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Giving Thanks To Film Editors, Part One

 November 18, 2020 at 3:00 AM PST

Speaker 1: 00:04 Oh, hi, what's up now. I put some music on Speaker 2: 00:09 Frances McDormand has one brilliant scene in hail Caesar that's chain, smoking, film editor, CC Calhoun, who handles an upright Moviola like Mario Andretti handles a formula one race car. Well, until her scarf gets caught in the gears and nearly choked. Speaker 1: 00:32 [inaudible] Speaker 2: 00:32 The thing to note about that film is that it's set in the 1950s and depicts a woman running the studios editing department. Editing is one of the few craft categories. Were women dominated from the beginning of the film industry. That was in part because in the early days of filmmaking editing was seen as an extension of the work of a script girl or continuity person, and was considered something akin to clerical work that required organizational skills more than creative or artistic flair, but as filmmaking quickly, advanced editing proved to be a key part of the creative process. And women had an early foot in the door. Speaker 1: 01:23 [inaudible] Speaker 2: 01:24 Hi, I'm Beth Erica Mondo, and this is listener supported KPBS cinema junkie podcast. Today I'll be speaking with one of the best female editors working in films. Now, Tatiana S Regal. She kicks off a trio of podcasts that explore the art and craft a film editing. Last month, the Comicon museum asked me to host a panel for it. Sam storytelling, across media program. I spoke with three editors, but only got to use a fraction of my interviews for the hour long online panel. So now I'm thrilled to share the full interviews here on my podcast, as someone who spends most of my time editing, I thought November a month for giving thanks was the perfect time to pay tribute to these artists that generally go unrecognized by audiences. I mean, most people can name directors and even the occasional cinematographer composer, but not many people can rattle off a list of the best film editors and even fewer have a true appreciation for what an editor does, but hopefully that'll all change after you listened to these editors, explain their craft and what it takes to be a good editor. I need to take one quick break and then I'll be back with my interview with Tatiana Sri gull, the Oscar nominated film editor of I Tonya Speaker 1: 02:52 Tatiana. Speaker 2: 02:52 First of all, I wanted to ask you what got you interested in editing as a profession. Speaker 1: 02:56 Let's see. I will. I love movies. I love film. Speaker 3: 03:00 And I always have, even when I was a kid, I used to go, I lived in LA and I used to go to Westwood village, which was sort of the multiplex of my youth before there really were, um, multiplexes. And I would just spend the whole weekend going from movie to movie, to movie to movie. I had no idea what I wanted to do, but I knew that I really love film. I went to college, got a degree in political science and a very nice practical move and then moved back to LA and wanted to get into the business. Had no idea how I was going to do that. Didn't know anybody in the business didn't know what I wanted to do and proceeded to go through the list of job titles that I thought existed anyway, and cross off anything that wasn't appropriate for me. Speaker 3: 03:45 So in other words, I know I'm not an actress, so I'm not going to do that. I'm, you know, I'm not a studio executive, so I'm not going to do that. I'm not really a writer. And I grew up in LA, so I saw them shooting a lot around Los Angeles on location and everything. Everything seemed pretty boring except for the director or the DP. It was a lot of hurry up and wait. So a lot of those jobs, I sort of crossed off the list and what was left was really post-production, which I knew nothing about. And it turned out to be a perfect sort of combination of both sides of my brain, for lack of a better description. It's sort of very creative and very technical. And I could kind of go back and forth with that depending on my mood or how I was feeling. And it sort of fit my personality perfectly. And I got my first job, a couple of weeks out of college and I haven't stopped. Speaker 4: 04:33 I don't think most people fully understand what an editor does. Uh, people who are just going to see a film in a multiplex or something, but what storytelling tools do you think you have as an editor that maybe people aren't aware of in terms of how you can influence a film and kind of the narrative structure of that? Speaker 3: 04:52 Well, it's a, it's a huge part of the process. They it's been called the final rewrite by many people. And it's really true. You have this idea in your head that is, um, yeah, writer has an idea in their head. It comes out onto the script. There are all sorts of rewrites, um, in that stage because you know, what's in your head, doesn't translate perfectly and you discover that you want to, you know, there's something that's redundant or not clear, or you move this paragraph up there. And that paragraph down there and all of the rewrites that go in that form, the exact same thing happens in editing. When the translation happens from the written word to the visual medium, it's different and all of a sudden things that seem to be, um, very unclear on the page because you're seeing them and hearing them become very redundant and you don't need them as much. Speaker 3: 05:43 So there scenes that we cut out or lines that we cut out or whatever, and the opposite is true. There are certain things that you, you can, um, put in a script I E mostly in stage direction or those little things between dialogue that, that sometimes don't quite get translated into the movie into what is shot and something would be, is unclear. And so there's that aspect of editing, but then there's also just the, the, it's