, you have to be really relaxed to laugh. If you are shooting, there’s always pressure, even though it was Christian, when you’re like, yeah, “it’s easy, but you know, okay, we need to get this done, this better be good because we have maybe just one take,” because that’s Christian’s style. No pressure, but laugh. And I was kind of afraid of that scene.

Q&A with Thaddeus O’Sullivan

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of The Miracle Club.

Period pieces are notoriously cumbersome and expensive to make. Did you find that to be the case?
Thaddeus O’Sullivan: The biggest challenge in this context was really the whole Lourdes issue. Trying to get permission to shoot at Lourdes was totally impossible. So we built the set– and that was tricky, both in terms of getting the scale and details right, and in terms of controlling the costs. And so I’d say that was the biggest challenge, and that was more of a logistical thing, really. In terms of shooting in very small spaces, working class homes, you know… we would normally go into a location which we couldn’t do in this case. I think with these three actors, you know, if we hadn’t been able to give them room to just be on the set and work… it would have been difficult. So we we had to build all of the smaller sets. They weren’t difficult to build or particularly expensive; it was just something we had to do. And the design of those was very carefully researched by the production designer. And even though he’s a little younger than me (quite a bit younger than me), he knows the period pretty well. And so we had a very creative time discussing all of the details, down to the wallpaper. All of the stuff. He was incredibly detailed, even with stuff he knew would not be on camera. He would still have it there for the actors to see as well, even for items the actors would pick up or look at that the camera would never see. And it was interesting to see their reactions, to know that somebody was thinking about the set with that level of detail. And that made the actors feel pretty good.

the story itself is really about this kind of self-discovery

Did you feel like a kid in a candy store, working with such an amazing cast?
TO: I was probably too nervous for that! Yes, I was at the outset: these are just the best actors around. And it was daunting. Maggie Smith said to me one day, “What’s wrong with you?” And I said, “Look, I’m standing here in fear,” and she said, “we’re all standing here in fear… just tell me what to do.” That was the second or third day. And I suppose I had one of my gloomy faces on and she was teasing me. But that kind of broke the ice. Kathy Bates is very easy to direct, very, very straightforward, and does a sort of forensic analysis of the script, which, given we’ve had a long protracted development period and we’ve had a number of writers involved, she was conscious of the history and wanted to know about earlier drafts and all of that. Laura [Linney] was easier (not on herself; she’s very tough on herself), in terms of applying everything she knew to every beat, and she had a very clear idea of the character from the outset and and how the character should be feeling in each scene. And she showed an unusual mixture of that kind of strategizing, but also very relaxed about, you know, changing things and so on. She came into the scene knowing how she’s going to do it. But at the same time, if we had changed the dialog, or if there was something that wasn’t working in rehearsal, you know, she’d change it. She’d adapt. But I found them all… You know, once we got started– before you get going with the whole star thing, it’s a big, big deal. But once we got started, it was very easy. Really.

One of the things that impressed me was that you have a film that’s kind of centered around Lourdes but it’s not filled with religion. Can you talk about that aspect of the film? It’s really about a relationship or relationships.
TO: Well, no, it’s it’s not a particularly religious film. The women who go there are all religious. And and Lourdes in Catholic culture is very important, and you grow up knowing about it and and so it doesn’t have to be religious… it can be, you know, a very spiritual pilgrimage, but it doesn’t have to be for a lot of Irish people anyway. Some people go there for a very particular reason: People will go to look for a miracle. Some people will go there just to engage with their spirituality, and then others will go there to pray for Our Lady to intervene and to help them. And then all of that is religious, I suppose. But the story itself is really about this kind of self-discovery. It’s about what the women discover about themselves in the process of making this visit. And and I suppose in a way you get what a lot of people expect, might expect, which is to go through some kind of transformation and to learn something about themselves. They expect to experience something about themselves, and they all do that. And I think people who go there… even if they’re fairly agnostic, you cannot avoid the spiritual atmosphere of being among people who have such a sort of collective spiritual feeling. It’s very emotional. And even people who are not terribly interested in Catholicism come back and say, “it really meant something to me, and it gave me a chance to reflect on things,” and and so on.

