How ‘Chimp Crazy’ Was Edited With Ethics

When I turned on Chimp Crazy for the first time, I had no idea what to expect. A few minutes into the first episode, I knew I was hooked.

You can imagine that making a documentary where you fake who’s directing it in order to gain deeper access to a subject is going to have some narrative and ethical hurdles to jump through in order to get it to the audience.

Well, editor, writer, and producer Evan Wise was one of those people helping craft the series into such a sensational journey. I had the pleasure of sitting down with him to discuss this epic story and how ethics can be incorporated into editing.

Let’s dive in.

Editor’s note: the following interview is edited for length and clarity.

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No Film School: What initially drew you to work on Chimp Crazy, and what were your primary goals as the supervising editor, writer, and producer?

Evan Wise: The biggest thing that made me want to tell the story of Chimp Crazy was the complexity and possibility of the story.

There were so many elements to consider: a driving and wild A-story, interesting detours into multiple B-story lines, controversial subject matter, complex and interesting characters. There were parts of the story that would be archival and interview-based dives into the past, but also huge contemporary vérité moments that were unfolding in front of us in real time. It felt like we would have to use every style of documentary filmmaking all at once to tell this story and that was really exciting to me.

NFS: Can you describe the creative process you went through in shaping the narrative for Chimp Crazy?

Wise: It was really hard! When I started, Eric and the Goode Films team had already been shooting on and off for 2 years, basically any chimpanzee story they could find. It was good stuff, but aside from all the characters having a chimp, it was hard to see how it would fit together. Tonia’s story stood out as the obvious A-story, and the easy choice would have been to just do a feature about her, but the other stuff was so interesting it would have been a shame to not include it. Eventually we started noticing distinct patterns in all the stories and realized we could use them to accentuate certain areas of Tonia’s story or show what someone else who had been in her shoes was experiencing in a similar moment.

The Travis storyline became a great illustration of the danger of keeping a chimp and added big stakes to PETA’s search for Tonka in episode two. The Buck storyline in episode three was all about pressure, so that was intercut to mirror what Tonia was going through and then also foreshadow to the worst possible ending, as PETA began closing in on her. Travis came back again in episode four to augment the feeling of loss and also to foreshadow the lengths to which some of these chimp moms will go to keep a chimpanzee in their life, even after a tragedy.

Pam Rosaire had such an extensive knowledge of chimps and was the only person we filmed that was actually able to handle a chimp presently, so she was a perfect kind of chimpanzee 101 teacher at the top of the show. And then when we realized her chimp Chance was the same chimp that Travis’s owner adopted after his attack, it was an amazing lightbulb moment and she was able to come back again in episode four.

NFS: How did you approach balancing the explosive moments with quieter, more introspective scenes in Chimp Crazy?

Wise: Varying tone and pacing is something that I consider really important to any project I’m working on. Loud vs. Quiet, Fast vs. Slow, Dark vs Fun… you have to have peaks and valleys. If everything is at the same “volume” at all times, then nothing stands out. One of the biggest directions from Eric was to not make the show overly depressing, no small feat for our subject matter, so finding the right time to change gears or highlighting a moment of levity in an otherwise not-funny scene was really important to keep the audience engaged and not sad the whole time.

A great example of this would be in episode three after a darker scene in the basement with Tonia and Tonka, we burst into a child’s birthday party, where our proxy director Dwayne is performing as a clown (he is actually a professional clown) and then has a call with a lawyer, outlining Tonia’s potential legal exposure. There’s a million ways to start a scene like this, and coming in hard with the disruptive singing of Happy Birthday was a very conscious choice to break the tension and change the tone. It’s really a lot of fun to work this way and it allows you to flex a lot of different editing muscles in the process.

NFS: What were some of the biggest challenges you faced while editing Chimp Crazy, and how did you overcome them?

Wise: One of the biggest challenges was the amount of footage we had. There was never an exact tally, but I think it was estimated to be somewhere around 1,200 to 1,400 hours.

The practical way you deal with that is having accurate transcripts, solid ScriptSyncs in the Avid and then dividing and conquering. It’s too much footage for one person to watch and retain alone, but between our edit team, we’ve watched everything twice over, or more. You become a master of your domain and absorb everything that relates to your episode, and then if you need more, do a transcript search or ask a coworker.

Also, as you are traveling through the footage, if you come across something that you think can help another scene or episode, pass it along to that editor. We all made little dropbox bins and I can’t tell you how many emails I’ve sent that started with “Hey, check your From Evan bin…”

NFS: How did you and your team decide on the pacing and structure of the series to keep viewers engaged throughout?

