NEWS
A Crash Course in Editing
Six Oscar Nominees Reveal Their Secrets of Success
by Michael Kunkes
 The 2005 Oscar nominees for Picture Editing: (front row, from left): Dan Hanley, Michael Kahn, Claire Simpson; (back row) Mike Hill, Hughes Winborne, Michael McCusker. photo by Gregory Schwartz |
On the day before the Academy Awards, the figurative red carpet stretched out a little further down Hollywood Boulevard, reaching Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre, where six Oscarnominated picture editors gathered for the American Cinema Editors’ (ACE) sixth annual presentation of “Invisible Art/ Visual Artists.” Moderated once again by ACE president and Oscar winner Alan Heim, ACE, each nominee described a sometimes rocky road to this industry pinnacle.
Claire Simpson, nominated for Fernando Meirelles’ The Constant Gardener, was a movie lover who gravitated toward the cutting room when she found sets largely closed to women. Onetime criminal justice graduate Mike Hill, ACE, worked as a prison guard in California, thought better of it, and was hired as an assistant, sans film experience, by James Blakeley (who is still working at 20th Century Fox at age 96). His partner, Dan Hanley, ACE, left an unpromising future as a baseball player and later hooked up with Hill in the shipping department at Paramount Studios. They have worked together for director Ron Howard since 1982’s Night Shift and shared this year’s nomination for his Cinderella Man.
Longtime assistant editor Michael McCusker, who has been cutting since high school, made his feature debut as sole editor on James Mangold’s Walk the Line. Three-time Oscar winner Michael Kahn, ACE, has gone from the ridiculous (Hogan’s Heroes) to the sublime with Munich, his 20th film with Steven Spielberg, for which he was nominated. Hughes Winborne, like Hill a product of the prison system (employee, not inmate), worked his way from shipping clerk to indie feature editor before his nomination (and eventual win) for Paul Haggis’ Crash.
Clips from the nominated films were screened, and Heim prompted discussion with his probing questions. Following are a few of the exchanges…
Alan Heim: How do each of you approach a scene? For example, I’ve been told The Constant Gardener changed a lot in the cutting room.
Claire Simpson: That’s very true, and I think my own background in documentaries helped me a lot on this film. Fernando and the DP, Cesar Charlone, were very unpredictable and had the actors improvise a lot, which made it very, very difficult for the script supervisor. They also would turn the camera off in the middle of a take without the actors being aware of it––and suddenly everything would just go black, and then come on again. It has great energy to it, but it’s pretty tricky to figure out in the cutting room.
Fernando asked me to put the film together pretty much in order from the meeting of the Tessa and Justin characters, but that turned out to be really boring. So we decided to see what variations we could come up with. The script had some intended flashbacks, but we created more, because the film is really a love story told in retrospect. We were writing in the editing room.
AH: That’s what it comes down to sometimes, doesn’t it?
CS: Quite honestly, a lot of editing is writing, whether you are following the script or not. As an editor, you can never really predict from reading the script how good or bad the end result is going to be. We always hope for the best, but it’s an everevolving thing that is never over until it’s pushed out the door.
Mike Hill: The way Dan and I work is pretty random. A scene will come in, one of us will take it, the other will do the next one, and we go from there. We also work in different rooms and don’t see each other much over the course of the shoot. When it’s all assembled and Ron is with us, we start working on each reel and on each other’s scenes so that a new perspective can come in. It’s pretty easygoing and relaxed and the cut usually all comes together nicely.
Dan Hanley: Sometimes you get a little myopic and the most obvious solution is staring you right in the face. So if you’re stuck, it’s nice to be able to pop next door and get another perspective from someone you trust. It’s a real benefit to Ron.
Hughes Winborne: Actually, my primary motivation is failure [laughter]. Seriously, that’s a hard question to answer, but I probably approach every scene differently because I am not a very methodical person. I sit and watch all the material without taking notes, and then I take everything out that I think is good and put it into my cut. My first edits tend to be very cutty because I try and get so much in, then I work it down to something that’s simple.
Michael Kahn: For me, the hardest part of editing is the first two cuts. Then all of a sudden it starts rolling because I have a really good memory and I remember all the footage that I’ve seen and made notes on. After those first two cuts, I go through it all very quickly as far as getting coverage. It’s much easier to put a master in after you’ve cut all that material.
On Munich, I did something I started doing some years ago. In conventional editing, you start with a master, then go back to coverage. But in a process I like to call “disorientation,” I’ll start in close, pull the viewers in, get their interest and develop the characters––then pull back and show everyone where you are. My brain tells me to do it that way. A lot of what I do is by feeling, so when I run dailies with the director, I watch him, because its not what he asks me to do that’s important, it’s what I think he’s really feeling that he may not be articulating as well as he can. I watch for those signs, and as a result, we usually get pretty close on our first cut.
Michael McCusker: Like Hughes, I just want to watch the footage and react to it, though I have my assistant next to me and I will say, “This piece” or “That piece” as I am watching it. Jim has this shooting technique where he runs a scene over and over with the camera running, so there might be just one take but with three or more passes. I try to find the beats within a scene, and on every single take I go though, and put a locator on each point I feel is a key beat in the scene. I code them in such a way that I can retrieve them quickly. That’s about as analytical as I get. After that, it’s all reactive.
