Q&A with Taylor Lewis

I spoke with an assistant editor who makes "Behind the Scenes" clips for feature films – and worked as Zack Snyder's assistant!

Growing up, I loved the Lord of the Rings movies. Watching the “Behind the Scenes” DVD featurettes was what first kindled my interest in moviemaking. It helped me understand that behind every film, there were hundreds of skilled workers banding together to create something incredible. (In no small part, Saints & Cinephiles is a tribute to those unsung craftspeople who bring our favorite movies and TV shows to life.) For the past several years, Taylor Lewis has worked for a company that makes these “Making of” videos, so of course I couldn’t wait to talk to him about it! We discussed his career as an editor, working for Zack Snyder on the production of Rebel Moon, and the ways the industry could be made more inclusive for those with disabilities.

So my first exposure to you was actually when we were at BYU; you directed the multiple award-winning documentary “Risky Business” about the opening of a late-night delivery sushi restaurant in Provo, Utah – which does feel risky! Tell me about how that project came together.

I wanted to make something that was very pretty, like a Chef’s Table vibe. But I also wanted to look at the different sides of taking something that was your dream and giving up everything that makes sense to follow that. It was probably because I had started off doing engineering at BYU. I worked for Vivint Solar doing drafting and design stuff for about a year, and I hated it. I hated working with the people there, and I hated the day-to-day. I loved learning about math, I loved learning about science, but I hated the job. (Which probably was more to do with Vivint Solar than anything else.)

A lot of solar bros?

Yeah, I just did not want to do that for my career. And so I switched to film kind of on a whim. I’d always liked movies and liked making movies. And so I think I was probably working through all of that still – giving up on a stable career. So telling the story of all these risky restaurants was me going, “They did it. Maybe I could do it.” Looking back, I’m like, “You idiot, you should have just stuck with engineering and made movies on the side!” But here I am now.

Anyways, in the documentary you follow these two people around and see two different ways of doing it. You had a baker, Pete, who had a whole career in advertising – he had a high-paying job, long hours, I think they lived in New York. And he just said, “I need to do something else.” So he started making cakes from his home as a hobby and decided to commit to it. He left his job; they moved back in with his parents. He started doing this bakery business, which was a crazy risk. And then on the other side you had Ammon, who did the late night sushi restaurant. He’s a kid who’s dyslexic. He dropped out of college. Everybody in his whole life said he was ruining his life. Restaurants have the craziest hours, the highest rates of failure. And he just believed in himself and managed to make it work, which is crazy. A lot of people try what he tried and don’t do it. So I think both of those stories really interested me a lot, and I can see how they mirrored where I was at the time.

Taylor’s BYU Capstone documentary Risky Business won Best Documentary at Austin Indie Fest and picked up accolades at the 2017 Spotlight Documentary Film Awards and IndieFEST Film Awards.

Did you have a moment where you realized filmmaking was something that you really wanted to pursue?

It’s hard to pinpoint because at that time, I was sure what I didn’t want, and I had no idea what I wanted. My parents told me I could do anything I want, and I really believed that – but I didn’t really care enough about anything to risk it all and do it. And so I applied to the film program because it was something I enjoyed and never really considered doing as a job. And I applied, and I got in, and then I realized, “Okay, I’m doing this now.” Hey, what’s something with a higher rate of failure than restaurants? [laughs]

Walk me through your early career, coming out to Los Angeles to work in film.

