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Within weeks Sharon Stone was the first to agree to be interviewed at her home in Los Angeles.  By chance, she was also speaking that night at the Carter-Thor studios.  Cameron Thor and Alice Carter were former students of Roy’s who graduated to teaching introductory classes at Roy’s studio.  After Roy’s death they set up their own very well-respected school, the Carter-Thor studios.

CM:  I think between Sharon’s house and Cameron & Alice’s studio, we shot 4 hours of Sharon that day. The footage was fantastic, she was prepared to share everything. It was something we would encounter with all the actors who came to bear witness. 

RA:  Sharon was our very first interview.  We arrived at her house at the appointed time and were shown into the living room.  The crew was outside unloading, etc., but a few of us were in the living room admiring her incredible collection of art.  Suddenly, Sharon came down the stairs and into the living room yelling for us to “GET OUT!”  Karen and I were just looking at each other like “what did we do wrong?” Then she told us that someone had been bitten by a brown recluse spider the night before and she didn’t want anyone to get hurt.  So we set up in her entryway and she was fabulous.

CM: David Miller, the DP and Jamie Maxtone-Graham, the operator, both of whom I’d worked with before, turned up at short notice, and stayed for the whole shoot. Steve Halbert, Rhonda Aldrich’s husband, and his brother Peter did sound. 

JW: Our entire crew worked for free. It was incredible to see how the passion for Roy could inspire people who had never met him. I remember one of the crew approaching me after a particularly moving day of interviews and saying how transported he felt and honored to be working on our project.

KM: Most of the crew were blown away by the actors' willingness to share their process. Most crew members never get to see what preparation goes into a performance or into an actor's career for that matter.

CM: I ended up doing the interviews, which I hadn’t expected to be doing. I only had two principles: One was based on a conversation I’d had years ago with Errol Morris who swore that he got his best stuff by saying next to nothing. That way his subjects became uncomfortable and were compelled to talk. So I tried to ask very simple questions and then listen as hard as I could. The other principle was to never have a result in mind. I was happy for the interviews to go in any direction – often with wonderfully surprising results. At all times Karen, Julie and Rhonda watched on the monitor and would quietly whisper ideas for questions to me. It was a group effort.

JW: There were certain interviews that floored me. First of all, hearing people talk about Roy and recalling class and individual coaching experiences was like getting to relearn many things from ten years past. Each interview was like a class for me. Some of the interviews were hilarious, Jeff Goldblum, who has been so supportive of the documentary, had the best description of Roy physically.

TH: There was one totally rigorous day where I packed up every single visual I could find in storage. I jammed everything in my SAAB hatchback and schlepped it over to Julie’s where they were were filming interviews.  I couldn’t see out the back and only part of the right side and I had to drive across town to get there. Karen, Julie and I carried all of it into the house and spread everything out in her dining room. Chris went through it all and with the crew photographed it. Then we carried it all back out to my car. And of course we had to do some of it over again, so we dragged it all around some more. But it has been worth it.

CM: First of all we shot all the photos with an HD camera. Then later we realized we’d get better results just scanning all the stills, so we scanned theml. Then, late in the process we had to scan them all again at a higher resolution. In other words we captured hundreds of photographs three times. That defines tedium.

After shooting in LA for several weekends Christopher Monger, Karen Montgomery, David Miller, Julie Warner, Stephen Nemeth and Tim Healey went to New York and shot for a long weekend.  

KM: Doug Blake could not come to NYC so Ron Bozman graciously accepted to line produce the New York shoot. He knew the equipment houses with the best deals and he hired our assistants.

CM: Ron produced my first American feature, Waiting For The Light, and he just jumped in and made New York a breeze.

KM: We had no budget really.  I was already in NYC with Chris who was writing something for Alliance Atlantis. We were working with the producer Ted Hope on yet another project and when I called Ted looking for space to shoot  interviews in New York he offered his building on Canal Street, where his company This Is That is located. It turns out that Ted's first job in the film business had been as an Associate Producer on the film TIGER WARSAW written by Roy London starring a young Patrick Swayze. Ted had worked very closely with Roy while Roy rewrote for production and Ted has wonderful things to say about Roy in our documentary. 

CM: All the way through it was like that – everyone seemed to have known Roy or was separated by less than six degrees.

One of my favorite moments was in New York.  Lanford Wilson was very busy because the Signature Theater were mounting a year-long retrospective of his work and he was in rehearsals of a revival of BURN THIS.  Nevertheless he rushed over one afternoon, promptly sat down in the interviewee’s chair and started with the words “I will only tell you the truth.” 

