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“The Intense, Emotional Journey of Navigating One’s Queerness”: Editor Erik Vogt-Nilsen on Plainclothes

Two white men look up, one in the background and one in the foreground.Still from Plainclothes. Courtesy of Sundance Institute.

Lucas is a young undercover police officer tasked with cracking down on gay communities whose job gets complicated when he falls in love with one of his targets in Plainclothes. The film is the feature debut of writer-director Carmen Emmi and is part of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival’s U.S. Dramatic Competition.

Erik Vogt-Nilsen (Big Boys) served as the editor on Plainclothes. Below, he explains how his own coming out, as well as his background in both dance and commercials, helped him shape the narrative and striking a balance between observing Lucas and inhabiting his point of view.

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?

Vogt-Nilsen: I had met our writer-director Carmen Emmi a couple of times, so we knew each other, but it was actually our mutual friend Arielle Zakowski who was the one who reconnected us for this project. Arielle is a mentor of mine and such an editing inspiration to me. She graciously recommended me for the film and really vouched for me. I interviewed, and the rest is history—I’m truly so grateful to her. As far as the hiring process went, I just really made it known how deeply I connected with the film and how eager I was to work side-by-side with Carmen and support his vision with everything that I had. I believed in the story, I saw myself in the story, and I wholeheartedly wanted to be one to help share it with the world. I made that passion extremely clear, and I think that helped me land the job.

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?

Vogt-Nilsen: When I first read Carmen’s script, I was incredibly moved by Lucas’s journey of self-discovery. His experience resonated with me on a deeply personal level and reminded me of how I was feeling when I was first beginning to embrace my queer identity. It really captured the intense euphoria/freedom I felt when I started to claim my queerness, while simultaneously being so overwhelmed by societal judgement and my own internalized shame. So as an editor, my main goal was to translate this raw, honest portrayal of self-discovery onto the screen. I wanted the audience to feel Lucas’s exhilaration and fear, to experience the dizzying highs and crushing lows of his journey, this frenetic explosion of anxiety, joy, fear and pride that are all so intensely wrapped up. Ultimately, I hoped to create an edit that not only entertains but also resonates with viewers, offering a glimpse into the complexities of queer identity and the universal human experience of self-discovery and finding one’s place in the world.

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

Vogt-Nilsen: Achieving these goals required a deep dive into the emotional core of the film. I drew heavily on my own experiences coming to terms with my sexuality, channeling the intense mixed emotions that I remember feeling during that time. This personal connection allowed me to deeply empathize with Lucas and ensure his emotional journey felt authentic and relatable.

To do this, we used a range of editing techniques to underscore the intensity of his emotions. For example, we used fast cuts to mirror his anxiety and slower, more deliberate cuts to emphasize moments of calm and reflection where he is easing into his sense of self. I also really wanted the audience to experience the world through Lucas’s eyes, so I tried to strike a nice balance between Lucas’s on-screen reactions and actually seeing his perspective. What really supported us here was all this incredible Hi8 footage that Carmen captured on set for these heightened moments where we could live in Lucas’s POV. This different camera format has such a raw and crude nature to it—an exhilarating life of its own—that just inherently underscored the intensity of Lucas’ emotions at pivotal moments of the film and really placed the audience into his psyche.

Additionally, we recognized that Lucas’s relationship with Andrew served as the emotional anchor of the film. Through careful editorial cuts and restructuring, we ensured that their evolving dynamic remained at the forefront, driving the narrative and deepening our connection to Lucas’ journey of self-discovery.

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

Vogt-Nilsen: My journey to editing wasn’t entirely linear. (A bit non-linear, you could say—little joke for my fellow editors!) I was an actor and a dancer before I was an editor. I went to USC for theater, and I studied tap dancing for some 10 years before that, and I think those backgrounds really influenced my editing style. I approach projects with a focus on understanding the characters deeply, exploring their motivations, fears, and desires, and I really use that understanding to help guide performances and stories. And I think my background in dance also helped imbue me with a sense of rhythm and pace that I employ whenever I edit—whether it’s the flow of an individual scene or the film as a whole. I love the relationship between performance and movement, and I feel like I really bring that with me.

