NFS: Hey Charlie! Surviving Ohio State has maintained a strong presence as the #1 series on HBO Max since its release. How does it feel to work on such a popular title?
Charles Olivier: Hey Jason, thanks a lot. Yeah, I suppose in a word, Surviving Ohio State’s popularity is, I’d say, bittersweet. It’s complicated. I’m so happy that the story of all these men is finally getting the audience it deserves, and that feels really good, if not also a little painful, in that their decades of tragedy have for so long been overlooked, or worse. The film isn’t a smoking gun of hidden evidence, something that, you know, we suddenly found and revealed. It’s not a gotcha piece. We organized a process of bearing witness to stories that were out there, stories of abuse that so many for so long either ignored or just straight up lampooned. Getting into the reasons for that mocking and overall avoidance is a big part of the film, and I think it very much moves an essential conversation forward. So for me, there’s a swirl of sorrow for these survivors and for so many young men who have been abused or frankly are being abused and keep that secret because of a Guy Code culture. Participating with the men in this film to undertake that process of, I pray, dismantling that code is something for which I’m very proud.
NFS: How familiar were you with the documentary’s story prior to joining the project? What kind of research went into your work both before and during the edit?
CO: I didn’t know anything about the story when I was first approached. I was, like so many, just sort of incredulous when presented with the numbers. I mean, thousands of kids had been abused by this one doctor over decades. And from the beginning, there were rumors, and those rumors became substantiated, and yet the abuse continued for decades more. It was beyond belief for me…. As I then began on the edit, I did deep dives into research. With the projects I cut, any project, I always get very involved with the research. With this one, I did a lot. So, to answer the kind of research I do, I basically do most of what you would do when getting into something. I’ll look up videos or other docs, of course, I’ll look into interviews, etc., but I’d say the majority of what I do is read: books, articles, all manner of documents. I really immerse myself in the research. Usually, this is in off-hours. But, to me, in general, it’s the reason I got into documentary. Making documentaries, editing documentaries, is a portal into fascinating, if sometimes heartbreaking, worlds I didn’t know. Making documentaries reveals the world to me in ways that change me, and I really seek that out. This OSU doc gut-punched me personally, and so I was specifically driven to learn about it, but truly, with any project I work on, I’ll get very involved with research.
But as I write all of that, there are a bunch of caveats that should be splatter-painted across the words; the biggest of them for me is that I have a job to do, and that my job in film and TV is about developing and maintaining emotional connection. The medium of film / TV isn’t the medium I’d say that is most attuned to conveying raw info. Film and TV are at their most powerful when they’re in what I would say is resonance. “Resonance” as a word signifies reverberating; it’s about how we vibrate in different states. And film elicits those vibrations. Man, I promise we’re not heading into “woowoo-dreamcatcher-teal is the most harmonious hue yada yada.” This is about how we as viewers respond to these stories, how we emotionally engage (or don’t) with facts and figures, the informational base stuff of docs. Another aspect of that word “resonance” is an electrical state. As an editor, you’re looking at how you can, à la Dr. Frankenstein, produce the largest possible emotional response to inanimate numbers and figures. You’re seeking to create life and heart and soul from a mass of information that has been discovered from research.
So, what’s really important to me in terms of any research I do is that as I go along, I’m keeping track of my emotional and mental states. So I’m always jotting notes about my personal experience as I do research. I’ll do my utmost to keep all of that in mind as I’m later structuring the film overall and/or when I’m structuring particular sequences and scenes. How you tell a story, how you build it, determines what an overall story’s viewer experience will be. How it vibrates with them, how it lingers. Most of a viewer’s life isn’t going to be them watching your movie. It’s going to be how they remember it. So, you want to make sure you’re building something that is a live memory. Structure is key. So, yes, it’s about the information, and an editor does herself a favor by knowing her subject, but more than anything, it’s what she or he does with that research. How they deliver it. And I believe she or he needs to be tapped into their feelings to do that properly.
