NEWS
Six Editors in Search of Oscar
Nominees Discuss Their Art, Craft and Collaboration with Directors
by Michael Kunkes photos by Gregory Schwartz
 Caption here |
In the mounting crescendo of Oscar excitement, six Academy Award-nominated editors gathered onstage at Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood on the eve of the Academy Awards for the fifth annual “Invisible Art/Visible Artists” seminar, presented by American Cinema Editors (ACE). Moderated by two-time Oscar winner and ACE President Alan Heim, ACE, the panel consisted of Paul Rubell, ACE, and Jim Miller, co-editors of Michael Mann’s Collateral; Joel Cox, ACE, Clint Eastwood’s collaborator of 30 years and editor of Million Dollar Baby; Paul Hirsch, ACE, who stepped into the breach to earn a nomination on Taylor Hackford’s Ray; The Aviator’s Thelma Schoonmaker, ACE, who ultimately took home the Oscar, her second; and Matt Chessé, the “youth” of the group, nominated for Finding Neverland, his third film for Marc Forster.
 Joel Cox, left, and Matt Chessé. |
Before a packed house of enthusiastic students, filmmakers and film buffs, the nominees screened selected clips from their nominated films and talked about the collaborative nature of their craft, their approaches to their work and especially the special working relationships they share with their directors. What emerged was the belief that no matter what technologies were employed and whatever politics were involved, the only thing that ultimately mattered–as it always has–was the creation of great entertainment.
Sponsors for the event included the Motion Picture Editors Guild, Avid, American Cinematheque, NT Audio and Video, Ira Berta, Accent Media, Pacific Title and Art, Thompson Grass Valley, and First Entertainment Credit Union.
Alan Heim: Please tell us something about your working technique and personal style.
 Thelma Schoonmaker, left, Jim Miller and Paul Rubell. |
Paul Rubell: I know this is a cliché, but the film does dictate the editing style; it tells you how it wants to be cut. My own style is lot like my mentor, the late Lou Lombardo, who cut for Sam Pekinpah as well as a lot of Robert Altman’s best films of the 1970s. Plus, to survive today, we all have to abide the MTV style, which came in at a time when we were all making the transition to electronic systems. We were all a bit drunk with the possibilities at first, and screwed up some good movies, but as the pendulum swings back, we are all learning to apply those techniques where they are justified.
Jim Miller: In spite of MTV, you still have to pay homage to the characters in the story and deal with that story, as you perceive it. And I agree with Paul that the material does dictate to some extent how you play it. It gets down to very, very fine strokes, so that people don’t think you are just cutting from this shot to that shot, or because that’s the best reading of the line. What’s important is the amount of time you use before a line is spoken; the little tweak in the eye that overplays or underplays the scene. We’re talking about single frames that make the biggest difference between getting it right or missing the mark entirely.
Joel Cox: I have been very fortunate, in that I have been working for one director for 30 years. Clint and I are a bit old-fashioned in that we still view film dailies. The reason we do that is that Clint wants me to see the film, to know what I see in it, and exactly what director of photography Tom Stern was photographing. At first, I’m not judging any of it for editing; I am watching the performances and looking for flaws in the film. Clint and I also talk every night about what I think and what we might try. Then I lay out my show by scenes with all the takes–almost like when I used to cut film and put it out in the bin. Clint has always told me, “I am never going to tell you what to use or try to influence you. Just put it together, and if there’s something I’d like to do differently, we can change it.” Well, he has taken one scene apart in 30 years. One scene! It’s an incredible thing to be given that freedom.
 Alan Heim, left, and Paul Hirsch. |
AH: Speaking of dailies, directors today are shooting massive amounts of film. How do you manage looking at three or four hours of dailies every day and still have a life?
Matt Chessé: I have now worked with Marc Forster
on four films, and our dailies have grown as our budgets have grown. And Marc
doesn’t cover the part of a scene that he wants to use from a certain
angle and then move on to another angle; he likes to shoot everything. That’s
great, because you don’t always know where the gold is, but it is very
laborious for me, because the whole scene is being performed from top to bottom
every time. In order not to have to constantly go back to the dailies, I watch
them on the Avid, and if something hits me, I cut it into a sequence and end
up with a bunch of strings.
I also do a lot of lining up all the dialogue in successive takes, then go
back and pick the ones I like, which is something I learned from commercials.
I refer to those a lot, and when I am locking scenes near the end of the show
and have gotten really used to how a scene plays, its nice to go back and
look at those early reels again, to see if something new will pop out and
surprise me.
Thelma Schoonmaker: Our shooting range, on the other hand, is going down, so we don’t have that many dailies. Marty [Scorsese] hates to shoot multiple cameras because he can’t control the image.
PR: On Collateral, I made a rare exception to my own “no
screened dailies” rule, and that was on the scene in the Korean nightclub,
where four different story lines converge. It took a solid six days to screen
all the dailies in the hi-def projection room. My major concern was that it
was shot in a small, crowded room and it was going to be very confusing. So
I kind of laid out a structure and we had to trick it out so that a lot of
separate stuff could happen on the way to the final hit.
Michael Mann had already seen the dailies and, as is his style, he dictated
a stream of consciousness of his reactions into a microcassette recorder.
Every half-hour, one of his assistants would come in with a fresh cup of coffee,
a fresh bottle of water and a fresh tape. After the six days, he called me
up and asked if I had anything to show him, even though I had only just finished
the dailies. “Just send me something tomorrow,” he said. I told
him that he took six days to shoot it, and that it would take me six days
to edit it. “Oh, just throw it together, it will be fine,” he
said, and that’s how just a small part of it ended up.
