Sean Combs: The Reckoning

0:00Hello and welcome to the Art of the Cut podcast brought you in partnership with Boris Fax. I'm Steve Hallfish, ACE. I'm a working documentary, feature and TV editor. For over a decade of interviewed nearly 600 of the world's best editors, welcome to episode 39 of season 13. Today on Art of the Cut, the Emmy-winning editors for Best Picture Editing for a nonfiction program, Sean Combs, The Reckoning, a four-part docu-series from Netflix. Interviewed for the project, we're Charles D.Vac, ACE, Jeremy Seifer, ACE, Evan Wise, ACE, and Benjamin Cast, ACE. Unable to join us on the call, we're editors Adam Goldstein, ACE, Jack Ravenna, ACE, and Jonathan Miller. Charles D.Vac has been on Art of the Cut in the past for Chimp Crazy, for which he was nominated for an Emmy and won an ACE.

1:00His other work includes full frontal with Samantha B, for which he was nominated for an Emmy, and the circus inside the greatest political show on Earth, for which he was nominated for an ACE. Jeremy Seifer's previous work includes HBO's Storm Over Brooklyn, Netflix's Blood Brothers, Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, and Showtime's Bronx Obama. Evan Wise has been on Art of the Cut in the past for Chimp Crazy, for which he was nominated for an Emmy and won an ACE. His other work includes Q, into the Storm, for which he was nominated for an Emmy, and the circus inside the greatest political show on Earth, for which he was nominated for an ACE. Benjamin Cast is a previous ACE nominee for the circus inside the greatest political show on Earth. His other work includes the HBO Docu series Monsters of God and the Britney Griner Story. Today's discussion includes how the structure of the series evolved, the remote workflow, and the editorial strategies used to clarify a complex story. Before we hop into our discussion with Charles, Jeremy, Evan, and Benji, a message from

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3:08ACE, on their Emmy-winning work on the Netflix Dock You Series, Sean Combs, The Reckoning. Welcome you guys, congratulations on your Emmy-winning, tell me about the Emmy night. Thank you. It's the best. It really is the best. Since we have so many people on the column, we're not going to have video for this, I do want to have everybody introduce themselves so people can put a name with a voice. Let's start with you, Evan, since you're up on my screen. I'm Evan Wise, ACE, supervising editor from Sean Combs, The Reckoning. I'm Charles DVAC, ACE, also supervising editor on UnSean Combs. Jeremy Cipher, I was the lead editor on episode one of Sean Combs, The Reckoning. I'm ACE for ACE. Yes, I'm officially ACE as of what a week ago. Congratulations. That's a huge deal. Well deserved. Hi, I'm Benji Cast, also ACE. I worked quite a bit on the end of the series, episode three and four.

4:09Just a big shout out to Jack Irvina, John Miller and Adam Goldstein, three of our co-workers, who couldn't be here with us today, but were integral to the editing series. Tell me about your assistant editors. Did each one of you have a separate assistant or was it a group thing? Yeah, so our lead A.E. was Orlando Perez, who did an amazing job organizing everything across the board. And then we also had Michael Wores and Brandon Brown, who were fantastic as well. How much of this were you able to do with such a big group of people? Were you all in the same place or was this all remote? It was all remote. It didn't start out as this big a group of people. Jeremy was the first editor on, I think, back in January. And he was working on episode one. And I was the second on, I worked on episode two. Evan was the third working on episode three and Jack Irvina was on episode four. And we were all kind of siloed on our own edits, working individually on our own episodes. And then when the verdict came down in July,

5:11that's when everything kind of changed. We were kind of all expecting the verdict to be guilty and that he would be in jail for a very long time. When he was not guilty pretty much on all the main counts, except for the man act, which was kind of holds like a lighter sentence. It kind of changed the trajectory of the entire show. So we got more people suddenly that wanted to speak and we also got less people that wanted to speak. Different people wanted to speak than before. So we suddenly got something like 12 hours of interview with the jurors that had to be cut immediately. And then Netflix was pretty smart about it. They thought, okay, we should probably get this show out where we're talking about it. If we wait on it for another year, we won't get the viewership that we got. And they were right. It ended up being one of the most viewed documentary series of all time. So that compressed schedule then led us to bring on three more editors to try to help. And then the siloed episodes kind of changed from that point on

6:12because we kind of had to rework several of the episodes with a new kind of thought process. Benji came on during that time when it got compressed. We had worked together on the circus and then John Miller and Adam Goldstein as well. I was really interested in the way episode one kind of starts, like any documentary or documentary series, that is a crucial idea of how you start the whole thing. Was it different before the verdict happened and then you changed it? It was that whole thing with Sean in his hotel room is what I'm thinking of. We originally had that later in the series and we moved it up to be the cold open. And I think we moved it up right after the verdict. You kind of see like he looks like he's on the ropes, right? And he's in that and you think everything's going against him. But he's really kind of laying the groundwork and the plan for what got him the not guilty verdict. And so he's kind of laying out the playbook for what he's going to do.