Afterwards he invited us all to the dress rehearsal – but we couldn’t accept because we had more people to interview.  Catherine Keener, a Roy London student, was in the production which unfortunately meant we missed interviewing her.

Now with almost sixty hours of material Daniel Fort came on as editor, with Alexis Martinez as assistant.

Daniel Fort: We started out talking about renting a suite at a post production facility, but that would have put lots of pressure to rush through the material and put together some sort of a first cut in a very short time frame. In addition, if we rented from a post house we only had the budget for one editing system. When we made the decision to work at home with Final Cut Pro we wanted to make sure we always had a "safety copy" of the project so we setup a "main" desktop editing system and compressed all the files onto a portable drive to be used on Christopher's laptop computer. Editing then became very much a collaborative effort. In fact when we realized just what a huge job it would be just to sort through and catalog the footage we "cloned" the portable hard drive and three of us worked on transcribing the interviews. 

CM: We were months just organizing the material into folders, finding threads of topics. At first I didn’t think we had enough material, but after a year we had a rough cut that was three and a half hours long. I thought it was fantastic but everyone else went to sleep.  

DF: We experimented with style. We had at our disposal some "B" camera footage of the interviews which we could have used to make an "MTV" style interview but before we tried that I assembled a short segment of various actors describing what Roy looked like. It was so entertaining that we decided that was the style we would use throughout the piece. However, when we got to the end of Roy's life, Lois Chiles was so moving that we decided to keep her story in one piece hardly any cuts at all. 

CM: Daniel really set the mood when he cut the first version of people describing how Roy looked. It was like a conversation in which the interviewees were talking with each other about Roy – and that set the tone for the whole feel of the piece. 

RA:  Since I have a major theatre background, I ended up working on collecting some of the materials having to do with Roy’s theatre days.  I had done a lot of Lanford’s plays and had copies of all of them.  One of the great pleasures of this process for me, was that I spoke to Lanford on the phone and got to talk to him about being in the West Coast premiere of his play  Balm in Gilead. 

The following year there were further interviews. 

KM:The following summer we interviewed Patrick Swayze, Lisa Neimi, Kathryn Harrold, Sue Kiel, Johnny Solomon and Tony Drazan but we missed lots of people because when we had the camera they were not available, like Kim Cattrall or Mary Lou Henner for example.

Finally it was a process of whittling.  All told the editing took almost two and a half years.

CM: It all took so much longer than we had envisaged and I just couldn’t work on it full time, I had my ‘day job’. During the time we were cutting I adapted a book for Alliance Atlantis, another for Scott Free, and I adapted a script of mine from its original UK setting to an American setting for HBO.  It was a busy time. 

DF: I volunteered myself full-time for the first month of editing then continued part-time for a few more months. Christopher went from using the computer for editing words to editing the movie.  At first I would do some clean-up passes and "technical support" but after a while he became quite an accomplished editor and he transitioned from a laptop computer to a state-of-the-art editing system.

CM:  It was great having Daniel and Alexis.  I would screw something up big time and call them up at all hours – asking how to fix it.  They were immensely patient.

Through it all I came to see the lack of Roy footage as a blessing, not a curse.  It means that his students tell the story.  There are wonderful pieces of Roy, and they are pure joy, but you have the added advantage of hearing working actors really talk about how he affected them, and how they used his teaching.

The film premiered at Tribeca in 2005.  Garry Shandling and Elizabeth Berkley flew themselves in from L.A.  Hank Azaria, Jeff Goldblum and Arye Gross were all coincidentally playing on Broadway, so they were there too.  With Lois Chiles and Johnathon Schaech also in attendance  it was one of the best red carpets of the festival.  Famke Janssen snuck in too.

CM: Daily Variety isn’t published in NYC, so we didn’t see the review until people on the West Coast starting calling.  We’d already had great online reviews from David Poland and Ain’t It Cool but we were stunned when Variety gave us a rave, with a big photo, and most of the page. That was a good day. 

DF: When I started the project it became clear that this was something much more than about acting, it was about life. How in the world can anyone put this material together in a way that Roy's message would come across, especially since there was nothing written about the depth of his teachings?

The first thing I thought when the reviews came out was, "they got it."

TH: I went around to all the Tribeca Festival offices and Filmmakers lounges and swiped every copy of Variety that I could find.  The greatest joy was that Roy got to have that great picture of him in color on top of a smash review in a Monday morning Variety. I know he was dancing, just like he is in that picture.

I will always be deeply grateful that, Chris, Julie and Karen have seen to it that this documentary, Special Thanks To Roy London, is complete and not only a moving tribute to my dear Roy, but a fine document of what he was able to achieve with actors.

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