After graduating from BYU, I got an internship at a production company in Salt Lake called Camp4 Collective. They do outdoor advertising, a lot of documentary-style things, a lot of brand stuff like North Face and Apple, outdoors stuff. And after that, I got a job at Deseret News to start their video team. The promise was that we were going to make evergreen, informational, mini-documentary stuff, like the Vox style of online videos. That never really panned out. I think the people in charge didn’t quite understand internet video or what we were trying to build. They wanted reactionary, caption on images, news-style content. And they wanted Church news, Meet the Mormons-style content. They promised me that I wouldn’t be doing Church news stuff when I got hired, and that’s literally almost all we did. I did get to travel, which was nice! We went to the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Peru, Uruguay, and Chile, all for Church news stuff. There were parts of it that were really enjoyable. But when you work for the Church, people tend to care too much, perhaps, about what they’re doing. They feel like it’s their calling, and so they can’t let go of control, especially the people in charge. So you can’t do anything that’s even slightly approaching a controversial topic, or anything that’s not tried-and-true tested, because we don’t want to make the Church look bad or something. So it really flattens the creativity of the role, and news media is already a volatile industry where people feel scared for their jobs. So that didn’t really work out.

I didn’t get fired, but they realized that I didn’t really want to be there and paid me out till the end of the year and we parted ways. So in February of 2020 – fun timing – I moved to LA, I got an apartment, started meeting with producers. I was still doing advertising. My plan was to get a nice roster of people who would call on me and I could do freelance while I figured out where I wanted to take my career. And then came the pandemic. Luckily, I managed to get a few clients, get enough work to stay here for a little bit. I also worked for a nonprofit called 1IN4 – they help people with disabilities to get into the industry, they’re really focused on access. I did social media stuff for them. And I worked a little bit with another foundation called the Group Effort Initiative started by Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively. They work broadly with all kinds of minority groups, getting more female, racial minority groups, people with disabilities into the industry. One day they called me and said, “Hey, we have an opportunity for you. We can’t tell you what it’s for, but if you’re interested you could come be a PA on set.”

Taylor worked as a camera assistant and editorial assistant on Netflix’s Rebel Moon, a sprawling interstellar action film from director Zack Snyder.

And it ended up being a Netflix feature; it was Zach Snyder’s Rebel Moon. It was supposed to be a three-month thing that ended up extending to be 18 months. It was crazy. It was 70-hour weeks, insane stuff. After that I got hired by a place called Mob Scene, which does Internet marketing. They do behind-the-scenes content, press content as well. Well, I got hired the same day the strikes hit.

You’re kidding me.

And they called me back and said, “We had a hiring freeze, I am so sorry. We cannot hire you.” So I went back on Rebel Moon because now they were in post-production. I ended up serving as Zack Snyder’s personal assistant. Then a full year later, Mob Scene called me back and they hired me. Literally, it was almost a year later that I actually started working for them after they first hired me. I was there for two years as an assistant editor, and then they let me go and now I’m hunting for more work.

As an Assistant Editor at Mob Scene, Taylor worked on pieces for dozens of films and TV shows. The work included traditional marketing content, behind-the-scenes featurettes, and social media spots.

You touched on this earlier, but were born with a disability that includes severe muscle contraction, right?

Yeah, it’s a connective tissue disorder. So it’s a single-gene mutation that caused all my connective tissue to be denser than normal, about three times denser, they think. When I was born I was the shape of a football, arms and legs tight. I’ve had years of physical therapy that have helped me extend. Thankfully, I have mid-range contractions. A lot of people who have hyperflection, where their arms are straight, or hypercontraction, where they can’t bend, but mine’s mid-range, so it allows me to do a lot more than others who have similar [conditions]. I’ve never met anyone who has the exact same thing as me.

As long as I’ve known you, you have never really let that define you – it’s just been one more part of being Taylor Lewis. But I’m curious, working in the industry as a person with a disability, what do you think the industry is doing well and what do you think it has to work on?

I think there are two big fronts among the disability community. There’s representation, on screen and behind the camera as well. And then there’s access – the actual physical, like, how do we allow people with disabilities to participate in this creative act, even though it’s a pretty intense situation. On the representation side, we’re getting better, but there’s still a huge gap. During the pandemic I did some consulting for agencies and creatives on disability representation. I did some presentations for an [advertising] agency called Johannes Leonardo, and I did stuff for the teams that cover advertising for Facebook or Kraft. But the truth is, fewer than 1% of characters on screen have disabilities. Maybe it’s up to 3 or 4% now, but that’s still pretty low, especially when the national average has 20 to 25% of people identify with a disability. But onscreen, less than 5% actually have the disabilities they’re portraying, which is a little bit crazy. In the context of race, if you had someone onscreen playing a race that wasn’t that race – we’re past that. We don’t do that anymore. But with disability, it’s still okay to throw someone in a wheelchair or CG off an arm or whatever. And different people have different opinions about that. I think that you have to allow for a transition period, right? There are reasons why you cannot or would not have someone who has a disability playing some roles. So it’s a really nuanced issue. But, yeah, representation is pretty rough.

And beyond just roles, you have a lot of questionable narratives, right? [For example,] movies like Me Before You, where if you become disabled then you think that life is not worth anything, so you should kill myself. Same with Million Dollar Baby. Or you have characters like Tiny Tim, who’s really just this thing on a pedestal, this perfect saint with no interiority. Very rarely do you have characters who are just characters who happen to have disabilities.

Taylor with his wife, Collette, who works in the film industry as a composer.

You mentioned that accessibility was another struggle.

The access side is a challenge as well because there are tons of roadblocks. I think the biggest thing that I noticed was that almost every entry-level job in the industry requires some kind of manual labor, even if further levels of that job do not. So in my case, I was a PA on set for the camera department for about a week, and then I moved to editorial. You can be a DP and be in a wheelchair — you could use little joysticks. It’s all computer controlled anyways; the DP just sits and points. But in order to get on that track, you have to be a PA first, which means hauling gear, hauling batteries that weigh 25 pounds, running around set all day, standing all day. There’s no reason why you couldn’t do later versions of the job, except that you will never learn how to do that job unless you’re on set with people. And you can’t be on set just as a watcher because you’re not participating, you’re not learning. So even if you were to put in place some kind of program, you’d still want to be contributing on set. But the system isn’t designed to allow for these kinds of things.

It’s the same in editorial — even though as an editor, you’re in a chair all day just clicking away. But as a PA, I had to run and get lunches and do all these things that were kind of at the limit for me. Anyone with a stronger disability than me, or with more needs than I have, wouldn’t have been able to do that job.

Taylor pictured with Zack Snyder and the rest of the post production crew on Rebel Moon.

I hadn’t thought about that, but you’re right. The PA level in any department is really just manual labor.

Even office PAs and writers assistants, right? You’re getting groceries, coffee, the whole deal. And if you can’t contribute, you can’t be there. Nobody wants to be a handout, right? There’s no one here asking, “Just let me not do work and be on set.” But we need to redesign these jobs or these apprenticeships in a way where we can see the value in people who can’t go get groceries and allow them to be on set and do things. But there’s no structure for that.

Everyone was so kind and so helpful and so willing to accommodate when I was on set for Rebel Moon. I started as a camera PA, and it was such a struggle to do that job. They were willing to accommodate me to the point where I wasn’t really doing anything. I’d just be sitting there and thinking, “This isn’t gonna work for me.”

That didn’t feel good for you.

That first week was rough. It was my first experience on a big budget movie, and I was realizing,”I can’t do this.” I’m lifting batteries that weigh 25 lbs and I weigh, like, 80. So I called my contact, a producer on the Netflix side. And she asked, “Well, what other experience do you have?” I told her I’d worked as an editor for years. “Well, then why are you not doing that?” So they transferred me to the editorial department and it was just great. It was definitely hard in different ways. We were pulling 60 to 70 hours a week, which is nothing new for production. It was supposed to be for three months, but I just kept showing up and they just kept paying me. I was taking dailies to set every day, we’d load them up on the iPad and I’d drive them to set. I got to sit in on all the different discussions and things that were happening between the editor and Zach [Snyder]. There were so many people with so many years of experience, and it was really great to learn from those people.

So you left, there was the writers strike, and you came right back and ended up working with Zach as his personal assistant.

Yeah, his normal one was out, she was getting back surgery. So I was balancing between that and assisting the other editorial PAs. Sometimes it would be getting lunches for people, sometimes it was, “I need a battery for my Aston Martin key.” Or “I got another ticket from parking my Rolls-Royce, go fix that.” I don’t really know how to do that, but OK. That man has a lot of energy. A lot of energy! But he’s also really chill, really down to earth. And I respect him a lot because he works really hard. Whether or not you like his movies, he works really hard and he understands how to get a movie made and when to let go. He’ll change stuff if he needs to he’ll do whatever because he’s like, “I just want to make a cool story.”

Tell me about Mob Scene and what you were doing there.

They do what would have been DVD content back in the day. They got their start doing bonus features. It still goes on Blu-rays, but mostly it’s online now. They also do a lot of EPK – interviews, soundbites, B-roll stuff that we send to the Today show. I was an assistant editor there, and we’d juggle anywhere between 12 to 20 different ongoing projects in various stages of assembly – anywhere from footage from set to a full movie. We’d cut together some clips, resize them, send them out. It was great because I got to see a lot of movies before they came out. I’ll give you a few examples of what we did.

Taylor’s job at Mob Scene involved editing “behind the scenes” videos for movies like Avatar: Fire and Ash.

The most basic ones were clip pulls. Lionsgate usually was our client for that. They’d send us a movie, like In the Heights or Borderlands or Ballerina, and we pretty much had free reign to pull what we’d think is a good clip. So I’d watch the movie, single out some clips, and pull about 30 different clips. And we’d send them to the client, they’d give us notes back like, “Cut this, cut there,” or “You actually want one that features this actor because we need it for such-and-such thing.”

Then we’d do stuff for press. We’d have interviews with the actors and filmmakers, and we’d cut out bites from those interviews to send that would go out to all the different press outlets that they could pull from. A lot more of my documentary background came into play there. I’d go through the interviews, edit out the little things that they needed, fix up their “ums” and “ahs,” do all that kind of stuff.

And then on the more involved end, we had stuff for the movie Michael. That one was 100-plus days of behind-the-scenes footage, counting pre-production, production and reshoots. So we took all that footage, did hours and hours of logging footage, keeping track of when they’re singing when, because they only licensed a limited number of songs for marketing. And then we’d send it out to our editors to cut social media pieces or behind-the-scenes pieces or stuff for awards shows. Mob Scene’s biggest name client they have is James Cameron for the Avatar stuff. For each movie, they’d put out a documentary that was an hour and a half long. But the majority of it now is just social content.

In what ways (if any) do you feel like your faith has played a role in this industry?

I was thinking about that the other day. I think for most young people in the Church right now, I feel like we have a different kind of faith than our parents or grandparents did. [For them,] it was you believe first, and then you see how that applies to your life. You just know it’s true. And for me at least, and a lot of people I’ve talked to, it’s more like, “Okay, I don’t really know what’s going on, but I do know the things that [the Church] teaches and how they affect my life.” And more recently, I’ve wanted to involve more of those elements into the things that I do. Not that I want to tell religious stories, but I want to have a little bit more earnestness, a little bit more kindness than you usually see. One of the movies that I pulled clips from a few months ago, a Lionsgate movie, was called, I Can Only Imagine 2. It’s about a country Christian rock band, about this dad who is going on tour, but his son is having a really hard time. He has epilepsy or something and he’s just struggling with that. And he doesn’t want to allow his son to go on tour with him because of the danger involved not being able to watch him. It’s about their father-son bond, and that movie is so earnest in [the way it] values family relationships, which you don’t really see a lot. And I was watching it and realizing, “This is not a money grab.” They believe in what they’re doing. They believe in the message they’re sharing. And there’s no cynicism, no irony, no sarcasm. And not that every movie needs to be religious or be that level of earnest. But it’s made me think about the things that I want to create, and I would love to bring a little bit of that earnestness back into my life.

Taylor poses (behind a mural of The Godfather!) in full pirate regalia.