Talking about editing: BAFTA sessions 2019

What happens to a film when the camera stops rolling? In comes the editor, to translate the clips into a story with flow and emotion.

Here, as part of the 2019 BAFTA Guru sessions, three BAFTA-nominated editors Hank Corwin (VICE), Adam Gough (Roma) and Tom Cross (First Man), share what it takes to put a film together and how they collaborate with directors and composers…

“The way I look at cutting films is really you go with the flow of the material,” explains Gough. Co-editing Roma with its director, Alfonso Cuaron, meant that for Gough, considerations about how the film would be edited were embedded throughout the filming process: “What Alfonso did on this – and it’s great having an editor behind the camera – he understood he wanted longer tails and handles on all of his shots. So he would leave the camera rolling up to a minute after the dialogue had finished to let the scene play out and he would let the actors ad-lib or live in the moment, and just let the camera roll. So we had the options, we didn’t have to cheat anything, we had long elements to cut in and out of, sometimes minutes.”

Gough also reflected on how Cuaron would film a scene “60 times”, each slightly different. When deciding which take to use, it was important to consider the scenes before and after to ensure the film continued to flow. Rather than working in short bursts, it was important to “to tackle it in long runs to make sure we had that correct rhythm going through.”

Having previously edited Damien Chazelle’s BAFTA-winning Whiplash and La La Land, Cross was already familiar with the director’s passion for music when editing First Man.

Despite not being a film about music, it remained a key element of the editing process for First Man. Cross explains: “Music really plays a big part in the picture editing… In the case of La La Land, he had to be on early on to prepare the music they were going to film to. He ended up doing the same thing for First Man… by the time I started editing I had a lot of rough demos of Justin’s music, and I always used them to inform how I was cutting things.” Cross also shares this was a different process to what he was used to: “It’s very unlike other projects I work on where the composers come on a lot later and they’re a little bit of a slave to the picture. Here, there’s much more of a back-and-forth.”

Corwin enjoyed a similar experience on Vice, with composer Nicholas Britell working on the film throughout the editing process. He describes the experience as very collaborative: “What will happen, when I’m looking at dailies, is we he have him come watch with me. He’ll plug his computer into the board and play tones… It’s the most fantastic thing to have the opportunity to work with a composer right from the beginning.”

Working on biographical films Vice and First Man, Corwin and Cross reflected on the challenges that came with portraying a true story.

A biographical comedy about vice president Dick Cheney, Vice has intense fast-paced moments before calming down. Corwin explained measuring audience reaction was crucial to getting the balance right: “On a film like [Vice], you have the facts which have been vetted and then you have the humanity, which we would think of almost as emotional realism. You have the facts but they become overwhelming so you have to feel where to slow the film down… we had the dubious luxury of having many test screenings so we would just screen the film through over people’s eyes, and it wouldn’t be for notes or comments or scores. We would just feel the film over and over and that was one of the keys to getting the film right.”

Cross divulged this was particularly difficult when portraying the 1969 moon landing because of the public’s familiarity with it: “The big challenge in general for the whole movie was: how can we show the audience things they haven’t seen before? How can we offer something dramatic and emotional that the audience is going to feel they can invest in and haven’t seen before? The thing we knew we would have to fight is the iconography. We couldn’t merely just offer up Neil Armstrong the icon, we had to offer some of his humanity, we had to offer very personal and intimate things that people are normally not privy to… If we could somehow let the audience get into Neil Armstrong’s head a little, or show a private moment, then they might begin to have an idea of how he might have been feeling.”