
“I Often Think of Doc Editing as Being Similar to Poetry”: Editors Kate Hackett & Andy McAllister on Sally

Sally Ride is well-known for being the first woman in space, but less recognized is her 27-year partnership with Tam O’Shaughnessy. Director Cristina Costantini gives both the professional and the personal equal treatment in the Sundance Premieres documentary Sally.
Much of the film consists of footage shot by NASA during astronaut training. Editors Kate Hackett and Andy McAllister were tasked with combing through NASA’s enormous archive for Sally. Below, they talk about the challenges and excitement of being presented with so much footage and the importance of keeping the film close to Sally Ride’s story.
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?
Hackett: I met the director, Cristina Costantini, when we worked together on the A24 documentary Open Wide, which she produced. That film had a wonderfully eclectic mix of archival footage and vérité and was a strong character-based film about a father-son relationship.
On Sally, we had the blessing of being able to work with a rich treasure trove of fly-on-the-wall footage that was shot by NASA in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The NASA filmmakers followed the astronaut candidates and eventual astronauts around for many hours without much intervention, a true editor’s dream. I think Cristina knew based on my work with her as well as on the documentary series Cheer and Last Chance U that I would be able to work with this footage to create tense and riveting action sequences, and a poignant and intimate character arc for our main subject.
McAllister: I knew Cristina from when she made Science Fair, which I loved. When she told me about this project, I immediately felt it was going to be something special. I was only familiar with Sally on a pretty basic level. The more I learned, the more it became clear that this was a very emotional story that needed to be told. You’re telling the story of a person who’s known for making history, but we’re diving into a more intimate life journey. And then you get to combine that with these incredible visuals from the archival material from NASA. I knew it was going to be a real challenge, but it really excited me. I just felt so lucky I got to be involved.
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?
Hackett: I had one main goal, which was to give the audience the opportunity to viscerally feel what it would be like to be Sally Ride. I wanted them to feel the excitement and immense pressure of preparing for a space voyage, the danger and exhilaration of the launch, the let-down of coming back to Earth. I wanted them to feel Sally’s passion and love for her life partner, Tam O’Shaughnessy. I wanted them to feel how Sally felt free and alive with Tam, yet weighted by the constraints of a world that didn’t allow them an open life together. Each iteration of the cut was a process of further refining this goal.
McAllister: I think my primary goal was just to do justice to Sally’s story, her voice. At the same time, I wanted to do justice to those in Sally’s life, most prominently Tam. I try to be incredibly compassionate and empathetic toward all the people in any documentary I’ve cut, so I’m always asking: What’s driving this person? What’s their motivation? How are they feeling or experiencing a situation? You’re dealing with people’s relationships. They’re being so incredibly brave and vulnerable to discuss these things, so you just have to be so delicate and sensitive to what they’re sharing and how you’re shaping it. Then, as an editor, you have to step back and ask: Are we making this clear to the audience? Is there a simpler, more engaging way to shape the scene while still retaining all the emotional weight?
And even though I ultimately think this is first and foremost a personal story, I think the other goal was to never let the grandiose of space, and how epically cool that whole world is, take any sort of a backseat. We wanted to maximize all the NASA footage because it really is mind-blowing what they captured and what Sally accomplished. You just don’t get those kinds of massive visuals at your disposal all the time when cutting a documentary.
Filmmaker: How did you achieve these goals? What types of editing techniques, or processes, or feedback screenings allowed this work to occur?
Hackett: In an archival heavy documentary like this one, I’m a big believer in creating a sense of time, place, atmosphere and mood. This can’t always be done exclusively with the core archive (in this case our NASA footage), so I worked with archival producer Eugen Bräunig to sift through piles of beautiful archival footage from various disparate sources to find just the right establishing shot, transition, bridge or cutaway that could both evoke emotion and seamlessly blend into the cut.
I also worked hard to understand who Sally was. Sally Ride was a self-professed introvert who tended to talk about emotions sparingly, which meant that, as an editor, I often had to read between the lines or listen to the interviews of those who loved her to understand what she was feeling and how she truly experienced the world. I tried to listen very carefully to Sally and her family and her friends, in order to represent her experience as truthfully as possible.
McAllister: Well, it’s a process of constantly reshaping and looking at how individual scenes are talking to each other. I always use the super dorky analogy of a Rubik’s Cube. You can have really great individual scenes that function wonderfully as a standalone sequence, but it’s ultimately how they are connecting to one another and lining up. How are they, as a unified whole, pushing the story forward? And structurally, you often have to be willing to throw things out of order to find the right sequence. You have to say, ok this isn’t going to work, but it’s not working the way it is so you have to break it and rearrange. You have to have some sort of faith that you’re not totally destroying the film.
I also love feedback screenings. When several people in unison tell you something is boring, confusing or unnecessary, it saves days in the edit. It’s harder to deny when you have overlapping responses. You eventually reach a point in the process where you’re sort of in an echo chamber of opinions with the director and the team. Everyone has weighed in on what they think, and you need the fresh eyes of an unbiased audience to help settle debates or push you into a new, more interesting direction.
Filmmaker: As an editor, how did you come up in the business, and what influences have affected your work?
