The editor

Hutch here. Last night, that was you, huh? And then here, we got a great phone call with RZA calling his brother from who knows where and... I think, originally, he was supposed to be on an island. That's what we had in one of the lines. But then we kind of thought, "Well, how does he get there from an island so quick?" So it was changed to a nondescript location. I always like how you step into the shadow when you take this call. Yeah. - Hopetully it's not too on the nose, but I kind of like that the family's light in the back, and then here you are in a little bit of darkness. And he mentions The Barber. - The Barber. And that was not what he said in the original script. No. This is where... So this is act two and act two was very, very different. And I don't know how much in detail we should go, 'cause there's a lot of them. But the idea is that now Hutch gets the call, gets the message to go see The Barber, gets the message to go see The Barber, he gets the phone message, a text message, he goes, and basically what we used to have Is... What we have now is a compact montage of a much bigger act two than we originally had shot and envisioned, which makes the film much, much better. And that was something that David Leitch set down with Evan Schiff, our second editor. I finished... This is right as Corona was hitting the US, and we all had to go home, and I flew home. And David spent time working with Evan over Zoom to put the sequence together. By the way, if you pay close attention to the clothes on Hutch's character, you'll see that it's very lucky that he's always wearing blue. And may I say the reason why you're wearing blue, Bob? Yeah. So, early in preproduction Bob said that, "Guys, I think we should get some blue stuff on me." I'm like, "Why?" He's like, "Well..." I think you said your mother saw you wearing blue... - In the Spielberg film The Post. She saw The Post, she liked it. And she goes, "Your eyes aren't that blue." And I go, "Actually, yes, they are. They pop blue more if I wear blue." You see the blue in my eyes if I wear blue. They're kind of a blue-green, I think. SO anyway... So your mother... We have to thank your mother for putting us in this direction because it saved us in the cut. She will not be seeing this movie. Really? - No. Can we do a cut-down version without... She's 84 and does not watch violent films at all. ...to the tune of eight and nine figures. Anything good? - Fuck if I know. But what I do know is, if he doesn't know who you are yet, he will soon. Now, Colin is amazing. Colin Salmon. Oh, my God, what a great actor. And there's your wife. That's not much. There's my wife. Ten-year anniversary today. Dasha. - That's right. She's a filmmaker herself. - She is now. I have competition in my own household. Good luck with that. - Yeah. I have the same situation. My wife is a manager, but also a producer and a creative, and it's great. You gotta figure it out. It might take you awhile. Now, you guys have 10 years, so you're probably doing pretty good. We're all right. - But it can be hard. Yep. What the fuck? This guy's like, "Wait. Some of these pictures are me. "Who's got them?" - This is J.P. Manoux. He was actually... Bob, he was the second person cast in this film. Obviously, you were first and J.P. was the second. Well, he's great. He's freaked out, working at the Pentagon, and Colin's telling me who Yulian is, and who I've just gotten myself involved with, and about the Obshak. And how Yulian's men are overseeing the Obshak, which is obviously something that's causing him a great deal of stress, but also, he takes a certain amount of pride in protecting it. Goddamn Obshak. He's kind of like, I think, the... Not kind of... For me, the goal was to have Hutch be the quiet guy that's hiding a storm inside himself. Whereas Yulian is living the storm but doesn't really want to. Yeah. - So their trajectories are clashing. There's not a goddamn thing about Hutch in all the documents he can find. It's all blacked out, except for some awesome pictures of the people he's killed. And Dasha decides, "Fuck this. I'm not part of this." And now he realizes what he already knew because that character's smart. My brother tangled with a bad guy. I

