Questlove’s Insane SNL Music Montage Took a Year to Complete

If your brain got deep-fried watching the marvelous opening sequence to 50 Years of SNL Music, yes, it was a very intensive labor of love for Questlove, and the Emmys committee should already have a verdict. Speaking with Deadline about the method behind his creative madness, the director said that the seven-minute mash-up — which deftly remixed about a hundred SNL performances — took nearly a year to complete in the editing room. “I knew you got to gobsmack them right at the top,” he explained. “I had all this music, so I thought, I’m going to prepare this montage the way that I would prepare a DJ gig.” Questlove was asked by Lorne Michaels to direct the project in early 2021 and committed to watching every single SNL episode for research, which gave him about two and a half years to complete it before working with an editor on the montage. (Depending on the day, Quest watched between four to eight episodes.) However, he was disheartened that the editor relied on artificial intelligence to cultivate ideas.

“He kind of laughed at me said that he took the liberty of doing the same thing, but ‘I didn’t do your process, I just put a bunch of stuff in the computer and this is what it spit back to me,’” Questlove recalled about their first meeting. “I was laughing, so I didn’t have to sit through a year’s worth of SNL viewing? Then we just kind of went through my notes.” The final edit, of course, has his very human Roots crew touch all over it, because we’re doubtful ChatGPT could suggest a transition from “Hot in Herre” to “Take Me Out.” “That to me is the most important part of where we are right now in terms of technology,” Quest added. “Do we still trust humans to do this stuff or can we just type a command in and let AI do it for us?”

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