I recently interviewed Lisa D’Apolito, director of the documentary Love, Gilda for the website NoFilmSchool. Years ago, when I was doing freelance editing work, Lisa would hire me for gigs at her ad agency. We’d both stopped working for the agency a year or two before she started working on the film and I can remember her telling me she wanted to do a feature about Gilda Radner. I’m sure I nodded and said something encouraging, gave to the IndieGogo campaign and kept it moving. Nearly five years later the film was selected as opening night film at the Tribeca Film Festival and played 50 cities this past weekend. Go Lisa!
I interviewed her in the lobby of a hotel in Manhattan, doing my best impersonation of a journalist, but really the questions were things I wanted to know, filmmaker-to-filmmaker. One of my favorite responses is below, but please read the whole thing over at NoFilmSchool.
Rivero: Were there things that you really wanted to do as a filmmaker that took your collaborators awhile to understand? How did you end up getting those things to work in the film?
D’Apolito: Getting the audio of her voice to work was my number one, most adamant thing. There was nobody who really said, “this is going to work.” The audio quality was so bad from some of the materials everybody said, “this isn’t going to work.” We kept digging and subsequently found other pieces. I spent a couple years tracking down anything I could find of Gilda. If I read somewhere that Gilda was in New Orleans, I would go through all the newspapers, and if someone did an interview with her, I would try to contact the journalist and say, “Do you still have the tape?”
The film is funny and touching. The fact that Gilda Radner’s voice anchors the story gives it an authenticity that’s rare in a celebrity biopic. The fact that it took so much effort to get the voice part to work, makes it all the more special. Be sure to catch the film in theaters as well. I’ve seen it twice. Once as a journalist, and once in a big old movie theater, just for myself.