SPECIAL AWARDS SECTION: MPEG WINNERS GALLERY
United 07
Editing Nominees Join Forces to Discuss Their Craft
by Michael Kunkes
 Oscar-nominated editors in 2007: back row, from left, Douglas Crise, Stephen Mirrione, Christopher Rouse, Richard Pearson and Alex Rodriguez; front row, Steven Rosenblum and Thelma Schoonnmaker. Photo by Gregory Schwartz |
Five films, nine editors. On February 24, the day before the Academy Awards, this year’s group of Oscar-nominated editors gathered at the packed Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood for the seventh annual presentation of “Invisible Art/Visible Artists,” the American Cinema Editors’ (ACE) yearly journey into the creative minds of picture editors, co-sponsored by the Editors Guild, among others.
The panelists included Thelma Schoonmaker, ACE, who would go on to win her third Academy Award (and 4th ACE Eddie) for The Departed; Douglas Crise and Stephen Mirrione, ACE, also winners of an Eddie Award for Babel (in a rare tie with The Departed); three-time nominee Steven Rosenblum, ACE, who edited Blood Diamond; French-born Alex Rodríguez, one half of the editorial team on Children of Men; and collaborators Christopher Rouse, ACE, and Richard Pearson who won a BAFTA Award for their work on United 93.
Unable to attend were Clare Douglas, the third nominated editor on United 93, and Alfonso Cuarón, co-editor (and director) of Children of Men. Moderator Alan Heim, President of ACE, screened clips from all five nominated films, and posed the questions in a spirited session in which the emphasis was clearly on building strong action sequences and director-editor relationships. Following are a few of the more illuminated exchanges.
Alan Heim: How did you get your first feature?
Stephen Mirrione: The first one that actually got released was Swingers. When I first came to LA, I hung around USC and UCLA and offered to do student films. I ran into Doug Limon, who had an editing room at Disney and was working in 35mm. He had landed a directing job right out of school and we started to work together. I was very excited and when we were finished, there was the year-long roller coaster of “Will it get bought?” It was very difficult to deal with that. When we finally did Swingers, I didn’t want to know anything about the sale or distribution. Then I went and got an assistant editor job because, at that point, I’d done three features and none of them had worked out. But a week later, Miramax bought Swingers and changed everyone’s careers.
Douglas Crise: I’ve been working with Stephen for ten years, but it was not until Babel that I was able to get my first feature. Many people take the leap into editing earlier in their careers. For me, that would have been a mistake, because I needed to grow and develop. Some, like Stephen, are born with natural talent. Others, like me, have to work hard to get it.
Alex Rodriguez: Twelve years ago, when I started out in Mexico, I was assisting an American editor who left after three weeks and left the producers in a pretty difficult situation. So they hired me, and they apparently felt I could do it.
Steven Rosenblum: At AFI, I met Ed Zwick, who had been a directing fellow. I asked if he needed help in the editing room, and started syncing dailies. He had no idea how to run a Moviola or handle film, so we started working together. We soon went our separate ways and, years later, when I was an assistant, he asked me to cut the pilot of thirtysomething. After one year of that, we went out and made Glory. We’ve been together close to 30 years, and I highly recommend that type of relationship.
Thelma Schoonmaker: My first feature was Who’s that Knocking on My Door, which was also Martin Scorsese’s first after he left NYU. He shot half of it with his parents’ life savings, and to help him finish the second half, a group of us from NYU volunteered our services and we all worked for very little to help him. But the first major feature I worked on was Raging Bull, also for Scorsese. There was a long period before that when I couldn’t work for Marty because I wasn’t in the union.
Richard Pearson: Well, how many of you have seen Muppets from Space [laughter]? I have a couple of features in my closet that you won’t find on IMDB, because I’ve tried to bury them. But my first major feature was Bowfinger, and I also worked on a miniseries called From the Earth to the Moon, along with Mr. Rouse here, my co-editor on United 93.
Christopher Rouse: Like Rick, I toiled in TV for a long time, and I think it’s a great place to learn. Frank Marshall asked me to come in and work on The Bourne Identity for three weeks, which turned into three months. And I then got another call to finish the film. I was off and running after that.
AH: All of these films have a high element of action and adventure. How do you work with this kind of material?
CR: I’ve been fortunate enough to work on a lot of action films, and I approach each differently. So much of the action in United 93 was born out of the emotion of the piece. It’s not raw physical action, but a building intensity that grows out of the information being received by the characters during the course of the flight. The editorial pattern became more aggressive as the events of the day got more intense.
RP: The sequence I started working on was the charge to the cockpit at the end of the movie. It was self-contained and unlike anything I’d ever worked on before. The dailies were completely emotionally draining to watch, and there were hours and hours of them. It’s a classic thing to say that the material tells you what it wants you to do, but in terms of the story that needed to be told, that really was the case here. It was a good journey, but a really difficult one.
