For ‘Will and Harper’ director Josh Greenbaum, ‘laughter is the shortest distance between two people’
“I’m a huge believer in the expression, ‘laughter is the shortest distance between two people,'” declares “Will and Harper” director Josh Greenbaum. For our recent webchat he adds, “I love comedy. I love making people laugh. I felt that was really critical, because that’s really the love language between Will and Harper. They met on both of their first days at ‘Saturday Night Live,’ and they shared an immediate kind of love language in comedy. For me, finding that tone and capturing that tone of their friendship, and what their friendship looks like, both prior to Harper’s transition and then post, was what I was most interested in capturing. Obviously, the other question we ask in the film is what Harper asks, which is that she loves America, she loves this country, but she wasn’t sure, and she’s not sure, if it loves her back since her transition.” Watch our video interview above.
SEE our interview with ‘Will and Harper’ songwriter Sean Douglas
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In “Will and Harper,” comedian Will Ferrell finds out that his close friend of 30 years, fellow “Saturday Night Live” alum Harper Steele, is coming out as a trans woman. The two embark on a cross-country road trip to process this new stage of their relationship in an intimate portrait of friendship and transition. The candid and heartfelt documentary was lovingly directed by Greenbaum, as Ferrell and Steele explore a new chapter in their friendship, with Steele reconnecting with the country she loves; this time, as her true self. Over 16 days, the duo drives from New York City to Los Angeles, stopping at places that hold significance for them, pushing through their comfort zones with lots of laughter, tears, and plenty of Pringles.
“It’s really an incredibly intimate personal story,” Greenbaum explains about the core themes that the film contemplates. “I believe strongly that that’s where our politics should lie. It’s pretty simple that 70% of people don’t directly or think they directly know a trans person. So, it’s this sort of unknown. And for whatever reason, human beings, we are scared of the unknown so we’re susceptible to politicians telling us how to think or feel about something we don’t know about. For me, certainly part of the film was, if you watch ‘Will and Harper,’ and you don’t know a trans person, well, now you know Harper, now you know one, and she’s fantastic, and she’s funny, and she’s as Will puts it, a lovable curmudgeon,” he says. “As she said when she transitioned, instead of an asshole she’ll be a bitch and she’s just incredible, and I think that was really important to me was just to capture both the tone and tenor of their relationship and their friendship, but really focus in on the personal. It’s a very intimate, vulnerable, personal story of friends.”
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