Wise: We were very fortunate because our A-story had so many unbelievable twists and turns that we were able to craft what are easily the best episode cliffhangers I’ve ever had in my career. That to me is the most important thing in keeping engagement across a series.

Early on, we made a list of all the potential episode ending moments (there were a lot) and then narrowed down that list to what was the most dramatic and also what was actually feasible to build an episode up to. Once we settled on our cliffhangers, they stayed unchanged for the duration of the edit.

NFS: How did your previous experiences with other HBO documentaries such as Q: Into The Storm or The Anarchists influence your work on Chimp Crazy?

Wise: Q and Anarchists both feature somewhat unknown subcultures and characters that think outside the mainstream, and Chimp Crazy was no different. So having experience bringing a mainstream audience into those worlds was really helpful on Chimp Crazy. Most people don’t think Qanon is a believable thing and most people wouldn’t choose to structure their life around anarchist principles, just like most people don’t think keeping a chimpanzee as a pet is a good idea, but an important part in telling stories like these is to make sure the audience understands why someone might do that. In the first 10 minutes of Chimp Crazy, it was important to show an idyllic version of life with a chimp that many of these people hold dearly, so that the audience could understand what drove these characters to make the decision to buy a chimp in the first place.

In all three of these series, the characters are responding to the same desires everyone has, but they choose to satisfy their needs in a much different way than most people would. And once an audience can realize this, it makes it much easier to connect with someone who is doing something that you may find bizarre, wrong, or repellent.

Evan Wise Chelsea Curtis

NFS: What role did collaboration play in the editing process for Chimp Crazy? How did you work with the rest of the team to shape the final product?

Wise: This may be cliche, but it truly was a team effort. Making a doc series takes a village and we had an incredibly talented and experienced post team with Chuck Divak, ACE, Adrienne Gits and Doug Abel, ACE. Everyone worked on every episode in some way, and then once the edit-dust began to settle, each editor took charge of an episode. Even after roles became more solidified, we still shared cuts and gave notes between each other. As the supervising editor, I did a pass on everything at the end to make sure we had consistency across the series.

We also brought in a fifth editor, Sascha Stanton-Craven, for a few months to help ease the pain when things got overwhelming. Tim Moran is a frequent collaborator of mine and he was onboard too, helping produce and write in the edit.

NFS: Can you discuss a specific scene or sequence in Chimp Crazy that you’re particularly proud of?

Wise: I really loved making the confiscation/James Brown montage in episode one. It was a ton of work because it was like six or seven hidden cameras, each running for about 6 hours and it was also really challenging to find an emotional balance to the scene. Unconscious chimps being dragged out of their cages and loaded into a truck for transport is a pretty dark thing to witness, so right away I knew we needed antithetical music to drive the scene.

There were a couple alt versions with Eddie Money’s “Take Me Home Tonight” and maybe a Journey or Nick Cave song, but “Please Please Please” felt like the right balance between darkly silly and strangely somber, the latter being how Connie Casey was feeling in that moment.

The chimps didn’t have a great life at the Missouri Primate Foundation, and we had highlighted that extensively earlier in the episode, so it felt important to focus on the other side of the coin for this scene, Connie’s loss. Every time the cameras caught her during the confiscation, she was having an emotional moment, saying goodbye to what she considered her children. You might not agree with how she views or keeps the chimpanzees, but the feelings she was experiencing are raw human emotions that we can all relate to, so I wanted to try and bring that out. When she walked back into the empty facility and sat down in the folding chair, it felt so sad and lonely, but I also sensed Connie’s relief that her legal battle with PETA was finally over and the overwhelming responsibility of attempting to care for these animals was gone. It felt like the opposite way to play this scene, but it was still accessible to the audience.

I have some very serious hardline vegan friends who truly despise people that keep exotic animals. I showed them this scene and they said to me, “I can’t believe you made me feel bad for Connie”. That was very rewarding.

NFS: How did you handle the ethical considerations of editing a documentary series, especially with sensitive or controversial subject matter?

Wise: The controversial subject matter of Chimp Crazy is what interested me the most. I think stories that wade into taboo or bizarre subjects and occupy a gray area are the most interesting to tell and I’ve been fortunate in my career that many of those stories have found me. I think I have developed a pretty good skill in humanizing controversial characters, breaking them down into their most human elements so an audience that may not agree with what they say or do can see them as a relatable person, even just for a moment.