7:13That cold open kind of comes through for Wishing during episode four. And Benji really did a great job kind of like making that whole kind of full circle. Benji, let's talk about that a little bit. The fact that it got moved to a different location and how you felt about that whole scene. I'm assuming you cut it as a scene at one point. Well, I didn't cut the original version. I took that and kind of made it the sort of like twist reveal and episode four version of the cold open. And one of the reasons from my perspective, I came in a little later. So I was able to see the whole series of fresh people were talking about how everything he was saying there was relevant to some of the material that we were seeing from the trial. So it was just kind of all clicked like, oh, let's reprise this in that moment when in particular someone who was like a web blogger was in the trial and was describing how the PR team was kind of like trying to get them to put this message on social media.

8:18I don't know if everyone had this in mind like the whole time, but when I kind of put all that together and working on it, it was like, oh, this is really like a kind of interesting inversion of what it feels like at the very start of the series. And even because if you're watching the series and just kind of like absorbing like one piece after another after another another and if you didn't know what was going to happen in trial, especially it would have that effect too. You know, because at the beginning he's he seems desperate and suddenly you realize it's actually somewhat the opposite. I mean, he was desperate, but all of the techniques also reflect back on other points in time throughout the series that are touched upon when Sean comes kind of comes in contact with you know, being in trouble for something and finding a way to get out of it.

9:21I mean, I think literally my first or second week I started working on something that began on September 16th. The day Sean Comes was arrested and indicted. That was the original beginning was when Sean Comes is basically met at the hotel in Manhattan and is arrested and taken into federal custody. That for a while that was the opening scene that was the cold open. Chuck maybe right it may have been after the verdict. I remember it being maybe a little earlier when we started to think about having Sean Comes in that hotel room talking legal strategy. The scene that now opens the series and so effectively is reprised at the end of the series when you sort of see and hear everything he's saying on the phone in a very different light. What it came down to was that there was such a magnetic quality to the verite footage of knowing what is awaiting Sean that he's about to get arrested. So in these last days and hours of freedom, you get a glimpse of a person a little bit

10:25like 25th hour you know Edward Norton's character right before they get locked up and I think that became something so psychologically revealing that there was almost no other place to begin the series. So I don't remember exactly when it happened but I think Chuck did the first pass of that phone call and then it ended up in what was at the time my episode, the first episode and I sort of did another version of that but it was one of those eureka moments where it's like it all begins here. Whether his story begins here this is where our series begins. So when you had the original first cut of the first episode how did that start originally? The first cut of the open of the cold open of the first episode was Sean comes arrest. There's basically surveillance footage from the hotel when the federal agents arrest him for a long time. That's where we thought the series should begin but obviously that arrest that indictment

11:29led to a trial and while we were editing the series the trial come July was unfolding and the most important moment is the verdict not the arrest but when we started cutting at the beginning of 2025 obviously there hadn't been a verdict. So it's just the way that actual events have you know a huge impact on how you structure a story. It sounds like you always knew how many episodes there were going to be from the beginning is that true? Yeah I think so there was a rough outline in the beginning from our director Alex Stapleton and it was broken out into four episodes. They were separated pretty tightly by chronology and I think the first two kind of stayed true to that for the most part and then three and four kind of had a permuneeble barrier in between them and there are a lot of things that were in four that we've been in the three and vice versa and then moving them back and there was a lot of instability between three and four for a very long time until after the trial when we kind of had like a eureka

