on The Process of Making TR, The Story of Theodore Roosevelt
It took us about two years to complete TR. We began by reading his letters, and there are over 100,000 letters, and all the biographies that were written about him and reading about his time. Out of that reading came a script. It took Geoff Ward and I six to nine months to write the script. The script serves as our road map, our guide. Based on the script we began to do our interviews and at the same time we began collecting the archival film and stills. I'd say the period of doing the interviews takes three or four months. We're always collecting archival film and stills but after three or four months we can begin to edit. We work with two editors and it takes maybe twelve months to do the editing.
People often ask about the archival film and archival photographs in a film like TR. It takes many months of patient search. I think if we make any special contribution to the study of history it's to the study of the visual record. We comb the country looking for, not only photographs of our central character, in this case Theodore Roosevelt, but for the contextual material, the material that will tell us what the times were like and we go to archival sources all over the country. What we do here is, we have a team led by Allyson Luchak, the coordinating producer for TR, who makes relationships with archival places all over the country. In the case of TR, the central source of the materials on the man himself was Harvard, the Harvard Library. There is a stunning collection of photographs and you can find the archival film, most of that featuring TR, is at the Library of Congress. What we did is we brought in about 5,000 photographs, photocopies, to study and out of those 5,000 we made 2,000 prints. We ordered them, we animated them, and in the final film there are probably 600. So the 5,000 reference prints that we brought in eventually got cut down to 600. Archival footage, we brought into our cutting rooms 17 hours, that's 40,000 feet of archival film, and in the end, out of that 17 hours there's approximately an hour in the film. We also shot about 20 interviews and then maybe, oh, ten hours or so of landscape footage or live action footage.