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“Anyone That Watched the Early Cuts Had the Same Reaction”: Editors Dashya Broadway and Jon Higgins on Your Monster
Still from Your Monster. Courtesy of Sundance Institute. Photo by Will Stone. In Caroline Lindy’s debut feature, an actress’s life quickly bottoms out, only to be rebuilt with the help of a monster living in her closet. Premiering in Sundance’s Midnight section, Your Monster, an adaptation of Lindy’s own 2020 short, nevertheless finds itself frequently in the vein of a rom-com.
Below, editors Dashya Broadway and Jon Higgins talk about finding the right tone for a story that has a little bit of everything and making sure they didn’t leave the audience waiting for too long.
See all responses to our annual Sundance editor questionnaire here.
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?
Broadway: The director, Caroline, reached out to me about coming onto the project. She saw and liked my previous work and wanted to discuss cutting the film. I found out later on that my friend (and phenomenal editor) Tom Cross had recommended me for the job as well. Caroline and I spoke on the phone, and I think we saw eye to eye in terms of what we thought the film needed. It was a really fun script, and I hit it off with Caroline right away.
Higgins: Melanie Donkers of HelloMerman reached out to me. I was recommended to her by a good friend and great editor, Laura Weinberg. Laura and I have worked together on many shows over the years (at least seven that I can think of), one of which was Search Party. I believe my experience working on Search Party, mixing suspense and comedy (and eventually horror), was a big contributing factor. From there I interviewed over Zoom with the writer-director of Your Monster, Caroline Lindy. I emphasized in my interview how important it was to me that the edit room be a safe, collaborative space to explore ideas—most importantly—without judgment. From assembly to final cut, it should feel like a journey we’re taking together. That must have been the right thing to say, because I was offered the job the next morning.
Filmmaker: In terms of advancing your film from its earliest assembly to your final cut, what were your goals as an editor? What elements of the film did you want to enhance, or preserve, or tease out, or totally reshape?
Broadway: When I came onto the project, Caroline and I had a lot of discussions about the tone of the film. It was a tricky one because the film had many layers. There was horror, romance, musical numbers and hints of a life-threatening disease, and then it was also funny. We knew we had to rearrange some things in the kitchen, so to speak. For me, I knew I wanted to make sure the jokes landed and that the audience just accepted the tonal shifts in the film because they felt natural to the storytelling. This meant creating a new opening to the film that really leaned in. I had an idea to start the film on Melissa’s close-up in the hospital since we end on her close-up on stage. She’s shattered, but we could add gleeful music underneath to introduce the different tones of the film. Caroline really liked the idea of a strong opening image, so things really took off from there. The ending of the film was another moment that Caroline asked me to reconceptualize and let it deviate a bit from the script.
Higgins: The goal, and biggest challenge quite honestly, was nailing the tone. Caroline is a huge fan of Nora Ephron, and this was pitched as a “rom-com turned on its head.” That turn was the hardest thing to define. There is a version of this movie that is a comedy, a version that is a love story, a drama, a horror movie, or even a musical. The assembly was over three hours and there were so many directions it could go. Imagine doing a 500-piece puzzle but having 1000 pieces in the box. The key was to figure out what belonged and what didn’t. Remembering that it’s a rom-com and anchoring ourselves to that idea helped distinguish the scenes that we may have loved but that didn’t ultimately service our goal from the scenes that did.
Filmmaker: How did you achieve these goals? What types of editing techniques, or processes, or feedback screenings allowed this work to occur?
Broadway: There was a lot of conversation. That’s kind of my favorite part of my job, besides mix sessions, is philosophically discussing the film and trying things, all with the goal of making the good become great. Caroline, Kayla Foster (who co-stars and produces the film) and I spent a lot of time brainstorming. I think I cut four or five different openings of the movie, and we’d screen them for feedback to see what was working. Some scenes became quick flashbacks to link characters and ideas. Among other things, I tightened up the ending and used a lot of intercutting in the musical performance to heighten the tension so that when you get to the main character’s big defining moment it’s particularly satisfying. It was great to work with Caroline, who was so open to collaboration and trying new ideas.
Higgins: Anyone that watched the early cuts had the same reaction, “the movie takes off when Laura and Monster are on screen together.” They are fun to hang with, so entertaining, and you find yourself rooting for them. They became our tentpoles, and we worked outward from there. In the assembly cut, they didn’t interact until minute 37, so the immediate goal was to get them together ASAP. We accomplished some of that by simply cutting entire scenes. That was more obvious. But trying to get Monster in the movie at minute 17, 15 or sooner… that was going to take more creativity. Some of that came about by stripping whole scenes for parts and compiling them back into a montage in order to be more efficient with exposition. There was another scene that was introduced in small pieces as flashbacks in a later scene.
Filmmaker: As an editor, how did you come up in the business, and what influences have affected your work?
Broadway: Over the course of my career as an assistant editor, I was networking as much as I could, telling everyone I met that I wanted to cut scripted TV and films. All the hard work and hustle paid off when I got my first scripted editing credit after being hired to cut the pilot for Lena Waithe’s show Twenties. My work on the pilot led me to be hired to cut the series. I then went on to cut the first season of A Black Lady Sketch Show, Insecure, and Between the World and Me, amongst other projects. I was promoted to Supervising Editor in the second season of A Black Lady Sketch Show, for which the editing team and I won the show’s first Emmy. Throughout my TV career, I’ve been lucky enough to work with women I admire, like Robin Thede, Issa Rae, and Lena Waithe. Recently, I was able to make the jump to film with my first studio feature, Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody, working with another artist I greatly admire, Kasi Lemmons.