the only art form that requires, you know, film and television that requires that part of it. So when you get into, uh, choosing performances, choosing, um, uh, scenes that stay or go lines that stay or go moving things around, like as I go through the process, so I'll step back a moment. They shoot the, they shoot the movie. I get the material in basically the day after they shoot it. Speaker 3: 06:37 Uh, when a scene is complete, sometimes a scene takes several days to shoot. Sometimes they do several scenes in a day. I get that material it's organized by my assistants and then deliver it to me. I watch all the dailies, which can be hours and hours of time. And I watch it. And I'm the first audience member. I'm, I am the one who hasn't been through the rewrite process and the location hunting and the casting. And it started raining in the middle of that scene, or the shot took a long time to set up or whatever. So what I see on the screen is really what the audience is going to experience. Also, sometimes that's even just geography of the scene that is not clear to me that if you're physically standing on a set becomes very clear. So I go through and watch all the dailies. Speaker 3: 07:22 Uh, obviously I have a script, which is a, uh, a map of where we're going story-wise and I try to put that together, but that, that means going through performance, trying to find out the tone of what needs to be there, the geography of it, the pacing, you know, all of these different elements that go in. So as I assemble a scene for the director to then see, um, considering all of those things and what I, uh, I kind of like to describe it because I'm still sort of constantly after 30 some years, describing it to friends and family, what I actually do for a living. Imagine if you're sitting at a dinner table and they're eight people at the table, and you don't know where that conversation is going to go, and you don't know, who's going to say what who's going to begin talking, who, what other things might be happening at the table. Speaker 3: 08:11 Like maybe two people at one end of the table are flirting or pay playing footsie under the table, or whatever it is editing is where your eyes go. It's what you want that story to be. So is it more important to see what you're saying or to see my reaction to what you're saying? And that storytelling elements has a big part to do with how, how the audience is going to perceive that. So, um, for example, it can be a very suspenseful moment day, am I on to cut to a reaction shot rather than just staying for the entire line of dialogue for you? Some of those are just little things. Like somebody will start to talk, you know, you're watching one person and somebody starts talking and then your eyes go to them. And that's a, pre-lab a sound, an audio pre-lab you start hearing the sound and then you go to the, to the other person. Speaker 3: 09:05 Anyway, that's a very, very rough, quick scattered this conversation of, of what editing is, but what it really is, is trying to figure out what you're trying to tell. Story-wise emotionally pacing, tonally, uh, you know, a scene, a movie can be very emotional and very funny, but where is that line? How funny or emotional do you want it to be? And that we get through this whole process, very slowly trying different takes, trying different lines, experiencing different things that way to find that place where it's supposed to be. So as I go through the movie and I assemble the scenes and then the director finishes shooting and they come in and sit with me and they watch the whole movie as an assembly of the script, then we get into the nitty gritty of, is that all necessary generally? It's way too long. Again, things are redundant, things are unclear. Speaker 3: 09:59 And so then we start really kind of pulling it all apart again and putting it back together, lifting out scenes or parts of scenes that don't need to be there. Moving scenes around, changing a performance. Your actors may give performances that are, are very subtle or very broad. And you're not really sure where that place is supposed to be until you get to know the whole movie. And, and sometimes it's like, you know, it's like building a house so you can build a house and you can buy furniture. If you start picking out furniture before you really see the size and shape of the house, you're going to end up with all kinds of stuff, if it's not necessary or missing something. So that's, that's a little bit of a crazy description of what I do. Speaker 2: 10:40 You mentioned performance, how can an editor alter an actor's performance? How can you influence how a performance plays out and maybe change the tone or the, uh, the performance itself Speaker 3: 10:52 A lot, we can change it a lot. There are some actors that number one gives you a great variety of performance from take to take. They can be a much more subtle and smaller. They can be much broader, every range of emotion within a thing within a particular scene, all obviously tied to that scene and what's appropriate to that scene, but various levels, but we can manipulate that. And honestly, that's what we do a lot. We manipulate it by pacing a lot. We can, you know, condense moments, stretch out moments, the subtleties, again, of reaction of line readings. There are many times where I will take the picture of one, take, say somebody saying one line of dialogue, and I may choose the audio or part of the audio from a different take, because that line reading is slightly different and inflects a slightly different meeting. Speaker 3: 11:41 And it gives you a slightly different meaning than, than what the other one does. Sometimes we do that just for technical reasons. And sometimes we will bring the actor back to rerecord it entirely. If there's something about it that we need to change for a story point. So there's a