by Norman Hollyn

In this, the second installment of our new series, editor Rick Shaine discusses the editing of a sequence from the new film Enigma, a World War II thriller written by Tom Stoppard and directed by Michael Apted. Due to be released in April (it has already opened to acclaim in Europe), Enigma is the fourth of five collaborations between Apted and Shaine, who are

Rick Shaine

currently working together on Enough.

During World War II, the British recruited mathematicians in an attempt to decipher coded messages that the Germans encrypted with a machine called the Enigma. The movie is set in Bletchley Park, where the mathematicians worked, and focuses on Tom Jericho (Dougray Scott), who has invented a primitive computer that facilitates the British attempts. After a brief romance with the mysterious Claire (Saffron Burrows), Jericho suffers a nervous breakdown. At the start of the film, he returns to duty at Bletchley, finds that Claire has disappeared, and that he is now the subject of an intense investigation by a man named Wigram (Jeremy Northam). The Nazis have altered their ciphers, and Wigram wants to find out if Jericho and Claire had anything to do with the change.

The sequence that Rick and I examined happens about half an hour into the film. Jericho has just been to Claire’s cottage, where he has found some stolen intercepts hidden under her floorboards. Dismayed and unsure of what to do, he returns to his boarding house with the intercepts. As he walks upstairs to his room, he hears Wigram pushing his way past the landlady below. The sequence is actually a series of scenes as Wigram confronts Jericho in his room and eventually begins to interrogate him. That action is then layered against a group of flashbacks to Jericho’s romance with Claire.

Norman Hollyn: How far along in the editing process were you when you began this scene?

Rick Shaine: It was towards the end of our shooting schedule, so I had a fair amount of the movie already cut. Michael felt it was very important for me to keep up with him, because there were so many levels to the movie in terms of characters, flashbacks and plot.

Were the flashbacks scripted?

Yes, but only a few of them have remained in their original positions. The flashback material was one of the first things they shot, and I roughly put it together, knowing it would integrate later on. I also did a cut of the boarding room without any flashbacks, which gave me a skeleton to fill in.

In addition to Wigram’s questioning of Jericho, you’re also trying to sow suspicion about whether Claire has leaked information to the Germans. That strikes me as a delicate balance.

That was inherent in the story. You might play a hint or two in the editing — lingering on a shot of her that’s slightly ambivalent — but it was something that I had to be very careful not to give away. One of the challenges of the movie was to do this while also establishing her allure for Jericho.

[In the first scene of the sequence, Jericho finds himself trapped on the stairs, as Wigram talks to the landlady below.]

Music begins now.

We used this music three times, always to emphasize the danger of Jericho being trapped with the stolen intercepts. One of the things that’s interesting about this scene is that when it was shot, the intercepts were not clearly established. I had to cheat a close-up of them from the end of the scene and use that at the beginning to establish what’s at stake.

At the end of the sequence, we will discover that Jericho has hidden the intercepts in the bathroom. How did you deal with the amount of time he needed for him to hide them there?

Michael had shot a scene where Jericho races into the bathroom, looks around and focuses on a stack of torn-up newspapers as a place to hide the intercepts. In the first cut, I put this in and intercut it with Wigram coming up the stairs. It created quite an exciting moment. But when we started screening the whole film, we found it too much of a giveaway.

In the next scene, Wigram searches Jericho. I think there is more tension because you believe Jericho still has the papers on him.

That was another big motive in removing it. We had to give Jericho enough time to create some hope that he’d been able to stash them, but also the belief that maybe he hadn’t. After we had gone through one or two cuts of the film, we screened it for a small group on a very large screen projection system that fed right off the Avid. From that screening, it was clear there would be a lot more tension if we didn’t show him going into the bathroom.

[Wigram haughtily leads the way into Jericho’s room. The camera follows him as he moves around, looking for clues.]

Did you have a lot of takes of this shot?

I think three or four were printed. It’s basically a master with a lot of good camera movement. In this take, when Wigram walks to the back of the room, Jericho goes out of focus. That really bothered the DP, Seamus McGarvey, and to some extent Michael, but I felt that Jeremy Northam [Wigram] had nailed the performance in this take. At some point, Michael had me change the take to one that held focus. But I believed in the earlier take — we got a full sense of Wigram’s total comfort in the job he was doing. I was going for performance over technical niceties. Michael later agreed that this take was better for the film, and I was able to get it back in. Also, sometimes you realize that a scene isn’t about balancing two characters. Sometimes it’s about giving the scene, or at least a part of it, to one character. There’s one cut away to Jericho, but at this point in the scene, we used his shots as minimally as possible.

[Wigram points out a postcard from Claire sitting on Jericho’s night table.]

We’ve seen this postcard before. Now we accentuate it. Wigram notices it and Jericho realizes that Wigram knows more than he’s letting on.

[Wigram plops down on Jericho’s bed, still grilling him.]

I had the choice of a medium shot or a wider shot showing Wigram’s full body position. The wider shot seemed more expressive at this moment. We’re about to come back to this same bed in the same room as a place where Jericho and Claire made love for the first time. It felt very important to establish the bed as a location and also establish it as a place being desecrated by Wigram.

In a piece like this, it’s important to keep the subtext clear.

Here’s another interesting thing in terms of the mechanics of cutting. One shot shows Wigram sitting with his feet stretched out on the bed. In the next, he’s got his knees up. But by simply putting the sound of the bed rustling over the close-up of Jericho, who was more dramatically important to see at that moment, we were able to solve that small continuity problem.

[Wigram gets up from the bed and asks to search Jericho’s coat.]

