‘Will and Harper’ songwriter Sean Douglas says the ‘resounding message’ of ‘Harper and Will Go West’ is about love and friendship

“That’s the resounding message of the movie,” declares Grammy-nominated and Academy of Country Music award-winning songwriter Sean Douglas about the line “a friend is a friend is a friend, ’til the end,” from his original song “Harper and Will Go West,” from the documentary feature “Will & Harper.” For our recent webchat he adds “it’s an issue that certain people find triggering. It’s an issue that is controversial, but when you get down to it, and why I think the movie is so wonderful is that Will is like the best ambassador for this. He’s not a person that people view as being a crusader for causes. He’s there to be a friend. That to me, it just feels like what it’s all about. It’s not about ‘everybody shut up and listen’ and it’s not beating heads about about how they need to come around to our side of this issue. It’s about two people coming together and loving each other.” Watch our video interview above.

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In “Will & Harper,” when comedian Will Ferrell finds out his close friend Harper Steele is coming out as a trans woman, the two decide to embark on a cross-country road trip to process this new stage of their relationship in an intimate portrait of friendship and transition. The documentary features the original song “Harper & Will Go West” as a tribute to their friendship, which Douglas co-wrote with Emmy nominee Kristen Wiig and the film’s director Josh Greenbaum,  which appears during the film’s end credits with Wiig singing the tune in her backyard with a ukulele.

One of the highlights of the Netflix film is the initial interaction between Ferrell, Steele and their friend, “Saturday Night Live” alum Wiig, who they call on FaceTime to ask her to write a theme song for the film that is “tear-to-your-eye, fun, up-tempo, jazzy with a little country.” It becomes a running gag after she takes notes, agreeing to deliver this tongue-in-cheek masterpiece in two days, but then doesn’t answer follow-up calls from the duo. Douglas laughs about it when reflecting on how he became involved in the project. “Obviously it’s such a ridiculous list of things to try and compile into one song, which is why the bit is funny in the movie,” he says, recalling that they “screened the movie and it was really beautiful and deeply affecting but also really funny,” he explains. “We just wrote it from there and wrote it from our place of how compelled we were by the story we had just watched about these two friends and just got off and running.”

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