42:46 · jump to transcript →

Well, he's gonna get into his car and then he decides, "Forget about that. "Remember that car that neighbor told me about that was so good? "Let's take that and do that." I love how his neighbors come out of their houses to see his house burning down. This was the first scene that I storyboarded because it's a music video and I thought I'd start with easier stuff. Right. - And... I just loved the idea of everybody seeing... And then Hutch, he doesn't give a shit, 'cause he steals the car in front of everybody, while everyone's seeing. Yeah. - One thing I do miss, though. lf I was a little bit smarter, I would have had Paul Essiembre, as Jim the neighbor, run out after screaming. That would've been a perfect ending to this drive off. Yeah. But I realized in the edit, great. My character's probably upstairs in his bedroom with a stripper, knocked out from two nights of drinking and partying. Wait. The nursing home? What's this? Yeah, remember he warned his dad that he was tangling with some big, bad guys and to watch out. And speaking of big bad guys, there's Ilya Naishuller, our director, right there on the right. My first Hollywood part.

1:02:07 · jump to transcript →

Christien Tinsley

to stick with something or not stick with something because he knew the outcome was ultimately something he was going to have to work with in post. And the one thing I've always given Damien ample amounts of credit for is, you know, being a good editor, putting this stuff together, putting a good effect sequence together is really hard to do because you want to hold on it long enough that everybody

59:10 · jump to transcript →

Christien Tinsley

has made Terrifier so successful for Damien is he really balances all of that. And he does it really well in editing. And I'm not taking away from his directing abilities or his makeup effects. He's obviously done really, really well in both those categories. I've just, you know, to be a really good editor is hard. But I always feel like the better editor you are, the better director and overall, you know, designer slash artist.

1:00:08 · jump to transcript →

And welcome to the commentary track for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's Mark of the Vampire. I'm novelist and critic Kim Newman, and with me is... Editor and writer Stephen Jones, and this is the first time we've done one of these commentary tracks in Los Angeles, rather than our native London. And we start with big billing for Lionel Barrymore, obviously the major star in...

0:05 · jump to transcript →

David Kalat

Nakajima's the one with the pencil behind his ear. Tezuka plays the editor who just walked in. This is the only moment in the film where you get to see their faces, but they appear throughout the movie in another role. They're the actors who played Godzilla, trading turns inside the monster suit.

34:34 · jump to transcript →

Brian Stonehill

Bazin wrote in protest against filmmakers' habits of cutting films thoughtlessly and particularly of the effect of phoniness that is created when film is chopped up. Truffaut absorbed these lessons and put them into practice in his early films before challenging them in his later ones. The three shots that comprise this final sequence are the longest in the film, as if the film were breaking free of the editor's knife at the same time that Antoine is breaking free of the reform school gates.

1:35:11 · jump to transcript →

The film was begun with only one editor aboard, Eugenio Alibizo, who had cut for a few dollars more. But the task of cutting together such a long picture with a set opening date was more than Alibizo could manage alone, so Nino Barali was brought aboard. Of the two men, Barali had the more accomplished career, going all the way back to 1950, and whose past work included many of the Pasolini films that Tonino Delli Coli had photographed.

2:10:34 · jump to transcript →

Joey Chitwood flew in, did it first shot out of the box. Went straight in, everybody cheered. Lean over. And, well, here we go. And so I designed a thing where Shawn says to her, lean this way, and the whole car tilts. That was a physical impossibility, if you watch this. I mean, when Cubby found out about it, Guy found out about it, we were back in England. And the editor said...

1:07:28 · jump to transcript →

Hello, I'm Barry Fulshaw. I'm the author of such books as British Crime Film, British Gothic Cinema, and various other books on film. And I'm sitting with a man who's very recognizable. Sherlock Holmes is one of the most instantly recognizable characters in fiction, but so is a man who's written some of the very best modern Holmesiana, which is Kim Newman. Kim is a movie critic. He's an author and a broadcaster. He's a contributing editor to Sight and Sound and Empire Magazines.

0:03 · jump to transcript →

worked on this dubbing, it was a cutting room where we dubbed French films into English, so I was in the lowest, lowest possible position. I was watching the editors and they were doing this lip-sync work on editolas then they had in those days. In the lunch hours, I'd sit at the editor and have it run it back. Again, this time thing happened, you know, running back in life and forward, running backwards, you know, put people back...

