Hollywood Reporter – ‘Pam & Tommy’ Editor Reflects on Scene That Was a “Pivotal Turning Point”

Talking about reteaming with her I, Tonya director Craig Gillespie on Pam & Tommy, Oscar-nominated editor Tatiana S. Riegel describes the stories Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, and that of Tonya Harding, as “misunderstood.”

“I actually find them kind of similar, the two stories,” Riegel says in a new episode of The Hollywood Reporter‘s Behind the Screen podcast. “Because of the length of time (since the events occurred), a lot of people either didn’t know anything about it, or had a preconception of what the stories were going to be — often a very judgmental preconception.”

“I knew there was going to be a certain emotional level to it,” Riegel adds of Gillespie being at the helm. “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.”

A favorite scene for Riegel, whose work with Gillespie also includes Disney’s Cruella, occurs in episode two and features newlyweds Pam (Lily James) and Tommy (Sebastian Stan) at home one night watching TV as 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.”

During the conversation, Riegel also discusses her approach to film editing, including why she “avoids the set at all costs.”

“I have a lot of work to do, number one. And number two, I think [being on set] influences my perception,” Riegel says. [When] I watch the dailies … I try to hold onto … my first emotional reaction–to a take, a line, a performance, whatever it is, as whether it’s genuine or real, or made me laugh or made me cry.”

“[But] there’s a very classic thing that happens where things are hysterical on the set,” she continues. “Everybody loves it. And when it actually comes into the cutting room and you watch it in dailies, it’s not so funny anymore, or vice versa. And so everybody’s like, ‘That seemed so much funnier on the day.’ It’s not an editorial thing. It’s just a translation thing. …. It’s like watching a comedy at home alone, versus with a huge audience. It’s a different experience.”

Variety – Why ‘Pam and Tommy’ Used Sebastian Stan’s Vocals Instead of Tommy Lee’s for Motley Crue Covers

In the finale of Hulu’s “Pam & Tommy,” based on the vastly different experiences of Pamela Anderson Lee and Tommy Lee during their sex tape scandal, Lee’s group Mötley Crüe performs a promotional gig in a Tower Records parking lot, pinned to their “Generation Swine” album. The song they perform is “Crüe-by-numbers,” even if you can’t quite place it. A Shazam tap reveals the song is actually “She Says Yeah Yeah,” and the singers are Sebastian Stan (who plays Lee), Sam Meader and Zack Gold, not Mötley Crüe.

In fact, there aren’t any Mötley Crüe songs in the series, partly due to financial constraints, according to Amanda Krieg Thomas, the show’s music supervisor. Mainly, however, she notes that it never felt like there was a need for one — with the exception of the one scene.

“The team wanted to wait until production was done before going down any Mötley Crüe roads,” says Krieg Thomas. “The financial component pointed us to the idea of, ‘What if we did something original in the style of the music they were making in that era?’”

Stan’s drum coach, Isaac Carpenter wrote, recorded and produced “She Says Yeah Yeah,” as well as played all the instruments on the song, barring the shredding lead guitar. Says Krieg Thomas, “[Carpenter] said, ‘I know this era. I know that music. I can nail it.’ And he did.”

Musician and producer Devin Bronson (Avril Lavigne, Krewella) recorded the lead guitar parts, as well as played hand double for the close shots. Chris Mann, who plays Mötley Crüe guitarist Mick Mars, learned the instrument just for the medium and wide shots.

Krieg Thomas reached out to Adam Anders, executive music producer for “Glee” to see if he knew someone who sounded like the band’s Vince Neil. Anders then pointed her to Scottish-born vocalist Storm Gardner, the Crüe singer’s vocal doppelgänger. “We also had Sofia Toufa who toured with Mötley Crüe, helping them with stage movement and choreography,” says Krieg Thomas. “She coached the guys on how the band performs, what Vince would do, what Nikki Sixx would do, how he holds his bass and how he looks when he’s doing it. It was cool to watch her. It added that level of authenticity to the performance.”

Krieg Thomas was given free reign on the needle drops of Craig Gillespie’s show. There were no restrictions on genre or period — or how many songs Krieg Thomas sent over.

