“Another must-read book for a whole new generation of editors.”—Alan Heim, American Cinema Editors

“First Cut 2 is the perfect sequel to its predecessor, an entertaining and in-depth examination of the editorial process. In each riveting interview, editors invite us into their inter sanctum, revealing fresh insights and providing concrete solutions to editorial challenges and problems. Gabriella Oldham poses intelligent questions that home in on many of the concerns I share with my editing colleagues. A brilliant compendium of talents and styles.”—Carol Littleton, American Cinema Editors

Gabriella Oldham is a freelance writer. Her books include First Cut: Conversations with Film Editors (UC Press), and Keaton’s Silent Shorts.

First Cut 2

More Conversations with Film Editors

By Gabriella Oldham

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2012 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-27350-4

Contents

Acknowledgments, vii,
Introduction, 1,
1. Keeping Beats Mark Livolsi, 13,
2. Pushing the Envelope Angelo Corrao, 34,
3. Cutting from the Gut Julie Monroe, 64,
4. Sensing Psychology Jonathan Oppenheim, 84,
5. Capturing the Feeling Lucia Zucchetti, 107,
6. Speaking Cinema Joe Bini, 126,
7. Editing the Self Alan Berliner, 149,
8. Pointing to the Middle Emma E. Hickox, 174,
9. Honoring Lives Kate Amend, 197,
10. Weighing the Gold Richard Chew, 219,
11. Making it Work Victor Livingston, 242,
12. Striking the Balance Michael Tronick, 268,
Bibliography, 295,
Index, 297,

CHAPTER 1

Keeping Beats

MARK LIVOLSI

2001 Vanilla Sky (coeditor), dir. Cameron Crowe

2003 Pieces of April, dir. Peter Hedges

2004 The Girl Next Door, dir. Luke Greenfield

2005 My Suicidal Sweetheart, dir. Michael Parness

2005 Wedding Crashers, dir. David Dobkin

2006 The Devil Wears Prada, dir. David Frankel

2007 Fred Claus, dir. David Dobkin

2008 Marley and Me, dir. David Frankel

2009 The Blind Side, dir. John Lee Hancock

2011 The Big Year, dir. David Frankel

2011 We Bought a Zoo, dir. Cameron Crowe

AWARDS

2006 Eddie Award (ACE) nomination, Best Edited Feature Film—Comedy or Musical, Wedding Crashers

2007 Eddie Award (ACE) nomination, Best Edited Feature Film—Comedy or Musical, The Devil Wears Prada

With a computer screen glowing off to the side of his New York cutting room, Mark Livolsi spoke of some of the box office smashes he has edited, including Wedding Crashers, The Devil Wears Prada, and Marley and Me. Livolsi peppers his comments with some essential metaphors (playing jazz, handing off batons, making a stew) that many editors here, as well as in the first volume of First Cut, have evoked in discussing their art and craft, establishing the multilayered nature of being an editor. In addition to metaphors, Livolsi offers practical illustrations of the many day-to-day decisions and pressures that an editor in the twenty-first-century cutting room faces, including the need to work faster because of tight schedules, excessive amounts of dailies, and “infinite” possible edits that the new technology facilitates. As Livolsi also notes, technology has finally eliminated the physical tedium of splicing film and the clatter of sound cuts that were prominent in editing on celluloid. However, the fundamental principles of editing—to find the story, tap into emotional truth, and present the material for maximum impact—remain key editorial responsibilities, as they have since the beginning of narrative cinema.

Because many of Livolsi’s films to date have been comedies, he offers a strong analysis of the editorial necessities of that genre, but he has also been extending himself beyond comedy to explore other types of film. Cutting across all genres, however, is perhaps editing’s greatest challenge: discovering the “story” and its related concerns with pacing and rhythm. Livolsi reflects enthusiastically on how actors’ improvisations, special effects, and the occasional “crane shot” can impact his efforts to pull the most effective story out of the chaos of feature filmmaking.

