A Long Time Ago in a Cutting Room Far Far Away Read online

  Beyond choosing the cutting point, I decide what order to place the shots in. Different angles have different uses. Each shot in a film sequence is like a container. It has within it sound and picture information. Wide shots contain a lot of information, but they’re weak and require more time on the screen for the viewer to take them in. Close-ups have less information but are strong and are read more quickly. They are similar to forte and piano in music, and I can employ them in the same way. Often in scripts you will read, “SMASH CUT TO: . . .” I joke about getting out my smash splicer. What this means, I think, is an abrupt cut to a close-up, preferably with accompanying loud music or sound.

  I make judgments about how long to keep a shot on the screen not only to register its content but also with regard to its context in the scene. Pauses are a particular concern. Because films are shot out of sequence, actors may inadvertently pause too frequently. I am careful to ration the pauses so that the overall pace doesn’t suffer. Pauses are like salt; they must be used in moderation. They can be particularly problematic in comedies, where much of the humor rests on the element of surprise. The dialogue has to go fast and not let the audience get ahead of the action. Pauses are also a form of punctuation, a way of making clear to the audience when we have reached the end of a sentence, a paragraph, or a chapter. Timing is crucial.

  It’s a strange collaboration, between actor and editor. I spend day after day going over a performance, rewinding an actor, then playing her forward, stopping, going back, playing lines from different takes over the back of her head, cheating lines into her mouth, stealing syllables, all to make her look as good as possible. It’s very intimate, in a way. I see all her moments, the mistakes, the weak takes; everything she does is exposed to me. But it’s all a one-way intimacy. The star has no greater knowledge of me than she has of some fan in Sandusky, Ohio.

  When I am putting together a first cut, I go into a sort of trance, an alpha state or flow in which there is no awareness of time passing and I am completely absorbed in the task at hand. I am operating nonverbally. If something doesn’t match, I fix it. If a shot is too short, I lengthen it. If it is too long, I trim it. If it is in the wrong sequence, I move it. If the sound in a wide shot is poor, I may cheat the dialogue from a close-up into the actor’s mouth. I don’t think in words: I just do it. If the actor stumbles, if there is a false note in the reading of a line or a hesitation when there should be none, I react. I must leave myself open, to empathize with the emotions expressed by the actors. Is the actor’s psychological state consistent when I cut from one angle to another? I have to feel what they are feeling. Sometimes that can be painful. Is this take more gut-wrenching, or this one? Which of these takes is more heartbreaking? In a way, editors are host organisms. We take into our minds all the film shot for a picture. It lives in there for months, until the film is completed, and we have to be careful what we ingest. It can keep us up at night, causing us discomfort if we take in something toxic.

  During shooting, the script supervisor keeps careful notes of everything that is shot. Sometimes the director will indicate that he prefers a particular take, and that will be noted. I don’t mind this. After all, I am there to help the director achieve his vision. I don’t feel that my autonomy as a creative person is endangered, although when I am given carte blanche, I do feel liberated and empowered.

  In the era when movies were still shot and edited on film, an assistant sat next to the director and me while we screened dailies in a projection room and took down our notes about the footage. Watching dailies back then was critical in evaluating the material. It wasn’t as easy as it is now to review everything. Finding line readings and comparing takes was tedious. John Hughes used to shoot takes that lasted until the film ran out and they were forced to reload. Each take might contain several resets, and finding the different readings was difficult. Keeping notes at dailies was essential.

  Hardly anyone screens dailies together anymore. Everyone gets access to a secure online site where they can watch digital dailies on their individual viewer. It’s a shame, because those screenings at the end of the shooting day were an opportunity for artists working on a film to communicate with each other. Now I am often in the dark about the intended function of a given setup, especially when there is so much use of blue screens. But it is undeniable that dailies are boring. Joel Schumacher shot less film each day than any other director I ever worked with. I asked him why he shot so little, sometimes only one take.

  “The reason I shoot so little is that watching dailies is so boring!”

  “What if the negative breaks or gets scratched?” I asked. Fortunately, this is no longer a concern.

  My dear friend and fellow editor, educator and author Ron Roose, likes to say, “No one has ever plunked down ten dollars to go into a theater and watch dailies.”

  When I was cutting a scene in the film era, I would review all the dailies for the scene. In doing so, I would form a mental picture of how the scene should go together, roughly. Then I would pull out the best pieces of each setup, using the notes from the daily screenings, put them aside on a rack on three-inch cores, and assemble the scene from those selects that I had made. I did this for twenty-five years.

  Then, when I first started working on the Lightworks, a computerized system for editing, I realized I could use the power of the computer to help organize the material in a way that I couldn’t do when I was cutting film. I had my assistants stack the lines, cutting together all the instances when an actor spoke any given line of dialogue. I was then able to play, in quick succession, all the options for each. This is an invaluable time-saver, and I do it to this day. The power of editing with the computer is extraordinary, and when combined with some of the visual effects (VFX) I can achieve, it’s as if I can reach in and edit the image inside the frame, not just trim a shot’s beginning or end.