12:33moment to figure out what needed to go where. That makes sense and to start the whole process you're mostly cutting scenes was that the idea was hey let's just get this scene this scene this idea caught as individual pieces that would maybe move around. Our episodes were sort of divided by time periods. Jeremy kind of had the beginning like you know Sean as a young kid up until he starts his beef with two pock Chuck picked it up from there and then it went through Biggie's murder and then I had sort of like the early 2000s up till well it was initially it was all the way up until he got arrested the arrest was an episode three at one point and then four was going to be the trial in the aftermath. We sort of like stayed in our little pens and we're cutting scenes within that and then you know three and four kind of changed a whole lot. As watching episode one for sure it felt much more like a documentary about Sean more than the reckoning itself and then it obviously got there in later episodes was there a feeling

13:37either with the editors or with the director of when do we really need to start introducing these women. We have at least one in every episode the guiding light from Alex our director was we want to tell the whole story of Sean and we don't want to leave anything out good bad ugly everything he was kind of doing these things almost his whole life if you're referring to like the reckoning it was kind of like a slow drip across his whole life really. I know that there was there was at least one abused woman in the first episode what was the idea of kind of when to reveal her or how that shook out chronologically. Her name is Joy Dickerson Neil she met Sean when he was still working in ANR for Uptown records he was producing a music video and he tried to cast her basically in this music video. It was very clear early on that this is the intersection this is the intersection of Sean and what would become I think a pattern of predation and abuse but it's completely intertwined

14:46with his ambition as a music producer. There's a lot of things that are captured in the scene between Sean Macast himself in the videos a sort of Pimp it completely lines up with how Sean not how he saw himself but how he wanted to be seen was as basically a sort of hustler a player I think he was a million miles away from actually being that but saw a path where he could project a certain image from the beginning the sexual abuse allegations it's impossible to separate the abuse from basically the attempt to make a trophy or a display or spectacle because that's part of if you've seen the first episode that's what Sean actually did allegedly is that he filmed this assault and showed it at a club and so I think if you want to understand Sean comes trajectory you have to

15:52understand where it started and to me this feels like as close as you're going to get to a sort of risetta stone for sort of understanding the way Sean operates. Interesting and as you point out because this is so tied to his producing and all that stuff in order to tell the story of the woman you have to tell the story of him as a producer and his ascension in that world first. Exactly as a producer as a party promoter that's what he was doing at the time you mentioned the city college stampede he was the promoter of that event you know a lot of people were responsible but arguably Sean was the most responsible and so it was a very early case of Sean comes not being really held to account and not taking responsibility that's what we really wanted to do in the first episode that's what Alex Stapleton the director really wanted to do was that by the end of the first episode even though it only takes us up to roughly 1993 94 bad boys just forming Sean Combs is known

16:54but this is right around the time that Biggie's first record comes out that's what really puts Sean on the map as a producer and that's what really launches bad boy records by the time you get to this moment where Sean Combs for most people I think his story begins there we've just told the entire backstory leading up to that moment it's the idea that that past is prologue and two bucks cousin William Lissane kind of breaks it all down it's like we are told you've seen how Sean operates and now he's about to operate with Clyde Davis's money and with this sort of impunity and there's going to be a body count by the time we're through this so that sets up that the rest of the series I've worked on features as well as doc series there's something so important about the ending of the first episode of any doc series as a springboard that makes you want to keep watching and so I think that's one of the reasons the series was successful I recognized that the graphic got used twice the one that's at the end explaining the I think the legal situation that was earlier

17:57and then also ends the episode it's the first series that I've ever worked on where there was an absolute certainty that we were going to get sued so every episode had to go through legal more so than any other series I've ever worked on and so we were constantly talking with lawyers everything was under a microscope and so the slate at the front and the back is you know recommendation by legal but it also reminds you of what happened and what are the stakes and what he got out of so it's kind of a challenge because you're forced to do some of these slates but at the same time you want to do it in a way that propels the story you know and and kind of and I think we were able to achieve that you know at first you're like oh I don't want to do that I don't want to put a slate here but then some of them work so well that really kind of like parse out the information for you and lay the the foundation and the gravitas and the the context for what he's actually accused of and what he got away with legal was definitely a big part of that the springboard going into the rest of the episode like you know I love that end of that episode and everything is kind of through

18:57the lens of control and power he's trying to attain more and more power and with that power he's using it to control and so the the first episode is him kind of trying to go after people above him kind of you know and and trying to rise up the the second episode is now two-pock he's that he's going after somebody his own kind of level now so he goes after two-pock he betrays biggie and goes after him and and as he attains more of this black hole like sucking more power in and all this control then the third episode now he has so much power that he's taking down people below him and he's controlling them and and using the same playbook that he kind of used in the first episode in the second episode and then the fourth episode he's like has supreme power and he can just take it from anyone he wants if you look at all these victims they're all through the lens of control everything is kind of building one after the other the perfect form of control is like making people take drugs and making them do whatever you want them to do sexually like you control their