When did you start editing?

I started when I was a kid. My father had an 8mm camera and shot home movies and I was fascinated by them. One day I found his camera in the closet, and I bought film and started to shoot. It slowly occurred to me that movies—which I loved—were something I could make as well. I started with little zombie movies. Back in the seventies, I was obsessed with George Romero and Night of the Living Dead, and zombie movies seemed easy to make. I was also into theatrical makeup, especially scars, so it seemed like the way to go.

Just you and your friends?

And my brother, Tim. In one film, I had my next-door neighbor attack and eat my brother! I have that movie somewhere in the attic, and my brother still talks about how I forced him into it. (Laughs.)

Did you edit in camera?

I did, actually. In fact, I remember the moment when I first made an edit in camera. It literally was a shot of my brother walking down the driveway, holding a BB gun, and I shot it in a wide. Then I paused my brother midaction and grabbed a medium shot from another angle. When I got the film back from the lab and looked at it, here was this professional piece of work! It actually told a little story in two shots and that fascinated me.

Did you have any editing equipment at the time?

I had a small hand-cranked splicer. My dad used it to cut out all the overexposed bits of film. I used it primarily to watch those old Castle Films, which were eight-minute condensations of my favorite movies.

How about scripting?

I’d say my movies were done on the fly, although I did write some scripts, but silly ones that were ten, twelve pages long involving massive special effects and alien invasions. I remember showing one script to my art teacher who remarked, “It’s a good script, but I think you bit off more than you can chew!” He was right because I never shot it. The planning, the coordinating, the sheer magnitude of what it took to actually make a film was to me so painstaking and daunting that very few of my epic projects ever left the planning stages. I was beginning to realize that each shot is a setup that has to be lit separately. Before that, I thought you’d just run out there and grab it like in a documentary, right? And then I realized, my God, you mean each of these shots has to be created separately and you have to move the camera here, move it there, set up lights? Forget that! I’ll wait till it’s all in the can and then work with it.

Aside from wanting to avoid those filmmaking logistics, why did you gravitate to the editing process itself?

I found I had a natural inclination for editing when I was in college. I tried everything at Penn State, which had a wonderful, very small film program. It was amazing because I had the opportunity to use equipment as opposed to competing for it. I learned how to write screenplays, direct actors, record sound, edit … but of all the filmmaking crafts, the only one that came easy to me was editing. In fact, with editing, I could get lost for fifteen, sixteen hours in the basement of the film department and just create, you know, put the film together. It was clear to me and it was clear to my girlfriend, Maria (who later became my wife), that editing seemed to be the right direction for me.

Did the detailed nature of the work appeal to you?

I think there was an obsessive component, a need to make order out of chaos. The chaos of infinite options, of infinite ways of cutting, of infinite performance choices, and what seemed like an infinite amount of dailies and turning it all into one final, decisive piece of storytelling. It was all instinctive. I never sat down and said, “This is what I like.” I just did it and didn’t think twice about it. When I got out of college, I focused on that. I said, “Okay, I’m not going to try to be a director or a writer. I know I’m good at editing and I’m going to get in there.” And that’s what I did from day one.

Did the chaos of editing ever overwhelm you?

To be honest, in college, you never have an overwhelming amount of footage. You barely have enough footage to tell a coherent story! But certainly in the professional world, there can be an overwhelming amount of footage, and, yes, I have been overwhelmed at times. That’s when you hire second editors to come in and help you out. As much as possible I try to tackle these situations by myself. It becomes a personal contest. But at a certain point, you risk undercutting the project because of your inability to look through all the footage and give it careful attention.

I imagine that if you parcel out work to others, you still have to oversee it.

Absolutely. It’s my responsibility as the editor. I like to delegate creative work to my assistants, who benefit from the chance to flex creative muscles and hone their abilities. In return, I get the benefit of their opinions and the wider perspective that collaboration brings. But this mostly happens during shooting, before the director walks in the door to begin his director’s cut. From that point on, it’s mostly between the director and myself.

