Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Respect

Jody Hill, the director of Observe and Report, talking about being a "story editor" for the reality tv show "The Mole"-


"JH: Oh my God. You would get all the footage that they shoot. Basically you shoot all this footage, and there’s usually some kind of event or contest or something that each week is structured around. I would have to watch all the footage and somehow make scenes out of this footage and put them together so there’s an A story, a B story, and all this stuff that leads up usually to this big thing.

But what’s weird is, you’ll take things from later in the season, like if there’s a big fistfight and you don’t really have anything going on. Like, say you have a girl and a guy hooking up, okay? And you don’t have any footage from that week of them hooking up, and yet at the contest that week, the guy helps the girl complete the mission or something. We would take something that was shot at the end and put it in that episode so it builds like there’s a storyline, basically. So I would have to watch, you know, hundreds of hours of footage and use different things to make it. I’ll say this, though, I think watching all that footage, as lame as those shows were and as miserable as I was—I was really depressed during that time. I just hated it, you know? It’s just horrible. I think just watching people—they might be phony folks, but they’re not actors—just watching all that footage kind of helped me a little bit, because I saw what people were just like in front of the camera, just doing their own thing, and I think that influenced the performance style I try to get out of characters and things."

Full interview is great-
http://www.avclub.com/articles/jody-hill,26484/