35:05 · jump to transcript →

constant ups and downs of the horror film. It's here to stay on a recurrent basis. Now, Don, do you miss being the, in films that you make nowadays, do you miss not being your own DP and not being your own editor? I know that in your last film you didn't, you don't take an editing credit and you didn't obviously operate the camera.

1:27:32 · jump to transcript →

go out into the street. Come along, come along. Over here. The editor put on this nice car squeal.

1:27:25 · jump to transcript →

Bill Paxton

I think editorially it's a fun moment. I like the build. I didn't do any editing directly on this film. Because it's film-based editing, with rapid cutting, I thought it had really good energy. You see that cutting now with the Avid cos you don't have to make each splice manually. This is the Alamo told with six people. So the sentry guns are the equivalent of the first couple of attacks. I think it's great foreboding. It's just coming at them like a wave. If these guns don't stop them, they're screwed. I think it works pretty well, but the studio talked me into taking it out. So I'm happy to see it restored in this extended version. Ray Lovejoy was our editor and it was a tremendous responsibility. And this is before you had all of the Avid and Lightworks and any kind of digital editing. There was so much film and we had a pretty short postproduction schedule and he did just a tremendous job. I hired Ray for one simple reason - cos he had worked with Stanley Kubrick. It took him a while to really get what I was trying to do with this movie. A lot of his early cuts I didn't really care for. It's not that there was ever any tension between us. I just didn't feel I was getting what I wanted. Ray was getting really frustrated. I remember toward the end he cut the alien queen battle, the power loader queen battle at the end of the film. He was really nervous, cos he hadn't given me the action cutting that I wanted and I'd had to mess with it a lot and there was another editor who was cutting some stuff, and I was liking his action cutting better than Ray's. Ray is just a dear guy and a really good editor, but he was struggling with it. SO, finally, he just grabbed all the film, locked himself in his room, said "Don't bother me." Not mean or anything, but "I just gotta do this." And he went in and he cut the entire last eight minutes of the picture. He showed it to me very nervously. He cut in a day or two. He showed it to me very nervously and I watched the whole thing and I said "It's perfect. It's absolutely perfect. Don't change anything." And that was that. He felt like it was such a huge victory because he had actually got it. He had mastered the style for the film. Sigourney, she's very liberal politically and despised the idea of any kind of guns or anything, and tried to talk me out of them having weapons. I said "They're marines. They'd have weapons." She said "Do I have to carry a weapon?" I said "Yes." She said "Why?" I said "Because it's not Sigourney Weaver in the film. It's Ripley. And Ripley wants to survive." So I took her out shooting a Thompson machine gun, out behind the studio, and she fired off a 50-round magazine from the hip. And then she looked up at me with this sly grin and said "That's really fun." Another liberal bites the dust. There were a few things she asked if she could do when we had our first meeting. She wanted to die in the film, she wanted to not use guns and she wanted to make love to the alien. And between the third and fourth film she got to do all of those things. But fortunately for this film, I said no to all of them, even though I was petrified. I thought she'd bolt from the project, but she didn't. She had a lot of good ideas. But she did have certain specific things she thought should be done in the Aven mythos. When she got to a position of power on the later films, she made that happen. This scene coming up with Ripley and Newt, which is the attack of the facehuggers, was a really tough scene to orchestrate, prepare for, as far as we think we're now back 16 or 17 years. So we don't have any kind of digital animation and there's not gonna be any stop-motion animation, and these facehuggers have gotta come to life, so we created I think a half dozen different facehuggers that would do different things to create the performance coming up, including our hero, which had completely articulated hands, multiple cables that had to be controlled by six puppeteers for one facehugger. We had one that would run across the floor. We called him our pull toy. We had stunt facehuggers that we could throw to hit the wall. We had actually two different heroes. There's the one that crawls up over the counter coming at Newt. And then a completely articulated one with tongue and fingers that Ripley would fight off with all of the cables down her arms through the whole sequence. And there's so much that happens in that. You think of the facehugger that's coming after them, and multiple to create that one scene.

