‘Baby Reindeer’ editor Peter H. Oliver on the art of knowing when to cut away [Exclusive Video Interview]
“Baby Reindeer” editor Peter H. Oliver was on the train when Emmy nominations came in on July 17. “When I came up over ground, suddenly my phone was going mad, going ping, ping, ping, ping, ping. And lots of people were saying, ‘Congratulations! Congratulations! My wife was waiting by the computer refreshing and refreshing to see, so she told me in the end,” Oliver tells Gold Derby (watch the exclusive video interview above). “ nerves mostly because I’m not great in front of lots of people, so I thought if I have to get up in front of lots of people, it’ll be short and sweet. But I’m very, very excited to be nominated and even if it ended there, then it’s been a great ride.”
Oliver’s “Baby Reindeer” ride started when his agent sent him the script. He was not familiar with Richard Gadd‘s one-man play from which the Netflix series is adapted. The breakout hit of the spring, “Baby Reindeer” is based on Gadd’s real experience with a woman who stalked and harassed him, played by Jessica Gunning on the show, early in his career. “I was just really excited because it’s kind of got that ‘Trainspotting’ feeling. It’s got that excitement that ‘Trainspotting’ had with the voiceover. I just really enjoyed reading it because it was very different from anything I’d read before,” Oliver continues. “I phoned my agent and said, ‘We gotta push for this as much as we can.’ I just couldn’t put it down. I read the first four straightaway. I just kept reading and reading, and then I read them again. It was such a strange beast, really, and it was so exciting to read.”
The first-time Emmy nominee worked on the first four episodes of “Baby Reindeer,” which were all directed by Weronika Tofilska. Oliver purposely did not watch any footage of Gadd’s stage version “just so it was fresh to me.” Balancing a dark but humorous tone, the series also tries show Martha (Gunning) as a troubled woman looking for connection — she has more in common with Donny (Gadd) than not — rather than lean in on the “crazy stalker” of it all, and that meant knowing when to cut away.
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“In Episode 1, the beginning was a lot longer when Martha first comes into the pub, but we discussed it a lot and we truncated it because we didn’t want it to look too weird,” Oliver shares. “You still had to think she was quite funny. She’s got lots of politicians on her phone at the end of the scene. It was a much longer scene and we truncated that because all the way through, Richard didn’t want her to feel bad or strange. He was really empathetic and sympathetic with her. I think he always wanted her to look like a lost soul so the audience has sympathy for her. If you hold on her for too long, you’d think, ‘Oh, no, she’s really strange.’ We definitely worked on those parts so she looked more like a lost soul than strange.”
Oliver is nominated for the fourth episode, which co-edited with fellow nominee Benjamin Gerstein. A flashback, the episode reveals the grooming and abuse Donny had suffered earlier by a TV writer, Darrien (Tom Goodman-Hill). The abuse footage was filmed later on, by which point Oliver and Tofilska had decided the pace and how much and little to do. “Obviously there are awkward moments. When Weronika shot it and sent it to me to assemble, I got this real knot in my stomach and I couldn’t work it out what it was. I my wife said, ‘Because it’s so awful what you’re cutting.’ I remember crying when Donny is on the floor afterwards and that was the most emotional part for me — when the abuser says, ‘Do you want a cup of tea?” afterwards. That he doesn’t rationalize what just happened and is a complete monster.”
Oliver’s favorite scene to cut was the end of the second episode, when Martha surprises Donny on the canal and the scene ends with her groping him. “It has the jump scare to start, it has comedy in the middle where you warm to Martha and then you think she’s funny,” he states. “And then you see this turn. ‘Oh, no, something really bad is gonna happen.’ And she chases him and abuses him in the end, and it’s just horrific. So it has everything that ‘Baby Reindeer’ has in that truncated scene. It’s just so intense because it’s just the two of them and there’s no escape.”
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