Editors
Interviews - Editors
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“The Unconventional Structure We Wanted”: Editor Katie Flaxman on Killing Ground
Katie Flaxman has edited 35 shorts, TV series, fiction films and documentaries in the past 12 years. Her most recent feature, Killing Ground, made its U.S. premiere at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this week. A violent thriller from director Damien Power, the film tells the story of a nightmarish camping trip in the Australian woods. Below, Flaxman discusses the film’s non-linear structure, her techniques for “storyboarding” a film in the editing suite and the importance of POV in thrillers. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that […]
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Listen: Walter Murch in Conversation (Part Two)
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Listen: Walter Murch in Conversation (Part One)
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A Talk with Manchester by the Sea Editor Jennifer Lame
Jennifer Lame is the editor of Manchester by the Sea. She’s best known for having edited all of Noah Baumbach’s narrative films since Frances Ha and is currently in postproduction on his next film, Yeh Din Ka Kissa. At what point did you join the project? I had been following it for a while, since I am a big fan of Kenny’s work. Between my agent and others, I got sent two or three drafts of the script and read them all, but I couldn’t seem to get an interview, I think because they were looking for someone with a bit […]
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How to Assemble a Rough Cut Two Days After Shooting Wraps: Editor Phillip J. Bartell on Miss You Already
Catherine Hardwicke’s razor-sharp blend of comedy and tragedy, Miss You Already, arrives on Blu-ray, DVD, and a variety of VOD platforms March 1. The story of best friends (played by Drew Barrymore and Toni Collette) struggling to deal with the fact that one of them has terminal cancer, it’s a film that walks a tonal tightrope: silly, devastating, sexy, angering, and bittersweet, the movie’s diverse range of effects is a testament to Hardwicke, her actors, and an ambitious script by Morwenna Banks. Pulling all of the elements together is editor Phillip J. Bartell, whose superb work on 2014’s Dear White […]
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“Looking for False Performance Beats”: Editor Fred Raskin on The Hateful Eight
As the first film to be shot in the Ultra Panavision 70 format since Khartoum in 1966, Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight has deservedly garnered a lot of attention for its cinematography; shot in an extra-wide aspect ratio on a 65mm negative, it’s undeniably a spectacular showcase for director of photography Robert Richardson’s visual gifts. Subtler, but perhaps even more impressive, is the contribution of editor Fred Raskin, who assembles the 2.76:1 images like a maestro of space, timing, and movement. At over three hours in its Christmas Day “roadshow” edition, The Hateful Eight doesn’t have an extraneous frame – […]
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“As Far as I’m Concerned, We Are Making the Movie Version”: Sam Esmail on Mr. Robot
It remains unclear at what point this century cyberpunk — a science-fiction subgenre that emerged largely from the pens of William Gibson and Philip K. Dick — leapt from the realm of speculative to historical fiction; everywhere one looks, it seems that moment has arrived. Many (if not most) westerners live connected to a cyberpunk meta-narrative of their own making these days. We can all be certain, in the era of Edward Snowden, that our digital lives are being recorded. A dystopian view of computing and information technology’s potential, along with a skeptical eye toward vision of “technological as social progress” that corporate propagandists hurl […]
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“30 Years Ago I’d Put Together a Scene with Scratches and Splices Jumping”: Editor David Rosenbloom on Black Mass
David Rosenbloom calls them “movie moments,” those ephemeral slivers of magic discovered amongst the voluminous footage he sifts through in his role as an editor. They can be as small as a glance or as large as a cackle from Whitey Bulger. The latter can be found in Black Mass, Rosenbloom’s second collaboration with director Scott Cooper following 2013’s Out of the Furnace. The film traces the true story of Irish gangster Bulger’s thirty-year reign in Boston, abetted by his role as an FBI informant. Rosenbloom talked to Filmmaker about his start as an editor, his software of choice for […]
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How To Complete Post-Production Quickly to Meet a Festival Deadline: The Making of Joe Begos’ The Mind’s Eye
In order to make the submission deadline for the Toronto International Film Festival, writer/director Joe Begos and producer/editor Josh Ethier had a locked cut of The Mind’s Eye seven weeks into the editing; the effort paid off as the psychokinetic thriller is getting a World Premiere as part of Midnight Madness programme. The cinematic tale features Zack Connors (Graham Skipper) attempting to use his special abilities to prevent the mysterious Dr. Slovak from descending into a psychic rage. “Joe is a visual director who shoots and operates on his own films,” explains Ethier, who has collaborated with Begos ever since […]
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One Brick at a Time: the Post-Production of A LEGO Brickumentary
A LEGO Brickumentary, a documentary that looks at the culture and appeal of the LEGO building block, opens July 31. Like many historical documentaries, this project involved working with a wide range of archival footage, but it also made use of footage shot with a wide range of modern cameras — in one case, all shooting the same event. Co-producer and post-production supervisor Chad Herschberger of Milkhaus talked to us about the work they did on this documentary and the ins and out of post-production work, including animating faces on LEGO bricks, moving media between Avid Media Composer and DaVinci […]