Q&A with Sean Mullin

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of It Ain’t Over.

When did you first start noticing a disconnect between Yogi Berra’s reputation and the player the stats showed him to be?
Sean Mullin: I think that’s what this was all about. When I started doing the research, I was like, wait, this guy was criminally overlooked. I mean, he was an incredible ballplayer and he’s not really talked about in a lot of the same circles as the greats. People always thought that he was good but not great. I think that there’s a difference between good and great. We really wanted to hit that home. The project came about because of Peter Sobiloff, our initial producer on this. He’s a big Yankee fan, and his wife dragged him to the theater to see the Mr. Rogers documentary [Won’t You Be My Neighbor?] in 2018. It was a Sunday, he was kicking and screaming, and as often happened in Peter’s life, his wife proved him wrong. He loved the movie. He absolutely loved it. And the next day, Monday, that’s when this project started. He went to the Yogi Berra charity golf event and he met the Berra sons. And he asked, why hasn’t there been a Mr. Rogers-like documentary about your dad? And they said, we don’t know. And then Peter told them, I have the perfect director for you. Peter had been a financier on Amira & Sam, my first film. He called me and said, would you want to direct a doc about Yogi? And initially I said, no, he’s too perfect. Where’s the drama? How am I going to get 90 minutes sustained on this story? And then I said, give me a beat. And then the deeper I dug, the more apparent this disconnect between perception and reality became. And finally, I was like, yes, yes, yes. This is the hook. Then I got the sons and we started shooting. The very first thing we shot was Dale’s book signing. He spoke about the drug abuse on the first day of shooting and that went really well and ended up in the film. I met Lindsay there too. I interviewed Lindsay a couple times like and every time she was like, you know, in 2015 I was watching that game with the “Greatest Players” with my grandfather and I said to him, maybe you should have been considered for that. She told me this story a couple of times so I said, how about we open the movie with this? We’ll use that as the hook. We’re not trying to say anything negative about Willie Mays or Hank Aaron or Sandy Koufax of Johnny Bench—they’re all icons and incredible players. But Yogi probably should have been in that conversation too.

I wanted to make a movie about a life well-lived

I read that you didn’t want to do a hagiography. Was that challenging given that the family was so closely involved?
They were involved in that they gave interviews, but we had full creative control and final cuts. I finally showed it to Lindsay and Larry when we were in the final cut stage, when we were almost ready to lock picture. We wanted to talk to them before we locked in case there was something really glaring. And they had two small notes, one of them was factual, a photo we had labeled wrong. We thought it was Yogi’s mom, but it was his aunt. The other thing—the problem with making a movie like this is that you can’t get everybody in there, right? Phil Rizzuto was one of the best friends. He’s hardly even in the film. It’s hard, you know, that was a difficult decision to make. But there were two people that Lindsay was adamant that we include. Gil Hodges was one of them. There was a quick Gil Hodges bit where he passed away and there was a funeral shot.  And then there was one about Elston Howard too. We added a quick beat about him in the late editing stages. But yeah, other than that, if you don’t like the film, it’s my fault!

This is a guy where you can take any part of his life and make a full-length documentary about it. How did structure the film to fit everything in?
That’s a great question. I mean, I’m a writer at heart. I broke in as a screenwriter. I’m a proud member of the Writers Guild of America, which is obviously right now on strike. I make sure all of my documentaries are covered under WGA contracts. So this is a WGA documentary. But I’m not writing the interviews. The people are saying what they want. But I am writing the structure, I am saying, this is Yogi’s life. There are three acts, just as I would do in a fictional screenplay. And within those three acts, the way I write, I do eight sequences. This film is two sequences in the first act, three to four sequences in the second, and two in the third act. Each sequence is 10-15 minutes and each sequence is a short film, essentially. That’s how I write my fiction screenplays and that’s how I structure my documentaries. I look at this three-act structure and I label them. The first one is “Becoming Yogi” and the second one is “Doesn’t look like a Yankee.” I label each short film. For this film in particular, they’re even more pronounced because I demarcated them with those title cards, the ones with quotes from someone “super smart” along with the quotes from Yogi. And eight ended up being a nice number for the sequences, because that’s Yogi’s number.