An editor, to me, has many hats to wear. One of the bigger, more ceremonial ones is that of the audience representative. An editor is tasked with being a first viewer. That’s a big responsibility. It’s why you’re in the chair (or at your cool standing desk if you’re responsible about your posture… I’m not.) You have to be able to watch your film as a viewer would, a viewer who has no history with your subject matter. That is so easy to lose a grip on. For me, I keep those jotted notes from before out and about, or I have little lines or particular images that suggest my state of mind when confronting this or that section. And as the research goes on, keeping that fresh mind can get more and more challenging. Luckily, I have a keen ability to forget almost everything: keys, meeting times, directions to basically everywhere, library books, why I’m at Home Depot, you name it. But, working on a film for sometimes years at a time, can test even the most absent-minded of us. So, I keep those reminders attached to index cards, just like I do little tidbits of content or interviews, for me to move around as I’m structuring, and re-structuring, and re-structuring again, ad infinitum. Man, that’s a lot of answer for your question. At this rate, we’re going to be here for years. I’m sorry. I can do better. You asked, "How do I research?" I read. While wearing teal.
NFS: How does your approach to the edit change when dealing with a uniquely sensitive project like Surviving Ohio State?
CO: Sure. Yeah, that’s a great question. I think there are multiple considerations in effect here. There are the various considerations of the many survivors, making sure that their stories are told as best as we can, and what that means, and there are the considerations toward all the various parties involved from the university and from Congress that we hold to account. Beyond ethically wanting to be just, we are also potentially facing litigation threats from the many different athletic and administrative personnel from the Ohio State University whom we call out, and from the University itself. From about halfway into the edit, ramping up and up and up to the end, lawyers from the production companies, 101 and Smokehouse, and lawyers from HBO would comb the edit for factual accuracy and our ability to triply source our assertions. I mean, it was a lot of notes in red and a lot of Zoom calls. That’s the first time I’ve ever been so scrutinized by so many lawyers for so long. All of them were really nice, and all of them were totally pro. So, they’d really nicely say “nope” to something you worked hard on because it intimated too much in one direction or another. What’s on the screen is so thoroughly vetted, there’s zero fat. And because this is all actively in the courts, we need to check and cross-check ourselves that we’re not messing anything up there as well.
And while all of that is going on, director Eva Orner and I kept coming back to our guys. We kept asking ourselves, “Are we telling their story the way they need it told?” I mean, we would kvetch, me especially, about having to go back and redo something, but after that, we’d bring it back to what was really important.
'Surviving Ohio State' Credit: HBO
NFS: Did you rely on any particular techniques or strategies in crafting such a complex narrative for the film?
CO: Eva had developed such incredible relationships with every survivor in this movie. And the interviews she conducted were incredible across the board. They were powerful and intense. These are big athletes who grew up as Big 10 collegiate wrestlers, gladiators, and all that that implies, and they had been systematically betrayed by almost everyone they trusted. And Eva gained these guys' trust to tell stories that they hadn’t told anyone before. So, their interviews were the powerful foundation on which everything was built. As I was building the movie, I wanted to let their voices drive the film.
Like a lot of editors, I come from a musical background, in addition to narrative. But music is my base, and it’s the most effective lens personally through which I view and craft film or TV. So, in terms of techniques, or frames, I’ll often think of films more in musical composition forms. I play different instruments and like all kinds of music: blues, R&B, pop, etc. But for composition, and for what you and I are talking about in terms of structuring a documentary, I’m a classical-head. This has nothing at all to do with the actual score and has to do with the structural approach. I’ll consider how the biggies of classical composition, like the Viennese guys Haydn or Beethoven or the Romantics like Tchaikovsky or Dvořåk or many who are modern – a big one I like is Shostakovich – sought to lead listeners through particular emotional journeys over a long period of time. I realize that probably sounds pretentious, and don’t think I have any deeper understanding of what’s going on with classical music than anyone, but I just find the link of music to film is so aligned. Whether you like classical music or would just assume pass, I can’t recommend putting in some time studying symphonies enough. Both music and film are structures in time. And both of those structures are built out of emotions. Symphonies are the 45-minute to an hour-and-a-half versions (unless you’re German) of those structures.
