Interview: ‘My Mom Jayne’ Editor JD Marlow Talks Collaboration with Director Mariska Hargitay, Creative Challenges, and the Film’s Universal Message
After premiering at Cannes Film Festival to exceptional critic reviews last month, Jayne Mansfield biographical documentary “My Mom Jayne” released on HBO Max yesterday. The film, directed by “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” star and daughter of Mansfield, Mariska Hargitay, follows Hargitay as she pieces together an accurate picture of who her mother, who died in a car accident when Hargitay was only three years old, was, outside of Mansfield’s scandalous headlines and shallow show-business persona. The documentary is Hargitay’s feature film directorial debut.
The film is unique in both its storytelling and structure. It’s not an autobiography of Jayne Mansfield or the memoir of Mariska Hargitay, it’s a conversation between the lives of two women—mother and daughter—who never got the chance to know each other. While Hargitay explores her mother’s life in the past and challenges her idea of who Mansfield was, she discovers information that forces her to reinterpret her own developing life and identity.
An editorial feat for editor JD Marlow, through the fearless and honest portrayal of one family’s story, the film powerfully lays bare the universality of the cyclical nature of family trauma, loss, triumph and how we contend with what we are left with.
Marlow is an editor specialized in documentary editing. His credits include “Stephen Curry: Underrated” on Apple TV+, “Endangered” on HBO, “Dogs” on Netflix and more. The Independent sat down with Marlow to discuss the challenge of tackling such a personal story in “My Mom Jayne,” his collaboration with Hargitay and the message he hopes the audience is left with.
Hannah Brueske: What made you want to concentrate on documentary work as an editor?
JD Marlow: I kind of knew that I wanted to work on documentaries from the time I was in high school. I tried other things that told me that I was right about that. I remember being a PA on a fancy Ridley Scott movie one of the summers that I was at Emerson [College] and I hated it. [I realized] this is not for me. I want to work on nonfiction. I’m just more drawn to nonfiction storytelling. The process is totally different in a lot of ways. [As an editor] you’re kind of the writer too, and you get to immerse yourself in a set of characters and a world or people that maybe you’re not familiar with and find yourself crossing paths with people’s lives that you never really thought you would.
HB: How did you first get involved with “My Mom Jayne”?
JDM: I had been in the HBO orbit for a couple of years. I don’t know if HBO recommended me or not, but the producer [of the film] reached out to me around this time, two years ago. I didn’t really know anything about Mariska Hargitay. I knew who she was, but I didn’t know Jayne Mansfield was her mom; I didn’t even know who Jayne Mansfield was. I met with [Hargitay and the producer] on a Zoom call, and then I went to [Hargitay’s] place and we had an in person chat. I asked, “What is the story?” She told it to me, and I was floored by the whole thing.
That feeling that I had in that first meeting was what I was attracted to about this project. This is a real story 60 years in the making. For somebody who loves documentary filmmaking, it’s such a gift to be presented with a story that you can get involved with that’s totally untold and intimate in so many ways. Mariska was so open about everything. She had no agenda. There was no, “I’m doing this to promote my skincare brand.” It was just, “I just want to tell this story that I’ve been keeping inside for decades and I want to do it now.” And so all of that was just exciting.
HB: It was the same for me as a viewer. I knew nothing about Jayne Mansfield going into the film, but by the end I really felt like I knew her, and felt so much for her and her story. That speaks to your brilliance as an editor. Like an onion, the layers kept peeling back revealing more and changing the story. Each time it was just shocking.
JDM: I’m so glad you feel that way. I always want a film to work for the audience. Part of what I’ve learned from doing documentaries is that you have to pay attention to how you’re feeling about something when you’re presented with it. If you’re in the field shooting something and there’s a moment that happens — that’s the moment. Remember that moment, because that’s what you want to have on screen. You don’t need to invent it later. That first meeting that I had, that feeling that I had when I spoke to her about this thing I had no idea about, there was an essence that was, “That’s got to be what we experience when we watch it as the viewer.” There’s so much trauma involved, too, in this kind of thing. But it’s a really heartwarming family story too.
HB: So much of the film is archival footage of Mansfield. As the editor, how were you involved in handling that footage?
We had the best archival producer in the business, Lindsay Schneider, who I worked with on an HBO film a previous year. I was like, “Hey, do you want to do this thing? It’s really going to be a huge challenge, but you might like it.” Neither of us really knew what we were getting into. For her, it was just a Herculean effort for one person to source [all the material]. We had maybe 1,000 hours of footage and 20,000 photographs. It was a huge filmmaking gift to have access to that massive amount of material, but for the archival people it was such a massive undertaking to source all that, but also to clear it for a documentary that’s going to be on HBO is a huge challenge. It was a big effort, mostly by her.
HB: For any feature length film the process of editing must feel a bit overwhelming when you’re starting, because you have to deal with so many different elements. Can you walk me through the process of editing this film specifically?
JDM: it depends on what the ingredients are, but for this, because it was so archival heavy, I was leaning more into reviewing what we had. We had probably 120 hours of stuff that was shot, like present-day interviews. I looked at some of that and then was like, “Okay, I’m going to go back and get into the archive more.” I would sort of dip back and forth. I spent a long time just watching stuff before doing anything with it, and that’s something I’ve been doing more and more when I come on to something, just to have as much of a scope of the whole thing as possible so that I’m not starting to cut a scene in a vacuum and don’t know where it goes. Because this movie really — none of us really knew what it was going to be. It was sort of like, “Okay, it’s not a biography of Jayne Mansfield, and it’s not a memoir for Mariska. It’s sort of this mixture. How do we square those two things and make it feel like one movie?” That was what I was really focused on at the beginning. I wanted to ingest as much material as I could before I got too anxious, so that I could have a better feel for sort of how those things would go together.