“When I read the script, it felt very stylized,” she says. “There were a few scripted songs, but not tons of them. Some of them were ’90s songs, like La Bouche’s ‘Be My Lover,’ and some of them were older, like Dolly Parton’s ‘I Will Always Love You.’ I pulled 20 songs for [Gillespie] and said, ‘This is what eclectic means to me.’ He said, ‘This is great. Send me more.’ I sent 400 songs in the first week. Those hundreds of songs went in the bank for the editors. We started seeing the cuts, and I did not anticipate 20 songs in each episode. It’s such a specific way to use songs to tell a story.

There were some selections pinned to Pam, that Krieg Thomas was insistent on including. Among these are Captain & Tennille’s “Feel Like a Man,” used when she is descending into a hotel lobby full of “schlumpy” men, and Roxy Music’s “More Than This,” which plays during Pam’s first Playboy photoshoot. The idea was to subvert the type of music the viewer might associate with her.

These are moments where it’s important to showcase Pam and who she is, as well as who she has to put on display for the world,” says Krieg Thomas. “It’s not necessarily always from her perspective, but to communicate with the world, and how we, the audience, are supposed to feel about her and be with her in these moments, using music.”

LA Times – Lily James and Sebastian Stan find a real relationship at the heart of ‘Pam & Tommy’

Lily James knew of Pamela Anderson only as “the icon from ‘Baywatch’ and Playboy.” Sebastian Stan knew something of Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee‘s reputation for debauchery. But when James and Stan got working on the limited series “Pam & Tommy,” which turns on the infamous sex tape stolen from the couple, the two actors found themselves struck by … innocence.

“There was a certain innocence to them that was in the script,” Stan says, “a lot of it in that initial, comet-like meeting that happened between them that led to three, four days in Mexico and, suddenly, a wedding. There was this instant pull, and it lasted for them. We were both conscious of trying to find that authentic kind of primal attraction, being protective of that and conveying that in the best way we possibly could.”

That high-speed collision of Anderson and Lee is depicted in the second episode. As presented by showrunner and writer Robert Siegel, director Craig Gillespie and the whole creative team, (especially cinematographer Paula Huidobro of “CODA,” editor Tatiana S. Riegel, who worked with Gillespie on “I, Tonya,” and the all-in hair-and-makeup department led by Barry Lee Moe, David Williams and Jason Collins), it’s a wild ride of two people falling head over heels in love — with a not-inconsiderable boost from mind-altering substances. The series doesn’t shy from portraying the couple’s explosive sexuality. It has loads of fun doing so. But as the poet sang, “Only true love can leave beauty innocent.”

Stan says, “We would meet at Craig’s house and he’d be like, ‘We’re gonna do this and all these push-ins, and these are gonna be the songs …’ When I watch that episode, I almost feel like I’m high.”

“High on love, high on drugs, high on everything,” agrees James from a separate Zoom screen. “It felt like them against the world, which felt so intoxicating to watch, and I think even more upsetting to see the world banging down their door.”

The actors’ transformations into the famous couple went viral before the show ever aired, but the stars solemnly attest to their determination to honor Anderson and Lee — and especially their relationship — despite the outsize personalities in the series and its crazy events. Seriously, four days knowing each other, then a beach wedding.

James laughs: “There’s no sense in falling in love!”

The Brit best known for “Downton Abbey” and “Cinderella” clearly enjoys the absurd. When the notion of her in the role came up, she thought, “‘Whoa, me? Pamela Anderson? That’s completely insane.’ I was just shocked I would be in anyone’s mind when it came to casting, and I was hungry for that.”

When she started researching, she was overwhelmed by the abundance of material. But when she found early Anderson interviews, “It would be like gold dust. Although she’d already ridden to huge fame, it’s that word Sebastian used: ‘innocence.’ The newness of her career, of ambition, of a relationship, of love — love feels so important for her energy. I began to see real anchors of behavior, mannerisms and physicality.

“We were working through the script in the garden. Craig was like, ‘Let’s just get it on its feet.’ We went out to his driveway and acted out the scene with the car outside the club — we were looking like Lily and Sebastian, so it was kind of weird without the whole —” she waves her hands to indicate makeup and costumes — “but there was something so playful … ‘This is cool, this is gonna come alive.’ ”

She looks down, smiling at the memory.

