Epic Bill is a feature documentary that I co-edited with my partner Quinnolyn Benson-Yates between 2020 and 2022. Just now in 2024 it's getting picked up by PBS for nation-wide distribution!

Before Epic Bill I had only edited fictional narratives, and that continues to be my main passion, however it was a special treat to put my mind to a documentary with such a vast amount of archival footage. My statistics program tells me that there was roughly 600 hours of footage. Our subject Bill Bradley had been collecting footage of his endurance athletics for over 15 years, and finding the gems was no simple feat.

In the process of searching through all that footage I developed a somewhat intricate filter and tagging system. I organized footage by event and potential role like "exteriors", "beauty shots", "action moments", and variations on "actuality dialogue" as their categories and themes emerged. Notable shots and special gems received highlight colors, and after the initial look-through began the selection process.

Every cluster of footage was cut down to its most valuable bits. My criteria for that was complicated and difficult to express exactly, but I can say at least that the criteria was emotional responsiveness, that is: no matter what else it's qualities or detriments, if a shot made me feel something it got selected. That could be the content of Bill's expression during a particularly difficult climb, an illuminating comment made by a nearby rando, or a vista so grand and striking that it would be criminal not to put it before other's eyes.

The film's structure was by far the most difficult process to hone in. David Lynch says encouragingly that you only need about 70 scenes to make a movie, but I ask: In what order do those scenes go? When you have 10,000 scenes worth of footage, which scenes do you include or exclude? More to the point, how do these scenes interact? A change in a scene in the first 5 minutes will completely alter the meaning of a scene in the last 5. Not only are the combinatorial possibilities exponential, but the audience experience is extremely sensitive to these minute details. And the documentary form is open: it does not give you an easy way to ignore these possibilities.

There were certain things we always kept in mind, such as the need for clarity, for an engine driving the plot, sensitivity to how the audience feels about Bill and those around him, how any given scene modifies the message of the film or how we think about the themes. We cared a lot about how it started, how things were introduced, how it ended, and how the engine transforms.

Overall the process required constant reflection, iteration, discussion, application of intuition, knowledge of film and story language, inspiration from viewings of other films and shows, and a boatload of elbow grease. We spoke constantly about the big picture, the little picture, and the medium picture and tried everything we thought might work.