Once again, we return to the tension music, to build suspense about whether Wigram will find the intercepts on Jericho. I tried to elongate the moment, to build the danger, without overdoing it. Originally, I did a much longer cut of this search, but it always seemed contrived that there would be this huge build-up, when basically all he was doing was putting his hand in Jericho’s pocket and pulling out a music program. Sometimes one runs into those kinds of issues in editing — you want to make something happen so badly, but it’s not believable in reality, so you have to simplify it.

[Not finding anything, Wigram asks Jericho if Claire was the reason for his breakdown. Over a shot of Jericho thinking, we hear music, which leads us into a flashback of a concert.]

Throughout this area, you play a lot of the dialogue on Wigram, even when Jericho is talking — a lot of overlapping for an American film. But finally, there’s a shot of Jericho that kicks off the flashback. Did you do a lot of work in terms of how to get into the flashbacks?

Absolutely. One interesting thing about this flashback is that it was actually scripted much earlier in the film. As we screened, we found the movie very demanding of the audience. They have to figure out Jericho’s state of mind, his relationship to Claire, his relationship to Bletchley Park. Then we get into the intricacies of code breaking and the Enigma Machine. The audience is involved in a sort of code-breaking themselves, unraveling the complexities of the film. To keep them engaged, we wanted to get to the flow of the narrative as soon as possible. This long flashback — Jericho meeting Claire at a concert —delayed the narrative’s start, so we decided to move it later on in the film. This seemed to be a perfect place for it. So I chose a shot of Jericho where it looked like he might be going into a kind of a meditative state, and the concert music enabled us to pre-lap some provocative sound that helped lead into the flashback.

The transitions here are very precise. It’s like the flashback and the present day material are talking to each other.

[Jericho tells Wigram what it was like to go out with Claire — “having the happiest month of my life.” We hear some big band music and go into an energetic dance concert.]

I tried to give the cutting in this scene a lot of high energy and fun, to offer a nice relief to the interrogation. It’s also one of the few times that we see Jericho smiling and happy in the film. I tried to choose shots to show that he really could have fun.

[Jericho and Claire go up to his room and make love for the first time. The music swells, and we return to Wigram sitting on the bed interrogating Jericho.]

Now we make that cut you were talking about before — going from Jericho and Claire making love to Wigram sitting on that same bed.

I’m also using fewer sound overlaps now. Once I established the back and forth nature of the scene, we didn’t need to always use overlaps to get in and out of the flashbacks — hard cuts would also work.

Do you cut with music while you’re cutting a scene like this?

No. I very rarely cut with music. It can give you a false sense of pacing and emotional involvement that should come from the picture. It’s too easy to get locked into the music.

In the next flashback — actually a series of flashbacks — you plant suspicion that Claire may be treasonous. She takes a paper out of Jericho’s book and wants to keep it. He gets really angry with her about this.

Jericho does have a bit of a temper, and by pointing that out a bit in the cutting, it gives the scene one of those points of energy that I think a long scene like this needs. The challenge of the flashback scene was to keep it playful and romantic, but to show behavior that is suspicious. The music is accelerating and the cutting is more rapid here as a result. Their fight was shot at much greater length in the dailies, and my first cut was probably twice this long. But we found that we couldn’t be away from the interrogation for that much time, or we would lose sight of it. It was quite a challenge to keep the emotional weight of one scene and the narrative flow of the other.

[Continuing the flashbacks, Jericho tells Claire that he’ll do anything if she’ll take him back. The flashbacks get shorter and shorter as they come to an end.]

When we come back to Jericho in the bedroom, we know that he’s been thinking about how their relationship ended — the very shots that we’ve been seeing.

Right. That was constantly what I was trying to do, to play off what was going on in his head with the narrative action around the scene.

[Wigram gets off the bed and approaches Jericho, telling him that something isn’t quite right with his story. Wigram then makes Jericho sit next to him on the bed.]

Now we go to the third part of the scene, in which Wigram reveals what he’s really after — information about the leaks to the Germans. Here’s another difficult point for the audience — to understand the idea of the primitive computer that the British had built to process all the information that was coming to them. So I stole some shots of the machine and cut them in while Wigram explains it.

[Wigram goes down the hall to use the bathroom.]

Now comes the payoff to the first scene of the sequence. Jericho had the intercepts, but when Wigram searched him, they were gone. Where did they go?

There are now shots of Jericho nervously looking from his bedroom door to Wigram in the bathroom. We again hear the music we associate with moments of tension relating to the intercepts, and we go back into the rhythms of a cat-and-mouse suspense scene.

Finally, after Wigram leaves, Jericho retrieves the intercepts from where he has hidden them in the bathroom and burns them. As he does, we see the final flashbacks of the sequence as Claire turns her back on him and walks away. He desperately screams after her, saying that he’ll tell her anything, if she’ll just stay with him.

This flashback was scripted, although I don’t believe it was scripted to be intercut with the flame like this.

You juggled a lot of balls in this scene — the tension of the interrogation, the love story, the Enigma Machine explanation. How did you keep it all balanced?

It’s a question of emphasis. I used to play tenor saxophone, and I always found that the melodies that had a lot of strength to them, the ones that were very memorable, often didn’t make the best songs to improvise on. I think that in editing this scene, if you gave the melody of their relationship and the anguish and their breakup too much attention, it would take away from the intercutting. Instead, I had to keep all parts of the sequence moving and give them shape within the whole film. The important part of editing is not to over-explain. If you can suggest things, then if the audience is with the film, they will get enjoyment from seeing them revealed. It’s hard to trust the audience sometimes, but it’s worth it.