Film editing roundtable: ‘Air,’ ‘American Fiction,’ ‘Saltburn,’ ‘Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’ and ‘Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie’ [Exclusive Video Interview]
Long before a film is locked, it goes through various edits and lots of screenings and notes from said screenings. But how does an editor know when a cut is the right cut?
“I feel it’s right by instinct,” William Goldenberg (“Air”) tells Gold Derby at our Meet the Experts: Film Editing panel (watch the exclusive video interview above) with Hilda Rasula (“American Fiction”), Victoria Boydell (“Saltburn”), Michael Andrews (“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse”) and Michael Harte (“Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie”). “And then you show a first cut to the director and he or she may have a different idea of what feels right, but then you come to a consensus of what feels right. And ultimately you show it to an audience and see what they think — early screenings with friends and family who don’t know anything about the subject and aren’t in the movie business. When there’s an audience in the room, you get a real sense of what’s right and what’s not right and what’s working and what’s not working. I think it’s a sort of step-by-step process.”
Click each individual name above to watch that person’s solo chat.
For Boydell, she senses when it’s the end of the emotional journey on the film. “It could be because everyone tells you you’re at the end of the journey because they’re all happy and the money’s run out,” she quips. But “Saltburn” was a unique experience as test screenings produced polarizing reactions, not to mention studio notes to cut down on certain graphic scenes on which Boydell and writer-director Emerald Fennell pushed back. But they spent so long refining the edit that Boydell, for once, didn’t sense the end was nigh at first.
“Usually, on a film, I can tell. There’s a crucial screening where all the execs and financiers look at you and they’re like, ‘Yeah, basically we’re happy with the film and you’ll be done in 10 days’ time or something,'” she states. “With ‘Saltburn,’ we were so immersed in it, I wasn’t quite sure when we would feel we’d arrived at that. And then suddenly, a few weeks later, we looked at each other, like, ‘I think we’re ready to put this to bed now.’ I think we felt like we’ve been locked in this room and we’re probably going to around circles again and trying things we tried five months ago. A lot of things we were trying, we were going, ‘No, let’s go back.’ It was about the journey. We knew when we’d come to the end of the road.”
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