Former Saturday Night Live segment director Oz Rodriguez had had his eye on making a feature-length SNL music doc ever since he was tasked with creating a montage of the show’s most memorable musical guests for the show’s 40th anniversary ten years ago. His chance finally came two years ago when he was asked to co-direct Ladies & Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music.
Together with Questlove, Rodriguez sifted through hours upon hours of archival material, much of it never-aired, to create a three-hour feast for the senses (the film was originally intended to run just two hours, but the co-directors successfully petitioned NBC for more). Their extraordinarily well-reviewed film premiered late last month on NBC and is now streaming on Peacock. An encore presentation is set to air this Saturday from 8-11pm on NBC, the night before the show’s much ballyhooed 50th Anniversary special.
With just days to go before said special—which he’s been enlisted to help out on alongside an all-star team of other SNL all-stars—we caught up with Rodriguez to talk about making the doc, highlights from his directing career at SNL, and what we can expect from the upcoming anniversary special.
This interview was conducted by Andrew Buss. It has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
Tell me about the process of going through 50 years of the show for this documentary. Where do you start?
The first interview we did was Bad Bunny in October 2023. But by then, we had been talking about it already for a few months. Maybe even six. And that was just sort of an overall conversation of “What stories do we want to follow? What stories do we feel like have to be in there?”
Sinead O’Connor, we were like “We definitely have to cover that.” Just like conversations like, “How do we represent 50 years of music in one documentary?” It was extremely daunting, especially at the beginning. And that’s where ideas like the mix at the beginning came to be. The thought was, “We have our stories that we want to look at, but this is a good way to show the breadth of the library, if you will.”
Part of me also feels like I’ve been working on this for at least 10 years, because I was here for SNL40. And we tried to do a montage to represent the music. But that montage ended up being 20 minutes long. And the producers were like, “We can’t hand over 20 minutes of SNL40 to a music montage.” Ever since then, I’ve been wanting to work on something that got into what we got into… the fact that [SNL] is like a time capsule of music. At first sort of American pop music, and now it’s gone global and international.
How did you go about trying to whittle it all down and figure out what goes into not just the documentary, but also that opening montage?
First, we watched every single music performance. Questlove went the extra step of cataloging each performance. We definitely had our buckets of stuff that we wanted to hit on. We were working on the rest of the documentary and the montage concurrently. The montage took about 10-11 months. That was a lot of experimentation. At one point it was 17 minutes long. That was too much. NBC was like, “Well, the first act can’t be 17 minutes long. We have commercials.” It was a lot of experimentation and trying to find the right balance.
As far as the clips that we use and the stories we follow, yeah, it was a daunting task. You’ve got to sort of start somewhere. It’s putting some stuff together and seeing how it feels. It was just sort of like–an expression I just learned recently–putting clay on the wheel and just sort of figuring it out.
What were some of the things you discovered while going through the performances that surprised you the most?
Well, I’ll tell you the most exciting thing. I was also an editor on the project, and I really wanted to include a chapter on Kanye West. Obviously a very polarizing person. But every time he came to the show, it was like pure chaos. It was so much insanity. I felt like there had to be a way to tell the story in a way that doesn’t glorify it or anything. It’s just about the craziness that happened every time he was there. I remember I asked the post supervisor for SNL if he could get me the footage from promo for the Adam Driver show. So he gives me the promo, and I rewound the clip and that’s where I found the moment where Kenan [Thompson] realizes that Kanye’s wearing the MAGA hat. That’s in the doc, and I just felt like a prospector finding gold.
Kenan has my favorite line in the doc talking about the moment where he went off the rails with his rant during Goodnights, saying “the hat was loud.”
(Laughs). Exactly. And I agree with him. I think the biggest bummer was it would’ve been a really cool performance with the band. If it was just the bit with the music, it would’ve been incredible. And I had forgotten that it was Ego [Nwodim]’s first show. There were just so many things that came together with that.
It was also cool to hear other people’s favorite performances. Nirvana’s first performance is the first one that I can actually remember. I grew up in the Dominican Republic, and I was so excited about watching Nirvana. It was then that I stumbled upon this crazy show and became a fan. But to hear Jack White talk about that he didn’t have cable, that he loved Nirvana and had been learning their songs. He’s just like us. (Laughs).
About those interviews, you got such a wide range of people. Were there any you were truly pumped about getting to interview, or just even surprised they said yes?
Well, when you get royalty like Mick Jagger or Paul Simon, that feels really good. Two of my favorite acts and two of my favorite interviews that we did were Tom Morello [from Rage Against the Machine] and Lee Ving from Fear. We worked really hard to get those interviews because I wanted to hear the stories from them directly. Those are two crazy legendary performances that people talk about behind the scenes. I just wanted to hear it from them.
Billie Eilish was cool to sit down with us. I thought it was really important for us to have people like Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo, so it doesn’t feel like this is just a thing about the past. It’s still going on. To go from Mick Jagger to Nirvana to White Stripes to Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo and Miley Cyrus and Bad Bunny.
Another person you got was Eddie Murphy. You got him to share his insights on his sketches like “James Brown’s Celebrity Hot Tub” and Stevie Wonder and Frank Sinatra doing Ebony and Ivory, but also Prince’s first performance on the show.
And the Fear performance! That was a last minute question. That was a surprise. We didn’t know he jumped up onstage to play bass. He said that, and we were like “What??” Then we looked at the tape, and were like “Oh sh*t. He’s right. That did happen.”