tremendous amount of manipulation that takes place. Then there's the, the, the broader manipulation, which is just, what is that scene ultimately going to be at the end of the day, a lot of scenes are written with a beginning, middle and end, and it's just not all necessary. Sometimes it's much more emotionally impactful to come in a third of the way through the scene and leave, you know, before the scene is over. And, and it propels you emotionally and pacing wise into what's happening. Speaker 4: 12:28 Each director is different, but what can you talk about kind of in more general terms about that collaboration that you have with the director that an editor working with a director would be going through. It, it is, Speaker 3: 12:39 Is different as the personalities of, of the people and, uh, uh, both parties, the editor and the, and the director. I've been very fortunate now to be working with one particular director, not, not all the time, but over and over again. And that's been really fun because first of all, there's just a level of knowing somebody that gives you a lot of confidence to maybe try things that you might not be as apt to try or mention, um, because you don't know them as well. It's a very, very vulnerable position for both the director and the editor through that post-production process because the film is shot. And that first assembly is sort of the worst possible version of the movie that could possibly exist because it's everything. And it literally is an assembly of the script. And, you know, hopefully a very good assembling of this script and, and everything. Speaker 3: 13:30 But, but it is that you don't want to get into too much of that manipulation or moving stuff around or deleting lines. There are many times where I will know a scene is never going to make it very long, but I still have to cut it and I still have to put it together. And I still have to have it in there at least for awhile. But the relationship is fascinating because it's really a true collaboration. You know, that's what filmmaking is anyway, is it collaboration? There are hundreds of people on the set and they're all in these actors and, um, uh, you know, lighting and sound and on hot costume and, and it is a collaboration, but then what happens when you get into post-production is it's a director and an editor sitting in the room together alone for days, weeks, months, really working on the most minute subtle detail that could affect everything in the story. Speaker 3: 14:23 I mean, you make a change in a performance or a line reading, you know, at the beginning of the movie, you could end up having a very large impact, you know, farther down. So it's, it's a fabulous collaboration. And the thing that's really lovely about it is that you build on each other, it's greater than the sum of its parts. You know, it's like they have an idea. Then I have an idea and they have a better idea and it just kind of keeps getting better and better. And there are things that the whole process is such a, a sculpture or a molding of what the film is going to be, that it, it changes, you know, all the time. And what you think. Like, for example, when I say there's a scene that I think is going to come out for awhile in the life of the movie, that scene may be out of a movie and you may get nine months down the road and you've taken other scenes out and put other stuff in or done a reshoot or whatever. Then all of a sudden, the scene that has been out for ages becomes very important and you end up putting it back in. So it's a, it's a jigsaw puzzle. It's a constant moving, living, breathing entity until you, um, I don't want to say finish it until you release it because it may never finish. You could go on forever. Speaker 4: 15:33 And generally speaking, at what point does an editor come in to a production? Are you there before shooting starts after shooting begins? Generally Speaker 3: 15:43 The editor starts just shortly before shooting begins maybe a week before most of the time. It's because it's a very separate process for me. I often am very involved with, particularly with this director that I've worked with a lot. I have more involvement earlier on, I'll read the earlier versions of the script and, you know, talk to him about that. Uh, sometimes they may even do, um, previous for some, for some large acts action sequences and stuff like that, that I will cut, uh, all before production. Um, and previous is, if, if anybody doesn't know what that is, it's sort of a, um, animated slightly, uh, very simplistic cartoon or storyboard version of, of a big action sequence so that you actually have something visual on tangible for all of the departments to see in terms of what is going to be shot and cover the angles, um, the sizes, how much of the, how much of the area is going to be seen, you know, stuff like that. Speaker 3: 16:45 So that everybody knows exactly what the parts are that they're trying to get. So I will come on and, and cut that sometimes ahead of the time. But generally we start a little bit before production starts to get set up and ready because they start shooting in the next day we have dailies and then we go all through production. And then, uh, there's generally a, um, what they call a director's cut, which is 10 weeks for the directors to put together their version of the movie. Then it starts to go to preview, uh, where we start showing it to audiences and getting their feedback, um, people who are not involved and were, or attached to it all wonderfully honest audience members and, uh, studio notes. Then we go into the whole finishing stage, which includes sound editing, uh, composing sound, mixing, visual effects, finishing all the visual effects and stuff, and, um, carry on through that whole, uh, final mix and color timing stage until the film is finally finished. So that take, I'm usually on a movie