“When we met Yolanda in that first weekend, we had this feeling that she was a great subject. As a person, she’s very ethical. She’s fighting this battle she believes in, and we knew that we had the heart and core of our story, whatever the ugliness surrounding it.”
“Sometimes, when you do a documentary, you start with this almost schematic understanding of what the story is,” adds Schock. “Yolanda seemed like somebody who’d lived through a whole world. We were very interested in this Mad Men-era, with her working behind the scenes at [Sea-Monkeys distributor] Transcience and working with novelty toys. But then we were struck by her struggle.”
That realization came the moment they visited Signorelli at the estate and found her living in ruins, with no running water or electricity.
“It was like a portal,” Schock says. “It was compelling, and we were a little bit ecstatic about it, to be honest, in that dorky documentary way that we had the privilege to be there. But then the human side came through, because we left the schematic notion we had and met Yolanda herself. She was so relatable, and we became comfortable talking to each other fast that we wondered when we would actually start filming. We were spending so much time just chatting and hanging out.”
During that period of conversation, the filmmakers witnessed Yolanda interacting with animals. Her care for real small creatures, not just sea-monkeys, struck the documentarians. But they were even more impressed that she stuck to her principles when it came to the dispute instead of cashing out.
“We figured pretty quickly that Yolanda had other options for her condition,” Schock points out. “She could have sold the sea monkeys for a few million dollars and retired, and that would be totally understandable. When we met her, she was in the process of putting hundreds of acres of valuable land into a trust so it could be a preserve forever. She could have sold it and retired to Florida. As we began to understand the parameters of her life and the choices she was making, it gave us insight into her ethical backbone.”