I love that you got that. Can you talk about bringing in not just the musical performances but also sketches and other elements with music in them as well?
At one point, the idea for this project was just 50 great performances. But then talking about the show, it’s really driven by music. Music is sort of the unsung hero. There are so many legendary sketches that involve music. So it felt like it was important for us to show the music in sort of the comedic space of SNL all the way to The Lonely Island.
I was hoping you could touch on the more technical side of that opening montage. Everything blended together so beautifully, despite the age of some of those clips versus others. Tell me about how you got the standard definition clips looking as crisp and clear as the high definition ones.
That was definitely teamwork. (Laughs). We began by working with the lo-res files to just make everything work musically. But once we knew what we wanted to use, it was literally going back to the archive tapes and re-digitizing them and trying to get things in 4K, trying to get them in the best quality that we can. And that’s something that the show’s already doing, trying to modernize the library. It was a mixture of that, and also a little bit of post-magic to make everything look as good as possible. Basically we tried every trick in the book to make something in the 2000’s match with the 70’s.
But because this was an SNL project, we had the keys to the archive, which was incredible. We could get in there. For example, the off-camera audio that you hear in Rage Against the Machine with the crew, sort of fighting them about the flags. We went back to the tape of that performance, which was very difficult because things weren’t properly labeled. There was a lot of digging through old material and all kind of weird tapes that aren’t used anymore and figuring out what machine will digitize this. I’m not kidding, the intro itself took about 10 months just to get it right.
It paid off. It looks incredible. It got a lot of love online even before the documentary came out.
It’s great to hear that people are digging it. We put a lot of work into it. And also, it’s as close as we’re going to get to showing how huge this library is, and how many people have performed. So many legendary artists. I had forgotten that Bob Dylan had performed here.
I’m guessing that you can’t say very much right now, but like everyone else, I’m very excited for the 50th Anniversary on the 16th and the music show on the 14th. Are you able to share if you are working on things for the celebration?
Yeah. I’m here at 30 Rock right now. Similar experience to the 40th. I think there might be a pre-tape. That might be something I’ll shoot. We’ll see. One thing I can tell you for sure is there will be some montages. (Laughs). That I’m allowed to say. What else, I don’t know. It’s sort of similar to the 40th, as far as trying to show the history of the show through sketches and trying to include as many of the amazing cast members and celebs who have made SNL the show that it is. I think that is all I can tell you. Classic SNL, it’s all still coming together as we speak.
Let’s talk about your work as a director of filmed pieces in general on the show. Are there any filmed pieces that immediately spring to mind where you were surprised they turned out as well as they did? Where you maybe thought leading up to it “I don’t think this is going to work.”
I remember we did one called “Kellywise,” which was an IT parody with Kate McKinnon as Kellyanne Conway. It was very ambitious. Kate had like 3 different looks and it was raining and we had to do the gutter from IT. So yeah, pretty chill. (Laughs). I remember by hour thirteen, I was like “Oh my god. We have so much more to do!” I remember just sort of trusting the process, like “We’ll get there.”
Obviously short films have been a staple since episode one, but over the years we’ve watched the films become a lot more polished and on par with their cinematic counterparts. When did that shift start taking shape?
As far as the modern era goes, I think it was the Lonely Island Digital Shorts that really changed the game. They were very run and gun in the beginning, but as they got more popular, they got more ambitious. And definitely that set a tempo. Once the show does something well, you have to match that, at least quality-wise. So they definitely set the bar pretty high. That also led to a lot more interest in videos. All of a sudden the show was having 2 to 3 pre-tapes per show.
That was definitely true of “Kellywise.” It very ambitious sketch, but once you do it and it’s successful, then the show’s like “Well, there you go. You can do that.” It comes with an evolution where you’re sort of challenged every week.
And if you meet the challenge and are successful, then the show keeps pushing a little bit more. I remember when I first started we had one VFX person here who would sort of handle everything. And now you sometimes have a big group of VFX people to handle something like “Mario Kart,” which is so VFX heavy. So it’s sort of been sort of growing and rising up to the challenge, where you’re presented with a sketch that’s pretty hard and you have to figure out how to achieve it.
Then if it works, then sometimes you’re screwed. Because it’s like “Oh sh*t. I guess we’ve shown them we can do this. We can’t complain about it now.”
Have there been times where a writer will come to you with an idea where it’s like, “We physically can’t do that”?
Definitely there are times where we’re like, “Guys, we can’t flood the set and have this Titanic parody in that amount of time. We just can’t do that.”
Last thing I want to ask is when you first started on the show as a director, what was it like to direct some of the more accomplished hosts that come through the door?
Um, terrifying. (Laughs). Terrifying, a lot of “I hope I don’t get fired.” Or, “Well, that was my last show.” The show has kind of a sink or swim thing, where they just let you do it. But there is support here. So when you start, they give you pieces that maybe aren’t as ambitious as the other director who’s been here a little bit longer. But yeah, sometimes you’re just thrown into the fire, like, “Here. Direct this Oscar winner.”
And I think the one thing that helps is that there is no time. So you have to get over the fact that you’re working with The Rock. The Rock has to leave in an hour. So you have to get all of your shots. At a certain point, you lose that sort of “Aw gee whiz, all these celebrities here,” thing. You get into work mode and it’s like, “We have this thing to accomplish. Because they’re waiting for them at the stage and they have to do this other thing.” Sometimes it’s just embracing that attitude, you we don’t get too lost in the fact that you’re telling Dame Emma Thompson how to walk into the room backwards.
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