  During production, I have an extraordinary degree of autonomy. I am busy each day putting on a show using the elements I have been given the day before. I am not only a storyteller, which editors often profess to be. I must also be a showman. I put together the film with as much style and pizzazz as possible. I once heard someone say about Mozart that his music produces a combination of surprise and inevitability. Your first reaction is Oh! Then you think Of course! I decided that this was something to aspire to in my own work.

  I prize clarity, so that the audience “gets it.” If they become confused, they tune out and soon get bored. My fellow editor Donn Cambern, in teaching students, says there are only two rules in editing: don’t confuse the audience and don’t bore them.

  Editing is not only about smooth cuts and exciting montages. It’s also about helping create the whole package. When I worked on Star Wars, I would think, with great satisfaction, The VFX guys only worked on one part of the movie. The actors only worked on one part. But I got to work on all of it.

  And there are many ways for editors to contribute. Sometimes it’s a question of finding just the right piece of music for a scene. Sometimes it’s about making a really nifty transition from the previous scene. On occasion, I will suggest a line we need, or a shot. When do I play a line on camera? When do I focus instead on the actor listening to the speaker? That line is weak in this take, but the camera move is the best. I’ll just use the sound from the other take instead. When I am making these choices, I feel like I am king of the world.

  Operating this way, without the director’s input yet, I may want to get a feel for how something is playing, and I’ll call my assistants in to watch a scene with me, to be my focus group. Just the fact of showing it to other people makes a difference, and sometimes, without them even voicing their reactions, I will realize I need to make a change here or there. It’s as though a thought is lying just below the level of consciousness, and watching the scene with other people makes the thought pop up. Then I act on it.

  Later, after principal photography is complete, I begin working with the director, making changes to the
cut to have it more closely reflect his or her sensibilities. We start to challenge the cut. Do we even need this scene? What happens if we take it out? I am a firm believer in removing scenes to see what the effect is. If the scene is really necessary, it will be obvious. Good film always finds its way back into the movie (as in the school bus scene we’d originally removed from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, which we later used during the end credits).

  There are four crucial steps in making a motion picture. The first and overwhelmingly most important is the script. If it’s not on the page, it’s doubtful that the outcome will be satisfying. (I have worked on numerous films for which the endings needed to be rewritten and reshot. Some people have jokingly speculated that this is because the powerful executives who green-light films may not have read them all the way through.)

  The second crucial step is the casting. Put a weak actor in a lead role and it won’t matter how good the material is or how clever you are later on.

  The third step is the filming.

  And the fourth step is the cutting and postproduction—the sound design, the music, and the mix.

  Oddly, the least important of these is the third step. A film can be shot indifferently and still succeed if the script and the cast are great, and you don’t screw it up in post.

  We editors can have a powerful impact on our movies. It’s true that we can be overruled, but we do affect the final film in a very personal way. British writer-director Jonathan Lynn once told me about a prime minister who had gone to Buckingham Palace to get the Queen’s approval for a cabinet appointment he was considering.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “I thought the Queen had no power in the government.”

  “That’s true,” he replied, “she has no power, but she does have influence.”

  “I see. Editors are like the Queen of England!”

  We don’t have power, relative to the director, the producers, and the studio executives. But we do have influence. On Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol, I sat in a room with J.J. Abrams, Tom Cruise, and Brad Bird. It was liberating. Since I couldn’t impose my opinion, I felt free to say what I thought, and often they would endorse my suggestion. Powerlessness can give you power.

  I have worked with over twenty-five directors in my career. Not that many, I suppose, compared to actors or sound mixers. But our collaboration is a prolonged one, so the opportunity to work with a great number is limited. There are some lucky editors who find a happy fit with A-list directors, like Michael Kahn with Steven Spielberg, or Thelma Schoonmaker with Martin Scorsese. They have enjoyed a “happy marriage.” But I have found it stimulating to “sleep around.” I do take it as a point of pride to be invited back by directors. It is an affirmation of good work. I have worked on eleven pictures with Brian De Palma, four with Herbert Ross, two each with John Hughes, Ron Underwood, Taylor Hackford, and Duncan Jones. George Lucas hired me twice, although he was executive producer and not director on The Empire Strikes Back. It’s always interesting to get to know new directors. They are all different, with different priorities, different methods, and different audiences. For some directors, what matters most is box office; for some it is how the critics react. Others crave invitations to festivals. They all have particular bugaboos. De Palma doesn’t like overlaps; he wants to be on the actor who is speaking. One director reacted in horror to a cut I had made. “You punched in!”

  I had never heard the term. “I cut from the wide shot to the close-up.”

