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“A Grueling 12-hour Interview Day” | Cristina Costantini, SALLY
Sally Ride appears in
SALLY by Cristina Costantini. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by NASA. Films are made over many days, but some days are more memorable, and important, than others. Imagine yourself in ten years looking back on this production. What day from your film’s development, production or post do you think you’ll view as the most significant and why?
My favorite part of making SALLY was getting to know Tam O’Shaughessy, and the most memorable day of shooting was a grueling 12-hour interview day which now serves as the primary narration for our film.
National heroes like Sally Ride inspire us, give us hope, and show us just how far we can go. But so often our heroes hurt the people they love the most for the benefit of those they’ll never meet. In Sally’s case, it was her life partner Tam. Their beautiful relationship was kept secret for 27 long years, which pained Tam immensely, their love never truly recognized until it was too late. The day I met Tam, I knew that she was a brilliant woman. But on that fateful interview day almost a year ago now, I began to appreciate what an incredible, insightful storyteller she is with a vivid memory that could rival anyone. Most people would say, “The shuttle launched that morning.” Tam would start the same story by saying “I remember as the sun began to rise, the birds were flitting around the foreground of the wetlands as the sun glinted off of the orange external fuel tank in the distance.” This was the greatest gift as a filmmaker, to have a central narrator who is also an incredible writer and storyteller.
But more than just her brain, Tam’s emotion and vulnerability that day allowed us to tell a complex story of who this pioneer really was. At the end of that shoot day, I remember getting a drink at the hotel bar with the film’s producer Lauren Cioffi and our director of photography Michael Latham. We were buzzing. We knew Tam had opened up the door for a much more textured, intimate, vulnerable film than we ever imagined. Bringing the memories Tam told us that day to life was the central project of this film. For much of the publicly recorded story we have great archive, but for the most beautiful part of Sally’s story, her romance with Tam, we had to develop our own visual device. We decided to shoot visual sequences on 16mm film to capture the fuzzy warm feeling of falling in love, the feeling of having a secret, and the feeling of growing old with a loved one.
Sally was brave in concrete ways I was able to understand as a kid. Blasting off into space on a fiery rocket takes a lot of chutzpah, after all. But as an adult, Tam’s bravery and authenticity is much more striking to me. Risking one’s career and public acceptance in order to love who you love is a pretty remarkable thing.
