NEWS
Editorial Troika Holds the Key to NAB Post+
Willingham, Schoonmaker and Squyres Talk Shop
by Adam Wisniewski
photo by Tomm Carroll
At this inaugural show in New York City, NAB Post+ trade show at
the Jacob Javits Convention Center invited three stylistically different
editors to deliver the keynote address on each of the three days,
show clips of their work and describe their experiences in the industry.
Chris Willingham, Thelma Schoonmaker, ACE, and Tim Squyres brought
a large number of attendees to the main ballroom to learn about, among
other things, creating frenetic action television, maintaining a 40-year
association with a world-class director and creating the ultimate
kung-fu wire fight. Following is an encapsulation of the three keynote
addresses.
Chris Willingham
An editor for three decades, Willingham, best known or his Emmy Award-winning
work on the groundbreaking television series 24, was the opening day
keynote speaker. He recalled that in 2001, Chip Johannessen, a writer
for The X-Files and one of the early staff writers on 24, passed Willingham
a tape of the pilot. Initially, he wasn’t thrilled with the
concept and stylized presentation. However, when his wife, also an
editor, told him that if he wouldn’t take the job then she would,
he accepted. Three seasons later, Willing-ham had three Emmys.
The editor explained that executive producer and pilot director Stephen
Hopkins had been inspired by the split-screen techniques used in Richard
Fleischer’s The Boston Strangler and had specified instances
of it in the script. “It’s a technique that directors
love,” Willingham said, “because they see more of their
footage on the screen.”
In between clips from the first three seasons of 24, Willingham shed
light on how technically demanding this action show can be. All of
the footage from the show is stored on Avid Unity and cut on Media
Composer, and Willingham stated that this type of show could not be
possible any other way. The editors need simultaneous access to all
the media at the same time, and the effects creation in Media Composer
is integral in creating the split-screen sequences.
Production on 24 is very intense because of the show’s caveat
of taking place in real time, Willingham explained. The crew films
two episodes at once over two weeks, handing that footage off to one
in a three-editor rotation to edit the nearly 25 hours of film shot
per episode into a 43:15 first cut in four days. “You’re
really watching the film as you cut,” he said. Executive producer
Joel Surnow then watches the first edit and orders re-shoots, which
can account for up to 20 minutes of screen time.
In order to keep performances from running long, each take is shot
exactly to the minute, and there are no pick-ups. If there’s
a mistake, it’s back to the top. Willingham often used whip
pans to edit different takes together, utilizing the blur from the
hand-held camera tracking to hide the cut.
After leaving 24 following its third season, Willingham has cut his
first feature film, Final Destination 3, which was shot in high definition.
His motto after 30 years: “Protect the director, protect the
actor and have a thick skin when a perfect piece is torn to shreds.”
Thelma Schoonmaker
Save for Woody Allen, there is no other filmmaker more identified
with New York than Martin Scorsese, and an appearance by Schoonmaker,
his longtime editor, certainly had the local crowd buzzing on day
two.
Scorsese and Schoonmaker met at NYU, and in 1967 she edited an extended
version of a student film that became his first feature, Who’s
That Knocking at My Door. The pair were co-editors on the documentary
Woodstock, for which only she was nominated for an Academy Award.
But she was unable to work with him again on his other features in
the 1970s because she wasn’t in the union. Scorsese got her
to join the Editors Guild before making Raging Bull (1980), and her
work cutting it earned her an Oscar.
“It was pure gold, that movie,” Schoonmaker related after
showing a clip of the climactic fight between Jake LaMotta and Sugar
Ray Robinson. The scene was created out of 90,000 feet of film, and
it was fully storyboarded by Scorsese––and inspired by
Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.
The editor admitted that the pacing and imagery in the scene is unsettling.
“It’s not violent when I get it,” she noted. “I
just have to make it that way.” She explained that both she
and Scorsese hate the sport of boxing, making it paramount that everything
be as real as possible to achieve a sense of brutal authenticity.