19:59bodies you control their minds and it all came from that desire for complete control over everything around him I put together the like the last like the final five-minute sequence of episode one one of the things that I was really trying to to get across was the jealousy that Sean felt of two-pock and a way that I'm really proud of I don't know if anyone noticed this but in the beginning of the episode Sean is is looking up to people like heavy D and we had a clip of heavy D on the Arsenio Hall show and then heavy D was kind of like one of his his idols and in the end I found a clip of two-pock on the Arsenio Hall show in the same exact position and you're getting the same exact introduction as heavy D did so I put that in there to try to call back to you know what Sean views as like the pinnacle of success so that he could really see someone he could see his rival getting what he wanted since he was 19 years old and that was one of the one of the things I really drove me when I was cutting the end of episode one what was the post-production equipment

20:59and remote situation that allowed you guys to all work on the same material how was that working technically we were using Avenue Composer you know with Nexus shared storage and we were all promoting into computers that I think we're in Texas we use Miro a lot digital no cards to sort of work at the scenes and stuff and one of the things I like doing on Miro and I'm pretty sure we did this on this show is you can all exist like you can zoom really far out in Miro so it's like this vast universe and you can all exist and you can just say okay episode one is going to be in this part of the Miro world and two is here and three is here and four is over there so at any point you can just kind of scroll to the side and check out what the episode before you is up to and then how it would inform what you're doing in yours so that was big in our collaboration were you dialing in like jump desktop yes yeah jump test cop for the composer for Pierre there was that interface you can play back live you know what's on the avid for everyone and then the director can give like music notes it was a looper yeah I had a bunch of screenings

22:04live screens with lawyers on looper I would play a sequence down and we would talk about it and then like what what do we need to do to to make this a little tighter legally sometimes I would live cut stuff with them to try to get it passed man the looper people will be happy because I just did the interview with your fellow Emmy winners uh DTF St. Louis and they used looper as well I love DTSing Lewis there were so many different types of footage you had verite you had 10,000 archival clips you had interviews from different people how did you organize all this stuff that people could find it we had a green archival team laurely bird Emily Baker and Rachel Morrison and we had them organize things by decade because a lot of the way we were thinking were debt was was decade and sometimes you just like okay I need I need a shot of Sean doing x-wine Z but it has to be from the right time period because that's what we're talking about so you go to that decades folder and look so we had we had a couple different levels of organizations so there was a big decade

23:07thing and then we also had them break it down by themes so it would be like okay music videos photos from recording studios or TV appearances interviews with news stuff like that it was organized but not too much because I do feel like sometimes you need a little bit of chaos to kind of help you make a happy accident occur you know you'll just I love to have big long sequences a string out a b-roll string outs so that I can just scrub through and then maybe I'll see a frame of something and it might not be what I'm looking for but it could work for what I need or it could spark an idea for something else so I love being not like hyper organized because I like going on like little little walks through the woods of the footage you know and then you find a little berry here and there like oh this is great I can use this. I heard many people mention the same thing that string outs are great because you're looking for something specific but you're able to find something that you aren't expecting. Also when you when you work that way and you're just kind

24:11of all over the place sometimes you can help out your your colleagues too like I can't tell you how many times I saw a good shot and I was like oh Benji you're gonna love this or cheer me hey if you ever meet Sean doing xyz it's this or oh it's Sean skydiving into his own backyard for his birthday I know that's the time period that Jack is working on so I'll just make sure that he knows that that's there and it's like it's a good way to help your friends. You know you mentioned Steve there's a lot of archival there's a lot of verite the other element is interviews of course and I think the interviews are the thing that maybe more than anything else I think for me at least as an editor just distinguished this series and Alex Stapleton's unique approach as a director they're not really interviews the way we understand interviews I mean they are very long I mean I'm talking you know a short interview with Alex and a subject is maybe four hours they could easily be eight hours they are that deep and in depth and in some ways they're not