AH: Mike, you and Dan start out with at least two people in your cutting room...
DH: We usually have three assistants, and we keep them pretty darn busy. Ron, as some may have heard, likes to preview a lot, so they are always choosing music and sound effects for us and getting us ready for screenings. With film, you could get ready for a screening fairly quickly because you could just pop in the new reel; now there’s an output tape, then they check the tape, then a second output tape, and all that behind-thescenes stuff needs taking care of.
MH: Assisting today is a much more difficult job. When Dan and I were on Apollo 13, our last film show, I would have a bin full of trims and I would sit down and roll them up myself. It gave me a chance to think about the scene and relax. Today, it seems like you have to rush so fast through everything, and there isn’t enough time to think about anything.
AH: How did each of you approach the sequence you’re showing here today?
MH: For this particular fight between James Braddock and Art Lasky, we all watched film of the George Foreman-Ron Lyle fight from 1976, where they just kind of slugged it out in the middle of the ring for the entire fight. That’s what Ron wanted this fight to be like. When I saw Ron in the hotel the night after he shot the fight, I asked how it went and he told me it was pretty scary; they were really getting into it and Russell wasn’t one to back down. But it was amazing the way Mark Simmons, the guy who played Lasky, could throw a punch and make it look real.
Dan cut most of that fight and I just sat back and admired it, but I did cut the corner scenes between rounds. The other fights we split up round by round for the most part. Cinderella Man has 32 minutes of actual boxing––more by far than any other boxing movie, even Raging Bull or the Rocky films. It took a lot of work to go through all that stuff.
MM: My sequence from Walk the Line covers two years, from 1956 to 1958. We’ve compressed a lot of time and you see a lot of things happening, including Johnny Cash’s life, his infidelity, his rising career and the beginning of his drug taking. There was an awful lot happening in the cutting room and a lot of plate-spinning going on.
Jim and I decided that since the drugs were going to play a part in the background of the movie, then there has to be a reason he continues to take them. We wanted to say, “Here’s a guy who’s doing something that the audience knows is going to destroy him, but the character himself doesn’t know that because it actually feeds him in some way.” The sequence we ended up with shows how he changed and how the drugs informed his life and his performances, without making it too much of a morality play. The other key to the sequence was a brief, three-shot montage about his home life; that was key in moving the story forward in an efficient way.
CS: I decided to show the scene at the ending of The Constant Gardener, where Ralph Fiennes’ Justin Quayle character goes to the place where his wife was murdered, fantasizes about speaking to her and is killed. Then it cuts to his funeral service, where his cousin implicates the British government. We had the problem at the rough cut stage of having these three different endings. We had to find a way to integrate the endings and to make the death of Quayle not be so much of a downer and, in fact, make it seem more like a celebration, the completion of their love story. That’s why it ends with the scene in the church. We were trying to maximize the emotional effect and not make it feel as if there were too many endings.
HW: I chose the scene where Matt Dillon and Thandie Newton meet again after the accident, because I still tear up when I watch it. This scene was tough to shoot because Crash was a fairly low-budget film and we could only blow up one car, one time. It was very intense dramatically; there were all these overturned cars, Matt Dillon running through the scene, and then there’s the big reveal where they recognize each other. The difficulty we had putting it together was in pacing it properly so that it didn’t end too quickly. After you look at these things over and over again, you can lose perspective and start to feel that a scene is dragging when it’s really not. This scene went on for six and a half minutes, and I kept trying to get Paul to cut it down. Fortunately, he didn’t listen to me.
AH: A lot of films go through intensive screening and testing. How do you feel about that? When I go to focus groups, I’ve always been terrified to hear people talk about the “arc of a performance,” because I know they’re coming straight from their screenwriting classes.
CS: Honestly, it’s a pain in the ass. But it is quite useful to see a film with a live audience. It helps give you a sense of whether or not the pacing is off. Sometimes though, the audience members can’t articulate what they think due to the nature of the questions on the response sheets, so you have to read between the lines to figure it out. I don’t think I’ve ever had one where the audience said it looked just right.
HW: The thing about the editing room is that the environment is so predictable every day when you go in, that it’s hard to get a fresh perspective, but a preview audience really does give you an instinctual sense of things.
MM: You feed off the energy in the screening, but it’s the literalness of the notes after the fact that makes things problematic. There is a section of What Dreams May Come, on which I was an additional editor, where Robin Williams descends through Hell and is stepping through all these faces in the ground. The focus group at the screening said, “Gee, Hell was really disturbing and didn’t make us feel good.” Well, damned if we weren’t back in the cutting room Monday morning trying to lighten up Hell!
Sponsors for this year’s event included the Motion Picture Editors Guild, Avid, Pacific Title, Universal, NT Audio and Video and Runway, Inc.
Michael Kunkes is a freelance editor and writer specializing in animation, production and post-production. He can be reached at writermk@sbcglobal.net.
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