  “Yes, you can’t do that.”

  “D. W. Griffith was doing that at the turn of the century. It is basic film grammar.”

  “No. You have to cut to the reverse angle first, before you can cut back to the close-up.”

  OK.

  George Lucas hated laying lines of dialogue over the exterior of a building as a way of getting into a scene. “Is the building talking?”

  And they all have unique ways of communicating with their editors. There are always cuts that don’t quite work, and directors have varying ways of expressing that. Lucas would say it looked “goofy.” Underwood would say, “That cut is hard for me.” Others might say, “That cut bumps me.” De Palma would simply snap his head back, as if he had been slapped in the face with a mackerel.

  Editors are largely invisible, and this is partly because many directors don’t like to admit they need someone else to help make their films. Actors don’t like to acknowledge it either, for the most part, although the gracious Lupita Nyong’o is an exception. The great actors craft their performances with the knowledge that they are being edited. It takes nothing away from their art. They rely on editors to put the finishing touches on their performance. Looking at the final product, it is hard even for actors to know that what they see on the screen may have been carefully assembled line by line, sometimes word by word or even by the syllable.

  I tell young people interested in the movie business that the only reason to become an editor is that you enjoy doing it. You won’t get rich, although you can make a nice living at it. And you won’t get famous, except maybe to other editors. But I consider myself extremely fortunate to have been permitted to get my hands on such wonderful material. Baz Luhrmann says that the best we in the industry can hope for is to work on a film that becomes part of the culture. I have been lucky enough to have that happen to me a number of times. It has been a wonderful, absorbing, and rewarding experience.

  * * *

  The trick to extending a career as an editor is to make it past old and reach venerable. If you manage to reach this status, you can become a “film doctor,” called in to help out on projects that are going badly. I have fortunately reached this point, and now, closer to the end of my career than to the beginning, I can look back and see my entire journey. I haven’t listed all the accomplishments of the gifted artists I worked with. If you don’t know them and want to learn more about them, I encourage you to look up their credits.

  I’ve also worked for a few less talented souls, but I am not writing to settle scores, I am writing to relate my experiences during the last fifty years as I recall them. My first feature film opened in 1970, forty-three years after the first sound film. My career has spanned more than half the sound era. It is a stretch that produced many memorable films that helped shape our culture, and I was privileged enough to have had a hand in some of them.

  Here’s how it went down.

  1

  My First Hit: Carrie

  IN 1975, WHEN I WAS STILL IN MY TWENTIES, Brian De Palma approached me about his next project, our fifth together, a film called Carrie. It was to be based on a first novel by an unknown writer, Stephen King. In it, Carrie, a shy girl who secretly possesses telekinetic powers, is mocked and shunned by most of her classmates. Her ultimate humiliation takes place at the senior prom, when she is elected queen in a rigged election and, at the moment of her triumph, has a bucket of pig’s blood dumped on her. I read the book and liked it, but it seemed to me to be a step backward for Brian. He had already done horror (Sisters) and musical comedy horror (Phantom of the Paradise), and moved on to romantic thrillers (Obsession), pictures that I had edited for him. Why go back to the B movie genre? Coming in the wake of The Exorcist, a story about a young girl with magical powers seemed imitative to me. Little did I know that Carrie was destined to become much more than a hit movie; it would become part of the culture.

  I expressed my reservations to Brian, but he was undeterred. He correctly saw the potential there and went out to Hollywood to start preproduction and begin casting for the film. Coincidentally, at that time, George Lucas was casting actors for his next picture, a sci-fi epic called Star Wars. Brian and George had become friends in 1971, when they were both in Burbank directing pictures for Warner Bros. Since the actors in their upcoming films were in the same age range, they decided to hold their casting sessions together. They agreed to have George do the opening speech and Brian do the closing speech. If the actor looked hopeless, Brian would launch into the
closing speech before George had finished the opening one.

  One day, Brian called. “George wants to speak to you.” I had an image of Brian with his arm wrapped around George’s neck in a headlock, dragging him to the phone.

  “Hi, Paul. I just wanted to tell you that I like your work, and I’d love to work with you someday.”

  Wow! I thought. This was exciting. I had met George and his wife Marcia, a fellow film editor, a year earlier at a screening of Phantom of the Paradise.

  “I have already hired an editor for this picture that I’m doing now”—my heart sank—“but I’m going to be doing another one right after it, so maybe you can do that one.”

  “That’s great, George,” I said.

  But I thought, Why couldn’t it be this one? I had done four pictures by now, all for Brian, and as much as I appreciated his support, and as proud as I was of the pictures, I didn’t want to just be one director’s editor. I wanted to get a chance to work with other people, with other sensibilities, and George’s previous film, American Graffiti, was exactly the kind of picture I wished I could have worked on.

  In any event, Brian wanted me for Carrie, and I was happy to be wanted.