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“Our Job Was To Create Two Movies”: Editor Brian Kates on Kiss of the Spider Woman and It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley

Two men are sitting on a prison floor. One has his hand near the other's mouth.Diego Luna and Tonatiuh in Kiss of the Spider Woman.

Screening in Sundance’s Premieres section, Kiss of the Spider Woman is a reimagining of the 1985 film set amid Argentina’s Dirty War, with one prisoner relating his favorite Hollywood musical to the other. The film is directed by Bill Condon, whose credits include DreamgirlsGods and Monsters, and both parts of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn.

It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, a documentary about the belated singer who drowned at 27 in 1997 featuring never-before-seen footage and interviews with those close to him, is also screening as part of the Premieres section. The film marks the return of Amy Berg (Phoenix Rising) to Sundance.

Brian Kates (All the Beauty and the BloodshedKilling Them Softly) served as the editor of both films. On It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, he was joined by Stacey Goldate (Disclosure). Below, Kates discusses both films, explaining the importance of maintaining connections and offering instructive connections between doc and fiction editing.

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?

Kates: I edited a TV pilot, The Big C, for Bill Condon fifteen years ago on the recommendation of its star, Laura Linney, who I worked with on The Laramie Project and The Savages. I owe her a lot. It pays to stick around and stay in touch with people. Many of my past projects have been movies or TV shows featuring musical performances, such as Shortbus, Bessie, How to Talk to Girls at Parties, and Treme. I’ve always wanted to edit a big Hollywood musical. It was serendipity that Bill’s adaptation of Kiss Of The Spider Woman came together shortly after the strikes ended.

Filmmaker: In terms of advancing your film from its earliest assembly to your final cut, what were yourgoals as an editor? What elements of the film did you want to enhance, or preserve, or tease out or totally reshape?

Kates: Kiss Of The Spider Woman involves a prisoner in Buenos Aires in the 1980s narrating a Golden-Age Hollywood film, so our job was to create two movies: a 1980s-era prison movie and a 1940s MGM-style Hollywood musical. We shot the 1940s movie first (on a stage in New Jersey) and the 1980s movie second (at a former prison in Uruguay). The goal was to finish a working cut of the 1940s movie by the time the company moved to Uruguay so that they knew the movie they’d be referencing in the prison scenes.

Filmmaker: How did you achieve these goals? What types of editing techniques, or processes, or feedback screenings allowed this work to occur?

Kates: I exported a work-in-progress assembly of the film every single week for the duration of the shoot, and occasionally more often, so that Bill could give me notes and I could do revisions right away. We were on a very tight schedule. My associate editor, Matthew Buckley, assembled a bunch of scenes for me, and the visual effects editor, Derek Cooper, was compositing and building VFX from day one, so this enabled us to have a cut much more advanced than an assembly just two days after wrap. After the shoot, Bill and I would screen the movie every weekend in New York for new groups of people so we’d have fresh feedback every Monday morning. I probably watched it more than any other movie I’ve edited, and I never get tired of it.

Filmmaker: As an editor, how did you come up in the business, and what influences have affected your work?

Kates: I went to NYU for film and cinema studies and started as an assistant editor for James Lyons, Norman Buckley, Kate Sanford, Sabine Hoffman, and Nancy Baker before cutting my first feature, Latin Boys Go To Hell, in 1996. I was inspired by the Queer New Wave in ’90s New York, but also by Star Wars and Spielberg and Hollywood musicals. Editing The Laramie Project in 2001 began a relationship with HBO that generated several other projects, as well as a pattern of working with directors with careers on Broadway and in musical theater—Moisés Kaufman, George C. Wolfe, John Cameron Mitchell, and Bill Condon.

Filmmaker: What editing system did you use, and why?

Kates: Avid Media Composer 2022 + Boris FX (for its stabilization tool) + Izotope (for noise reduction and music stem-making possibilities).

Filmmaker: What was the most difficult scene to cut and why? And how did you do it?

Kates: On It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, it took us a while to find the opening. We tried a few versions: (1) Jeff’s voice and journals leading us to the musical title sequence; (2) an archival video of YouTubers who didn’t know Jeff listening to him and gushing over him; (3) a flash-forward to around the time of Jeff’s death and his Memphis friends projecting the emotional turmoil he was in. In the end, we decided to open with the three main women in his life—his mother and his romantic partners from different eras. Amy Berg had access to Jeff’s inner circle, and their candor is what made our movie unique. We wanted to lead with that.

Filmmaker: What role did VFX work, or compositing, or other post-production techniques play in terms of the final edit?

Kates: It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley and Kiss of the Spider Woman are the first jobs on which I used “Izotope Music Rebalance.” It’s a plug-in that lets you effectively create rough music stems by letting you raise and lower sliders for “vocal,” “percussion,” “bass,” and “other.” Since we had access to the entire John Kander score of Spider Woman, and Sony gave us access to Jeff Buckley’s entire catalog, I could use it all if I could just manipulate it (strip out vocals, isolate percussion and loop it, etc.). After the rough cut stage, I collaborated with brilliant music editors and composers who took it all to another level, but my hands would have been tied early on without Izotope.

On It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, the animation was done by the brilliant filmmaker Sara Gunnarsdóttir. Stacy Goldate and I worked with her throughout the process. I relied extensively on archival producer Lisa Savage and assistant editors Jesse Swensen and Sushant Choudhary to feed me material.

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?

Kates: Kiss of the Spider Woman takes place during Argentina’s Dirty War—the time of its military dictatorship—so it was natural for me, from the start, to think about other repressive governments and the censoring and jailing of dissidents going on now. We finished the movie right before the Assad regime in Syria fell, and the subsequent reports and images of Syrian jails instantly freeing “disappeared” citizens reminded me of Spider Woman‘s Argentina. The context may change, but I don’t think the film will lose those resonances anytime soon.

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