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“We Wanted to Make Sure There Was Intention With Every Shift”: Editor Stacy Moon on Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul
Regina Hall and Sterling K. Brown in Honk For Jesus, Save Your Soul. (photo: Alan Gwizdowski) Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul, Adamma Ebo’s feature-length adaptation of their short film of the same name about a couple attempting to rebuild the congregation of their once-thriving megachurch after a scandal. Partially shot in the faux-documentary style of the film’s own documentarians, the film required the hand of a diligent editor to make every shift between the film’s different styles meaningful; editor Stacy Moon discusses how she made these shifts purposeful and more below.
Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job?
Moon: Ali Greer, the other editor, reached out to me about working on the film. We had been friends a long time from working on Portlandia, so we’d always talked about working together again sometime, and when I read the script I really enjoyed it, so it was a no brainer. And I had a really good talk with Adamma about what she envisioned.
Filmmaker: In terms of advancing your film from its earliest assembly to your final cut, what were goals as an editor? What elements of the film did you want to enhance, or preserve, or tease out or totally reshape?
Moon: One of the biggest things to draw out from the editing was Trinitie’s journey. She is a complicated character mired in a situation she never chose herself, but she also refuses to leave. Regina Hall gave a brilliant performance, and we mined the most interesting moments from take to take. Then we had to step back and look at how that takes form over the course of the film. We kept reshaping and whittling away anything that got away from that idea.
Another aspect that was interesting to reshape was the portrayal of the scandal. There hadn’t initially been a title sequence in the film, and we realized early on that it would help immensely to move this montage of news footage and Lee-Curtis’ sermon that came a little bit later in the film up to the beginning to immerse you in the adoration people had for them in their community before it all fell apart. It helped set the tone of these other montages throughout the film where the fallout from the scandal was portrayed with radio voices and shots of the surrounding Atlanta area, which really helped fill out the scope of the consequences that Lee Curtis and Trinitie were facing.
Filmmaker: How did you achieve these goals? What types of editing techniques, or processes, or feedback screenings allowed this work to occur?
Moon: Feedback screenings were really helpful in gauging how much of the scandal we wanted to portray in the film. We didn’t want the scandal itself to be the focus of the story, but we wanted to portray just enough to give weight to what Lee Curtis and Trinitie were going through. At the same time, we didn’t want it so ambiguous that it raised distracting questions for the viewer.
As for honing in Lee Curtis and Trinitie’s dynamic and their journeys as characters, we looked at takes and rearranged scenes, cut stuff, etc., but we also had to look at the way the shots from the documentary cameras within the film versus our own “cinematic” cameras functioned in the story. Some scenes we entirely recut to be seen from within the documentary’s point of view; it was a tricky balance to find in purposefully shifting from one style to the other. We wanted to make sure there was intention with every shift to build that tension the couple faced with being on camera as their relationship changed throughout the story.
Filmmaker: As an editor, how did you come up in the business, and what influences have affected your work?
Moon: I started out as an assistant in comedy TV. I have edited a handful of great, weird comedy shows, and I’m glad that Adamma and Adanne let me try something a little different! I knew they wanted to work with me because I had a comedy background, but I also saw this as an opportunity to work on something that extended beyond that and sought to draw out more aspects of humanity, including some of the darkness.
My biggest influences are my colleagues; I’m lucky to be surrounded by some really talented directors and editors, so I have the privilege of being inspired by the great stuff they make and try to mimic whatever it is they do.
Filmmaker: What editing system did you use, and why?
Moon: We used Avid, because, working remotely, I had to share bins constantly with my wonderful assistant editor Helen Han, and also Script Sync is very useful for flipping through takes.
Filmmaker: What was the most difficult scene to cut and why? And how did you do it?
Moon: The scene of Trinitie breaking down in front of cameras was maybe the most difficult because everything leading up to it mattered in how it landed, on top of the scene itself. And we wanted to give it a sense of being wholly continuous as an experience, un-editorialized by the documentary filmmaker within the film. So there was a lot to juggle. So we started with pulling what we felt were the most powerful moments, and then worked backwards to find cut points that felt right and emotionally seamless.
Filmmaker: Finally, now that the process is over, what new meanings has the film taken on for you? What did you discover in the footage that you might not have seen initially, and how does your final understanding of the film differ from the understanding that you began with?
Moon: I guess I’m just proud of the film we made. I hadn’t really thought about how much I got to know these two characters in just watching them over and over again, but I feel it is a credit to Regina Hall and Sterling Brown that I feel as though I’ve gotten to empathize with two people that, superficially, you would think deserve little of that. I think that felt very real to me, to end up really liking people that you really shouldn’t.
