Michael Ruscio (‘3 Body Problem’): ‘As an editor, you’re the first audience’ [Exclusive Video Interview]
“As an editor, you’re the first audience,” declares “3 Body Problem” editor Michael Ruscio about the essential role that his craft plays in shaping the narrative and amplifying emotion of every scene. For our recent webchat, Ruscio (who received his first career Emmy nomination to date for the Netflix sci-fi blockbuster) adds, “You’re also needing to continually shed, detach and look at it again, and then another time, and then another time,” he explains about the painstaking process of chiseling a scene into its final product. “Sometimes you’ll take the material home where you’re not in the editing bay, and then look at it there, where you can’t touch any buttons and see how does this work for an audience? I think you do have to trust the intelligence of the audience,” he says. “We didn’t feel like we needed to spell it out and that we could just deliver it and have it unfold.” Watch our exclusive video interview above.
SEE Exclusive Video Interview: David Benioff, D.B. Weiss and Alexander Woo (‘3 Body Problem’ creators)
“3 Body Problem” scored six Emmy nominations this year; for Best Drama Series and for the show’s editing, cinematography, main title design, sound mixing and sound editing. The series was co-created by multiple Emmy-winning “Game of Thrones” duo David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, who serve as co-creators and producers with writer/producer Alexander Woo (“True Blood”), based on the Hugo Award-winning novel “The Three-Body Problem” by Chinese author Liu Cixin, the first in Liu’s “Remembrance of Earth’s Past” trilogy. Benioff, Weiss and Woo co-wrote the pilot episode together, titled “Countdown,” which takes place in both 1960s China and modern-day England, where astrophysicists try to uncover and expose what is ultimately revealed as an existential threat to humanity from a distant and more advanced alien civilization known as the San-ti. The sci-fi drama’s international cast includes Rosalind Chao, Jess Hong, Benedict Wong, Jovan Adepo, Eiza Gonzalez, Alex Sharp, Sea Shimooka, Marlo Kelly and “Game of Thrones” alums Jonathan Pryce, John Bradley and Liam Cunningham.
Ruscio is nominated for the show’s fifth episode (the pivotal action-packed “Judgment Day”), in which chief planetary defense strategist Thomas Wade (Cunningham) enlists Dr. Auggie Salazar (Gonzalez) and a Royal Navy team to ambush the fortress-like Judgment Day ship that is scheduled to cruise through the Panama Canal in order to retrieve enemy intel. The team deploy Auggie’s (literally) cutting-edge nanofiber technology to horizontally slice through the ship, killing everyone aboard, including Mike Evans (Pryce), the wealthy leader of the shady Earth-Trisolaris Organization. Their mission leads to Wade and Dr. Jin Cheng (Hong) discovering the San-Ti’s true mission; to cripple Earth’s scientific advancement, preventing humans from technologically surpassing them by the time of their arrival in a few centuries’ time. Shortly after, all electronic devices around the world display the message “YOU ARE BUGS,” with the San-Ti’s advanced proton-sized super-computer “sophon” enveloping the Earth, revealing the existence and power of the San-Ti to the world. It’s a narratively dense and visually and sonically ambitious installment in the show’s freshman season, accounting for all four of the show’s episode-specific nominations.
“A lot of what the editing challenge was how are each of these people reacting to this,” Ruscio shares about the final sequence as various characters react to the Earth-shattering otherworldly sophon taking shape in the sky above them. “In Auggie’s view, it’s horrifying because there’s this realization that she doesn’t know what it is,” he adds. “With Wade and Clarence, they’re marveling at it and there’s almost a pride with Wade saying, ‘that is our biggest enemy,’” he explains. “It went through a lot of variations of the timing of it with getting on the roof with them, finding the people down below, and of course, at the very end with Tatiana, seeing that reveal,” he says about the final shot of the mysterious Tatiana (Kelly), working for the San-Ti, as she looks up in awe and wonder at the gargantuan celestial eye peering down at a helpless and afraid humanity.
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