Anyway, if you listen to these symphonies, if you get intimate with the build of melodies and themes, you track how they’re telling their stories, how they’re unfolding that story’s colors and emotions. And those stories are very different and aren’t in the least broken into a classic 3-act structure. The thing with documentary is that while it may be a feature or a series, just like Syd Field-type fictional creations, it is very much its own creature. The structures, by way of production reality or approach, dictate as much. Docs are assembled from what you have access to, who is willing to talk, what archival, if any, is involved, revelations captured, what you are going to need to explain, etc., etc. And it can be – as in IS – all over the place. And you need to find a vehicle in which to structure that, and structure that with emotional resonance (and teal). Musical forms I keep finding fit the bill the best.
Swap out our listener with a viewer and the game is the same. A first movement in a symphony is typically energetic. It can be fast, but more than anything, it’s about being arresting. And so I like to think about what I find arresting in this particular story, or what best sets up the emotional telling of this journey. Often, I find I want to create presence and immediacy. With Surviving Ohio State, the story was, for me, humans versus buildings. You know it was about these big institutions, and their seemingly regal neoclassical buildings, but these places are so impersonal and ultimately cold, as confronted by us. And so, I wanted height and air and an absence of, call it, soul, a more palpable rhythm. We come into the film with a kind of bird’s eye of the architectural purity and pattern of OSU. I found that really arresting. It just seemed like a trip. All of it feels so designed, and far away. A symphony’s second movement is about digging and creating depth. So, here we are going into the people. We are anchoring in our two main protagonists, Dan and Mike, but we are also meeting the various people inside the buildings. These are the parts of your movie that are slower and more lyrical. Third is lighter and faster because you need the viewer to reengage. The fourth movement is arresting again. You’re looking to stick the landing. Now, all of these movements have their own internal structures, and we can talk about those in musical forms too, but the key takeaway is that as a documentary editor, it’s good to be aware of different ways of sculpting emotion in time. Music, and in particular, symphonies, are an excellent thing to understand.
Now, all of that said, we’re not doing music. And so, you need to know your narrative chops. One of the biggest developments in my life of documentary telling is the new documentary movement that came out of the ‘90s with Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky or Steve James andTerry Zwigoff. Directors and editors began freely and unapologetically applying narrative chops to documentaries. So you had the reliance on engines of setups and payoffs to drive a film forward, you have foreshadowing, you have a conscious decision on point of view, proxemics, etc.. I use all those same elements when I’m building scenes and sequences. I’ll often think of narrative films and their devices when I’m building out a documentary.
For Surviving Ohio State, I remember watching Spotlight and wanting to anchor the story in similar ways, in one character, which is Dan, and then have him meet our other protagonist, Mike, and have their friendship be a spine of development through the story’s telling. Of course, on top of that would come the many other survivors’ stories, but those two and their relationship drove the turns. In Spotlight, the journalists and their coming to grips with what they are learning drives the structure. In this doc, it’s the men and their own resistance to accepting that they were abused because of male indoctrination, and then their not being believed by their own caretakers, or being vilified for calling into question this university, or someone like Jim Jordan, or anyone else that seemingly was a ”pillar of society.” There are very definite spots along the journey. Finally, like in Spotlight, these guys have to make the decision to turn apostate from the school. So all of that, for me, defined the first two movements of the film. The back two begin with them, now on the outside of their communities, holding everyone to account.
NFS: How did you work to balance contemporary interviews with archival footage in the film?
CO: There’s always an interesting dance between contemporary footage, in this case, sit-down interviews, largely, and archival. Archival in this film, as in other films I’ve done, is either a means of illustrating what is being discussed in the contemporary interview, or the archival itself begins to build an idea that will then pull in voices from the present to corroborate or respond to it. So in the first case, contemporary interviews are guiding us through their remembrances, and those remembrances are being experienced by the viewers with archival footage, so it’s very 1:1. But then a seed of a theme will be planted and that theme is told by archival, until contemporary voices begin coming in to comment on it.
For this last one, I’m thinking of when we get into views of male athletes and the sense that they can’t be victims. That story gets told largely in archival, but then someone like the journalist Jon Wertheim will come in and take up the reins to guide it directly back to our OSU guys. Or when Jim Jordan later is denying, denying, denying, that archival of news footage really tells much of that story. Since he’s such a known figure as a prominent congressman, there’s no shortage of news coverage of him. Because of that, it could be shaped on its own with other journalists of the era to shape those sections, with our interviewees then coming in to comment and respond.
