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“He Wanted To Share with People How To Embrace Death”: Editor Parker Laramie on André is an Idiot

Close-up of a brown-skinned men with long gray hair.Still from André is an Idiot. Courtesy Sundance Institute.

In Tony Benna’s directorial debut, André is an Idiot, André Ricciardi, armed with his sense of humor, documents his own eventual death from cancer. The film will premiere in the U.S. Documentary Competition of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.

Parker Laramie (Unfriended, Sing Sing) served as the film’s editor. Below, he talks about what it was like to join a delicate project while it was in motion and how they cut their subject’s journey down to just 88 minutes.

See all responses to our annual Sundance editor interviews here.

Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job?

Laramie: I had met producer Josh Altman a few times over the years, and I was working with a friend of his when this project was looking for an editor. He sent me some footage of André and immediately I wanted to jump in. André is the kind of documentary subject you only dream of—entertaining, intelligent, hilarious and comfortable being in front of the camera. I would’ve worked on anything with him at the center of it. Meeting Josh and director Tony Benna felt very natural and easy right off the bat, and I guess they liked me too, so we jumped right in.

Filmmaker: In terms of advancing your film from its earliest assembly to your final cut, what were your goals as an editor? What elements of the film did you want to enhance, or preserve, or tease out or totally reshape?

Laramie: When I came on, they had already been cutting as they were shooting. A lot of this team came from the ad world, so they already knew how to put together some very well cut and strongly conceptualized scenes. The tricky part, as André himself put it, was structure. Making sure each scene was building on the last one and setting things up early to have emotional payoff later on was what we focused on once I jumped on board.

Filmmaker: How did you achieve these goals? What types of editing techniques, or processes, or feedback screenings allowed this work to occur?

Laramie: Josh is a very strong storyteller and was already laying out a solid framework for us to work from before I started. When I stepped in, I dove into transcripts and watched all the vérité footage I could find looking for thematic connections and emotional arcs. We threw it all together, and it was about twice as long as we needed it to be, so we started whittling. Sometimes choosing what to cut is a gut feeling; other times, it’s about putting everything up on a board and drawing the big picture connections. Sometimes it was about finding the right piece of music, especially to work counterpoint to some of the darker moments of André’s illness. As soon as we felt we had something cohesive, we started sharing it with friends and family, sometimes individually at home and eventually in a small theater followed by a discussion and a questionnaire. We got feedback not only from trusted arbiters of taste or other filmmakers, but also people who themselves had gone through a cancer diagnosis or cared for someone who did. Sometimes we showed it to people with no connection to any of it at all, since part of the goal for us was to reach a fairly broad audience in spite of André’s niche sense of humor.

Filmmaker: As an editor, how did you come up in the business, and what influences have affected your work?

Laramie: I grew up in LA, and my whole family worked in TV and advertising. We watched a lot of movies and TV growing up. In high school I started digging into the Criterion Collection and the AFI Top 100 and stuff like that. I did critical studies of film in college, watching, reading and writing about film from a pretty academic and theoretical angle. In those years I was probably watching at least a movie a day, if not more. I don’t even remember most of the films I saw. I frequently will sit down to watch something only to realize halfway through that I’ve seen it before. After I finished school, I immediately started working as a PA and an assistant editor in whatever post-production scenarios would take me (VFX, web series, feature films, you name it). I did a lot of work for free before I was really qualified to do any of it and spent a lot of time teaching myself how to do it all both technically and creatively.

Filmmaker: What editing system did you use, and why?

Laramie: Recently I’ve been on more Adobe Premiere projects, but I came up using Avid almost exclusively. I prefer Avid’s robust media management and performance, but I prefer Premiere’s audio editing & mixing tools. Lately, Premiere has made some structural improvements to how everything is organized that bring it much closer to Avid, so I’ve started preferring Premiere lately. But a lot of times I don’t have a choice—I frequently come on to a project after it’s already been worked on for a few years, especially on the small indie docs I tend to gravitate towards. I like to make it easy for directors to do some of their own cutting if they like to, and they are usually more comfortable in Premiere unless they’ve done a lot of professional editing work on bigger shows. I’m fluent in both now, and if I have a solid AE I might start letting them decide based on which one they prefer to use.

Filmmaker: What was the most difficult scene to cut and why? And how did you do it?

Laramie: It was probably the road trip/mushroom trip scene. Those were originally two separate scenes, since the mushroom trip we had a recording of (André, unsurprisingly, does a lot of mushrooms) was technically much later in the progression of his disease. Both scenes were originally 4-5 times longer than they are in the final cut, and they never felt like they fit into the film until we combined them. At one point I was actually confused and thought the mushroom trip recording was from the night he spends with his best friend Lee out in the Blackrock Desert, since André was also doing mushrooms that night, so I accidentally combined them at one point. It unlocked this really big turning point in André’s journey and gave us the momentum we were looking for at the point in the film.

Filmmaker: What role did VFX work, or compositing, or other post-production techniques play in terms of the final edit? (Feel free to ignore this question if it’s not applicable.)

Laramie: As a documentary, the film doesn’t utilize any VFX, but it has a ton of animation. Director Tony Benna is an animator, so I followed his lead. Our process was—I would start out cutting the interview audio with some music and putting text cards describing what I thought the visuals might look like. Then he took that and drew storyboards, usually building on (or more often totally scrapping and replacing with a funnier, more sophisticated idea) my temp text descriptions to build a true scene. Tony had still photos of what the stop motion puppets were going to look like, which we included to give us a better sense of the visual tone and style we were aiming towards. Once we had a completely locked cut, Tony and his team totally took over and did the tedious but rewarding work of actually animating it all.

Filmmaker: Finally, now that the process is over, what new meanings has the film taken on for you? What did you discover in the footage that you might not have seen initially, and how does your final understanding of the film differ from the understanding that you began with?

Laramie: When I first came on the film, André was still alive. He was very much at the helm creatively in terms of what the film had to say and was making unexpected choices right up until the end. The film was brash and wild and unpredictable—as it still is! After he passed, it became much more about honoring his legacy. As he says, he wanted to live and die on his own terms, and he wanted everyone to know that they could do that too. He wanted to share with people how to embrace death, even as he struggled to do that himself. I, too, cope with the difficult things in my life with a dark sense of humor—but now I try to take a step back and make sure I’m also being sincere and authentic, especially with my family. It’s surprisingly difficult to toe that line.

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