25:13an interview as much as an exploration of someone's experience the first question you ask is never gonna get you to the heart of what she's looking for each of us in our own way with our own process each each of the editors I think approach that volume of material of of interview in in our own way several of us have worked on other things I know we have different methods like I I know that like Chuck for example does like a lot of sub clipping of stuff and has like a ton of sub clips I don't like a lot of sub clips I like to work basically on a transcript especially early on I'm listening and reading at the same time and then what my sort of go to is I love to string stuff out like I love to basically turn an idea that's in an interview that's explored into one string out and that sort of becomes in many ways like the backbone but it's it's actually more like the central nervous system it's more connected to sort of the brain in terms of what the character is seeking or needing and I think that's the thing that really really has resonated with a lot of

26:18viewers is that it's an intensely psychological story and that includes Sean Combe's psychology because it's I think it's I think it's really easy maybe too easy to just sail he's just a monster and he did all these horrible things and let's just you know sit back and and you know we don't want to create a thing where you're being entertained by all this you know the horrible things he did to people but at the same time you you want to understand what made Sean tick so I will say that that that was a huge part of organization was taking these interviews and finding ways to sort of break it down into dramatic components that that you know could be fashioned into scenes that eventually would be put together into the episodes the idea of using transcripts is a question like how else what is the other people on the call how do you deal with these interviews we kind of heard from Jeremy I've heard I interviewed Werner Herzog's editor and he says they never use transcripts

27:21in an ideal world I like to sit and watch the whole thing and put markers string it out chronologically string out selects and then go through and kind of organize that based on theme or topic or like if there's an outline the transcripts obviously are a shorthand and a lot of times you don't have time to watch everything but yeah in a perfect world that's what I like to do is take time to watch then organize and everything I kind of do like a hybrid where I always have the script it's it's impossible for me to like get through an interview without the the script next to it and so I'll be reading the script and if anything's confusing to me or even slightly interesting I click on it and watch it and then I'll watch the stuff around it and then I'll pull like a million sub clips of it and like write like kind of detailed stuff in the in the in the sub clips and then I'll put like an asterisk or like two asterisk or like some things like amazing like five asterisk you know and just like and you look at this giant bin eventually and there's all these sub clips and then I I kind of take the themes and then kind of lay them into like the scene that I'm kind of going to work

28:25on so I'll make like a pod of selects of like something that could be a scene or an anecdote or something and and kind of build from there and then I'll go back to that that pod sequence and and there'll be like 15 or 16 different sequences in there from all the selects that I pulled I'm also a big asterisk guy I like to use locators and you know if I like it I'll put one and if I'd like it a little more or two and then sometimes when you know then then you just keep hitting the button like crazy but then I go into the like the look or a look I guess they're called markers now maybe I'm you know dating myself here they're called markers now you go into the markers window and then you word search for just asterisk and then everything goes away that you didn't put a star on so it's like oh this is this is everything that I think is great oh that's an interesting thing there's so many different ways people organize stuff by layers by colors by letters yeah I love hearing all the different ways people try to organize stuff especially I mean there was so much

29:25material do you have any idea how much material was on that habit no Sean recorded everything for his whole life like he was his best his own best archivist and whether he was on TV or in a music video or he hired someone to shoot it himself or he was filming himself like he's just been on camera for 40 years and we had most it's way more of a blessing than a curse but we just had so much but it was great because if you were ever like imagining a scene like oh I wish I had Sean writing and convertible through Manhattan at night we had it you could almost just think up a scenario and it already would exist somewhere you just have to find it his interviews where he he does like all these different like public interviews they're so coded the thing about him is he's always has this like public facing mask he's the master manipulator and an amazing marketer and so and he's constantly just marketing himself and so all these interviews that he's giving are very polished and he's very you know he's giving exactly what he wants to show but there's little

30:26things about the way he says stuff that you can kind of use different ways I think the way that we we ended episode two I can't remember exactly what it was but he was talking about sometimes there are good people and bad people and some and you just have to decide which one you're going to be and you know obviously he was you know he was saying you got to be a good person right but you could tell by the way he was saying it he he wasn't really saying that it's just amazing like all these little coded hints and messages all throughout his history that you know he was kind of laying out for everybody and so that that to me was super interesting we're just going through all his interviews and all that stuff and and that's if I would just watch just his interactions just what he did there were just little pieces of gold like scattered throughout his history that was a really fun part is like watching those things and then thinking about like okay what's the context that I can put this in that actually reveals what he was really trying to say and in episode three Jack Ravena made this amazing sequence there was like a perfume commercial that Sean made with