I’m heavily influenced by the films that I love because of the great editing on display. I’m the biggest Sally Menke fan there is, and it was such an honor to be chosen as the Menke Fellow this year for Sundance. Watching her films is always like a master class for me. Especially Inglorious Basterds. I’m also heavily influenced by music. I listen to a lot of score while on a project, but also if I’m just like driving to Sprouts or something.
Higgins: I made the transition from AE to editor on the multicam studio show Crossing Over with John Edward. Most recently I was editing a feature. There was a long 2+ decades journey along the way, having cut reality, doc, commercials, sketch, short films, half-hour comedies, features. I’ve basically cut everything but one hour dramas which, ironically, is what I watch more than anything. So if anyone is reading this and looking, I’m interested! People don’t always see that body of work as a strength though. I’m sure many editors can relate to this, but for me there was a lot of “you can’t cut sketch because you’re a reality editor.” Then “you can’t cut half hours because you’re a sketch editor.”
It’s been a long road of proving myself over and over, but because of that I’ve picked up skills along the way that have influenced me as an editor. For example, when I was editing live-to-tape studio shows and needed to change a camera on the linecut, there’s a rhythm there that the technical director creates when live-switching that you need to preserve when making edits. You delay the edit a few frames before cutting, creating a rather short J-cut. I often carry over that concept today when doing scripted to help make a scene feel “paced up” without making it “cutty.” Some influences like that come from my own work background, but also from watching others. Before I started working on Search Party, I watched a lot of Better Call Saul. And even though Saul is an hour drama and Search Party technically a half hour comedy, Search Party had a seriousness to it that traditional half hour comedies simply weren’t doing. So I couldn’t approach it like I would a comedy like Broad City.
Let me just add that I also keep a running memo in the Notes app on my iPhone of things that stand out to me when watching the work of others. I don’t remember the season, but there was this moment in the Netflix show Bloodline where Kyle Chandler’s character is driving a car in the rain. The camera is filming him from outside the windshield. It was an end-of-episode moment, tense music, pensive performance, loud rain/driving/wipers sound design. Then… everything slowly strips away except for the sound of the wipers. No music, no rain, no wet road… just wipers. I remember getting chills. Right away, I wrote it down. This is a very long way of saying that I am influenced all the time by editors and editing, regardless of the type of show or movie.
Filmmaker: What editing system did you use, and why?
Broadway: For Your Monster, we used Avid Media Composer. I’ve been working on Avid for 10 or so years, and it’s become my partner in crime on a lot of projects. For me, it’s the best when it comes to user customization. Also, there were musical numbers in this film, and script sync is unmatched.
Higgins: I used Avid Media Composer, specifically a 2018 version. This was a low budget movie with a big budget heart, and having only had an AE for 2-3 weeks and no other tech support, I decided to play it safe. I came up in the industry working on Avid, so I’m very familiar with most of the error messages and how to fix them, and I knew that I didn’t want to be near a version of Avid with Titler+. If you know, you know.
Filmmaker: What was the most difficult scene to cut, and why? And how did you do it?
Broadway: I don’t think any of the scenes were particularly difficult, but there were a few puzzles to solve and they were solved by thinking outside the box and letting the film be what it wanted to be. One night I was watching Practical Magic and it helped me solve one of the puzzles. There were no wrong answers!
Higgins: There is a scene where Monster and Laura are walking through a park outside at night. The film was shot in February in northern New Jersey and it was freeeeeezing. I could see it in their breath, hear it in their voices. It was so cold that they had to cut the shoot day short for safety reasons before getting all the singles coverage. The first half of the scene had close-ups, but then in the second half, we had our choice between two takes of a medium wide, 2-shot. Pickups were not an option. We attempted to sneak in a fluid morph to hide an edit, but it was not working. Cutting away to something felt really unnatural and unmotivated. The saving grace was that Melissa Barrera’s and Tommy Dewey’s performances at the end of the scene were pretty great. So we worked backward from there to find the best inpoint to cut to the wide. Everything before that, since we had coverage, we tried to live in the tights as much as possible so that once we had to cut wide, it felt earned and appreciated.
Filmmaker: What role did VFX work, or compositing, or other post-production techniques play in terms of the final edit?
Broadway: Monster had amazing special effects make-up applied to him every day of the shoot, so there were no worries there. There were a couple of split screens I used because I wanted Laura to react to Jackie with a certain pacing, and I added a VFX shot to the list for when Monster first appears in the closet, but most of anything that feels like VFX was done in camera.
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?
Broadway: As an ex-people-pleaser, I think I always understood the thesis of the film, so the real discoveries came in how we could use the footage that was shot to evoke that thesis. It didn’t have to be linear, and it didn’t have to be bound to anything that might not work. It needed to execute Caroline’s vision for the film, and it needed to make you feel. The journey to figuring that out was long but awesome.
Higgins: There’s this famous line in Jurassic Park that Jeff Goldblum’s character, Ian Malcolm, gives criticizing the scientists that brought back the dinosaurs as being “so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” That’s how I felt with some of the scenes in my assembly, where I tried so hard to make them so good, so scary or funny or so emotional, that I didn’t stop to think if I was servicing the overall tone. I’m sure I freaked out Caroline when she watched the first cut, but I wouldn’t trade anything for having the pleasure of shaping it together. It is a journey, after all. But I hope this movie comes out on blu-ray one day and we show those deleted scenes with commentary.