anywhere from eight or nine months for the short end of it for a fast sort of smaller movie to a year and a half for, for like the film I'm on right now, I'll be on for a year and a half. It's a larger, uh, very heavy visual effects film, um, for Disney. Uh, so it's taking a lot more time. Speaker 4: 18:11 Which of your films do you feel you had the greatest impact on in terms of the storytelling? Speaker 3: 18:16 It's always a tough question to answer because you have an impact on all of them in different ways. Uh, and some of the films that I've worked on that are not as good as some of the others I may have had is going to sound bad, but I may have had a larger impact on those not to make them bad, but to make them better than they hopefully would have been. So when, if when, uh, when a project is, is not as good as one hoped either because of budget or performance or, um, you know, not enough time to shoot it or whatever, those are often a lot harder to edit because you just don't have the, all of the tools and, and everything that you might want to put that together. It's much harder if a performance isn't as good to get that believable and, and have it touch an audience in the way it's supposed to. Speaker 3: 19:09 And so it has to be worked and manipulated and clever ideas have to be, um, used to get that point across, or perhaps the director didn't have time to shoot, uh, something that was very crucial to tell the story. So you have to come up with something in post-production some way to, to express that, um, or it just wasn't thought of in the script and all of a sudden you show it to an audience and they say something and it's like, Oh yeah, we never thought about that. We have to figure that out. So that they're all difficult in their own way, you know, the good ones with great performances and fantastic camera working, beautiful sets and great lighting and all of that make it a lot easier in certain ways, but still sometimes that, that you, you were always trying to tell that story. Speaker 3: 19:53 And that is a process that if you've ever sat down and, you know, written a paper for school, or try to write a book, or even a letter that is very important and passionate to you to a family member or, or a significant other or something you want to make sure every word is right, and expressing everything that you want to say. And the exact same thing is true in editing. Every shot has to be there for a reason, the right length in the right place with the right shot before it, and the right shot after it's tell a story in the way you want to, and, and that doesn't just fall together. It's not just cutting out the bad parts. It's really figuring out what it is to tell that story and how, um, and, and there are no rules to it per se. So a lot of it is just trial and error. Speaker 4: 20:43 What advice would you give to a director on how to best work with an editor? Speaker 3: 20:49 But the advice that I would give is the advice that I would give to them with every department head, which is, you know, find people who are, who are really good at their jobs and let them do their jobs. I mean, the directors, um, it's their movie and they have to make sure that they're getting what they want and they have to straight stay true to their vision, um, and be very clear about their vision and, and fight for it. Right. Having said that you are surrounding yourself with people who know their job and have tons of experience and may have worked, uh, may never have directed a movie, but may have worked on multiple, if not tens of, or dozens of films and no have come up against all of those problems and issues. And so use all of your department heads to their fullest, take advantage of their knowledge, um, and communicate with them. Speaker 3: 21:49 Um, and in terms of choosing an editor, you want to find somebody that, uh, obviously understands the movie that you're trying to make, that you can communicate with very well, but isn't just a yes, ma'am because you want that sounding board. You want somebody who's going to fight with you about it because my job is to make their movie, but I need to be, you know, you don't want a bunch of yes, men around you when you're making a movie or nobody, you know, whereas the emperor's new clothes, you know, they don't, you want to hear the bad news before it gets out there. You know? So, um, I guess that's what I would say. Speaker 4: 22:26 Talk a little bit about the technology that you use film used to be edited on physical film, or you'd have a work print. And, you know, when you made the splices that was damaging the actual piece of film you were working with, now, we have all this digital technology. Do you feel that has helped editors in terms of how they can get their job done? Speaker 3: 22:47 Absolutely. I started on film. I started with the cutting and splicing. I have, I have scars to prove it. Um, and, and I love it. There's something about it that I, that I quite miss the physical aspect of it, you know, literally, um, you know, grabbing the reels off, off the shelf and rewinding and, you know, threading them up on the camera, on the movie or whatever we were using at the time. There's something very nice and physical and, and obviously working digitally has become quite sedentary and, and still, um, not as healthy, but yes, you have the work print. It's obviously not the negative that you're working off of. So you can always print another piece of work prints. If you, if you make too many cuts or mistakes or tear it or whatever, there's something working in film that, that you had to go through a lot more thought because of that to make your cut, there was a lot more, and you had the time for the creative process in your head to do that. Speaker 3: 23:51 Working digitally is much faster. You often don't have the time to do it. And sometimes it's really nice because