Stan says the scene in which the two actors felt most connected involved a bedroom fight — James cheers in assent as he invokes their nickname for it, “ ‘The John Cassavetes Scene’ in Episode 5.”

She interjects, “This is what I was going to say!”

“We were like, ‘It’s good in a oner!’ We had this wide shot,” he says, still enthused. “ ‘You could just keep it as a oner!’ ” he says of wanting a long, uninterrupted shot.

James shares his enthusiasm. “We were texting the showrunner this shot of the monitor: ‘Do this whole fight in this one wide shot!’ It was so physical,” she says. “It went from 1 to 100, like fights do.”

But in all the excitement, James emphasizes they were “really trying to explore that personal relationship to understand how deeply painful and unforgivable it was to rob that [tape] from them. To steal something so private.”

Stan echoes what a violation it was for a thief to expose their most intimate moments to the world.

“People just assumed they did [it on purpose]: Everybody has a sex tape, blah blah blah. But that was never the intention. Buried underneath all that, it’s two human beings who wanted to have a family. I feel like no one really thought of that,” he says.

“We just wanted to get to the human beings,” he adds. “We make a lot of projections on people — they were loud in certain ways, they were on top — but deep down, they just wanted to have a family and have some normalcy. That’s all they were trying to do.”

The Wrap – The actor has received some of the best reviews of his career for portraying Motley Crüe’s Tommy Lee in the Hulu miniseries.

This story about Sebastian Stan first appeared in The Limited Series/Movies issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.

Even in the carefully tended superhero universe where Sebastian Stan resided for quite some time as Bucky Barnes/Winter Soldier in various Marvel Cinematic Universe projects, the actor still got to play a distinctly dark duality. It’s a characteristic that has marked many of Stan’s best-known roles, such as figure-skating schemer Jeff Gillooly in “I, Tonya” and his recent turn as a human butcher in the thriller “Fresh”. But the prospect of playing Motley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee was a whole different jam.

The Hulu miniseries “Pam & Tommy” doesn’t focus on Lee’s bad-boy image, but rather the litigation surrounding the infamous sex tape that he and wife Pamela Anderson (Lily James) made — and that ended up being a bellwether for the boon of the amateur video market. The series doesn’t shy away from showing you his goes-to-11 bluster, but it also makes room for the guy who held Anderson’s hand in the hospital during some crushing personal news and could cook up a mean, full-course Greek meal just for fun.

“I was terrified, but the themes felt very resonant and timely, and anything (where I feel) a hesitancy or fear means there’s really something to unpack,” said the Romanian-born actor, who moved to the States in the ‘90s when he was an adolescent (and the heyday of hair-metal mania was over).

“Actually, in 2006, there were auditions for (the Motley Crüe biopic) ‘The Dirt,’ and I had actually gotten an audition to play Vince Neil. That film didn’t end up getting made then, but later did elsewhere (at Netflix), but by then I was too old for it.” Eventually, “I, Tonya” director Craig Gillespie approached Stan about “Pam & Tommy.“ He said, ‘I think you’d be great for this,’ though I was never quite sure why he thought that.”

Stan’s wild-eyed yet empathetic portrayal of the drummer with bravado to spare has won him praise from critics. The physical transformation into Lee took up to three hours every day to ensure that the jet-black hair, multiple ear-and-nipple piercings and tattoos were just right. There was even the application of a prosthetic puppet penis (voiced by Jason Mantzoukas) to whom Lee waxes romantic about his love for Anderson. This came right out of the eyebrow-raising biography “Tommyland” by Anthony Bozza that Stan used as a guidepost. (Lee also gave the miniseries his blessing.)

“Talking to (the hair and makeup team and costume designers) is just as important as the director,” Stan said. “I like to hear what they’re thinking and their take on the scene. In this instance, they were essential, because I don’t have tattoos and I don’t wear thongs,” he added, laughing. “But that time in the chair was very helpful. I used to listen to audio of Tommy to prepare, and it was just a great time on my own.”

The actor also had to learn to wail on a drum set like Lee notoriously did. He took lessons and is still trying to keep up with it post-shoot. “Tommy said it was a great outlet for him,” Stan said. “And I’ve always looked at acting as a way to learn new things, and you’re not always given that option. It’s the same with learning stunts and doing physical training. It’s just a really exciting thing.”