Are you partial to editing any particular genre—besides zombie movies?

Yeah! No, I love all movies. I started with horror films as a kid, and blossomed into a little bit of everything. I love noirs, Westerns—I was a big holdout against Westerns for a long time, but finally fell under their spell a few years ago. Comedies, especially the classics, Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton. But that’s just as a viewer. As an editor, I think challenges are to be had in any genre, and I would love to work in all genres. My goal is someday to cut a musical, a thriller, a drama—whatever. It’s really immaterial because I think telling a story well is the great challenge of editing, just creating effective storytelling and doing the best work I can on any film. But it seems like all I’ve done so far is comedies!

I was just going to say that.

Well, that happens. You do one comedy film, somebody sees it and thinks you did it well, and that leads to another comedy film, and the next thing you know, you’re being stereotyped as a comedy editor. That certainly doesn’t preclude you from being able to do other genres, though. One of the main reasons I recently did The Blind Side was to try my hand at drama.

You made an interesting point that each genre poses its own set of challenges. However, since your overarching concern for all films is story, what are different editorial challenges within each genre?

Well, the prime directive of comedy is to make people laugh and to tell a story entertainingly. I think, then, that issues of rhythm and pacing in a comedy are different than they would be in a drama or horror film. You certainly have to present the material in a way that achieves maximum impact, but a brisk comedy won’t necessarily have the same presentation as a thriller.

By pacing you mean …

A combination of length of shot, rhythm of cutting, number of cuts, connections.

And use of sound and silence?

Exactly. The kinetic qualities that are either within the frame or imposed on the film by the editor, by the editing itself.

Marley and Me has both comedic and dramatic scenes in it. Can you speak of that film as an example to compare the pacing of each?

Marley and Me begins as a comedy and gradually morphs into a drama. The first half of the film is generally briskly paced. We never outstay our welcome in those early scenes. And that, I think, is one of the mandates of editing comedy. People become invested through laughter, through enjoyment of the experience of watching comedy. The minute they become bored or the film loses its focus, you risk losing them and it becomes that much harder to get the momentum back. If a scene wasn’t funny enough or slowed down too much, David Frankel, the director, would toss it out. This cut-and-dry approach was a little more complicated in the later, dramatic scenes. Audience investment wasn’t dictated primarily through pace and laughs, but through investment in the characters and their problems. It was often a hard call to make: is a scene too long or just right? The third act wasn’t terribly plot-driven, each scene being a beat in the declining years in the life of a dog. We went back and forth on the length of many of the later scenes, as well as removing and reordering them.

When you say that each scene is a “beat,” are you referring to the action within the scene or the rhythm of how the shots are cut together?

A beat is like an ingredient. It could be small, a moment within a scene, or it could be a whole scene when looking at an entire film. When I’m looking at a film overall, I tend to think of it as a sort of stew, and you need many different ingredients. Like you can’t leave out the salt—you need a pinch of salt here, a dash of something else there. Marley and Me is sort of a tone poem, more about emotion than plot. In fact, there’s very little plot. It’s very episodic. So when the plot especially in the second, more dramatic half is not advancing at a breakneck pace, then the film becomes all about the little emotional beats and what adds up to make the best stew. What is the best recipe? Well, you figure that out by trial and error. So for instance, toward the end of Marley and Me, when the dog is very sick, Owen Wilson’s character talks with the dog as they’re walking up a hill, asking Marley to let him know when “it’s your time to go.” The next scene shows Owen finding Marley lying near the fireplace, too old to climb the stairs. We removed this scene, but found that suddenly the next scene, where Marley is dying at the vet, came too soon. We needed the fireplace scene as a bridge to make clear that time had passed, that the scene on the hill and the dying scene weren’t happening one right after the other. That was a necessary beat.