that becomes a very instinctual and I am much more willing to try things because it's just a copy of it. I can always go back to my other copy when we were, try something crazy on film. You that's physically taking it apart and Oh, that didn't work and then physically putting it back together and you'd waste days and hours, and it was excruciating. And you, you know, inevitably you'd lose a tremor or whatever, a piece of film in the digital world. It's, it's wonderful to be able to do to, um, just try stuff. Sometimes it's, sometimes it's a happy accident. You hit the wrong button and you're like, Ooh, that's kind of cool, which surprisingly happens more than you think, but you're much, much more apt to give it a whirl, at least for me, uh, to just, Oh, I'll try that. Speaker 3: 24:45 Sure. Make a copy and do it, but it doesn't give you the time to think about it. Uh, you tend to get your attention span becomes a little shorter and, and before we would go through this whole process, we could only screen the movie, you know, 10 minutes at a time, unless we actually went into a theater and now people don't go in and we don't have these screenings if full beginning to end screenings on a big screen. So we'll do it in the cutting room on the monitor, but that's not the same as watching it, you know, 30 feet high. And the timing of it is different than the feeling and the intimacy and the, the, that whole world without phones ringing and stuff. So it's there all kinds of pros and cons. I mean, obviously there are lots of pros, technically in terms of visual effects that you can do, you know, Tempa facts and having many, many tracks of sound and, you know, dialogue and sound effects and music, and having it feel almost finished again. Speaker 3: 25:43 That's wonderful, but it's also, it's also very difficult when people are no longer capable of looking at it, not finished. You know, we used to screen it with a dialogue track and no music, no sound effects, no nothing. Or sometimes if it was really fancy, we could screen two or three tracks that we would mix on the fly during, you know, I used to have to do that on this slide during the screening, sometimes make a mistake or whatever, and people were always like, Oh, okay. We know it'll get fixed later, but you really had to use your imagination to imagine a dissolve was just a white line, the film to show that we're sort of having a dissolve that's fast or very slow or fade out until we actually had those things made. So it required a lot more imagination on the parts of the, um, the people viewing it, whether it be the director or the studio executives or test audiences or whatever. And now it's, everything's all polished and perfect. So there are pros and cons to both, but, you know, I think with everything I like to think technology, you know, all those tools are good if you use them properly. Speaker 4: 26:50 And which of your films would you recommend? People watch to appreciate editing? And I know that good editing is meant to be invisible, but, uh, which would you want to tell people like, Hey, watch this. And here's why here's what I feel like I did in this film that I'm proud of or happy with Speaker 3: 27:10 There, there are three films that I think I'm, I'm sort of the most proud of for different reasons. I mean, there, I'm proud of, like I said, different aspects of each of the films that I've worked on, but there are three that I think are very interesting for very different reasons. Two are Laura's and the real girl, and I, Tanya both the same director, very different films, extremely different films. One is they're very similar in certain ways to the totally sort of this humor and emotion and oddity are very similar. And you can definitely tell that they're coming from the same director, but in terms of pacing and storytelling, they're very, very different from each other. Lars is calmer and slower and, you know, very, very pretty and, and, uh, subtle, super, super subtle. And I, Tonya is just chaotic and crazy and fast and not subtle at all. Speaker 3: 28:07 And to sort of compare those two, back-to-back given that they're the same director, I think is a very interesting little study and film I Tonya is, is a movie that I don't know if anybody's watching a seen it or not, but it's, it's a film that deals with some very strong issues, spousal abuse, child abuse, you know, these sort of things about this, Tonya Harding, the skater, um, then this crazy situation that happened, but it also is extremely emotional and very, very funny. And that's a hard thing to pull off giving all due respect to all of these, you know, strong issues. And I think a lot of that, a lot of that comes from the editing. A lot of that obviously comes from the way he shot it and, and a phenomenal script. Um, so those two, I would say there was another movie that I worked on called the way, way back, which is a small, very simple sweet movie, very, very small budget, uh, that was two directors and just a lovely movie that sometimes films like that are just really, um, I just appreciate their simplicity, but because it's, it's still very emotional and very funny and enjoyable and entertaining and not like crazy visual effects and bombastic, you know, explosions and craziness, but just a really, really good heartfelt, um, story. Speaker 4: 29:30 And if you had to pick a film that, uh, you did not work on, are there any that you would recommend people to look at to maybe learn a little bit about the craft of editing or a, what an editor can do? Speaker 3: 29:43 There are a couple of that kind of that I really always like, and they're sort of the, the, some of them are the movies that, um, they come on television and you, as you're channel surfing, you find them, and there those films that you stop no matter where you find them and you watch to the end. And one of my all time, very