What’s your relationship like with your researchers? I imagine that’s a very intimate relationship.
Absolutely. I have a production company called Five by Eight Productions, and it came about because as a comedian, I wrote all my jokes on five by eight cards. My house was cluttered with five by eight cards, and when my films started getting into festivals, I needed a name for my production company. And I was like, five by eight? I just looked around the apartment. My partner at the company is a guy named Michael Connors. He’s a co-producer on the film, and Mike is an Army vet like me. He went to Harvard and ROTC, an Army Ranger guy. We met at grad school at Columbia and we bonded instantly. And we’ve done all of our films together. When I work on his films, I do second unit stuff. We have an interesting production company where we’re both directors, so we both develop stuff internally. If his stuff gets greenlit, I co-produce, I’m like his creative, his right brain. And when I get something greenlit, he’s my kind of creative brain. So Mike Connors was a big part of this. He helped me with a lot of research and then there’s archival producers. I had four or five archival producers on this over the course of four years. It was just a lot it was a lot to go through. You know, I was very adamant that I wanted to tell the story as authentically as possible with as much footage as possible. I hope you all enjoyed the footage we dug up! It was a lot of work.

Do you have a favorite Yogi-ism?
Oh, goodness. I mean, I love them all. I like the ones that are more philosophical. I love that one where he said, “we’re lost, but we’re making great time.” That’s my life in a nutshell! And “nobody goes to that restaurant anymore; it’s too crowded.”  It’s great. Those are some of my favorites, but it was tough.. We didn’t know where to put the Yogi-isms at first. Initially I had them in the third sequence right after the break. Baseball is only about thirty minutes of the film, at least with Yogi playing. I was very adamant that I didn’t want to make a baseball movie. I didn’t want to make a sports movie. I mean, I love sports and I love baseball, but I wanted to make a movie about a life well-lived and about a whole picture of the American Dream encapsulated in 98 minutes. I felt strongly that we had to get out of baseball as soon as possible. The Yogi-isms were initially going to open up the third sequence, but they just didn’t fit there. I moved them much later and they’re in the sixth sequence now. Stuff like that you have to move around a bit. The Jackie Robinson thing became such a meal, it became such a nice thing, that whole safe/out thing which I loved. And his relationship with Jackie was really great. They played minor league ball against each other. Yogi was in Newark and Jackie was in Montreal and they were both veterans. They really bonded over that. I really wanted to highlight that relationship as well.

Is being a Veteran a connection with Yogi Berra that you took very seriously?
Oh, absolutely. I mean, that is another connection. I was a first responder down at Ground Zero after the attacks of September 11th. We spent twelve hours a day down there. The first two weeks down there were really intense. And I was tasked I with escorting some of the remains out in bags and over to the morgue, I was in charge of that. So, dealing with that and finding out that Yogi was pulling bodies out of the water and after D-Day and Normandy, I was like.. I’m sorry, I don’t want to bring everyone down. But I did really want to really dig into that because I think that set the tenor for a big chunk of the rest of his life. He grew up very fast. And something we didn’t get into the film was actually some of the braver stuff he did. After Normandy, he stayed on. They went and had more battles in North Africa and he kept on going and fighting. That didn’t make it into the movie but the D-Day thing was so appropriate and people know about it. He didn’t know how to swim! And he really did think like, oh, rocket boats, is that Buck Rogers? He had this childlike wonder that was so great and I hope it comes through in the film. He had really tapped into some sort of universal truth, I like to say. He just had no filter. That to me was so fantastic to kind of delve into. I had a blast making this film, even if I was killing myself while making it.  My mom says that I’m not happy unless I’m miserable. And I say, Mom, that’s a Yogi-ism.