HB: This story was just so tight in the way it was told and which information you chose to reveal at what point in the film. Is that a storyline that you wrote out in the beginning before you got into editing?
JDM: Yeah, kind of. I watched stuff for six, seven weeks, and then I sat down with my associate editor, Sarah Wasserman, and we spent just three days together making a board of what we thought, beat by beat, the film would be, based on everything we had looked at and sort of what the feeling was at the time of how this might come together. There were some things that were still a little bit vague in there. There were some moments where we don’t really know how we’re going to get from this to this, but this is the general idea. It’s going to start here. This is the intent. We’re going to end up here, and then by this point we’re going to know this. So we had mapped it out to a degree. I would say maybe 80–85% of that held true for what’s in the movie. Generally it was a helpful and accurate guide for how we structured the movie and how we approached how we were telling it. I started in late October. I didn’t start editing anything until January. But we had this guide that we had created for ourselves, and it gave us a framework for how we’re going to do this. There was intent for almost everything in how we were dealing with it. And then I started to put it together almost linearly in terms of that structure.
HB: Was Mariska very involved in the editing process? How did you collaborate with her? Obviously it’s a very personal story, so how did you make sure that the way she wants to tell the story is coming through in the editing?
JDM: We were building things for many months and we built stuff, and then we’d look at it together. She was great in that she gave me the room to sort of keep building. We didn’t get stuck on too many things. She was super enthusiastic about what was being built. I was nervous from the beginning, just because it’s not a normal situation where you’re showing a director a cut, and it’s her story. It’s about her family, so it might be a hard section to look at. I just didn’t know how it was gonna go. But she was so great about watching stuff and giving positive feedback, and sort of getting granular at the right times.
Once we had a real rough cut, we started spending days together getting into the weeds of specific things. And that’s kind of how it should go. We had so many amazing days working in person where eight hours goes by and we can’t believe what we just did together because having the two minds in the same room at the same time just took this thing to the next level. So many of my fears going into it about making a film with the person whose story it is, really started to fade away. It really became about collaborating with another creative person and having these dialogues. She was just so open and great about the whole thing, so I can’t say enough good things about that.
HB: It’s great to hear how collaborative and seemingly smooth it was to work together. In general, as an editor, how do you know how much to push if you feel really strongly about something, but a director might feel a different way?
JDM: That’s an amazing question, and this comes up all the time. You always want to pick your spots and pick your moments, and that was especially true on this one. I try to just show. If I have an idea about something that is going to work better, I try to just do it and show it. And if that doesn’t win [the director] over, then it didn’t work. But sometimes it does win [them] over, and we don’t have to have a big long debate about it. I was so grateful to have that trust from [Hargitay] because then it didn’t have to be that way. I have a huge responsibility to get this right with her, and to present her with things. She didn’t know me when we started this. So she doesn’t know what I’m gonna do or how I go about things. It’s a hunch. So you’re sort of feeling it out in the beginning.
HB: What would you say the most challenging part was about working on this film?
JDM: The thing that made it the most challenging is what made it special to me, which is just how personal it was. Going in that was something that I had some reservations about because it’s obvious — if you’re gonna make a film with somebody and they’re telling their own story, there’s a million ways that can go sideways. You don’t know if they are going to have the perspective to do this and make it good or are they going to railroad you and do whatever they want? And so navigating that was tricky at times. But I also knew from the beginning that that had to be embraced, no matter what, because this was a personal essay. And that’s what it had to be. And anything else wouldn’t have worked. I felt like my job was to keep it in perspective as much as I could for her, and if I felt like if we weren’t doing right by the audience for one reason or another, just raise my hand and say, “Hey, this isn’t gonna work and here’s why,” and that’s kind of how it went.
HB: Speaking of the audience, how do you hope that an audience receives this film? Is there a specific message that you hope people will leave with?
JDM: I don’t know if there’s a specific message, but my hope is that a general person who doesn’t have any connection to [the story] will sit down and watch it and be as surprised and sort of moved as I was when I knew what it was. I suspect that there’s a lot of families who would watch this and it could be about a dentist and it would have the same impact because it’s just a really intimate family story. It’s authentic. These are real people whose lives went a certain way because of a series of events and the fallibility of parents and the decisions that they made.
For me, I don’t want to give anything away, but this movie, to me, is not as much about Jayne as it is about Mickey. And the most powerful stuff for me in this movie is about Mickey. And the choices that he made and how he moved forward, because he carried with him so much, and it didn’t have to go that way. He didn’t have to do what he did for himself, for her, for the family. And it’s moving to me every time I watch it. It’s powerful. I found myself thinking about my own family and my own parents plenty of times on this film. Hopefully that’s the experience that people can have watching it.
BONUS: JD Marlow, ’08, on his formative experience at Emerson College:
JDM: I knew I wanted to go to film school, and Emerson had this honors program that I was fortunate enough to get into. It was a half tuition scholarship situation, but it was also just a really good academic experience. That was a huge reason why I ended up in Boston. I was just super glad that I made it there because it ended up just being a great experience. It was the kind of place at the time — I assume it still is like this — where you really make the most of it yourself. You sort of get out what you put in. It’s a really great way to experience college, rather than just being fed classes. That’s what I loved about being at Everson. And it has served me well.
Regions: Boston, Cannes, New York City