favorite movies is Harold and Maude. I just, I, it, it is directed by a former editor. Um, and I think it's a very interesting, unique film, the way it uses music. It's got the soundtrack is all cat Stevens. Uh, that's an element that we haven't really talked too much about with editors. Editors have a lot to do with the music that's in a film, whether it be score or songs. For example, I, Tanya had a lot of songs and none of them were written into the script. Speaker 3: 30:33 They were also ones that we found through the post-production process and that it was just, you know, throwing spaghetti against the wall and seeing what stuck and what we liked, what worked for the scene and what didn't. And anyway, I really liked the way music is used in that film. I really like the way it's shot and the way it's cut together. Um, sometimes, you know, the, the pacing of it I really enjoy. And the story is I think just wonderful and quite beautiful. There's a film called I think, I believe it's a Canadian film, uh, called [inaudible]. That is really, uh, like incendiary. It's a French, French Canadian film. I found it extremely powerful. I just remember when the lights came up, I haven't watched it in awhile. I should, but I just was, I was just stunned by it. It's an incredibly powerful story that I never would have expected about a whole other world that these people live in. Speaker 3: 31:28 It's really a remarkable film. And I think cut very well. There's well, there's all that jazz is a movie that I remember really, it came out, you know, sort of when I was in high school and it just very, very much effected me. It was where I first thought that was kind of the first place that I kind of began to understand that there was editing and what that kind of meant. Um, and I just remember watching that a lot. Um, so I guess those would be the, the, the three that I, that I, they're always my kind of go tos, um, that I really love. Speaker 4: 32:05 Well, I do remember all that jazz that the actual editor appears in the film. And I remember that was a moment for me because I was interested in editing and I thought like, Speaker 3: 32:14 Yeah, I know it's, it's very nice. Yeah. And he, and he's a great editor and actually the president of our union right now. He's, he's fantastic. There are a lot of, um, you know, sometimes the films that are not as flashy to me, um, I mean, obviously I'm very impressed by, you know, a lot of the, I mean, to, to like some of the Marvel films and stuff that are, I think just amazing these worlds get, and the editors are putting them together before, you know, nobody's seeing anything it's blue screen, there's this and that, to be able to use your imagination and rights, I've worked on a couple of films like that, that were, had a lot of, a lot of visual effects in it. And it's challenging. It's tough, but there's also something for me personally, in terms of the films that I like sometimes that are chest the ones that really get me emotionally, that, that all of a sudden, after I've seen them, you know, even a few days or a few weeks later, I, I find myself still sink thinking about them a lot and that begins to grow and grow. Speaker 3: 33:13 And then I want to watch it again. And sometimes it editorially can appear to be a very simple film. Um, but when you really begin to study it, you see how, how specific and the choices that were made and why for every single cut in the movie. Speaker 4: 33:30 Well, and I also just thought of the, a Cohen brothers film, hail Caesar, where Francis McDormand plays an editor. And I thought that was just a, a wonderful glimpse into a particular kind of, Speaker 3: 33:42 Yeah. There's another one that Albert Brooks that modern, modern romance. Yeah. Yeah. It's very rare that you ever actually see an editor Moe. Yeah. Always. It's interesting. Cause it's a really, it's the only time that, you know, the director is with all of those hundreds of people on a set and everybody's grabbing a moment of their time, but, but we get them and get to participate in this process of the filmmaking, all, you know, just the two of us. And it's, it's a very unique and interesting place to be that never really gets seen by anybody or, or that people aren't aware of. And, uh, until they've actually experienced that, even the people on the set often aren't really aware of what happens, um, you know, during post-production so Speaker 4: 34:31 Well, and the thing that I've always liked about editing is that it's one of the few places where you can kind of be on your own and make mistakes and not be under the scrutiny of a lot of people while you're experimenting. Speaker 3: 34:45 Exactly. And I do that sometimes with the director also, I last them to go away so that I can just try stuff that, that, uh, and be willing to fail in the privacy of my own cutting room. Um, without them looking at me going, why did you do that? Um, but yeah, it's, it's really fun. It's a really fun process all the way beginning to end. Speaker 4: 35:06 Well, I want to thank you very much for talking about editing. You bet. My pleasure. That was Tatyana [inaudible] editor of I Tonya Lars and the real girl. And the way, way back joining me for my next podcast will be Steven Marioni. Who's worked repeatedly with Steven Soderbergh and Ella Hondros in URI to rounding Speaker 2: 35:38 Out. My trio of editors will be Paul matchless. Who's cut Edgar Wright's baby driver, the world's end and Scott Pilgrim vs the world. Thanks for joining me for another episode of listener supported KPBS cinema junkie podcast. I hope you'll come back to hear what these other editors have to say about their impact on cinematic storytelling. I want to thank AEs the American cinema editors for helping me set up these interviews till our next film fix on Bethlehem Mondo, your residents, cinema junkie Speaker 1: 36:58 [inaudible].