1:41:44 · jump to transcript →

Outside? Yeah. Come on. I'm not suggesting the worst will happen. You know, this is a kind of bureau chief, a kind of editor who really existed in the time. There used to be a lot of them were Irishmen with big hearts and who had this feeling of family for the people who worked for them.

1:13:20 · jump to transcript →

John McTiernan

While I was temp-tracking the movie, we used some Aaron Copland. I guess I have since learned the name of the pieces, Fanfare for the Common Man. It just, it just got introduced there. And Alan Silvestri later on parodied it beautifully. And we... It's playing in the background here. In the cutting room we call it Fanfare for the Common Mercenary.

52:12 · jump to transcript →

suspicious that the movie would be over. Yeah, I got a big argument with the editor, Mr. Frank Uriosti, who's a great editor, and I just said, look, you gotta go longer. You gotta go 15 seconds and pull the track out. Like, there should be no sound. And he looked at me in horror, like, you can't do that. So they didn't, the chickens. In fact, we chickened out a little bit. We compromised, and I think we should have added five seconds, yes. And taken the track out. Yes.

26:44 · jump to transcript →

And you had two editors on the film, right? That's why I don't remember Post. They did an interview with me. They asked me on Post. It's funny. I barely remember Post. It's because we were still shooting blob bits, second and third unit. While you were back here, right? Yeah, while I was editing. It was crazy. Because you worked with Terry again from Nightmare 3, right? And then you had another addition. If you don't mind my asking, was the use of an additional editor just for expedience? Yes.

41:01 · jump to transcript →

Stephen Prince

When Yamamoto directed Horse, for example, in 1941, Kurosawa scripted the picture and worked as second unit director and editor, and Honda served as the assistant director. When Kurosawa directed Stray Dog in 1949, Honda was his chief assistant director. It's a striking coincidence that they both made, as directors, a pair of tremendously influential films that were released the same year, in 1954, Seven Samurai and Godzilla.

1:15:27 · jump to transcript →

Macaulay Culkin

There's a Barry Bonds baseball card. - Yep. For those who wanted to see Barry in his younger, thinner days. Um.... Now, this was actually the real house here, which was in Winnetka, Illinois... ...and, um.... It was interesting because we were... We were able to shoot a great deal of the film at this house. None of the interiors that you see in the film were shot here... . UM... ...but this house worked out very well for us. Strangely enough, you know, with today's budgets... ...we would've built the back of that house completely... ...because the fact that we did all of those stunts later in the film... ...on the actual location was just ridiculous. And they were very friendly. - They were great. They had T-shirts made up. - They loved it. They used to have hot chocolate and stuff for us... ...and invite us in. They were great. They were a great family. It's incredible because I see... ...the things people do to people's apartments and houses... ...when they rent them out, like, you Know, for production. I'm like, "I'd never do that." - No, I know. Once you learn... Once you've seen it done, you know... Not to discourage any of you guys out there listening... ...to renting out your houses to future productions. But make sure you're paid very well. - Yes. That voice on the answering machine was Raja Gosnell... ...who was the editor of this picture... ...who's gone on to become a director in his own right. I

37:15 · jump to transcript →

Paul M. Sammon

by Curtis Harrington, which was a Roger Corman special, where Roger Corman took a Soviet science fiction film, filmed American scenes with Basil Rathbone, and the guy on the left is Forrest J. Ackerman, editor and publisher of Famous Monsters of Filmland. John Davison, the producer of this film, got his start with Roger Corman at New World Pictures. In fact, he was his publicity department. And John's first film was Hollywood Boulevard with Joe Dante. John also did Piranha.

