Indie Wire – Behind the Whirlwind Romance of ‘Pam & Tommy,’ There’s a Longstanding Creative Partnership

Australian director Craig Gillespie creates an energy in his images that brings the emotional undercurrent of his characters to life. He invites you into their space to wash in their feelings without saying too much. It’s the result of close collaboration with key department heads, a dynamic that editor Tatiana Riegel was first introduced to on 2007’s “Lars and the Real Girl.” “Craig is remarkably collaborative and secure in his own feelings and ideas to not insist upon them but he allows people to interpret them where he can then say yes or no,” she told IndieWire.

Riegel said their efforts have blossomed over the course of projects like “I, Tonya” (for which she earned an Oscar nomination), “Cruella,” “The United States of Tara” in part, because even though they “are very different people, the yin and yang of it works pretty well.” Gillespie has grown fond of how effortlessly the editor navigates outside the box. “We did our first assembly of ‘Lars’ and there was an interview scene between Ryan [Gosling] and Patricia Clarkson [who plays a therapist] that I thought was too long,” he said. “Tatiana said, ‘Maybe it’s in the wrong place.’ So we pulled out the scene cards and rearranged the whole second half of the film and that scene never got shorter. Since then, we’ve never settled on the structure of the script and we’ll always think about moving something around or tightening.

The simpatico relationship gives Riegel the “courage to try things” she might otherwise be conservative about with someone new, a trust that continued into the first trio of episodes of “Pam & Tommy,” Hulu’s limited series about how the infamous Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee sex tape found its way onto the web.

Creator Robert Siegel based “Pam & Tommy” on a 2014 Rolling Stone article that details how the “Baywatch” star and Mötley Crüe drummer first met, and the “karma” that led to their private life being exposed. After stripping away the public persona and glamor of these two famous icons – portrayed convincingly well by Lily James and Sebastian Stan — “Pam & Tommy” depicts a couple unequivocally supporting each other while falling deeper in love — until it collapses.

“The tone was incredibly clear to me and that’s something I always look for when searching for something to work on,” Gillespie said. “If I can visualize it while I’m reading [the script], half the job is done.”
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Hollywood Reporter – These series blend comedy and drama, which meant their editors had to find the right tonal balance.

Tatiana Riegel’s long collaboration with director Craig Gillespie includes I, Tonya — the dark comedy about the Tonya Harding 1990s figure skating scandal for which the editor earned an Oscar nomination — and their latest, Pam & Tommy, for which she again had to walk a fine line between humor and seriousness.

“For Craig to be attached to it, I knew there was going to be a certain emotional level to it,” she says of the Hulu limited series, which revolves around the marriage of model-actress Pamela Anderson and Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee and their notorious sex tape. “And it would be intriguing in addition to his comic sense, [showcasing] his ability to sort of walk back and forth between those two places in a lovely way.”

Riegel, whose work with Gillespie also spans Lars and the Real Girl (2007) and Disney’s Cruella (2021), cut the first three episodes of Pam & Tommy, which vary greatly. The first follows Seth Rogen as Rand Gauthier, the man who steals valuables (and, inadvertently, the sex tape) from the couple after Lee (Sebastian Stan) stiffs him on a construction job. The second goes back in time, showing viewers how Pam (Lily James) and Tommy met, fell in love and were married. The third in the eight-episode arc picks up the narrative just after Rand had stolen the tape, and the story proceeds from there.

“Then you get into this much more emotional storyline of what’s happening to Pam — both of them — but I feel, or at least how I interpreted it, was sort of more the Pam story,” Riegel says. “A lot of it is defined by the script, and that’s the jumping-off point in terms of the broader themes of fame, how women are treated versus men and a love story that is very unusual. Those are the things that I really liked about the scripts for the first three episodes that I read, early on, and that I thought were just going to be really fun and challenging to cut.”

Finding each character’s tone was critical. She says of the first episode, “Seth Rogen is obviously known for this wonderful, great, broad, hysterical comedy, and this was a very different role for him. It was much quieter and stiller. [In the editing, I had to] find that and make sure that we didn’t drift into other things.”

She also had to navigate the arc of Stan’s Lee as he is seen in the first episode by Rand. “To make Tommy Lee as unappealing as he actually is in that first episode [took] work, because Sebastian’s fantastic and charming,” says Riegel, who also worked with Stan on I, Tonya (he played Harding’s then-husband, Jeff Gillooly). “You have to find all of those moments without making him too horrible because you want the audience to empathize with him and be into his story as well. But he’s doing dreadful things in the first episode and is really a jerk. Finding that line is just always interesting.”

In contrast, a very different side of Lee is seen in episode two, during which newlyweds Pam and Tommy are home one night watching TV and Pam introduces her husband to The King and I. She sings “Getting to Know You” from the classic musical as the pair playfully giggle and dance around the bedroom.

“That particular scene was a real pivotal turning point, emotionally, in the story,” Riegel says. “This is a really unusual scene, to have a character like Tommy Lee watching this musical. She’s so into it. I find it to be this really sweet, vulnerable scene that they both are participating in. And I feel like that really cracks the door open for the rest of the season.”

It was also a tough scene to cut, she adds. “They’re moving all over this room, and musically, you’re having to follow along with the specific song and create the fun, the movement, the emotion, the relationship, the vulnerability, all of those things happening all at once.”