After college, before I dove into any longform narrative work, I started out in commercials at a post house called Work Editorial in Los Angeles where I got such a great crash course in editing and storytelling at such a high level. In commercials, things move very quickly—you’re on a lot of different projects, telling a lot of different stories, often juggling multiple things at once. And so, through that experience, I learned how to edit quickly and all these different ways of storytelling in a compressed manner. I also had the privilege to assist a lot of different editors, watch their techniques, see how they work with clients/directors and become kind of a sponge for all the approaches and kind of take in what works best for me. This work experience was challenging but incredibly rewarding, equipping me with a versatile skillset and a strong foundation for my editing career.

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

Vogt-Nilsen: We went with Premiere Pro on this project because of its incredible versatility and collaborative tools. Premiere is so user-friendly and intuitive, so it made it easy to bring together all the pieces of our film—picture, sound, music, and VFX – in a way where we could prioritize the storytelling first and foremost during the offline edit. We were a small team during editorial—it was pretty much just me and Carmen working alone—so Carmen’s familiarity with software was also a factor because it allowed us to work concurrently on different sequences to cover more ground. While I’d be tackling picture notes on one scene, for example, Carmen would be experimenting with music in another one. This kind of collaborative access through Premiere was invaluable because it enabled us to explore different creative avenues while maintaining an efficient workflow to meet our deadline.

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

Vogt-Nilsen: I don’t know if it was the most difficult per se, but one particular scene comes to mind that took some time to get right. I don’t want to spoil anything, so I’ll try to keep it somewhat vague, but it was a scene that was challenging for a couple reasons. Firstly, it didn’t have a lot of dialogue to guide the edit—it was mostly Lucas reacting to what he’s seeing. So, when I was assembling this scene, it was helpful for me to first distill it down in a sort of simplified, beat-by-beat approach, where I was making sure all of the story beats were coming through so that we could track what was happening and what Lucas was making of it. Once we had that solid foundation in place, we could play around with the emotional feeling of the edit, ramp up the speed, and get more creative/cerebral with how the action unfolds.

The challenging part here was in how much footage we had for the scene and the plethora of options. Production basically shot the scene fully in two different ways with two different cameras, so we had four unique variations of the scene that could unfold, and we had the flexibility to use elements from all of that material. Ultimately, we decided that anchoring the audience in Lucas’s subjective POV was the way to go with the scene, and we let that be the compass for how we shaped the edit. It was an iterative process from beginning to end, and I’m so proud of where we landed with it.

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

Vogt-Nilsen: I think the beauty of VFX nowadays is that you kind of can trust that anything is possible in the edit. I know that’s not really the case, completely, but I think the potential of VFX can be freeing when you’re building out the edit and want to subtly change or heighten moments of the film in specific ways. I’m a big fan of employing split screens, slow motion, fluid morphs, etc.—all these little tricks you can do in VFX to support already incredible performances. And we had such skilled VFX artists on this film that we could trust that any tweaks we wanted to make to picture would make it to the final cut, and they pretty much did.

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?

Vogt-Nilsen: From the beginning, I was drawn to the film’s raw portrayal of the intense, emotional journey of navigating one’s queerness. I felt a deep connection to its depiction of the complexities and contradictions inherent in that process, but the more time I spent with the footage, the more I think I developed a deeper appreciation for the beauty inherent in that complexity. The prism imagery that Carmen imbued within the footage really helped play a part in shaping that understanding for me. The more I sat with the film, the more I understood how beautifully it symbolized the fractured nature of identity—how we all contain multitudes, with different aspects of ourselves sometimes in conflict. The film shifted from simply depicting the emotional challenges of navigating one’s identity to celebrating the beauty of that process. It’s in our imperfections and the constant negotiation between our different selves that we find our true authenticity. Through editing the film, I gained a deeper appreciation for the messiness of being human and the courage it takes to embrace our true selves—as beautifully fractured as we may be.

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