Tribeca Festival 2024 Exclusive: Directors Melissa Haizlip & Chris Bolan talk Hamilton’s Renée Elise Goldsberry doc ‘Satisfied’
Among the films that had its World Premiere at the 2024 Tribeca Festival was the documentary 'Satisfied,' directed by Peabody Award winner Melissa Haizlip and Chris Bolan.
Tribeca Spotlight Documentary Feature SATISFIED takes viewers through that emotional journey, providing an intimate look at Tony Award Winner Renée Elise Goldsberry’s path as she grapples with fertility and the desire to have a family, all while balancing her growing career against the backdrop of the hit musical HAMILTON.
With vlogs Goldsberry recorded over the years and exclusive never-before-seen footage of the making of Hamilton, audiences are given a front-row seat to not only the show itself but also get a chance to deeply understand the sacrifices and battles Goldsberry navigated on her way to motherhood and stardom.
Haizlip previously directed the documentary Mr. Soul!, which won several awards, including the 2022 Peabody Award for Best Documentary.
How did this story come about? Renee's a public figure, it's not easy to tell one's personal life, so whose idea was it to get Renee on screen and talk about her life while trying to make Hamilton work?
Chris Bolan: Well, you know, it was a team effort bringing her story to the screen, but the way it kind of started was just by an introduction from Kelli O'Hara, who's an executive producer on a film and a Broadway star in her own right.
It was 2020, Wilson, and everybody was on lockdown and my son's mother was teaching a tap class on the front lawn and socially distanced tap class and Kelli had brought over her daughter and brought over Renee and Renee's daughter Brielle for this tap class and Renee and Kelli were talking and Disney was about to launch Hamilton on Disney Plus and Renee was saying how she had all this behind the scenes footage and how she wished she had done more with it, that she wished she would have met somebody who made documentaries or if she knew somebody who would have done more with the footage and Kelli said, well, you just happen to be at the house of somebody right here. So Kelli introduced me to Renee, we spoke about some of the stuff that she had behind the scenes and one thing led to another after a series of conversations, Renee said, do you want to direct this or not? And I said, yeah, I'd love to. And so Kelli was on board, we then brought on board a production company and then I was introduced to Melissa Haizlip, who I loved. I had met a number of directors to partner with me on this and when I met Melissa, there was a connection.
We both shared a background in theatre. We both came from a very collaborative way of working. We were both relatively new filmmakers. She had just finished her wonderful film Mr. Soul, I had finished my film A Secret Love on Netflix and we really hit it off and I felt that Melissa was going to be extremely additive to the process and an important voice on the film.
Melissa Haizlip: I come from a theatrical background. I had a 25 year career before becoming a filmmaker on Broadway and Broadway with several big shows and and so theatre is in my blood. And I was a big fan, incidentally, of the musical Hamilton. I'd seen the last show with the original cast, which was eElectric, and I was in love with Renee Elise Goldsberry and obsessed with the album and all the lyrics, knew everything frontwards, backwards, sideways, every line and could wrap the whole record without stopping. So when I learned that this incredible project was happening, I got really excited.
But also because, you know, Renee is a public figure, but she's also really beloved. And this was an opportunity to really delve into this idea of what it means to have it all and what that definition is. And here you have Renee, who had luckily recorded so much of her feelings in these selfie video diaries.
And so we had an opportunity to follow her story of making a family and also making the phenomenon of Hamilton and really get to understand what it means to her as an actress, as a woman, as a Black woman, trying to have it all, balancing career and also balancing her home life and her family. These are themes that are universal, but they're also really specific to Renee and to Hamilton. But we knew that this was going to be an incredible opportunity to share this story, which is so relatable and yet at the same time, opening up a world to Hamilton that no one had seen before.
How much of how much of the film is footage that she had and then put together and then creating something new with her describing what the footage is?
Melissa Haizlip: I don't know the ratio, but let's just say that as you know, it was an embarrassment of riches in terms of the footage that we have from Renee. We had so much footage from her that was just on her cell phone where she was either talking to her camera or videotaping her children and then also showing the behind the scenes things that were happening at the theater.
So what we did was we pieced that together with contemporary interviews with Lin- Manuel Miranda and also, of course, Ariana DeBose and several others that we weren't able to fit in. And then we, of course, we had this timeline from 2014 to 2016 and then to date 2023, 2024. So we had to figure out how to thread these two stories together, her family and her career, use her archive, use additional archive to show what was happening in the zeitgeist during the time she was making Hamilton and then fill out this story as she's telling it to us today. So it was kind of a game of Tetris with the storyline A, storyline B and storyline C and figuring out how to unify them and collapse those three stories into one.
