The Making of a Motion Picture Editor. Thomas A. Ohanian
aware of an American film that seemed relevant for the times.
TO: And had a social aspect to it…
RC: Yeah. I hadn’t seen To Kill a Mockingbird yet. And the sound effects and music track added such rawness to each of the scenes. It really opened my mind to thoughts of ‘Hey, this is really great. What if I could learn to do that? Can people do this for a living?’
TO: It’s great that you can trace it back to a single film and an experience like that.
RC: I am forever grateful to Michael Roemer and Robert M. Young, the filmmakers. It wasn’t overtly political, but by showing the hardships of two African-Americans who were just trying to pursue a normal life against certain societal odds made the film implicitly political. I like to mention that film because it led me to the career I have. Robert Young gave me a lot of guidance at the beginning.
TO: You made the transition to editing electronic nonlinear…
RC: I wasn’t raised with computers but learning to work with them wasn’t difficult for me. The first film I edited on computer was Waiting to Exhale. And it was a really good match because I found the digital equivalent to what I was used to doing on film.
TO: That’s why when we created it we used those very similar film concepts.
RC: Well, you succeeded with me, buddy. (Both Laugh)
TO: It was all timing.
RC: Digital editing has created the misconception that it would speed things up. Whether it’s Pietro Scalia, Paul Hirsch, Lynzee Klingman—it’s a creative task and you don’t create faster because you have a computer in front of you. That’s why directors shoot so much—because they want options. All of a sudden, the editor now has 15 takes per angle — instead of three—and so our task becomes more time consuming.
TO: Are there films that stand out where you were particularly challenged?
RC: The Conversation for sure, because it was such an editorial puzzle. Credit has to be given to Walter Murch for solving that. I was just too inexperienced. But the one that I was more intimately involved with and that took much longer is Bobby. As I mentioned, after it was shot, there were issues that Emilio and I had to solve. And when Harvey Weinstein picked it up for distribution, he had some ideas, which led to reediting portions of the picture. Now, none of those ideas were bad, but they were different from what was intended in the script.
TO: So, you had to go and do things that you hadn’t planned on?
RC: Yes. They were to introduce the character of Bobby Kennedy earlier. The original script didn’t have Bobby enter the picture physically until the last act when he enters the hotel and Anthony Hopkins greets him. Once Harvey Weinstein got involved, he thought—probably correctly— that the name Bobby Kennedy wouldn’t mean anything or have an attraction to audiences in 2006 unless we introduced him earlier and interspersed him through the picture. So, to create the prologue and to set the time frame was challenging.
TO: You were in California at the time that Kennedy was campaigning and when he was assassinated. It must have been emotional for you to see the recreation.
RC: I marched with the anti -war movement in the ‘60’s and it meant a lot to be offered the chance to work on Bobby. It was very meaningful for me to revisit that time and it was emotional. After he is shot, the picture ends with a voice-over of the speech that he gave a day after Martin Luther King was assassinated.
TO: It’s an incredible speech—it really is. I looked it up and it’s the one that he gave in Cleveland. It’s the “On the Mindless Menace of Violence” speech.
RC: The power of ending the film with that speech led us to change how we presented the political remarks Bobby made in Ambassador Hotel ballroom before he stepped into the kitchen where he was shot. Emilio wanted to use those remarks because it’s the last documentary footage we have of him. But those remarks were overtly political, and it would have diminished the powerful speech that we use at the very end. I had to convince Emilio to use what Bobby was saying in the ballroom only as a voiceover supporting images of the Vietnam War and street protests. We didn’t want to take away from the final speech. That was something we had to discover as a solution along the way.
TO: Anything else that comes to mind?
RC: On Risky Business, I used second unit footage to show a lot of trains passing each other in rapid succession. Then at the end there was a train giving off a spark that was to symbolize a sexual climax. I showed it to Paul Brickman and that inspired him to reconceive the sequence. Eventually he returned to the location in Chicago and shot a new scene to precede what I had shown him. By step printing to slow down the action and that, combined with the music that we picked, gave us the feeling we wanted. From the Tangerine Dream music and the step printing of the footage and how it fades to black, we created the whole feeling we were after.
TO: What films and editors do you admires?
RC: Apocalypse Now, The Godfather I and II, Raging Bull. In more recent times, City of God—just the use of the parallel characters and how they were introduced. I like Slumdog Millionaire, Into the Wild, Babel, and Traffic in terms of how they were put together.
TO: Because of the sequencing?
RC: Yes. They had nonlinear structures which we talked about earlier. I talked to Jay Cassidy who edited Into the Wild, and he said originally it was a linear story. It wasn’t until much later in post-production that they decided to start with the end of the story. I thought about how much it sounded like what I had experienced with Walter on The Conversation and how you have to manipulate these things and see how they work.
TO: What else?
RC: Babel and Traffic were both edited by Stephen Mirrione and I admire his work. Slumdog Millionaire has a clever story structure alternating the character’s past with the present time. I liked 127 Hours a lot. When you realize the confined time period and location, how can you present that story and the development of that character and still tell a story full of tension? I thought it was brilliant to be able to do that.
TO: What editors come to mind?
RC: Walter Murch has worked with Fred Zinnemann, Anthony Mingella, Francis Coppola. Walter is so special that he’s able to bring his uniqueness to the works of these different directors. I think the same of Anne Coates—being able to work with everyone from David Lean to Wolfgang Petersen to Stephen Soderbergh. Alan Heim because his career goes back some 30 years, to the work he did with Bob Fosse, such as Lenny and All That Jazz… Today there’s a new guy on the block whose work I like. Hank Corwin.
TO: Yeah. You know, Hank’s name doesn’t come up as often as it should, I think. He’s really talented.
RC: Right. He isn’t as well-known as some other editors, but his work is so unusual. I worked with him on The New World. His style is so unique because of how he sees things. Even though Natural Born Killers doesn’t have the story impact of some of the other films we’ve been talking about, but the stylistic pizazz—Wow.
TO: Speaking of style, what did you think of J.F.K.?
RC: It’s right up there. It’s one of those experiences where you look at it as an editor and think, ‘How is that even possible?’ The editors that work with David Fincher…
TO: Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall.
RC: They’ve come on like gangbusters. The late Sally Menke and Quentin Tarantino.
TO: Waiting to Exhale did really well.
RC: Yeah, it did box office because the book was so popular. Forest had a difficult job. He had to babysit a diva —Whitney Houston—who was hard on the crew. Once she got out of the trailer she was fine with cast members. Forest’s job was to balance a huge megastar with an accomplished actress —Angela Bassett—who comes with formal training from the Yale School of Drama.
TO: What have you learned along the way?
RC: