When filmmakers Peter Ettedgui and Ian Bonhôte embarked on telling Christopher Reeve’s story, the last thing they wanted to do was make a typical biopic.
Their biggest concern in telling Reeve’s heroic journey was that it would be a story of two halves. Reeve portrayed Superman in blockbuster films in the late 1970s and 1980s, but his life was rocked by tragedy after suffering a horseback riding accident in 1995 that left him paralyzed from the neck down and unable to breath without use of a ventilator.
In the aftermath of the accident, he became an advocate for spinal cord injuries. “We were worried that the film would be half Christopher as an actor standing on his legs, and then Christopher disabled, sitting,” says Bonhôte. But the result is a story of strength, courage, perseverance and determination, with an emotional experience at its heart.
While Ettedgui and Bonhôte wanted to veer away from a traditional biopic, they still made sure Reeve’s story conveyed what it means to be a hero both on screen and in real life. With emotion driving the narrative, the last thing they wanted was a gimmicky doc.
Enter editor Otto Burnham, who effortlessly weaves in archival footage and new interviews with the Reeve family, Whoopi Goldberg, Susan Sarandon and Glenn Close to hit those emotional beats.
Burnham spent six to seven months in the editing room piecing together a story that concurrently follows Reeve pre-accident and post-accident. Burnham was determined that every transition would be different. “You would drift thematically, or it would be a hard cut,” he says. One example shows Reeve learning to fly as Superman and then cutting to the actor arriving home after leaving the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation. Burnham explains, “It’s a simple transition, and Richard Donner, the director of ‘Superman,’ says, ‘Chris convinced me that he would fly. He also convinced me he will walk again.’”
Burnham was always conscious of the emotional spaces within the narrative and sought ways to bind them.
One method was through the use of celebrity interviews; but Close, Goldberg and Sarandon were not just talking heads — they were close friends of Reeve, so much so that Bonhôte considered them to be characters in this movie.
“They are so close that when you interview them, they crack. They crack naturally because they love and cherish that person,” Bonhôte says.
The family interviews with Reeve’s children — William, Alexandra and Matt — add an emotional spine to the story with their honest and intimate knowledge of their father.
Ettedgui recalls meeting the trio for the first time in person over lunch in New York after a series of Zooms. “We came out of that lunch, and we thought, ‘Well, you know, we almost don’t need to interview anyone else.’ Of course, we did. But we just knew that we could build the film around the three of them.”
Ettedgui says, “There is something emotional about seeing Chris going through the process of learning about disability and accepting it and finding a new purpose in his life, and juxtaposing that with looking back at his past as he says, ‘When I was home and when I was healthy.’”
That’s where the filmmakers and Burnham could find the film’s emotional resonance. “The idea was to do something that would give the film a structure,” Ettedgui says, “that would let the emotion of it really play to its fullest capacity and potential.”
