“All five of us met at an orgy,” Harper Steele deadpans while gesturing to the core team behind “Will & Harper,” the new Netflix documentary about a consequential road trip she took with BFF Will Ferrell after coming out as a trans woman. And Ferrell, his eyes sparking with punchlines to come, seizes the opportunity to build on the bit.
“We didn’t remember that we had met until much later,” he says. “We’re like, wait — Acapulco?” At that, Ferrell scrunches up his face like one of those suburban dads he’s so famous for playing on-screen and lowers his voice as if something embarrassing had slowly dawned on him.
They’re joking about the sex party, of course, but the group behind “Will & Harper” does boast a tangled network of connections that extend back through the decades, one that includes marriages, longtime friendships and artistic partnerships. It culminated in a film that will have its New York premiere less than 24 hours after we meet in a tiny green room above the Paris Theater. “This was a family affair,” Steele says. “We couldn’t have done something so personal in any other way.”
Take Ferrell and Steele, who spend the bulk of “Will & Harper” driving across America’s deserts, prairies and mountain ranges while talking about Steele’s experience as a trans woman in a country she loves but worries doesn’t “love me back right now.” They met in 1995 at “Saturday Night Live” — Ferrell had just joined the ensemble as part of a major cast shake-up, and Steele had been hired for the writing staff. “We became best friends,” Steele says softly while smoothing out her dress.
The two discovered that they shared a similar outlandish sensibility: It was Steele who penned some of Ferrell’s best-loved sketches, including his sendup of Robert Goulet as a pompous, whiskey-swilling crooner. After leaving the show, they continued to collaborate, with Steele writing Ferrell’s quirkier films, such as the Spanish-language telenovela parody “Casa de mi Padre.”
Then there’s Jessica Elbaum, a producer of “Will & Harper” and the co-founder of Ferrell’s company Gloria Sanchez Productions, which put the documentary together. She entered Ferrell’s orbit 22 years ago as his assistant before rising through the ranks to become a producer on many of his films.
Elbaum’s 2017 marriage to Rafael Marmor, a film producer whose company, Delirio Films, makes documentaries about everyone from Magic Johnson to Mike Wallace to Dr. Ruth, extended the web of connections. More than a half-dozen of Marmor’s films were directed by Josh Greenbaum, who Ferrell and Elbaum tapped to direct “Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar,” the 2020 Kristen Wiig comedy that Gloria Sanchez produced. Steele met Greenbaum on the film’s set when he was there for a day to punch up the script.
Marmor and Greenbaum’s friendship began in college at Cornell. “His older brother and I were roommates for several years, and Josh was kind of the younger brother who came and visited all the time,” Marmor says.
Got all that? Marmor quips that you need “one of those crazy person’s charts with all these lines leading to each other” to make sense of things (think Carrie Mathison’s evidence wall on “Homeland”).
All these relationships came in handy with “Will & Harper.” The film represented something gnarlier and more raw than the previous projects Ferrell and Steele had collaborated on, and they weren’t sure how to approach it — or if they wanted to do it at all. Well, it was Steele who had the biggest reservations. “She hates being on camera,” Ferrell explains.
The origins of the project date back to 2021, when Steele sent a letter to her friends and family telling them that she was transitioning. It was Ferrell who first thought that Steele’s revelation could inspire a movie — one that could entertain as well as inform at a time when the LGBTQ community is facing a wave of anti-trans laws and restrictions.
“Her great love is to take these cross-country road trips,” Ferrell says. “And I heard she was kind of questioning that. As a trans woman she had to think about things differently, and so I said, ‘What if we did this drive and I can be your buffer, and I can also ask all the questions that I have.’”
Harper Steele, left, Will Ferrell and Will Forte in “Will & Harper”
©Netflix/Courtesy Everett Colle
Elbaum nominated Marmor to help produce the project, and Marmor, in turn, suggested enlisting Greenbaum given his nonfiction background (he had directed docs on subjects such as “The Dana Carvey Show” and sports mascots). “Steven Spielberg wanted to do it,” Ferrell jokes. “But then Josh came in and we said, ‘Sorry, Steve.’”
“There was a scheduling conflict,” Elbaum offers diplomatically.
Greenbaum earned Steele’s trust by outlining his approach. “I needed to make sure we kept away from the tropes of how cis people sometimes see trans people,” Steele says. “For my own comfort level, I needed to make sure that we weren’t shooting a movie that’s like ‘Will has a trans friend, and that’s crazy!’”
Instead, Greenbaum embraced a no-sketches mantra, encouraging his subjects, so deft at deflecting with comedy, to reveal a bit more of themselves. “It’s gonna be weird, and it’s going to take two days,” Greenbaum told them. “But after 48 hours you will forget that the cameras are there. You will be worn down and drop your facade.”
He was also interested in capturing another side of the country, one that leaned less on iconic landmarks like the Grand Canyon. “Harper finds the beauty in the mundane,” Greenbaum says. “She likes to pull out her lawn chairs and watch the sun set from a Walmart parking lot on the side of a service road. I wanted to capture the beauty of Harper’s vision of America.”
So Greenbaum strapped two cameras to the hood of Steele’s jeep (“It made driving complicated,” she says) and followed the pair for 16 days as they attended a Pacers game and a stock car race, relaxed in an Oklahoma dive bar and went for a hot air balloon ride in New Mexico. What followed was nearly 240 hours of footage from their cross-country odyssey. It showed Steele’s fellow Americans being unexpectedly welcoming in some cases (the bar scene) and shockingly hostile in others (a visit to a Texas restaurant famous for its 72-ounce steak goes south). Greenbaum whittled it all down to a manageable two hours, requiring him to excise scenes of Ferrell using Steele’s CB trucker radio under the handle “California Kid,” as well as a bit involving a chocolate bunny that the pair inadvertently left out on the dashboard until it became soup.
“I was blown away by the finished film,” says Elbaum. “But I was also concerned about how Will and Harper would feel because they are so unguarded.”
She needn’t have worried. Both Steele and Ferrell loved the movie’s honesty, humor and heart, and they’ve been surprised by the intensity of the response to it. At Sundance, where it debuted in January, it scored multiple standing ovations, as well as a distribution deal from Netflix. Being on the world’s biggest streaming service offers the friends a chance to spread their message of empathy and tolerance to a global audience.
“We’re hoping that the algorithm says, ‘If you’re a fan of ‘Holmes & Watson,’ why not watch ‘Will & Harper,’” Ferrell says.
“No, ‘Ricky Bobby,’” Steele interjects. “Come on.”
Source Agencies
