Stephanie Filo, ACE is a four-time Emmy, as well as Peabody and ACE Eddie Award-winning editor and activist based in Los Angeles and Sierra Leone, West Africa. She was the supervising editor on Max’s A Black Lady Sketch Show and also edited Sony Pictures Classics’ We Grown Now and Netflix’s Monster, among many others. Outside of film and television, Filo often produces and edits social action campaigns and documentaries, primarily centered on the rights of women and girls worldwide. Her notable credits include work with the United Nations, International Labour Organization, and the Obama White House Task Force. Her charitable work has been featured in Forbes Magazine, Entertainment Tonight, Telegraph UK, Yahoo, Al Jazeera, and more. She currently serves on the board for Girls Empowerment Sierra Leone and is a co-founder of End Ebola Now. In 2023, Filo made history as the first picture editor and first Black editor ever to be Emmy-nominated for three different series at the same time.

As part of our Well Versed series, we chatted with Filo about interesting moments throughout her career and her perspective on the craft of editing.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Tell us about a moment when you “fixed it in post.”

A moment recently where I “fixed it in post” was in the film We Grown Now. We’re following Malik and Eric, two boys in 1990s Chicago, and chronicling their friendship throughout this film. Towards the end, Malik shares a poem or essay about his best friend, Eric, and it feels like Malik’s closure moment, coming to terms with growing up. But once we hit the edit and we were in post, we realized it doesn’t feel like Eric has his closure moment. So we spent a lot of time thinking through how we could create a moment like that. And something we realized was, towards the end of the film, there’s a moment where Eric is praying with Malik’s mother and grandmother, and it’s kind of a general prayer. But we thought, since Eric has been struggling with religion throughout this film, what if he has a prayer moment, where he prays about Malik and about the future, and that’s his closure, coming full circle? And so, a couple of days before we locked the film, we built this montage where Eric is saying a prayer for Malik, and it felt like it really tied the characters together and the film together, so it ended up in the finished product and it’s something we’re all really proud of. 

How do you think your work with nonprofits might influence your work as a film and television editor?

Outside of editing, I do a lot of work with different nonprofits as well as different PSA campaigns. Originally, I viewed that as kind of a side hustle. I would work on a TV show or film during the day and then I would go home and work on different nonprofit stuff at night. And at some point it occurred to me that those two things don’t need to be separate. As editors, we have such a powerful voice in the room; we’re really the final rewrite of any script. And so it’s really important for us to focus on sort of the ethics of any project, no matter what the story is that we’re trying to tell. There’s a nuanced voice we can add to whatever story we’re telling; there’s a different perspective we can add in the room. If there’s an underrepresented character, maybe there’s a way we can try to highlight them within our edits. So, as much as I thought nonprofits and editing were two totally separate things, it’s definitely become a major part of my day-to-day life, just trying to apply those principles throughout my life as well as throughout any story that I’m trying to tell.

Take us behind the scenes of A Black Lady Sketch Show. Any fun facts or stories from inside the cutting room?

A fun thing we do behind the scenes on A Black Lady Sketch Show is figure out what our episode titles should be. So once we’ve put all of our episodes together and figured out what order everything goes in, our showrunner Robin Thede, as well as our head writers and all of the editors on our post team will sit down to watch the episode all the way through. And as we’re watching, we’ll jot down little one-liners, any lines that make us laugh—usually the more absurd, the better. And once we get to the very end, we’ll all share what lines we wrote down and we’ll take a vote. And that’s how we figure out what our episode titles are. And since we’ve done the past three seasons of A Black Lady Sketch Show remotely, it’s all been done via Evercast.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve received as an editor?

A piece of advice that I got early on, which has helped me throughout my career, is never to be afraid to try notes. I know when we’re first starting out it’s really easy to feel married to whatever it is that you just edited, but so much of our work, so much of creating any project, is about collaboration. So even if you get a note that makes you think, “That’s insane, that will never work,” you never know until you try. It’s always worth at least trying it, and, worst case scenario, you can always go back to what you originally had. You’ll never know until you try. There’s just so much value in that and trying to get to the best story you possibly can.

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