But I’ve got to solve problems in the scene. What if the shot I need doesn’t exist? What I finally land on is this: capture the truth of someone’s experience. If it’s a broken heart, tell that story. If I need to combine two lines of dialogue into one for something to make sense, so be it. If I need to steal a shot from a different scene to add emotional power, fine. As long as I don’t turn a yes into a no. As long as I don’t embellish or lie. As long as I don’t change the experience.

Robbie the soccer captain is the first character to take shape for me, a trigger point setting other stories in motion, like a cue ball on a pool table. Not much of a first impression. Easy going. Stoner. No known enemies, flame-haired girlfriend. Decent grades, nice family, no discernable problems. Until there are. The first clue comes in one of his video diaries. To help gain permission to shoot, the production gave inexpensive cameras to a number of interested students to use at school. Nobody takes their footage seriously until we realize they’ve been taking the cameras home, to the privacy of their rooms. The results are raw, real and surprising. While our crews follow their lives, these diaries have been capturing their secrets.

Robbie’s at home, it’s night, and as usual he’s toked up. While bitching about his parents’ and his girlfriend’s anxieties, this pops out: Oh, and I got red-carded at a game today. What? I rewind the footage and listen again. Red carded? Mellow, team captain Robbie? I’m no soccer player, but I know it means he’d been kicked out of the game. I mention it to showrunner R. J. Cutler, but don’t get much of a response. A week goes by: more diaries, and a bigger clue – Robbie’s got a black eye. He got into a fight when somebody made a crack about a friend named Brad. Tedeschi hasn’t encountered a Brad. My assistant searches the field logs, finds a Brad, we start following him and stumble onto his mother recounting that when Brad was 5, she and her husband were already wondering if he was gay. Ah.

We’re soon stitching together odd bits and pieces of dialogue from the boys, their parents and friends – enough to establish that I’ve found a love story: Robbie and Brad grew up together, they’re best friends, and Brad came out to him first, in their junior year. But these are past events – none are on camera. Important information, yes, but with little emotional resonance.

I need to find a visual language to tell their story. There’s a trick I learned about physicalizing the unspoken while cutting Bob Altman’s ensemble drama Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean – visual clues to a character’s inner life – but its roots are in my dance training. Even when unmoving, a dancer is never dead weight. He’s alert, aware and awaiting. It’s the same for everyone – even silent and still, we instinctively react to the world. We smile, we slump, we shrug, we frown. Our fingers twitch, our nostrils flare, our shoulders rise, our eyes drop.

Find those shots, put them in the right places, and you’ve got subtext. Why can’t it work in documentary as well? I know where to look, and I know how to spot them. Watch the dailies again – but without sound. I start with Robbie. Turn off the lights. Mute the audio, hit play. Let the silence strip everything of context. Slip my mind into neutral and focus on what I can reimagine as unconscious reactions to an action word, or thought – There. Just before he turns off his camera – the slight head shake, the small smile … I know he’s been talking about his da – Forget that. Try it against Brad laughing over his fear of telling his best friend … and I love Robbie flipping off the camera. Clever but organic…

What else, what else… I experiment with timing and juxtaposition. I play with transitions. I audition music cues, building emotional continuity. Hours later, I’ve stitched together a rough portrait of the black eye affair, the emotional truth of their experiences sometimesovert but often implied over a rough story arc. Implication is something I know from my dancing days.

My body has never been flexible – I couldn’t elevate a straight leg above my waist without throwing my center – read balance – off. A dancer with the Martha Graham Company saw me struggling with this in class, said he had the same problem and offered a solution – a deception – that can fool an audience. Never quite reach the upper limit of your leg’s full elevation. Keep moving it in that direction, slowly, stretch the moment out, closer – until it’s time to move somewhere else. Never getting to the end created the illusion of greater height. I could imply something that was never there.

When I first arrived in the editing room, I already knew this instinctively. It’s a poorly sung piece of music that finally leads me to the tone and style of the show. I discover a shot of Brad sitting at his school locker at one end of a long, empty hallway. He looks drained after a long day – or so I imagine. Maybe brooding. Or bewildered. And I recall a song Robbie sings in one of his video diaries, his scratchy late-night stoner voice murdering a Bob Dylan lyric after yet another argument with his dad: There must be some way out of here, said the joker to the thief… I find Robbie’s shot, mark the opening lines, then cut Brad’s shot just behind it. Robbie’s singing continues over Brad closing his locker and starting his lonesome walk down the deserted hall. Another half-verse in, I cross-fade Robbie’s voice with Dylan’s own recording, let it take Brad out the door. I rewind, sit back to watch … and something happens.

I don’t have a clue yet where this scene might fit into the season. But I don’t really care right now because I’m being lifted from my chair by an alchemy of shots, lyrics, timing and emotional investment that’s whispering follow me. Get on the train, go for the ride, let the story unfold itself. American High is coming to life.