TS: On The Departed, we had the problem of combining a thriller [the Hong Kong-made Infernal Affairs] with this wonderful new footage full of character and humor. We ended up restructuring and rewriting a good deal, but the violence and dramatic action is quite heavily directed and very quick, sudden and devastating. Scorsese had thought that out extremely well. So except for the long shootout sequence when the police confronted the gang, most of the action moments are very short.
For instance, when Leonardo DiCaprio’s character is killed coming out of the elevator, he’s just ripped away in one second, with no premonition of what’s about to happen. There’s no shot of someone waiting outside the elevator with a gun; suddenly the door opens and he’s gone. It was done in a wide two-shot because, like a good director, Scorsese knew it was so powerful that he did not need or want close-ups. He wanted it all to happen in that proscenium arch so that the devastation was truly felt. For me, it was just a matter of cutting together these beautifully designed shots.
SR: Zwick is from that long and fine tradition of Hollywood directors interested in political goals and motivations. That said, we knew we had to make an action picture to get people to see what we wanted them to see about diamonds. I would look at all the material and organize it into various ethereal subjects. Then I’d listen to rock music for eight hours a day and try not to think about how everything goes together until after the first cut. It’s always the last idea that works and that’s why it takes so long. Ed likes to juxtapose the disturbing with the visually entertaining, so when we see a 13-year-old killing wantonly from a rooftop, he wanted that seen against our two heroes avoiding death, and that became the motif for the movie.
AR: Actually, Children of Men’s action scenes were some of the easiest I’ve ever had to edit––and we also had probably the world’s slowest car chase. I had to cut in a lot of built-in segments that were shot separately, including speeches, musical and visual effects. But overall, it had a very organic nature, and a lot of this engrossing material is played out in single, well-designed shots.
DC: I don’t think of Babel as an action picture, but it bombards you with imagery. One scene I worked on a lot was the helicopter rescue. I put that together without talking to director Alejandro González Iñárritu, but when he came in and saw it, he had me start it all over again. I had made it so much about Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett and their escape, but the movie is about so much more than that––especially about the villagers and how they are seeing the events.
SM: Babel gave us as editors a lot of opportunity to take the audience on a very hallucinatory ride, and it was all about knowing what the audience is supposed to be thinking and feeling. Alejandro is so meticulous about getting so much life into every shot and frame that it becomes easy, once you have that focus, to tell the story exactly how you want to tell it and stitch it together that way.
AH: How long was your first cut?
DC: On Babel, our first cut was 3:45 and the final ended up at 2:22. Alejandro shoots a lot of extra material, but sometimes, to understand certain things in a movie, the actors need to perform every scene written, because that will color other things they do with their character, or the director will learn something about another scene in the movie. As an editor, it’s difficult sometimes to realize that some scenes are only there to inform choices for other things; that they can be redundant and meaningless in the context of the whole movie. Yet often, these are the most difficult scenes to yank out. Usually, I have to wait until I love a scene to pull it out; otherwise I feel like I haven’t worked hard enough on it.
CR: The assembly that I first saw on United 93 was 2:40, and there was still footage coming in. There was an opening shot that was supposed to have occurred years ago with Osama bin Laden planning the 9/11 attack, and in the end, we realized that this had nothing to do with the story we wanted to tell. In addition, there were a lot of introductions to the crew and passengers waking up in homes or hotels and journeying to the airport. We dispensed with that, though one of the things that director Paul Greengrass felt strongly about was that we follow the hijackers to the airport and see the passengers through their eyes. It colored the film in quite an interesting way.
AR: Our first cut was 2:05, and I think the final came in at 1:39. Most of the scenes we lifted were in the first half of the film, which contained a lot of exposition. The best way to make it more clear was to cut it back.
AH: How involved were your directors in editorial?
RP: Very little, actually. One of the great things about Paul is that he tends to trust his editors quite a bit, and it was the same way on The Bourne Supremacy. He gives us a lot of freedom, he speaks about great thematic aspects and he’s really great at getting his editors in tune. He is less concerned with dotting the ‘I’s than he is about everyone getting the organic structure of everything.
TS: Scorsese’s favorite part of filmmaking is editing; he thinks like an editor and he likes to conceive a certain style for each film. He’s also very self-critical of his footage, and one of my best times with him is when we sit in dailies together and he talks a constant stream of consciousness about the film. Then I go off and cut, and he will spend four to five hours each day going over it. He has an incredible mind and a tough attitude about his film––and he will fight to the death with the studio about it.
SR: Ed insists that I make the first cut without getting much from him. He says it’s like a tennis game. He shoots the film, that’s the serve. I return it, and that’s the cut. Then we rally together. When I first started in editing, I thought the first cut was where you earned your money and the best part of the process. Now, however, I’ve learned that the collaboration part is the best part, and the first cut is the lonely part.
SM: Alejandro loves to talk about all that he’s feeling, and it illuminated the material for me in a way that inspired me to go onto the next step and see what the film was about, and that’s what I enjoy about that collaboration. He treated Doug and me the way he treated anyone on the set because, for him, it was about inspiring a performance out of us as editors and letting us put our own imprint on the movie.
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