At any point, was it ever challenging for her reliving the traumatic experiences that she had and putting it on screen?
Chris Bolan: That's a good question. The beautiful thing about Renee is that she just allowed herself to go there. When she's talking about her miscarriage in The Color Purple in that interview, Wilson, she cries, she's breaking down. That is all genuine. So that was one of the gifts of working with her is that, again, back to that authenticity and that vulnerability that she allowed us to see.
Oftentimes, people just don't want to show that sides of themselves. They're there and she did. She went there. So, yeah, she would she would talk about those moments and she would need a little bit of a breather afterward. But in true Renee fashion, she is such a fighter and she would just, she's like, what do you need next? I want to keep going here. So, yeah, it was such a gift to see her show all sides of herself.
Melissa Haizlip: Everything for Renee is right at the surface. She's very transparent and she's very emotional and it's all very sincere. And so for her. Her defining her journey to motherhood is still very real and very present, so it doesn't feel like it's in the past, it's as if all of those things that have happened to her have added up to her, who she is now and her resilience and her determination, and you really see it come together as she expresses it in the Tony speech when she won the Tony for the role of Angelica Schuyler in Hamilton, because in under two minutes, she describes her life's journey with Hamilton and also to motherhood and how important all of that is, as well as her faith. And so she's incredibly articulate and also very present with her emotions, which it was very lucky for us because, as Chris says, you don't always get to see or have access to that kind of emotion. And what one quote that she has from a different interview, which I love, is that she says, what's most valuable about me are the things I survived. And I think that speaks so much to who Renee is, that she really recognizes the trauma she went through and all of the things that make all the pieces of her that come together to make her who she is and all of it is valuable. So we were able to bring that into the film as well.
I'm sure there's a lot that anyone can get from watching this documentary, especially if they are an actor or an actress on Broadway and the pains that they got to go through to get a job, to land a job, to stick with the job and so forth. And obviously having somebody like Renee, who's on top of it, they see what she had to go through is a learning experience. At the end for both of you as directors and producers, what is the goal of this documentary? Because as we see, I always think there's a lot of documentaries, but there's never that big of an audience. What's the sell? Renee is the sell, but is there anything you want out of this documentary?
Chris Bolan: Well, for me, there's such a double standard, Wilson, men and women in this industry, even in Hamilton, there's a song, I'm not going to give up my shot. Some men are encouraged to kind of pursue their careers at all costs and they're raised up because of it. And women are kind of applauded for sacrificing or for giving up just like Angelica does in Hamilton. She sacrifices the love of Hamilton for her sister. And so Renee shows us that both should be possible, that women should be allowed and not stigmatized against for pursuing their family while at the same time pursuing a career. So that is something that I hope audiences take away from this, that we start to empower women, we lose these taboos about women not being able to talk about miscarriages or talk about their personal life, because somehow it's going to have an effect on the professional life. That should not be the case. And so
Melissa Haizlip: I'm hoping this film helps in that capacity. And I'm hoping that the film will help show that women can really have it all. It's just what the definition of having it all is for you that needs to be determined. And that's different for everyone. But in Renee's case, we get to see her resilience and her determination to be equally present and accounted for and giving her best and her all to her career and also to her family.
And that both are equally significant to her and her ability to thrive, that it is okay to be ambitious and to want to have great roles and to create great art. And it is equally okay to want to have a family that thrives and flourishes and that you can prioritize both. In the end, we get to see her in the Shakespeare in the Park production of The Tempest. And it was the best of both worlds for her because she finally got to have her two dreams at the same time, the dream of having her family and the dream of having her career. She starred as Prospero in The Tempest, but her children were also cast in the roles to be in the ensemble. So she got to be with them and work at the same time.
So in a way, that denouement is almost emphasizing that you can have it all, that you don't always have to choose one or the other. And throughout the film and throughout her career, she has had to have choices, make choices rather, throughout the film and in her career, she has had to make choices between having her children or having her career. And sometimes those choices were made for her physically by the miscarriages that she endured. So I think it's important to show that all of these pieces of a woman are part and parcel of what's universal about the woman's experience. Not just a Black woman, but every woman struggling to balance career and family, that it is okay to pursue both and to follow your dreams.
We produced a concert right after the show and Sara Bareilles was singing from Girls 5 Eva and Paula Pell was also there, but it was just really great to have all these amazing people, Renee's friends. It was also Leslie Odom Jr., Billy Porter, Ariana DeBose introduced the film, and then Kelli O'Hara and Renee brought it home with an incredible duet. So it was a really magical night of theater and television and film colliding together.