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“Any Type of Work Has Things to Teach”: Editor Geoffrey Boothby on Didn’t Die

Black-and-white close-up of a wide-eyed man.Still from Didn't Die. Courtesy of Sundance Institute.

Meera Menon’s 2025 Sundance Film Festival Midnights selection follows Vinita, a snarky podcast host in a post-apocalyptic world dealing with a philandering ex, traumatized siblings, and a dwindling audience. The film is a low-budget, black-and-white homage to George Romero updated for contemporary anxieties.

Geoff Boothby served as the film’s editor. Below, he talks about cutting in placeholders that allowed for future shoots to be carefully designed and how choices of what equipment to use in the shoot reverberate in the edit.

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?

Boothby: Meera (the director) and her husband Paul (the DP and VFX supervisor) have been close friends for almost a decade—we have daughters the same age, and even our dogs are friends. We had been looking for opportunities to work together, so when they started making this film two years ago, I jumped at the chance. And in the post process, it really was a film being driven by our two families.

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?

Boothby: My goals as an editor are always to tell the story with as much clarity as possible, so that was my primary driver. This film was shot in stages, so the initial cut had a lot of placeholders—which I really think allowed Meera to design the un-shot scenes very intentionally based on what had been cut. It also had a lot of ad-libbing in the performances—which I love. I’m all about trying to build scenes in a new and interesting way—not necessarily the way they were directly performed—to make them more interesting and natural.

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

Boothby: Some of the main techniques I employed on this were intercutting scenes that were originally designed to be separate to bring out parallels in the story. [I also employed] various techniques for expanding the coverage. The film is really beautifully shot using a monochrome RED in 8K, and the high resolution allowed me to expand the coverage through cropping, zooming, freeze framing etc.

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

I’ve done a lot of weird jobs. I did doc work for the David Lynch Foundation; I shot and edited wedding videos for years; I did brand content and commercial directing and editing; and I’ve done corporate work in the tech space. None of those things were particularly glamorous, but if you’re open to it, any type of work has things to teach: doc work taught me how to maximize my use of footage; weddings taught me to recognize and cut for genuine emotion; commercials taught me to work at a high level with clients; and corporate work taught me extreme attention to detail—all of which I’m grateful for and bring to the table now for any project I’m on.

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

Boothby: I use an M3 Macbook Pro with the Adobe suite. I’m deeply embedded in a Premiere/After Effects workflow at this point—all of the Adobe CC programs are very powerful and constantly being updated in ways that genuinely improve them.

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

Boothby: One of the more difficult sequences was the climactic fight sequence, and the thing that made it challenging was that in the original shoot they ran out of time and weren’t able to gather everything for it. So all that had initially been shot was essentially one angle of coverage on one character. The way I approached the scene was to cut it with the existing footage (about 10% of the scene) and fill in the other 90% using text cards describing the action with full sound editing to help time it out and give a sense of the scene. So, if there was going to be a shot with the characters running from the house but we didn’t have it yet, there would be a text card on black that said something like “they run from the house towards the lake,” and you would be hearing footsteps and breathing with the music and everything. Then Meera took that cut and designed what she wanted to shoot using it as a stepping off point. The rest of the scene was shot in a completely different place almost a year after the initial shoot and then meshed with the original footage, and no one would ever know.

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

Boothby: We did a ton of VFX work and compositing on this—blood work, background extensions, etc.—and since we are such a small team, it was mostly done by Paul and me (primarily Paul). The black and white actually helps a lot for that—and that was part of the intention with choosing B&W. It makes it much easier to make realistic looking composites.

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?

Boothby: I mean, this is really fresh, but both Meera and Paul’s house and our house were lost in the Eaton fire, so the movie has taken on all kinds of weird new personal meaning. It’s a film about grief, and a film about a family surviving in the loss that comes in an apocalypse, and now we all find ourselves navigating a parallel type of extreme loss and the grief that comes with that. It makes the movie hit in emotional ways that it hadn’t through the rest of the process for me.

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