
“Knowing How to Take Feedback Is an Art”: Editor Lev Lewis on Dead Lover

When a young grave digger (Grace Glowicki) finds love—despite her crude demeanor and disheveled appearance—she vows that it will be eternal. When her betrothed dies at sea, she decides to revive her dream man out of the corpses that she buries every day. Glowicki serves as the writer, director and star in this horror-comedy take on Mary Shelley’s iconic sci-fi novel.
Editor Lev Lewis tells Filmmaker about the extensive test screening process, his preference for cutting on Premiere and why he’s “thrilled” to be part of the team that made Dead Lover.
See all responses to our annual Sundance editor interviews 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?
Lewis: I knew Grace Glowicki, the director, a little from a project she had acted in and I had co-written and edited many years ago, but my primary contact was Yona Strauss, one of the film’s producers, who I’ve worked with a number of times over the past few years. She reached out to ask if I would be interested in managing the dailies during production, putting together an assembly and then handing the project off to Grace—who at that time wanted to cut the film by herself. Liking everyone involved in the project, I signed on. Rather quickly, I discovered that I was quite taken with the film—its humour and style and emotion—and I mentioned to Grace that, should she want any feedback or assistance down the line, to get in touch. She was happy with my assembly and a couple months later reached out to ask if I would edit the film for real. We worked together for about three months, then took almost a years’ hiatus, then resumed for another three months and locked picture.
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?
Lewis: Specific to this film was trying to balance the zany with the serious. Early on, without consulting Grace, I started to get a little crazy with the edit, especially with sound and music—where I really went to town with comic, over the top SFX and lots of musical tonal changes. The footage was very pliable and you could really have a lot of fun with it. On the other hand, where I started to fall in love with the film was when I started cutting a montage sequence where the two lovers, who’ve just met, are spending a sort of unbroken honeymoon together, falling in love—and my instinct there was to play everything completely earnest, completely romantic, no winks. Balancing those two poles was what I tried to keep my eye on through the whole process
Filmmaker: How did you achieve these goals? What types of editing techniques, or processes, or feedback screenings allowed this work to occur?
Lewis: The same techniques and process I almost always use—which is just to look at the footage in front of you. It can sound cheesy, but you just have to watch and listen and try to figure out what it’s telling you. I just want to know what the characters are thinking and feeling and how that relates to the story and how it pushes it forward and then how you can create the right style, right patterns, right sounds around that. I also love test screenings. The absolute hardest part of film editing is losing objectivity. I’m preparing something that I’ve watched thousands of times for an audience who will (most likely) watch it one time. That’s an unbridgeable discrepancy, so feedback is crucial. Luckily, Grace was amazing about screening it for different groups, sometimes small (5ish people), sometimes larger (30-40 people). In the small groups, we’d do a live Q&A after the film and in the larger groups, we created questionnaires and solicited responses solely through writing. Thank god, because locking picture without this level of feedback honestly makes me feel like I’m moving through the world with my eyes closed. That said, knowing how to take feedback is an art, one I’m increasingly convinced is just part of the job of being an editor, director or producer. You can’t be reactive and you have to really think through what someone is trying to say. My starting point is a) any feedback that is consistent, say five or more people are saying essentially the same thing and b) anything that resonates with something I was already feeling myself pre-feedback.
Filmmaker: As an editor, how did you come up in the business, and what influences have affected your work?
Lewis: I started out by working on tiny micro-budget films with my brother and his directing partner, Calvin. Initially, I composed the music and gave feedback on their scripts, cuts etc. before quickly becoming more and more involved, until I sort of just found myself doing it full-time. In 2019, we released a slightly higher-budgeted movie called White Lie, which was successful within Canada—and I used that as an opportunity to branch out into being a “professional” freelance editor for other productions. My influences are mostly Bruce Springsteen and Clint Eastwood and Mickey Newbury and Gilead and I watched Gun Crazy for the first time last year and I’ll keep thinking about that forever.
Filmmaker: What editing system did you use, and why?
Lewis: I use Premiere, unless forced into an Avid, which has happened on a couple of occasions when I took over an edit midway through. I initially learned video editing on Final Cut when I was a teenager before transitioning over to Premiere in 2015. Had I been an assistant or worked in a post facility or been over a certain age, I would likely cut on Avid, but since none of those things apply to me, Premiere is the logical choice. It’s the most intuitive and friendly editing software I’ve used. Yes, it has some downsides integrating into the rest of the post pipeline, but, overall, my ability to be agile and creative within it more than compensates.
Filmmaker: What was the most difficult scene to cut and why? And how did you do it?
Lewis: The massing of the mob at the end of the film was the hardest sequence. The thing is—it’s a sequence based around geography (essentially, there are four different people/groups converging in one spot from different locations), but this film was shot almost entirely on a black soundstage, making distinctions between locations tricky. Creating some kind of order out of this disorder—orienting the audience between the different spaces and managing the level and degree of the chaos was something Grace and I worked on until the day we locked.
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?
Lewis: The truth is my understanding of the film hasn’t changed and that’s been very gratifying. A few days into editing the assembly I got a feeling that this was a unique, funny and heartfelt movie—but you’re never really sure when you’re working on something if your instincts will align with others’. So that this super tiny little Canadian movie is getting recognized feels sort of vindicating. I think Grace and her whole crew found a wonderful balance between something that’s very artsy and kooky and out there and something that’s very story-focussed and legible and structured. I’m thrilled to be part of that team.