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Join me in a three-part tribute to film editors. Most people can name a film's director and maybe even its writer, cinematographer or composer but far fewer can name editors. But film editors can alter performances, determine pace, and affect cinematic storytelling in so many ways. To kick off this three-part series is Tatiana S. Riegel, Oscar-nominated editor of "I, Tonya."

Cinema Junkie begins a three-part tribute to the art and craft of film editing with Tatiana S. Riegel, Oscar-nominated editor for "I, Tonya."

Frances McDormand had one brilliant scene in "Hail. Caesar" as chain-smoking film editor C.C. Calhoun who handles an upright Moviola like Mario Andretti handles a Formula One race car ... until her scarf gets caught in the gears and nearly chokes her. But she takes it all in stride.

The thing to note is that the film is set in the 1950s and depicts a woman running the studio’s editing department. Editing is one of the few craft categories where women dominated from the very beginning of the film industry. This was in part because in the early days of filmmaking editing was seen as an extension of the work of a script girl or continuity person, and was considered something akin to clerical work that required organizational skills more than creative or artistic flair. But as filmmaking quickly advanced editing proved to be a key part of the creative process and women had an early foot in the door and proved their worth to remain a significant part of the editing workforce.

For this podcast, I speak with one of today's best female editors, Tattiana S. Riegel. She kicks off a trio of podcasts that explore the art and craft of film editing.

Last month the Comic-Con Museum asked me to host a panel for its SAM Storytelling Across Media program. I spoke with three editors but only got to use a fraction of my interviews for the hour-long online panel. I am now thrilled to get to post the full interviews here on my podcast.

As someone who spends much of my time editing, I thought November, the month for giving thanks, was the perfect time to pay tribute to these artists that generally go unrecognized by audiences. Most people can name directors and even the occasional cinematographer or composer. But not many people can rattle off a list of the best film editors and even fewer have a true appreciation for what an editor does.

But hopefully that will all change after you listen to these editors explain what it takes to be a good editor.

Riegel, editor of "I, Tonya," "Lars and the Real Girl" and "The Way Way Back" kicks off the podcast trilogy. Joining me for the next one will be Stephen Mirrione who has worked repeatedly with Steven Soderbergh and Alejandro G. Iñárritu.

Then I close the series with Paul Machliss who has cut Edgar Wright’s "Baby Driver," "The World’s End," and "Scott Pilgrim Vs the World."

Thanks to ACE (American Cinema Editors) for helping with the interviews.