Cutting Pink’s Path to Wembley Stadium
“Pink: All I Know So Far,” streaming on Amazon Prime Video starting May , is not a concert documentary, says the film’s co-editor Cindy Mollo. Rather, it’s the story of a mother on tour with her family whose career goal is to play the world-famous Wembley Stadium.
The doc, directed by Michael Gracey, follows the Grammywinning singer-songwriter’s Beautiful Trauma tour, on which she was accompanied by husband Carey Hart and their two children — daughter Willow, at the time, and son Jameson, .
“We had to weave in bits of her backstory for the few people who don’t know Pink,” Mollo says. “We also had to explain why she wants to bring her kids on tour and integrate family and work.”
Mollo’s colleague Brad Comfort is no stranger to the world of Pink, having edited her music videos, but the opening sequence, he says “was a daunting endeavor that went through several iterations.”
An early assembly included an anxiety dream-type opening showing the chaos of the tour. That evolved into a vérité-style start with footage from tour stops in Dublin. Finally, the editors landed on the backstage opening at Wembley as Pink goes through her vocal warmups. A voice-over radio spot announces the soldout Wembley dates before cutting to some of the , fans waiting for her to take the stage, then lands on an animated map that plots the tour cities. Interwoven into all that is the concert’s opening number, “Let’s Get This Party Started.”
The key, Mollo notes, was not to start the doc on a negative: “Brad had to take that opening and recut it. He had to reinvent it, so what we see now is the preparation, the connection-building and the scope of the tour building to her coming out on the chandelier.”
The star’s signature entrance also informs her backstory. “She was a gymnast when she was a kid,” Mollo says. “She wants to challenge herself and try something no one else is doing. We needed to tell the path to Wembley, and this is why all of this matters to this woman.”