
“I’d Waited My Whole Career for a Director To Ask Me To Do That”: Editor Shawn Paper, Love, Brooklyn

Rachael Holder, who has directed several episodes from shows including Dickinson and Everything’s Gonna be Okay, makes the jump to filmmaking with Love, Brooklyn. The film is an observational portrait of three Brooklynites navigating love, loss and life.
The U.S. Dramatic Competition Sundance entry was edited by Shawn Paper (That Awkward Moment). Read on to hear about Steven Soderbergh pitch-perfect advice to Paper, as well as the difficulty of—and solutions to—editing the film’s beginning.
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?
Paper: My agent Julia Kole at Artistry connected me with the producers, but it was my interview with Rachael Holder, the director, that led to my being hired. Before we even talked about the film, she wanted to get to know me, my path, and journey. We discovered that we both attended Bennington College, where she participated in the summer writers’ workshop some years after I had been an undergraduate double-majoring in theater and literature. At Bennington, you were encouraged to take bold creative chances, but often on a shoestring budget. You learned how to work with limited resources, but without cutting artistic corners. Above all, you got a priceless education in how to create something extraordinary and magical through an intense harnessing of collaborative effort, goodwill, and shared vision.
It’s the same with an independent film. You instantly become a tightknit family where nobody feels like they’re just a hired gun, someone simply brought onboard to execute a readymade vision. Instead, everyone’s input is encouraged and valued. It was clear to me that Rachael and the producers wanted an editor who would be as invested as they were and feel a similar sense of ownership. Again, it’s that sense of family and really trusting that everyone’s got each other’s backs. Rachel and I achieved that rapport when she interviewed me for the job. It was an honor to work with her.
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?
Paper: One of the things that drew me to Love, Brooklyn was the central way that place connected to character in the screenplay by Paul Zimmerman—also a Bennington alum, as it turns out. The deep-rooted existence that the film’s key characters have in Brooklyn both defines and unmoors them. I loved how this duality was mirrored in the shifting relationship dynamics between the characters themselves. Cherishing what you love about a place and a person, while also letting go as you and they evolve—this resonated strongly with me.
I felt it was important to preserve the macro story of the evolving city by enhancing it throughout the film. On previous projects, I’ve been able to fill narrative or thematic gaps by snatching bits and pieces of discarded footage from various scenes to create entirely new scenes out of them. But I didn’t have enough of the right footage for that workaround in this case.
Filmmaker: How did you achieve these goals? What types of editing techniques, or processes, or feedback screenings allowed this work to occur?
Paper: We experimented with inserting throughout the film snippets of the article Andre’s character was attempting to write, but it ended up over-explaining things.
In the end, we shot some new footage which kept the theme alive using the writers’ voice to tell some new information.
Filmmaker: As an editor, how did you come up in the business?
Paper: I came in at an inflection point not unlike the one we’re at now. With AI, post-production is seeing a vast change in how we ingest, process and edit. When I started in the mid ’90s, digital editing had just started taking off. While at Bennington, I had served in the Navy reserves, where I acquired computer literacy. This allowed me to become the “hands” of a veteran editor, Fred Berger. Fred was 82 years old when I assisted him. He had been the first president of ACE. He cut his teeth editing Hopalong Cassidy shorts on nitrate! He went on to edit M*A*S*H, All in the Family, and Dallas. I was brought on to assist him in editing two Dallas reunion MOWs using the Lightworks system. He had never used a keyboard and mouse. So he told me where to cut, explaining when and why as he went along. It was a great apprenticeship and launched my career.
Filmmaker: What editing system did you use, and why?
Paper: I used Avid. Because this was a low-budget film, I didn’t have an assistant, so I wanted to be as nimble and efficient as possible. I was more comfortable flying solo on Avid since I’ve been using it longer than Adobe Premiere. It’s also the only software that allows an asynchronous trim, letting you apply greater intuition to trimming decisions, whereas other editing programs require you to type in the exact number of frames to trim.
Filmmaker: What was the most difficult scene to cut and why? And how did you do it?
Paper: The first 15 minutes of a feature film tend to be the hardest to crack. Every film I’ve done has either needed a reshoot or an out-of-the-box rework of the opening. Although we’d always planned to get more footage establishing the city, it took a lot of experimentation to distill the opening scenes in a way that didn’t make them top-heavy with context-setting but, instead, made them more evocative, so that the rest of the story could unfold organically.
Inspiration came from Steven Soderbergh, who stepped in at the end to help finish the film. After watching the working cut, he asked me if I’d ever seen his film The Limey. I said, “are you kidding, it’s one of my favorite films, especially the editing.” He said, try Limey-ing this up. I’d waited my whole career for a director to ask me to do that, and suddenly here was the director of The Limey himself asking me!
That gave us license to play with time and sequencing, really freeing us up in terms of how the film progressed in and out of scenes. It also helped us dispense with scenes that were explanatory in a literal kind of way. Instead, we conveyed vital information through more impressionistic means, though still using footage we already had.
Filmmaker: What role did VFX work, or compositing, or other post-production techniques play in terms of the final edit?
Paper: Rachael really wanted this to feel like an indie film. Any time I started “conventional cutting,” she’d ask me to hold back, preserving as much of a wide shot and on-camera performance as possible without cutting. To accommodate her request, I employed sleight-of-hand editing—meaning I’d make an invisible cut for pace or performance, hiding the cut by any number of editing techniques such as split frame or speed ramps.
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?
Paper: I’m answering these questions a week after the LA wildfires erupted. Love, Brooklyn is about the centrality of place to identity and the challenge of balancing that with the need to move on. For the film’s characters, moving on is a gradual evolution. For the people displaced by the LA fires, moving on has been an abrupt and severe shock. My family and I had to evacuate when the Eaton fire got close. We did not lose our home, but many of our friends did. An entire community has been displaced, including people whose homes had been passed down over several generations. Los Angeles has a long history of redlining, but Altadena provided a refuge from that, allowing a vibrant, racially diverse community to establish itself and thrive. In recent years, however, steep rate hikes in homeowners’ insurance have left some Altadena residents without coverage. Without an insurance payout, people who lost their homes in the fire won’t be able to rebuild or transfer wealth to the next generation. Predatory buyers are already pouncing on the neighborhood, looking to price out its newly uprooted, longtime residents.
All of this has given Love, Brooklyn new resonance for me. In the film, racially diverse neighborhoods are trying to stave off gentrification as developers systematically buy up blocks, pushing out families who’ve lived there for generations. Needless to say, the poignancy of this is amplified for me as I witness the devastation in Altadena. Not only is there the loss of property, there also is the loss of the broader backdrop of peoples’ lives. Suddenly you realize how much your landscape affects your inner scape. Love, Brooklyn captures that so well as Andre’s character crisscrosses the neighborhood on his bike. Despite the ongoing gentrification around him, it’s still recognizably his burg, still full of brownstones and front stoops, where he can bicycle down the street with both arms outstretched. In that early image from the film, he’s letting go, without going.
It’s an inspiring image. We can’t have too many of those right now.