52:05 · jump to transcript →

There should be. Why isn't there? It's not the actors. It's, like you say, the editor. I think the score, by the way, which we haven't mentioned yet. I don't know what you make of it, but I freaking love the atmospheric side of it. I don't know about the themes. I didn't really notice them too much, to be honest. But the general sort of ambience is brilliant. Yeah, I love... Yeah, I mean, Eric Goldenthal combines electronic with, like, orchestral stuff, but also...

54:15 · jump to transcript →

My name is Terry Rawlings. I'm the editor of Alien 3. And it was a thrill to work with David Fincher on his very first film, which was a very difficult task, in a way. And it was nothing to do with David Fincher, who I think did an incredible job. And I wish that he had fought for it harder in places because it became very difficult handling sort of the front office at Fox. They never let us properly complete the film in Pinewood Studios before we left, so there were things outstanding for the film. So when we first got it all together, it just didn't quite work because of the areas that were missing.

0:03 · jump to transcript →

Fred Dekker

In terms of the editing of the picture, was there anything that changed dramatically during the post-production that you had shot? Was there anything cut from the movie that was left on? Was it pretty much the movie that you intended? Looking at it now, I'm really pleased with the editing of this movie. Burt Lovett was the editor, and he's a guy. He had worked with Scorsese on New York, New York, and some of the documentaries that Scorsese did years ago. Just a terrific guy and a great editor.

1:11:12 · jump to transcript →

And there's Kenneth Cochran's credit. Yes, our co-producer. We have a neat little group. Kenneth Cochran, our co-producer. Chris and John Ottman, editor and composer. And myself. And we've known each other for a long time. Chris and I went to high school together. And I know Ken and John from film school at USC. San Pedro last night. The idea for the titles... We debated that one forever, as to exactly how to do that.

1:48 · jump to transcript →

Hello. My name is Jean-Pierre Jeunet. I'm the director of Alien Resurrection. Hi. I'm Dominique Pinon. I played Vriess, the guy on the wheelchair. And I'm Hervé Schneid, the editor. My name is Sylvain. I was a storyboard artist and a concept artist on Alien Resurrection. This was designed, composed, shot almost entirely and never used, because we couldn't complete it for budgetary reasons. But initially, in the first opening of the film, we looked at the mouth. The mouth of an insect. Except we didn't know it was an insect. We mistake it for an alien creature. And the camera backs out and actually reveals a little bug. And in one camera move, as it keeps on backing up, we see a finger crushing that insect and sticking the insect into a straw. And splattering that insect against the glass as we recede... And we go all the way back into outer space and actually reveal a giant spaceship, which is where the story begins. I remember especially about the main credit. When I arrived in LA, I was waiting for an offer from the studio. You can imagine - a poor French guy like me, I was very scared. I was in a hotel, waiting for the answer, and I didn't sleep because of jet lag and because I was scared. I thought "OK. To prove to myself I am able to make this film, I have to find a good idea for the main credit, for the first shot." Immediately, I found the story of the guy alone in a big spaceship, with the milk shake and the pipe. He scratches insects, he puts them in the pipe, he blows the insect on the camera. I was very happy about this idea. I told this idea to the studio and they were happy, too. We began to work on it, but it was very very very expensive. One day, my line producer told me, if you could find another idea, because we have not enough money to finish this idea. This is a secret - I was pretty relieved. In fact, I think it was a little bit too funny for the beginning of Alien. I didn't say anything to the people. I said "You want to cut my idea?!" But, in fact, I was very happy, and I prefer the credit we have now. This is a model, and at this time, we hesitated about to use CGI or models for the spaceships. And Pitof preferred to use models. Maybe it was one of the last films with spaceship in model. That was very impressive. I came once on the set while you shot the models, and it was really big. - Yeah. Not really big. It's never enough big. And Pitof made a lot of parts, and he mixed the different parts.

0:03 · jump to transcript →