Editors
Interviews - Editors
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“What Paul Was Saying Was Very Reflective of Who He Was”: Editor Damian Rodriguez on Pee-wee as Himself
Filmmaker Matt Wolf chronicles the life and career of Paul Reubens—best known as his alter ego Pee-wee Herman—via intimate interviews and a trove of archival footage in Pee-wee as Himself. Filmed before the artist’s recent death, the series premieres in Sundance’s Episodic section. Editor Damian Rodriguez discusses navigating Herman’s enormous personal archive, how the actor’s passing altered the film’s narrative and passing down his own affinity for Pee-wee’s Playhouse to his son. 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 […]
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“Paring the Story Down to Its Bare Essentials”: Editor Joshua L. Pearson on Sly Lives
Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius) examines the life and legacy of legendary funk act Sly & The Family Stone. Rather than biography, the film opts as an examination of legacy that combines archival footage with discussions among friends, family and other musicians. The film is Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s follow-up to the award-winning Summer of Soul. For the new film, he reteamed with editor Joshua L. Pearson, who explains how his background in music and long history with music videos prepared him for the job. See all responses to our annual Sundance editor interviews here. Filmmaker: How and why did […]
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Sundance 2025: Editor Interviews
Each year, Filmmaker sends all Sundance feature film or series editors a questionnaire to complete ahead of their film’s festival screening. We also send out a single question for feature directors to answer as well as questionnaires for cinematographers and first-time Sundance feature producers. Below, find links to individual editor responses, which will be updated daily during the festival. “Paring the Story Down to Its Bare Essentials”: Editor Joshua L. Pearson on Sly Lives “What Paul Was Saying Was Very Reflective of Who He Was”: Editor Damian Rodriguez on Pee-wee as Himself “It Was an Ambitious Project From the Get-go”: Editor Bryan […]
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Until the Last Beat: Nick Emerson on Editing Conclave
In Conclave, corruption, betrayal and clashing ideologies turn the selection of a new pope into fertile ground for a taut political thriller as English cardinal Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) is caught in the middle of the struggle between a conservative caucus wishing to return the Catholic church to its dogmatic past and a liberal wing pushing for a more open-minded future. As dean of the proceedings, Fiennes is tasked with shaking off his own crisis of faith in order to guide 120 fractious cardinals sequestered in the Vatican to a consensus on a new leader. The parallels between the film’s […]
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“Musicals Are the Hardest Thing I Could Ever Cut”: Editor Myron Kerstein on Wicked
For Myron Kerstein, whose work on Lin-Manuel Miranda’s feature debut Tick, Tick… Boom! earned him a 2022 Oscar nomination for best editing, cutting a musical number is no different than any other scene in a movie. With Wicked, the editor’s third collaboration with director Jon M. Chu (following Crazy Rich Asians and In the Heights), Kerstein had roughly 250 hours of footage to assemble into the two-part adaptation of the long-running and beloved Broadway musical that serves as a prequel to The Wizard of Oz—and honoring both the stage show and the classic 1939 film brought extra challenges to the […]
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Sequential Notes: Angela Schanelec on Music
Since her debut feature, My Sister’s Good Fortune (1995), Angela Schanelec has steadily established herself as one of the Europe’s most idiosyncratic filmmakers. Across nine features, Schanelec’s style has evolved but retained consistent qualities: stark, clean visuals and crisp editing combined with elusive narrative techniques that crescendo into unexpected moments of emotional catharsis. A subject of hardcore cinephile fandom since her 2019 feature I Was at Home, But…, Schanelec seems to be gaining broader acceptance. Still, the peculiarities of her approach can be off-putting for general audiences. I first encountered Schanelec’s work at the Locarno Film Festival, where I was […]
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Fluid(s) Filmmaking: Lance Oppenheim and Daniel Garber on Spermworld
Like Lance Oppenheim‘s first feature, 2020’s Some Kind of Heaven, his follow-up Spermworld follows three nonfiction protagonists through a niche American context. Heaven focused on three residents of The Villages, a retirement community in Florida that’s the largest in the world, through cleanly composed, academy-ratio images of seniors who’ve self-selected to live in something like Back to the Future’s ’50s backlot suburbia writ large. Per its title and subject, Spermworld is a grimier follow-up in the wider 2.1 ratio, all sickly blue and green colors and degraded frame edges, following three main sperm donor subjects who tell themselves different stories about […]
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A Conversation with Luke Lorentzen from Mary Lampson’s The Cutting Room (A Work in Progress)
The following conversation is an excerpted chapter from The Cutting Room, an upcoming book by documentary film editor Mary Lampson tracing the story of a woman building a life and career as an editor in an industry hostile to both women and independent filmmaking. Traveling over the decades through massive changes in documentary storytelling and filmmaking technology, the book revisits her work with some of the great talents of the documentary form while chronicling major technological changes connected directly to her brother Butler Lampson’s groundbreaking work on the development of the personal computer. In a moment when the conversation about documentary film feels all too […]
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“I Want All The Lesbian Experiences I Can See On Film”: Tricia Cooke on Drive-Away Dolls
Directed by and co-written with collaborator and husband, Ethan Coen, filmmaker and editor Tricia Cooke’ Drive Away Dolls (or Dykes, per the end credits) finds her doing sapphic donuts around classic movies like Kiss Me Deadly and even a little North By Northwest. As Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) decide to take a trip to Tallahassee, they’re dogged by inept criminals seeking a package and suitcase in the back trunk of the car the pair have rented. If the road trip movie and film noir have long been exercises to explore the American psyche and the landscape’s possible […]
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“Establishing the Idea of Ending Scenes Abruptly…”: Editor Greg Jardin on It’s What’s Inside
In the Sundance 2024 Midnight premiere It’s What’s Inside, the feature debut of writer-director Greg Jardin, an uninvited guest with a mysterious suitcase derails a pre-wedding party. Below, Jardin discusses what led him to edit his own film, the balance between long shots and flutter cuts, and more. See all responses to our annual Sundance editor questionnaire 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? Jardin: I started out directing low-budget music videos, which I more or less […]