JM: If I sat down and looked at dailies, I would never get any work done. Sometimes I take DVDs home with me and I will watch them in bed, and I will skip to the last take. That’s not to say that I will edit with the last take, but I look just to get a sense of the structure. And when I set out to cut a scene, the first thing I do is line up all the takes in a sequence, just as with a KEM roll. On a KEM, you could high-speed backward and forwards and you’d be looking for one thing and find another.
And the way the Avid is set up, you don’t really have an opportunity to do that. You just kind of find the tape you are looking for and you go right to it. But I like to take all the dailies and line them up in a sequence, put locators at the beginning of every set-up so I can jump from set-up to set-up and all the takes, one right after another. And then I put away the dailies bin and I never go back to it. I just stick with that sequence. From there I will start pulling selects. So rather than sit down and look at all the dailies straight through, I’m trying to perceive the overall structure of the scene. I have always tended to find the skeleton of the scene and then put flesh on it, so to speak.
AH: That’s interesting, the idea of going to the last take; but of course often the first take is very good, because the director hasn’t meddled in it.
TS: That’s true, the first take is sometimes the best.
Paul Hirsch: I am not a big believer in sitting in the screening room watching the dailies, simply because I think that many times when you are looking at dailies you make the wrong choices, especially at the outset. The film hasn’t really arrived where it is going. In a sense, the film is the final re-write. So, I think that with the Avid, the real choices about which take to use are made when you can actually compare takes side by side.
AH: Let’s talk a little about presenting cuts to the director.
JC: The first cut should be everything the director wants it to be. If he tried out something special during the shoot, I want to try and make it work in the film, because we can pull it down faster than we can go back up, which is like having to start all over again.
MC: The situation with Marc, and this is not a knock, is that he gets very attached to things, so I have to be careful since he doesn’t like to make changes late in the game. I really have to sell it to him if I think something can be improved. Marc is very presentational and doesn’t like to show things to people until he is happy, so our editing room is a little sealed. As a reaction, I become very presentational in the way I show things to him.
AH: Most directors really don’t want to show the cut until its ready. So they sort of hold it back as long as possible.
JC: For me, it’s really easy, especially on Million Dollar Baby, because it was shot right here in town. But Clint doesn’t look at dailies, because he has this new piece of equipment, a handheld monitor that he carries with him on the set, and the scene is radioed to him from the camera. I start cutting scenes and he will leave me alone for the first week of shooting. Then I will send him a tape of what I’ve cut and he will call and tell me what he thinks. And I just continue to go through the film, because I don’t want to wait. I want to get it done.
Then we will sit down about two weeks after wrap and walk through the film reel by reel and make any little nicks he wants to make. Altogether, we will end up with eight or nine cuts total, and I save everything I do, especially the first cut, which is my cut and which we can always go back to. But Clint is a guy who makes decisions, and he lives with them. That is easy for him to say because he has directed 25 pictures, and has been a performer in most of them. So he relies a lot on his operators and his DP as to what they did while he was in front of the camera. He goes totally by his instincts.
PH: The process I used on Ray was the way I like to work, which is to be allowed to do my version of the film and present it to the director as a “finished assembly.” You only get once chance to see a picture for the first time, so I try to make it as good as possible and take it from there. As Joel was saying, it’s a lot easier to take things out than it is to add things back. Normally, I would have a cut of the picture a week after the end of shooting, but I was brought on board late because the original editor withdrew due to personal problems. I brought on Peck Prior to help with the first cut, because otherwise it would have been two months before I had a first cut to show Taylor.
PR: When I first started out, I was pretty territorial about the editor’s cut, but not so much lately. My heart can’t take it anymore. It seems that the director is also incredibly nervous when you sit down to look at the first cut. It’s such an artificial kind of situation that I find it’s better for both of us just to send the director scenes and comments to get early feedback and know if we’re on the right track. I’m working now with Michael Bay on The Island, and I can’t even get him to look, he’s so superstitious about it. I have to trick him into looking at it.
AH: When you put your first cut together, do you put music and sound effects to it?
TS: I don’t screen my initial assembly for Marty because when we do screen, we do very complicated mixes, and it’s just not worth the time at that point to mix. So we start from the top, work our way through reel one and reel two, then screen for the first time. And we never do temp scoring. I think that’s cheating, in a way. But when Marty does start to put music to a film, it’s a great experience. Sometimes he already knows exactly what piece of music is going to go with what scene. Other times, we listen to several pieces he has chosen and find out which one works best.
JM: As far as I am concerned, I prefer to present the director with a film that is ready for titles and the MPAA [Motion Picture Association of America]. So I work the devil out of it before I show it to him. All kidding aside, an editor will not always be allowed that luxury. It depends on the director’s demeanor and his various preoccupations. Some want to involve themselves from the very beginning with every little frame and cut; others could care less. But I believe in putting my best foot forward on the first cut–which means some sound effects and, if you have the time and ability, temp music as well.
AH: These are five completely different films in five completely different styles of editing and structure, but each of them has its own little spark of the miraculous. Any final thoughts? Especially for the aspiring editors in the audience.
TS: Collaboration is so important in filmmaking. It is something that any of you who are beginning filmmakers must understand. We all rely on each other tremendously.
PH: Editing is the only craft in our profession that is truly native to film. Everything else—cinematography, costuming, props, writing, acting, music—all have their roots in previously established arts. We take pieces of film that, when seen in isolation, have little or no meaning until they are placed into context, one against the other, to create a story. But what is most fascinating to me about film editing is the way we have all influenced each other over the years. So it has become a truly international art that transcends language differences.
Ultimately, the whole trick is to follow your instinct, and use the techniques that seem most appropriate to the moment.
Michael Kunkes is a freelance editor and writer specializing in animation, production and post-production.
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