So the beat or scene of the dog by the fireplace served to transition between the beat of the sick dog on the hill and the beat of the dying dog at the vet.

Yes, it was a transitional point. In a film where we deliberately avoided referencing the passage of time with titles, we needed to show the passage of time in subtler ways. That scene represented a necessary space. In that way, you don’t think it all happened from one day to the next, but you have the opportunity to think it’s more gradual.

The beat of that scene also reinforced Owen’s connection to the dog—

Which I felt was solid throughout the film. The dynamic was clearly between Owen and the dog. The triangle between Owen, Jennifer Aniston, and Marley was not a perfect triangle in that sense. A scene that we ultimately took out might have helped to balance the triangle—but maybe not, because it happened too late in the film. It was a scene where Jen has a private moment with Marley under a tree. It would have been interesting, but again for pacing reasons, we were cognizant that we had to honor the progress of the dog’s decline and death, while also being aware of not overly methodically pacing it by including every beat we had. Also, when we previewed the movie, some of the audience commented that the film was too sad for too long. Some things had to fall by the wayside.

But the ending had to be sad. Moreover, it was a true story.

Yes, it was based on John Grogan’s book. Many people commented on how obvious or manipulative or whatever it was to kill off the dog at the end. Never mind that it actually happened!

Still, because the first half of the film was so bouncy and comedic, and the second half depicted such a sad reality, the film almost splits in two.

I do feel that the transformation is gradual, though. Yes, it is a very different film in the first act than it is in the third act, and juxtaposed side by side, they seem black and white. But the second act I consider a baton handoff, so that the film morphs into more serious material. In the beginning, it’s all very cute and sparkling and hilarious. Then it starts to become serious in the second act, dealing with real issues such as when Jen has a miscarriage and she and Owen fight a lot, but there are still comedic moments. By the third act, I can safely say there is no comedy. Now, Wedding Crashers has the same sort of paradigm, although not as extreme, where we start out as a crazy-guys comedy and then suddenly it’s more serious, or at least more like a romantic comedy, with the emphasis on romantic. Again, there’s a baton handoff that I find interesting, with the comedy between Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson turning into Owen’s more serious romantic story. I remember when we got to the postprocess on that film, a twenty-something-year-old guy working at a video facility was watching the movie as he was turning out reels. He was laughing his head off at the beginning, and then about halfway or two-thirds through, he looked up and said, “Hey! This is a chick flick!” He was completely confused. It snuck up on him that the movie was suddenly trying to be something else.

In the opening montage to the song “Shout!” when Vince and Owen are crashing several weddings and picking up girl after girl after girl, you sense Owen is unhappy by the end of it. It was almost foreshadowing that Owen was facing a major life change, unlike his buddy Vince.

That’s right. I think any film that doesn’t really “feather in” those sorts of turns is the poorer for it.

In Wedding Crashers, I noticed another comedy-genre device not seen much anymore—wipes!

Yes, wipes can live in a comedy environment because they’re whimsical, like a page turning. They’re punctuation marks, so to speak. A dissolve usually means “later on, that same day.” A fade-up and -out could be “later on, that same year.” A wipe is “meanwhile, in the next room,” or some such. In Wedding Crashers, since parallel stories were going on a lot, especially when Vince was trying to win over Isla Fisher and Owen was in a parallel circumstance trying to win over Rachel McAdams, I saw opportunities to wipe from one to the other. I had absolutely no predisposition to use wipes. In fact, I usually try to avoid that sort of thing. But the footage guided me and, in this case, wipes seemed best.

Not to stereotype you further, but I notice that montages seem to be something of a trademark for you. Wedding Crashers, Marley and Me, and The Devil Wears Prada all had them.

I know. They get thrust upon me! (Laughs.) They’re in the script, of course. The Blind Side had two of them practically back-to-back.

(Continues…)Excerpted from First Cut 2 by Gabriella Oldham. Copyright © 2012 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.