HBO doc ‘Adrienne’ is a husband’s loving tribute to murdered wife and rising star

NEW YORK — Sitting next to her father Andy Ostroy, Sophie, then 15, opens her mother’s high school yearbook and reads the quote: “Don’t be afraid of dying, be afraid of never living.”

It’s an early scene in “Adrienne,” a new HBO documentary directed by Ostroy that explores the life of his wife and Sophie’s mother, Adrienne Shelly — the actor and filmmaker best known for “Waitress,” who was murdered 15 years ago.

“In hindsight, it’s a metaphor for this whole film because Adrienne’s father died when he was 40 and she died when she was 40,” Ostroy said. “She was 12 when he died and she quickly understood that life isn’t forever. So she lived. She achieved. She accomplished her dreams. She never expected she would automatically have a whole life to do that in.”

Born and raised in Queens, Adrienne Levine (she later adopted her father Sheldon’s nickname Shelly as her stage name) dropped out of high school just before completing her junior year to pursue acting. Before long she’d landed roles in over 20 films, including Hal Hartley’s indie classics “The Unbelievable Truth” and “Trust.” Subsequent movie roles followed, including the 2005 movie “Factotum” with Matt Dillon, Lili Taylor and Marisa Tomei.

Her film “Waitress,” a Sundance hit that Shelly wrote, directed, and co-starred in across Keri Russel and Cheryl Hines, was released a year after her death. The movie, which Shelly penned while eight months pregnant with Sophie, was adapted as a musical in 2015.

But Ostroy says that despite Shelly’s many talents, his first impression of her was of “just this sweet little Jewish girl from Long Island” who was also “profoundly deep and funny.” The pair met on the dating site Match.com. As Ostroy tells it, Shelly proposed a five-minute first date. It lasted five hours. A year later Ostroy proposed in Paris and a traditional Jewish wedding followed in 2002. They welcomed their daughter Sophie in 2003.

Shelly was just hitting her professional stride and enjoying marriage and motherhood when Diego Pillco, a 19-year-old construction worker, killed her during a robbery on November 1, 2006.

On the morning of the murder, Ostroy dropped Shelly off outside the Abingdon Square apartment building where she did most of her writing. He watched her walk inside. It was the last time he saw her. Throughout the day Ostroy tried reaching Shelly, to no avail. Worried, he went to her office and found her dead in the shower. After a violent struggle with Shelly, Pillco had staged her death to look like a suicide. It was only after Ostroy and Shelly’s family implored the detectives to investigate further that Pillco was caught.

Although the 90-minute documentary includes a scene where Ostroy visits Pillco, who is serving 25 years for manslaughter in upstate New York, it doesn’t dwell on the murder. Instead, it spends most of its time exploring the yawning chasm created by Shelly’s absence, as well as how she continues to touch the lives of those who loved her most and those who never knew her.

“About three weeks after she died I realized Adrienne was a struggling filmmaker. She always found it challenging to raise money to make films,” Ostroy said. “I remember hearing her talk about being a woman and how challenging that was at times. So I decided to start a foundation with her name as a way to further her legacy. It allowed me to spin something positive from something so negative.”

Today the Adrienne Shelly Foundation awards scholarships, grants and stipends to women filmmakers. It’s given more than 100 production grants in the past 15 years, including to Chloé Zhao, who won this year’s Academy Award for Best Director.

The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

The Times of Israel: Your documentary is both a public eulogy and an intimate portrayal of Adrienne as a wife, mother, daughter, friend and colleague.

Andy Ostroy: Like other documentaries, it can make you feel like you are getting a private window into someone’s life at home. That feeling might make some people uncomfortable at times, but then again this is not a film with a happy ending. It’s a film about a tragic murder. But it is also a film that is honest and genuine about the whole saga.

I think documentary filmmakers do us all a great service when they tackle a subject we don’t know about, whether it’s a critical moment in history or a critical moment in an average person’s life.

There’s a part in the film where Adrienne talks about being a control freak and wanting to write and direct so she has more control. While you were working on this, how much of her voice as Adrienne the director did you hear?

I heard her voice a lot. Not in a literal, actual sense, but just inspirationally. There were times I would ask “What would Adrienne be doing right now? What would Adrienne’s principle be here, what would she be sticking to?” That guided me a lot. It was hard to live with a filmmaker for five years and then revisit all of the footage about her talking about being resolute in her filmmaking and not tackle this project in the same way. I set out to make a film about her, but also to make a film that she would make.

Your daughter Sophie is a big part of this film. What was it like to work together?

It’s tough being a teenager who is finally embracing the fact that her mom died, who died this way, and who is also realizing how awesome and revered her mother was. So for her to go through this journey with me and be part of the filmmaking process was very special.

She’s credited three times in the film, so she learned a lot about filmmaking. I also think she got a sense for the first time of not just who her mother was, but what her mother actually did for a living.

At one point Adrienne talks about finding what’s funny in what’s painful and how that can be a great survival technique. That’s a hallmark of a lot of Jewish humor.

She was a Jew through and through. Maybe not a High Holy Days “temple Jew,” but a Jew in her core, in her humor, in her philosophy, in her outlook on life, in her sensibility. In her essence she was a Jew. And as she got older she was just more comfortable being Jewy — to reduce it to that term.

I’m the same way in terms of those attributes and we connected on that. I met Adrienne Levine, the sweet Jewish girl from Long Island. That’s who I met. That’s who I knew. That’s who I grew to love.

Did she ever feel comfortable with Adrienne Shelly, the screen persona?

Like a lot of actors who really love the craft, she loved acting but on some level she didn’t love the attention. She was an introvert at heart. She once told me about how when one of her films went to Sundance and everyone was out at parties, she stayed in her room reading a book.

The trappings of it all was never something she was into. When we would go into a store a young woman might go up to her and say, “Oh my god! Adrienne Shelly! You profoundly changed my life.” Adrienne would try to hide in a coat rack. I would say to her “No one is ever going to come up to me and say ‘Oh my god Andy, you have changed my life,’ so if it happens to you that’s amazing.” But she just wasn’t comfortable with that kind of attention.

I understand you wanted the film to be about moving forward with your grief. Can you expound on that?

When I set out to do the film, I wanted it to be about three things: life, death and the aftermath.

I don’t believe in closure. I don’t really understand it. Closure means something is closed and to me, closed means something is ended. If you lose someone, especially if you lose someone in a horribly tragic way, which adds another layer to the death and loss, I don’t know how you close that out. You can say I’m not going to talk about it and it’s not going to be a part of my life. But that doesn’t mean that it went away or that it’s closed.

For me there is also a huge difference between not having closure and being able to move forward. You can be happy again; you can find love again. You can live your life in a productive and satisfying way. That doesn’t mean you have to close out the past. Everything in our past is part of our future. That’s what shapes us as we grow and mature.

You had a deliberate vision of how you wanted the documentary to go. Did you discover anything along the way that changed that?

In the beginning of the film, you see me asking people waiting in line [for the musical “Waitress”] if they knew who Adrienne was. Most didn’t, and I say how I find that profoundly sad. Then there’s a part at the end of the film where Paul Rudd says how it’s kind of amazing as an artist to create something and then have people enjoy it from all walks of life, from all parts of the country not know who created it, not know the backstory. He says how as an artist that’s the best thing — to have the work stand on its own. That was a moment for me that I was like, “Hmm. That’s interesting.”

I still find it sad that people don’t know who she was, but it did make me think that from an artist’s perspective he’s got a really strong point. That it’s okay to detach yourself from the family tragedy element and just look at it from an artistic standpoint.