As a documentary filmmaker, how many times can you reasonably expect to work on a project that includes explosive, surprising material that drops jaws? Editors Charles Divak and Evan Wise are now at two, having followed up the insanity of Chimp Crazy with Alex Stapleton’s Sean Combs: The Reckoning, which includes cinema verité footage that would make D.A. Pennebaker drool.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen footage that vulnerable in my career,” Wise says of the footage captured before Combs’ arrest, showing moments far removed from his polished public persona. “This felt like the first look behind the curtain anyone had ever had.”
That sense of disbelief was familiar. Chimp Crazy hinged on similarly explosive material, and Divak and Wise found themselves once again sitting down on day one thinking, How is this real, and how do we responsibly use it? Divak spent his first days in the edit bay doing little else but watching it. “It was wild,” he says. “The intimacy of it—just mundane things like him putting on lip balm in the mirror—I’ve never seen inside something like that, especially with a public figure.” In a series interrogating power and control, those moments proved as unsettling as the revelations.
From the start, the challenge was restraint. “You don’t want to cut to it because you can,” Wise says. “You want to cut to it because you should.” That meant constantly reassessing the footage as interviews came in from former collaborators, employees, and insiders, watching it “a million times” as the story evolved and resisting the urge to let spectacle override structure.
One of the most powerful patterns emerged when interview subjects unknowingly brought up moments captured on tape. “You’re not planting ideas for them,” Divak says. “So when they bring up something that’s also in the footage—something they don’t even know exists—it rings alarm bells. Like, OK, this is real.”
As Sean Combs: The Reckoning took shape, its four-episode structure was more fluid than viewers might assume. Episodes one and two, which chart Combs’ early rise and the violence and rivalries surrounding Bad Boy Records, locked in early. The back half—dealing with later allegations, lawsuits, and the trial itself—was messier. “Episodes three and four were far more nebulous,” Divak says, especially as the team found themselves editing while a real-life verdict was unfolding in real time. When the verdict landed, it sent shockwaves through the edit bay. “We did not get a lot of work done that day,” Wise admits.
The verdict forced a recalibration, particularly for the finale. “The fourth episode probably had the most permutations,” Wise says. Ultimately, the editors chose not to over-litigate the trial itself. Instead, the episode widens the lens, using the footage and interviews to examine patterns of behavior that stretch far beyond a single courtroom outcome.
That access came through archival material, startling not because it existed but because of who created it. “[Combs is] his own best archivist,” Wise says. The sheer volume of self-shot material recalls the shock of how eager Chimp Crazy’s Tonia was to spill it all on camera without grasping how damning it would become. “A photo is just a photo,” Divak says. “But when you understand what was happening behind the scenes, it takes on an entirely different meaning.”
For both editors, one of the most chilling throughlines was repetition. “He was a man of patterns,” Divak says. “After a while, you realize you’ve heard this story before, it’s just a different person, five or 10 years later.” Wise, meanwhile, was struck by Combs’ ability to compartmentalize. “He could flip a switch,” he says. “Be in total crisis mode, then pause to take a photo with a stranger.” In a series about image management and accountability, that switch becomes its own form of evidence.
That tension between access and ethics, spectacle and responsibility, is one reason The Reckoning has landed as a cultural flashpoint. As Wise puts it, “A good documentary teaches you something you didn’t know or takes you somewhere you can’t go. No one in the world has ever been in that room with him. And we took you there.”
For editors, that’s the highest compliment there is. For viewers, it’s why The Reckoning feels less like a passive watch and more like a reckoning in real time.
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