In some ways, “Secret Mall Apartment” does what it says on the tin. The documentary charts the adventures of an artist collective in Rhode Island that found a hidden space inside the bowels of the Providence Place Mall in 2003. There, the collective created a domestic hideaway in defiance of the consumer mecca that the mall represented, documented the project, and used the space undetected for years.
Director Jeremy Workman and editor Paul Murphy knew there was more nuance to the story than a clandestine performance piece, though. They didn’t want the documentary to feel like a conventional, fill-in-the-blank news item. So they didn’t work in a conventional way, either.
Workman, based in New York, and Murphy, hailing from Australia, divided up the material and worked siloed on specific sequences and with specific types of footage — Murphy with the astonishing DV shot on an Optio stills camera from the ‘00s by artist Michael Townsend and his collaborators, Workman with a lot of the interview and recreation footage shot for the film.
They did this not just because the time difference between Brooklyn and Melbourne makes collaborative editing tricky to organize; they wanted to be able to surprise each other, to build in a number of tonal and stylistic gear to reflect the artists behind the secret apartment, without waiting for the opinion of anyone else on the proverbial edit couch.
“You’re in these really fun sugar rush scenes where it’s so entertaining and ridiculous [as] they’re bringing in cinder blocks, and it’s cut like it’s a Hollywood heist movie. And then we knew that we wanted to slam the breaks on you and shift gears,” Workman told IndieWire. “In a weird way, this process really lent itself to the form we wanted the movie to take.”
“I’m very much the sort of editor who wants to know the big picture when I’m cutting a scene; I want to know where is that scene in the bigger structure. And this was a departure of that for me,” Murphy said. “How can I cut this scene not knowing what’s come before? But because of the way that we divided the film, I was able to just go, ‘Look, I’m just going to make sure that this is a great scene.’”
There are a lot of great scenes in “Secret Mall Apartment,” from the context behind the building of the mall in Providence and the gentrification of the surrounding area to the story of the artists behind the apartment and their other projects across the U.S. There’s also the apartment’s construction, to something of an affirmation of the value of art to individuals and communities. However, Workman was determined none of these ought to feel like copying and pasting an interview transcript.
“I wanted to free ourselves a little bit from structure,” Workman said. “A lot of documentaries — for whatever reason, I’m not casting aspersions — there’s teams involved and everybody’s highlighting transcripts and doing a lot of paper editing. And we were like, ‘How do we free ourselves from that approach and swing for the fences on these scenes? Let’s just cut the best stuff we can and make the best scenes, and Paul and I can figure out how to build it.”
Murphy was quick to point out that they did do some paper editing in Descript — particularly of a long conversation recorded in the mall between Townsend and his then-wife Adriana Valdez-Young about the tension of doing home improvement on the secret apartment and not their actual home. But whatever the method, the goal was always to delight and one-up each other. “We would gestate our own concern of the film and then bring it back to the collective to discuss it,” Murphy said. “It was still collaborative.”
“Because of the time difference, it also created this situation where it felt like we were editing 24-7. I would finish pretty late, at like two in the morning, and then I’d turn around and Paul would be starting his day. It felt really seamless,” Workman said. “We were batting scenes back and forth to each other and it was very much like, ‘Oh, top this. Watch this one. Oh, you think yours is cool? Watch this.’”
There’s a joyfulness that’s possible to sense from the editing volleys between Murphy and Workman, one that echoes the joy the artists themselves had in putting the apartment together. But in part, it’s because both the original artists and the documentarians knew they were getting as close as possible to a real-life Soderbergh film, and the editing reflected that, too.
“ I had a ‘Secret Mall Apartment’ playlist that I just kept on a loop all day, and it was ‘Ocean’s Eleven,’ a lot of Lalo Schifrin,” Murphy said. “That was the thing that helped me get into the style of it, especially the whole [cinder block] sequence. [The material] was just there. You saw from the start that we had the ingredients to make something really interesting and heist-y. It was captured on tape. So it was just about trying to dial that in as much as possible.”
