How Will & Harper Changed After Trump’s Election Victory

A very funny road trip movie that also happens to be very moving, “Will & Harper” gets into a car with Will Ferrell and one of his closest friends, the writer Harper Steele, for a trip across the United States in the wake of Steele’s gender transition. As Kristen Wiig’s theme song puts it: “Harper and Will head west/Just two old friends and two brand new breasts.”

How did you get involved with the film? This was after Will and Harper had already decided to go on a trip across the country and potentially film it?
Yes. Once the idea of ​​doing this road trip came up, the possibility of it being a documentary was when I became part of the conversation, as a documentarian, but also as a fairly long-time friend of both Will and Harper. I’ve known Will for about eight years and Harper for about four. Kristen Wiig introduced us when she had Harper come in to do a punch-up on “Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar,” which was my first narrative film. They turned to me and said, “Josh, do you think there’s a documentary here?” to which I replied, “Absolutely.” A few months later we were on the road driving across the country.

Had Harper already come to terms with the idea of ​​putting a very sensitive part of her life on film?
I think they had mostly gotten past that. I know it took a while for Harper to come up with the idea of ​​not only taking the trip, but filming it. But I think that’s one reason why I made a lot of sense as a director. I had a pre-existing relationship with both of them, which helped because it was super important to create a very safe space where they could be open and vulnerable and honest — not just to each other, which is hard for anyone, but in front of cameras .

And I think the three of us share a similar comedic sensibility. We all wanted what came out of it to be fun. I think Will and Harper’s love language is comedy, so it was very important to them that whoever directed this movie had a sense of comedy. I think maybe I was the last piece of the puzzle that made Harper finally just say, “Yeah, let’s do it.”

When you sat down to think about what this film wanted to be, what were the big questions you had to answer?
There were many. I think my first question was: What does the film explore? The concept for the tour was: Harper loves this country, but she’s not sure if it loves her back since her transition. She was going to the places she used to love, these small towns and dive bars, and see if she can still feel comfortable. So we had to make sure we had a small and nimble crew, so if Will and Harper had any idea of, “Oh, let’s jump in here, let’s do go-kart racing,” I was able to follow them with a crew.

The big second question was about their friendship and their relationship. It was obviously a big change for Harper, but as Will says in the film, it was uncharted waters for him. It was always going to be the deeper thing the film explored and the more universal themes of empathy and love and acceptance and growth and change in a relationship.

But how do I capture it? The car needs a lot. We came up with some fun creative ideas like mounting two cameras on the hood of Harper’s Grand Wagoner. One was a two-shot, and it was strapped. I also put another camera next to it with a longer lens and I had a remote control head to pan back and forth.

And the last part of it was I wanted to make sure I captured Harper’s version of the America that she loves. She loves to find the beauty in the everyday and the quote-unquote ugly. So it comes down to choosing lenses and I chose these beautiful old Cooke prime lenses that have soft properties to capture the way she sees America.

It is of course ideal for you if the conversations start tentatively and become more intense and open when they reach three quarters of the way across the country. But can you tell them, “Don’t go into it too much the first week?”
That is a very sharp observation. That’s the concern—and by the way, not only that, but given the nature of how I shot it, where we’re tracking their journey, and they start in New York and go across the country, you can’t really do what you can usually do in a documentary, which is to take a scene that happened maybe 15 days after and edit it to make it look like it’s day 2. That wasn’t on the table when you could see where we were in land.

I had them both send me questions they wanted to ask each other so I had what I called the question or conversation bible in case they ran out of things to talk about, which shockingly they didn’t over the course of 16 days. But what really happened is the organicity of how these conversations happen. No one jumps into the hardest conversation on day 1, you know? It played out the way you’d expect, starting in an easier, more comfortable area, and as the journey went on, they let down some of their inhibitions, both with each other and in front of the camera.

What was it like sitting with 250 hours of footage?
The word I would use is overwhelmingand I mean that in both a positive and negative connotation. The first cut of the film that I thought really worked was five hours long. And the secret was to let go of some of the comedy. They are by far two of the funniest people I know. But when I let go of that and focused on structuring the film around moments of growth and change and more emotional story beats, I got the film to a reasonable length and could start folding back in the more comedic moments.

In the film, the experience of traveling across the country seemed to help Harper figure out her relationship with this country and her view of herself. But the way the film has been received and embraced must in some ways have been a continuation of that journey.
Absolutely. All of us, but especially Harper, have gone through incredible growth since we started making the film. And so this transformation has obviously taken on a whole new identity since the film was released. Even making the movie, one of my favorite moments was when she decided to walk into that bar in Oklahoma by herself. She didn’t want Will by her side. She wanted to see if she could do this on her own. And she was met with a surprising amount of love and acceptance, even without Will in there, in a bar where I was sure love and acceptance wouldn’t be the result.

And soon after that she was on the racetrack and she said, “I think I’m aware that I am, I’m not afraid of other people hating me. I’m afraid of hating myself. ” She’s still on that journey — and I think a lot of trans people can relate to this, but also, there’s a universality to learning to love yourself, flaws and all , much of the journey in the back half of the film is about, and it’s been wonderful to see that continue as the film has been out in the world.

Did the experience make you believe that America still loves Harper?
Yes, but we obviously have a way to go. The reality right now is that we have a president-elect who spent over $215 million on campaign ads targeting transgender people. I can speak for all three of us when I say that our film took on a whole new meaning (after the election). He and his most vocal supporters regularly go after the trans community and spread division and hatred in general, not just the trans community.

The last time Trump was president, hate crimes increased by 20%. And for me, and I think we all, the only way to push back against this hate and division is with love and empathy. On social media, people have become nothing more than avatars and usernames. We have lost touch with each other’s humanity, and I feel that many politicians take advantage of that. And so stories like ours, stories of love and friendship and ally, is how we fight back.

A version of this story first appeared in the SAG Preview/Documentaries/International edition of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.