31:27with Cassie Ventura his girlfriend where they were having these like rough sexy chasing scene and it was very sexual and very steamy and then you know Jack paired that with an interview with Andy Cohen from Bravo where they're kind of talking about that and she was like oh yeah this is my fantasy this is what I love this is what I want and you know you might think that he's joking in the time but when you put it in the right context you're like oh no that's what he's talking about he's like controlling people and hurting them and he paired it with with the sex worker describing Sean being violent in reality yes yeah right getting back to what Charles was talking about with the kind of the coded message I appreciate because I took away the same thing I appreciate that you believed in your audience enough that they would see that subtext because you could hammer that home somehow like you could you could put a hat on a hat you could really drive at home but instead you know if you have moments like that and you can trust your audience to to feel them

32:30part of that is repetition because all humans act in kind of patterns but Sean particularly would keep doing these same things over and over again and if you just keep if you keep showing it then you can trust like okay the audience will absorb this and you don't have to sit there and have someone say oh well look at this thing this is what this means of blah blah you can just give them the evidence and they'll come to the conclusion based on that of the stuff that you worked on what is something that you were either really proud of that you were able to solve editorially or that you know it was a big challenge this is in episode three Adam Goldstein and I were batting around the cold open together and the theme of that episode is kind of Sean's relationship with women like that he's dated in his life and there was a piece of archival footage of Sean on vacation singing Nacking Cole's nature boy it was really really important to our director Alex Stapleton to get that in somewhere because she really felt that Sean viewed himself as nature boy

33:31and he even says so in the in the clip I remember her telling us like we got to get this in somewhere please find a place to put this Adam and I were trying to work it into the cold open and it was like kind of working and not really and then we were on a meeting and I just said what if we just got the nature boy song what if we just licensed it as a needle drop everyone kind of looked at each other like well it's going to be expensive but like let's try it and we made this version of the cold open using Nacking Cole's nature boy which was haunting and beautiful and then it plays into this archival moment with with Sean singing the song and calling himself nature boy one of the reasons why we were able to do that is because every other time we tried the licensed music for the show we got denied by the the rights holders they didn't they didn't want us to use it so we didn't spend any of our music budget and we were just fortunate enough that like we had enough money in the whole budget to get this one song I mean it's one I'm glad we were able to use the money but we really made like an interesting and beautiful open and I'm very very proud of the way that episode three opens with that song what I'm most proud of is the two-pock and biggie story

34:36laying that out it can be really confusing and people can kind of get lost in it and so I tried to make it as clear as I possibly could and like how each domino led to the next domino and how they was this natural building thing and then to try to like carve out the emotion like of these personalities kind of like building within it and so like each event kind of builds to the next and builds to the next and the way he kind of betrayed biggie putting the funeral then him like cutting biggie out of the the contract and like you know lying about paying for the funeral and doing all this stuff to him and then boom he comes out with you know I'll be missing you and like putting his grief on stage for everyone and saying look at my best friend like look how much I miss him when when you now know like the context of all of it I love the idea that how much the clarity concerned you because I think that's a big thing that young editors might miss is that when you're trying tell a story how important it is that the audience just gets it like if you've got a complicated

35:37story how much can you simplify it if you don't know what's going on then you you're just going to be like what's happening I don't get it I don't understand you have to know enough to not question it like because if you give too much information too much information is boring you give too little you don't understand what's happening so there's there's a fine line of what's the least amount of information I can give so that you're still invested you can still feel and you can still understand that's actually like really hard sometimes or a lot of times it's like we take for granted when we watch something that's finished sometimes because it's sometimes so simple you know and it and you like get it and it just like everything's so clean and you're absorbing it but to get there sometimes it's forever and so many iterations I mean sometimes you hit it right out of the park but you know it's just interesting how the simplicity of something that's clear and also has like an emotional note is such a challenge in the first episode I sort of faced a different problem than what Evan was describing because Sean began filming video taping so much of his life it is true

36:41that at a certain point you can almost dial up anything but that didn't start from the beginning and a lot of the story that I was trying to tell in the first episode at least the first act of the first episode is before that is before there's precious little footage of Sean in the early days him dancing in a couple of music videos there's some photographs of him being in a way kind of a hanger on at a lot of hip-hop parties so there's there is a scarcity of a footage from those days and there's even less of his childhood and yet we're trying to tell the story of his childhood of how he came up and there's some very very important episodes that Sean himself is just not a reliable narrator of his childhood because he's so fixated with his own myth and the myth making and so he talks about his past in interviews but he mythologizes so many things and so the goal was to basically understand when we go back to Sean's childhood his adolescence