Hackett: Both of my parents are theater directors, and I think watching them work with actors taught me that empathy and putting yourself in someone else’s shoes can be a tool for creative expression.
I went to UCLA Film School, where I got my degree in film production/directing. There, I was lucky enough to be mentored by two incredible editors, Nancy Richardson and Curtiss Clayton.
Directly after film school, I had the opportunity to work for composer Laura Karpman, first editing and then co-directing a series of art films for her multimedia concert Ask Your Mama at the Hollywood Bowl. This began a career directing concert art films for composers, including for the internationally touring show Portals for violinist Tim Fain, which featured a premiere of a piece by Philip Glass. When I pivoted more towards scripted and then documentary editing, I think I brought my musicality and my sense of rhythm, pacing and tone along with me.
McAllister: I actually interned at a recording studio in high school, and they had a bunch of video gear gathering dust in the corner. Bands would come in to record in the studio, and I’d shoot and edit little behind-the-scenes videos for them. That just sort of kept going. I’d direct some of my own films, then help friends cut their films. I was always a big movie lover growing up; the more escapist, the better. I loved Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, sci-fi and horror movies. So I suppose it’s a little strange I wound up working on so much “real world” material.
I’ve been incredibly lucky to work on documentaries about people who’ve had a tremendous impact on our culture, like Quincy or Stan Lee. I’m drawn more and more to docs about people, how they did what they did, and what makes them tick. And I love how much of a wild horse documentaries can be. As an editor, you have a lot of opportunity to explore and shape things. Stories evolve in documentaries in ways that, as long as you don’t fight it, are pretty exciting to be a part of.
Filmmaker: What editing system did you use, and why?
Hackett: We used Avid on this film. I work on both Avid and Premiere, but I’m a big fan of ScriptSync when you are working with this many interviews.
McAllister: Avid. But I also use Premiere. To me, they’re both great. Unfortunately, neither has created the “make the story better” button yet. That’s the dumb joke I always make to get everyone to groan when things are going particularly bad in an edit, ha.
Filmmaker: What was the most difficult scene to cut and why? And how did you do it?
Hackett: I’m especially proud of my work editing the NASA footage from Sally’s missions. The missions were shot with numerous cameras—usually one on the mission control room floor, one or more inside the space shuttle operated by the astronauts, several placed near the launch pad, several following the space shuttle as it ascends, and then sometimes (and most beautifully) cameras attached to a remote manipulator arm to film the shuttle gliding through space.
There are several things that make this work difficult. One is the sheer volume of the footage. The other is, as a layperson rather than a scientist, the learning curve of being able to visually identify the different steps of a space voyage. The third challenge is then to be able to distill this footage, so that in very little time, the audience gets the sense of what Sally must have felt like on her journey.
I often think of doc editing as being similar to poetry. You don’t have the screen time to show things as they actually happened—so you need to choose your words and images very wisely.
McAllister: For me, it’s always the montages. You can spend a day or a week cutting montages, come back to them a month later, and it always feels like you’re leaving some cool shots out. Sometimes Cristina or I would discover a really amazing shot, and instead of being excited, we’d be horrified that it somehow wasn’t being used in the cut. But I think we remedied that for the most part.
Filmmaker: What role did VFX work, or compositing, or other post-production techniques play in terms of the final edit?
Hackett: I think, especially in an archival heavy documentary like this, it’s important to start previs-ing some of the choices you will make in the finishing processes as early as possible, because they will also determine the pacing and style of the edit.
From a very early stage, we started playing with what footage we would punch in on, or what footage we would leave in its natural aspect ratio, and building a set of editorial conventions and language. We started temping out adding grain and other effects to untreated footage, to see if we could seamlessly match our archival. We started introducing elements of text and animation.
I think this previs process helped refine Cristina’s, Andy’s and my mutual language.
McAllister: There were certain moments in the film where we were having trouble visually representing the story. Some of the historic footage just wasn’t hitting right. But then Alfie and Alex (who were our art director and animator) started creating these more abstract animations, often inspired by old vibe-y science films, and it just brought a whole new life to those sections, expanding the world of the film. I kept asking, “Can we do more of that?!” And also, more of Jeff’s score! Both of those elements kept making everything so much more interesting, dynamic and bigger. As an editor, you can sort of feel like you’re grinding away on sections, and then other brilliant people come in and save the day.
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?
Hackett: In the thick of the edit, this film felt complex. There were questions of structure and pacing to solve, notes to address, details to leave in or omit. As a finished film, it feels simple and universal. At its heart, it’s one of the oldest stories in the book—an intertwining of an adventure story and a love story.
Reflecting at the end of the process, my biggest take-away is that I feel deeply honored to have had the opportunity to tell Sally and Tam’s story.
McAllister: I think it’s a deeper understanding and appreciation for what Sally and Tam went through. I think initially I had the preconceived idea that I’d see the film through the lens of “accomplishments,” this idea of “follow your dreams” that we all hear so much and is so ingrained in our culture and exploring just how much that is just not the same for everyone. But I came to understand how much of a love story it is, about choosing who and how you love someone, and all the complications and sacrifices that people make to be with another person. And at the end of the day, I think we need more love and understanding in this world! I’m really so proud to be a part of this film and for people to see it.