Universal Cinema’s Ester Bovard interviewed Stormy editor Inbal B. Lessner ACE following the release of the film at the 2024 SXSW Film & TV Festival. Lessner is an Emmy-nominated documentary editor and producer based in Los Angeles.
Ester Bovard, Universal Cinema Magazine (UM): Can you tell me a bit about how you became involved with Stormy?
Inbal Lessner (IL): I was wrapping up Escaping Twin Flames for Netflix, a three-part docuseries, and my agent sent me the sizzle reel they put together. I had a vague recollection of the story from 2018. I remembered this moment in time where it was everywhere all the time and that some people thought Stormy Daniels was somehow going to save America or impeach then President Trump. But I really didn’t know much beyond the headlines.
I really liked the sizzle reel. It seemed like a feminist point of view on her story, and I was interested enough to take the meeting with Sarah Gibson, the director. They had already started editing, and they had a very aggressive schedule, unbelievably short at that point. I said, “Oh, who do you have already cutting on it?” And she told me four names of four men. I said, “Hmm, it’s interesting that you can’t find one woman available to cut the Stormy Daniels story.” And she looked at me and she smiled, and I think I kind of used my gender to get the job. Before I left the room, she said, “I’d like you to do this film with me.”
It’s interesting that shortly after we started, they put us on a two-week hiatus, because they started receiving all this footage after a first and second cut was already done. Extra footage from 2018, from previous filmmakers that have followed Stormy. We were able to obtain their footage that was never released or made into a finished documentary, and use that as archival in our new film.
The production needed time to ingest all that material and understand what we were dealing with and organize it. And then myself and my partner editor, Ben Kaplan, started diving into that new footage and figuring out how to incorporate it into the skeleton that they had already built. It was really like making a brand-new film from scratch.
(UM): With so much footage from other filmmakers and how much was in the media, there must have been a huge amount of material to reckon with. What was the process like, diving in from both ends when you had something partially assembled, and then something totally fresh?
(IL): I’m lucky enough to also create some projects where I start from the development phase and imagine the whole project from the beginning, usually with my producing partner Cecilia Peck. We’ve done three projects together, where we were on from conception to realization to release, and beyond. So, while I love getting in from the beginning, there are other projects where I’ll come in at the very end to just do a finishing pass, or like this … sort of in the middle, but then you understand that we really should take a step back and look at what we have.
I think the vision never changed. We just had this wealth of new footage that really let you see in real time what happens to somebody caught in the eye of the storm of an international scandal. Everywhere people talked about her, it was always “Porn Star Stormy Daniels,” and the reduction of her to that is problematic. We wanted to look at her as a full person: as a human being, a mother, a professional director, a wife. What did this do to her personally? How did she cope? Was she riding the wave? Did the wave crash and eat her alive? It’s a really interesting examination of what goes on behind the scenes: in the green rooms of these talk shows, in the car on the way to the strip club appearance, or in the hotel rooms, in private conversations on the phone with her then husband.
I personally came to it very quickly with a lot of not only empathy, but identification. Her daughter at the time was the age of my daughter. She was going through a crisis in her marriage, and I was in the midst of separation as well. She was a creative trying to manage it all, and I thought there was a lot to be learned beyond what people knew.
Obviously, when you work on a project like this, you’re not allowed to speak about it, but even when I mentioned the name to some friends, it seemed like people didn’t really know. They kind of remembered some details they heard in the news, and they usually made a salad of that. But nobody really knew the actual facts, and definitely didn’t know anything about her as a person. I saw the potential of it to be a really interesting profile of this woman and what she was going through as a result of one night that she spent with this 60-year-old man when she was 27 and how it upended her life 12 years later.
(UM): That struck me watching the film, all of these different perspectives that people have about Stormy and what she represents. People hook a lot of ideas onto her.
(IL): On both sides, right? Yes, exactly. Totally the spectrum.
(UM): You really present her in all her complexity, and contradiction sometimes. Was there anything that surprised you, or that changed your perspective?
(IL): Just so you know, Stormy herself didn’t have final cut. None of the previous filmmakers or journalists who contributed footage had any influence on what we could use or not. It was completely up to us to shape this story.
