‘Pam & Tommy’ Editor Tatiana S. Riegel Talks Two Important Scenes in ‘I Love You, Tommy’

Awards Daily talks to Pam & Tommy editor Tatiana S. Riegel about her work cutting the Emmy-nominated episode “I Love You, Tommy.”

Episode 2 of Hulu’s Pam & Tommy has a little bit of everything. A meet-cute, romance, timeless ’90s references, and a talking penis.

“I was cutting this at home and doing the penis scene,” says editor Tatiana S. Riegel, “and one day my housekeeper was here, and I was like, ‘Oh no! I’m not cutting porn!'”

Riegel’s previous work with director Craig Gillespie prepared her for cutting this particular scene in which Tommy (Sebastian Stan) has a conversation with his penis (voiced by Jason Mantzoukas) about falling in love with Pam (Lily James).

“You just have to treat it like a character. I had a similar situation in a film I did with Craig called Lars and the Real Girl, where Ryan Gosling falls in love with a sex doll. And we had to treat it like a character during the editorial process. Stay on it a little bit longer, as if Bianca is making comments or saying something. The same with this scene. You just treat it like another character. The craziness of it goes away pretty quickly; once you get through the dailies, it’s just another scene.”

But while this scene proves to be an important turning point for Tommy, Riegel points to two other scenes that she put some extra care into.

“One is the end of the episode with The King and I. [The music and dancing throughout this episode] shows the joyful bliss of that new love and euphoria, and it just worked well thematically, from that crazy weekend in Mexico with the alcohol and drug-induced insanity to getting married to this really, really lovely sweet scene at the end with The King and I. You’d never think either one of these people would have anything to do with that movie. It’s really funny and sweet and a great metaphor for the innocence and purity of where their relationship was at that moment, given the craziness of the start. They really had this love that was blown up by the events.”

The second scene that she gave some extra attention to was the one of them on the plane after they got married, which is their first moment of sobriety, with everything sinking in of what just happened.

“They don’t know each other at all, and then the scene in the car from the airport. Everything was just so spontaneous with them and not thought through. But I think that’s the really interesting thing about the entire episode. There are a lot of very delicate character things that happen.”

Music plays a huge portion of the episode, too, with multiple montages and dance sequences. Riegel, who cut the first three episodes, really loved working with music, whether it was in the background or incorporated in some other way.

“Some of the music they tried on the set, other times we stuck other songs in. It’s such a fun thing to do, and to show the passage of time, this crazy weekend of partying. It was a very interesting structure. The first episode was Rand’s relationship with Tommy and how he got into this predicament. And then with the second episode, it takes you to a whole other place with characters you’ve spent no time with, like Pam.”

Riegel also thought a lot about tempo with all these montages.

“You’re always thinking about pacing. There is a little bit of restructure stuff that we did that happens in the normal post-production process to make things more clear and less redundant. You keep watching and watching it. It’s like a sculpture—you have to take away just enough. The great thing is we can put stuff back, unlike a real sculpture, until we find that perfect recipe for conveying the emotion and the themes that we want to portray.”

In a different cut of the beginning of Pam and Tommy’s relationship, it could have been a horror film.

“First of all, he’s kind of stalking her, but she’s encouraging it but cautious. So it grows from that. Thank goodness Sebastian is so wonderful in that part. You really don’t like him in the first episode, but you can see why Pam is attracted to him, more than just that physical thing. You feel as an audience maybe that relationship could have worked if not this horrible thing happened.”

The scene where they reveal themselves to each other for the first time has a completely different tone than what might be expected from a series about a sex tape.

“You want it to be sexy but genuine and that playfulness you have at that stage of a new relationship where it’s exciting and everything is tingling, but it’s not gross; it’s so innocent and fun, almost teenager-like. It’s the process in post. You make a shot a little longer or shorter, sometimes you tighten things so much that you break it. A lot of it is just intuition and instinct. Because I’m the audience at that point. When I’m watching dailies, I just try to remember my first reaction to all of these moments. What I believed, what I laughed at, what I was touched by. And I have to remember those initial moments.”

Pam & Tommy is streaming on Hulu.