NFS: What was your collaboration like with executive producers George Clooney and Grant Heslov?
CO: The way that I usually have worked with producers, especially sort of well-known producers, is that there are a lot of meetings at the beginning. It can all feel kind of Flashdance. You walk into an echo-y room, announce yourself, and do your dance. Today, that panel of faces staring at you is more during a series of Zooms, but you still initially need to audition and pitch your take on the footage you’ve seen or your approach to the idea you’ve read about in a way that lands with them. And really, you’re seeing if you all resonate together. If you’re even the right person for the film that they want to tell. And then you typically do that Flashdance panel again. And again, 101 Studios with David Glasser and Eliot Goldberg, along with Smokehouse, George Clooney’s and Grant Heslov’s production group, and their producer Rebecca Arzoian, were also very involved throughout these initial meetings and discussions. And of course, the director, Eva Orner. We all talked a lot about what we each thought we had, and where it could go. Then, if they bring you on, it’s like everyone leaves the room. It all gets quiet as the editor and director work alone for a while. Once cuts start going out, then folks like Grant and George, and the others would send notes. It was all very clean. I got the impression that what always resonated most for Grant was story. "Is this tracking?" "Is that paying of?" And for George, it was about emotional arcing. "Is this moment peak enough?" "Could that be delivered by someone more or less assertively?" That kind of thing. Presence and immediacy were the focus.
'Surviving Ohio State' Credit: HBO
NFS: You are perhaps most well known for your work on the iconic HBO documentary The Jinx. How did your creative approach to that project prepare you for a film like Surviving Ohio State?
CO: Yeah, those are very different projects. I suppose from a creative approach, for starters, you’re looking at two much differently sized canvases. The Jinx is a series, so the structure is episodic and will play across many more movements than a single feature like SOS. When you’re laying out a series, especially something with as many moving parts as The Jinx, sections are moving around the show a lot. Or maybe moving greater distances in time is a better way of saying it. And you’ve got to keep in mind that a viewer is going to see the series over a timeframe of weeks, so moving a section from episode 6 to episode 2 is moving it a month. So, yeah, there’s that and what that means for context and all the rest. With a feature, you’re talking minutes. Maybe it can be as much as an hour in a big change, but you know, it’s still all essentially one sitting. You’ve got much more of a unity of time and tone in a feature.
The other big difference is that on The Jinx, there was a team of several editors, and we collaborated, gave a lot of feedback. With Surviving Ohio State that was a solo edit, so, while I was of course working with Eva and we were sharing cuts, those cuts going out were more official cuts on which to receive notes, rather than “Can you take a look at this section when you have a sec and tell me if it’s sucky or not?” That’s a different working environment. One’s not better than the other. There are pluses and minuses to both. It’s wonderful to share and have a community, especially for the hermit who is an editor. And on the flip side, for me, it’s also really rewarding to go into a film as a solo editor and map out the course and march and scale unaccompanied. I do think the solo one probably comes with more highs and lows emotionally, just that I’ll (often) get lost and think I can’t figure something out, and then will finally get it to work (or so I tell myself). And that solitary puzzle aspect is really trippy. I like it in the end, but it definitely requires staring out into the middle distance a lot, as my brother would say. You take some walks to clear your head and reframe a lot more.
In terms of tone, both are dark to be sure, but also have comedic elements. What I’m talking about is human comedy. An absurdist aspect. The Jinx has many more notes of comedy than SOS without a doubt, but still, there’s comedy in both. I think one of my qualities, or say my voice, is that I often seek to weave in the comedy, the absurdity surrounding a story. Durst is a killer, and his friends know he’s a killer, and when confronted with the fact that yeah, they sort of suspected their buddy Bobby was killing folks, they’d say he was also charming: “You know, he always had a zinger during a dinner party, and he gave me that car…" "But, um, that killing thing didn’t weigh on you sometimes?" "...the killing thing?" "Bobby’s?" "Sure, yeah, that probably wasn’t great...what was the question again?”