We wanted to be fair, and not have it be slanted one way or another. In the end, it’s a sobering portrait. She’s not the hero that the left was trying to make her. She’s not the skanky slut or traitor that the right was trying to make her. She was just a human trying to make do with this situation.
The revelation to me was that the more we allowed the story to be as complex or messy as it is, the better the film became. When I first I started watching the footage, I was like, who is this Denver guy? Is there something going on between them? You could tell something was there, but just from watching the footage, I didn’t know any other story. I just let the footage inform me.
I like to come to any film I make clean, especially when I’m hired as an editor. I come to it as clean as possible, and I just learn the world from the footage. I swim in it. I drown in it. I could tell there was something there. But obviously, that shot of them on the bed I hadn’t seen yet, which was the one shot we had that definitely shows intimacy between them. I just felt like there was something going on with their relationship.
I think leaning into the messy truth, whether it was the failure of the marriage, and then her husband stating adultery as the cause for filing for divorce, and different details of their story … how she got him into porn, and how that affected his mental health and their relationship. All that stuff is just fascinating and is the stuff that you can’t write.
If you try to write it in a movie, people will tell you that can’t happen. That’s too out there. But because it’s truth and it’s the messy reality, I think it’s even more interesting. It’s hyper real. I think that’s what we all learned. The more we leaned into the truth, even when it was complicated and messy, the better the film got.
(UM): You talk about how when it’s the reality, you can go places with the story that you can’t in a fictional context. I’m curious, because you’ve worked in narrative film as well, is that something that attracts you to documentary?
(IL): I love storytelling and I love editing. It has to be a specific story, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, that appeals to me. It’s also my livelihood, so I didn’t always have the privilege of choosing. But now that I have a little more choice, I try to go for films mostly about women who stand up for their truth, who find their voice, who have managed to tell their stories with newly found agency and try to bring justice or shed light on really important topics.
With my last two docuseries about cults, we had very, very brave women speaking out against coercive control and against abuse – emotional, psychological, sexual abuse. So, when you make documentaries about the kind of subject matter I do, it becomes partly activism. It becomes a calling. It’s more than a job. It’s more than telling a story. Oftentimes, the subject matter becomes more important than the craft. I love the craft of editing. I love the art of editing. But oftentimes, the story, the subject matter, the activism part of it takes precedence.
So that’s my niche, working on sexual assault documentaries and genocide, racism, sexism, terrorism … It’s all very dark, and the topics tend to overshadow the craft. But you still have to craft a really engaging, moving, compelling story for people to care about the subject matter. So, I think they’re equally important.
(UM): On some of the projects you’ve worked on with Cecilia Peck, you’ve worked with predominantly female crews. Do you think that makes a difference when you’re dealing with such sensitive subject matter?
(IL): Absolutely. I don’t want to sound sexist, because we didn’t have exclusively female crews. Over time, we did add very sensitive and sensible males to our crews. But there were a few days where we had exclusively female crews, and that felt different. Where everybody from the PA to the director and producers and all our department heads were women.
For survivors of cults or of sexual assault, there’s already so much trauma and trepidation in sitting in a chair in front of cameras and sharing very vulnerable, intimate details of very difficult experiences. There’s something about a set where it’s okay to, you know, talk about girl stuff, that just makes it a little easier. The typical set is very male dominated, so we work extra hard and the men and women we hire go through our own sensitivity training. Cecilia leads that effort. She makes sure they come on set with the right attitude, with the right understanding, with the right openness to listen and to offer support to somebody.
For example, if we have to cut to change battery, we don’t just say, “Let’s cut, we’re gonna change battery.” We say, “Thank you for sharing. We have to take a quick break.” And it’s not fake, the crew really do appreciate the openness and the candor and the genuine way in which the interviewee just shared. It just feels like a different experience being on our sets.
(UM): What’s next for you?
(IL): I had a very productive busy year between the release of Victim/Suspect last May, the release of Escaping Twin Flames in November, and now the release of Stormy. I’m working on a new feature, but not quite ready to share.
I’m also teaching documentary editing at AFI, which is a pilot course. They’ve never taught documentary before as it’s predominantly a fiction narrative conservatory. We’re adding some documentary to the toolbox of the editing fellows there, and I’m having a lot of fun with that.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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