37:43there are certain things that his childhood friends a couple of whom appear in the film like in order to understand the story they're telling which is really a story of someone who was in many ways not popular outcast to some degree was bullied but had a desire even a sort of desperation to sort of break through that and become something I mean he was just very very tenacious and very very ambitious and that's the fact of of Sean like Sean doesn't get to from where he started to where where he got to without those qualities so I think the challenge was to go back to Sean's childhood and not just sort of rely on kind of the lore like if you sort of Google Sean he you know he grew up in Mount Vernon just north of the Bronx in New York and there's certain you know touchstones he would you know love heavy D he was also from Mount Vernon but the the most important thing to understand about Sean's childhood is his relationship to his mom you know the episode is called pain versus love and that's like Kirkborough's and you Sean very well from those

38:50you know the the beginning of his career that's the duality of Sean and so that the same person his mom who gave him so much love so much adoration such a sense of sort of I think purpose also was by I'm gonna say allegedly clearly there was a level of abuse happening as well and and I think that was in order to tell that story we had to really dig very very very deep into archive where we found things from an obscure interview that Sean did with James Lichten on inside the actor studio where his mom suddenly appears in the audience and you had to basically fill in a lot of blanks to understand this really rich complicated personal history and so I'm proud of that because it sort of uses found footage available material for which we had to dig very deep in order to construct a story that by the time you come out the other side at the very least you understand that Sean as Kirkborough's describes it he started hurting people because

39:55he was trying in some ways to cut the pain out that was inside of him and so I think it's just an example of what only docs can do that you can sort of find a deeper truth by showing the sort of multiplicity of perspectives on an event I'll talk about a challenge that we had which was the in episode four was the the trial how to tell the trial so I had started when I came on the the first attempt because they're all the material wasn't quite in yet was just to kind of intercut some backstory with some flashes of trial news I kind of started trying to just figure out how to tell the trial chronologically with you know what we had and of course it was two way too long and it didn't really like work because we didn't have the material and that wasn't it was going way too off of what the whole series was supposed to be which was like a lot more intimate with you know firsthand people and you know that were connected to Sean comes and at some point

40:58actually I think Netflix came and said like well maybe we just start with the verdict and then kind of like just look at specific things from my perspective like that with that opened up was the opportunity to only focus on like the Sean comes of it all which is really kind of what the whole series was and going into like what the prosecution wasn't doing right was like way too far a stray so that really just kind of like pointed it toward where it needed to go in like the what the efforts were that Sean comes did I think Alex donned on her or suddenly she was like we could use like Kirk for this which was something it was also lacking like like I think it was like it's too far a field from people that knew him where like go you know it's too many like third party people and then Kirk kind of became the center of that whole whole telling as well and that's how it all came together so that's just like a kind of a group like experience of figuring out that problem and what and and and then of course the proportion of what was necessary to be told in in that

42:02episode right it didn't need to be a half hour long thing of this whole trial like Jack made the comment he's like you could make a whole episode about the trial which is what we didn't weren't doing and didn't have the bandwidth for and wasn't really the the point of the series either so the tone needs to continue from the rest of the episodes whenever we strayed from Sean it felt like I think we all had our own moments in this we're like the story straight a little bit away from Sean and we could feel it kind of sag and then we either cut that or we redirect it back towards him and then everything made much more sense and became more clear uh gentlemen I've kept you far too long I really appreciate all the time you spent uh talking about this documentary and congratulations on a well-deserved demi thank you very much that's it for out of the cut this week thank you so much for listening if you'd also like to read this interview and see the trailer and clips check out borisfx.com slash blog slash aotc where there's

43:05a ton of great expert content for filmmakers of all types also my latest art of the cut book conversations with documentary editors which includes interviews with these guys from the podcast volume three is now available on amazon and on routledge.com thanks to Charles dvac ac e jermy cipher ac e evan wise ac e and Benjamin cast ac e for discussing their Emmy winning work on the Netflix docu series Sean combs the reckoning thanks as always to our partner borisfx to see how their award winning post-production tools can elevate your workflow visit borisfx.com and definitely check out isotope rx and borisfx's full suite of audio tools i'm steve hallfish ac e thanks for listening and please tell all the editors and filmmakers that you know that to get more great art of the cut interviews every week please subscribe on your favorite podcast app