With Surviving Ohio State, the comedy for me was this school’s straight-up defiance of facing the reality that their doctor was systematically abusing and destroying these boys. These school officials just shuffled past the crime scene over and over and over. Or worse, they’d actively promote this predator, or give him awards, so as to pretend that everything was ok. And that went on and on. So, as truly mind-bendingly horrific as it was, the “move along, nothing to see here” take of these coaches and clowns was a circus of terror. And I looked to build around that.
Again, I’d say music is a good lens by which to talk about this idea of tragedy and comedy. There are certain composers who I think can walk that razor-thin line between tragedy and comedy, and they can really help shape a story’s telling. John Kusiak, who actually scored some of The Jinx, and Cornel Wilczek, who scored Ohio State, can create scores that move in and out of all these different colors. When I’m working, I’ll also use scratch cues from composers who I think are great in this arena too: Mychael Danna, to me, is a face chiseled into the Mount Rushmore of tone variations. For tragicomedy, he’s incredible. For both The Jinx and Surviving Ohio State, I would use scratch cues from Danna’s The Ice Storm. Listen to it, you just get this almost operatic unfolding toward a fatalistic, horrific end, but done with a master’s light, almost playful touch. It’s like a perfect score to me.
BUT, in the big comparison, the two, while ostensibly being crime type docs, aren’t the same. With The Jinx, you’re tracking Robert Durst, who is actively sitting, unbelievably, for an interview. And you’re also shifting outside to the lens of Andrew, Marc, and Zac as they decipher what exactly is going on, and, of course, what they discover and record. The power of that series comes in things said and evidence discovered. There’s some “lightning in a bottle” that happens, actually, multiple times. With Season 2, that’s not as on display, and it’s much more a build around the village of complicity that surrounded Durst and let him get away with his crimes, but still you’re riding the revelations of his friends’ knowledge, and even the complicity of the woman he killed. So, that’s all very immediate. With Surviving Ohio State, there’s not that smoking gun. It’s a weaving of a tapestry. Dr. Richard Strauss, the man who abused these men for all those years, has been dead for some time, so there was never going to be a relationship with him other than as remembered. Yes, for sure, when administrators are deposed and say heinously callous shit that’s immediate in its impact to your gut, but you already kind of knew they were bad news and wildly heartless going in.
'Surviving Ohio State'Credit: HBO
NFS: Is there anything else you would like to share about Surviving Ohio State and its powerful unveiling of the school’s sexual abuse scandal?
CO: I mean, I should just congratulate anyone who has read this interview this far. Beyond just being chatty, I love talking about this stuff. So, mazel tov to you marathoners. In terms of Surviving Ohio State, the last thing to share is my personal take, not with the building of the movie as an editor or any formal aspect of its telling, but with the story itself and the courage of these guys to weather this terrible, awful journey to bring this tragedy to light. As a man, I grew up very much in the center of a Guy Code. I went to an all-boys school in Texas, played football, etc., etc. All this at the same time as those in this film were at Ohio State as wrestlers. I am steeped in that “Be a Man” indoctrination. And I am steeped in its subsequent hateful shame. There were so many times as I worked on this film that I would just lean back and hurt. These guys carried the crimes of this doctor, but more than that, the crimes of betrayal by their coaches and school administrators, people they looked to as parental figures all of their lives. And it nearly broke them… but what I take from this movie is that these guys helped each other to find the courage, the true sense of strength, to step into the spotlight and tell their stories.
There is this Japanese art form in which broken items, plates and cups and such, are put back together with lacquer and gold. The places where the pieces were broken, and all the various cracks, aren’t hidden; they are put into relief with gold. It’s this art and philosophical form that doesn’t try to hide the damage, but instead finds a stunningly and ferociously beautiful new life. We are all of us, men and women, so often told explicitly or implicitly, to hide our hurt, to “be tough.” Athletes are on a kind of X1000 level with that. This movie and these men shatter that for me. I’m a Dad to two little boys. When the time is right, I’m going to show them this movie, not because of me in any way, but because of these guys, and what they discovered strength and bravery and love to really and truly mean. I’m so very proud of the survivors in this film and so grateful to have been allowed to participate in their story.
'Surviving Ohio State' Credit: HBO 
'Surviving Ohio State' Credit: HBO 
'Surviving Ohio State'Credit: HBO