Schoonmaker used clips of Henry Hill’s flight from the helicopter
from Goodfellas (1990) and Sam Rothstein’s hierarchy speech
from Casino (1995) to illustrate the way Scorsese would edit shots
together in his head. The music cues in Goodfellas were sometimes
playing on set so that the camera could track in time or even simple
actions like slamming a trunk could occur during a specific part of
a song. All of the whip pans from the dealer to the “eye-in-the-sky”
in Casino were planned in advance.
Casino marked Schoon-maker’s migration to the Light- works nonlinear
editing sytem. And while she admitted skepticism of the new technology
at first, the move to digital has been a productive one. Although
she still misses the contemplative moments cueing up film on the Moviola
that often led to inspiration, she now has the ability to make multiple
edits in less time. She noted that she doesn’t feel like the
NLE saves her any time cutting a film, it just allows her to experiment
more.
A final clip of Howard Hughes’ first plane crash in The Aviator
(2004) closed the program, and Schoonmaker discussed integrating 400-plus
effects shots for the first time in her career. Both crash sequences
relied heavily on the use of miniatures rather than straight computer-generated
effects, with green screen matte shots used for the cockpit interiors.
Her relationship with Scorsese has rarely had tense moments of disagreement
because his background in editing forces him to think about the final
product before he ever looks through a camera, according to the editor.
“I always try to show Marty what he wants,” she said.
“Then I may make an alternate take. But I don’t try to
take him on directly because it makes him rigid.” Then she added
with a laugh, “I just wait and then break him down.”
Tim Squyres
After screening a rousing, aerial martial arts battle between Michelle
Yeoh and Zhang Ziyi, Squyres asked the audience, “Where does
the motivation for a good cut come from?” His answer: Motivation
is what the audience wants to see.
Squyres edited Ang Lee’s first eight films from Pushing Hands
(1992) to Hulk (2003)––gaining an Academy Award nomination
for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)–– as well as
for Robert Altman’s Gosford Park (2001).
“It’s been suggested that every main character should
have a dog or a monkey so you have an excuse to cut away,” Squyres
continued. “Because you cut where you have to, not where you
want to.” He followed with scenes from Sense and Sensibility
and The Ice Storm to illustrate how Emma Thomson and Katie Holmes,
respectively made movements and glances while they were listening
to other actors’ dialogue, allowing him to make reaction cuts
to show subtext or change takes even though there was little action
occuring on-screen. As an editor, he encouraged actors and directors
to take note of physical movements and behaviors that are in character
and that allow the editor the freedom to cut to what the audience
needs to see.
An action sequence in Ride with the Devil (1999) followed with lots
of quick cutting as characters were pinned inside a cabin by gunfire.
Squyres stated that his goal was to move quickly to create a visceral
experience of the chaos of the moment but balance it with brief close-ups
of all the main characters because the audience is interested in what’s
happening to them.
Contrasting that sequence with the fight in Crouching Tiger, Squyres
noted that he wanted to stay away from the action to put the audience
in the role of the observer. The sequence is more about the beauty
of the fight than what is happening to the characters.
Squyres described the next clip as an example of an “unobtrusive
editing sequence.” What followed was a montage of jumps, split
screens and wipes from the controversial Hulk (2003). Squyres did
all but one of the comic-book effects and wipes on the Avid––they
were editorial effects, not visual effects. “What I did was
limited by the Avid but also inspired the 2-D look of graphics art.”
Unlike Sin City, he noted, Hulk was filmed fairly conventionally.
When he first started testing the radical techniques used in the film,
he found that they were a welcome relief for the laboratory scenes,
which had little action or subtext and lots of jargony dialogue. Going
to split screens gave the scenes tension and movement when the only
action on-screen was three scientists watching a frog.
Ultimately, Squyres stated that the editing in Hulk didn’t turn
people off. “My impression was that people who didn’t
like the movie wouldn’t have liked it anyway––but
the people who liked it, liked it more because of the editing.”
Ironically, after all of the experimenting with the Avid, it wasn’t
until he had finished Hulk that Squyres felt he was truly ready to
begin making it. “By the end of the film, I felt I became an
expert, he said, then admitting, “But it’s something I’ll
never do again in my life.”
Adam Wisniewski is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer who specializes in television, film and video game technology.
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