The Making of a Motion Picture Editor. Thomas A. Ohanian
of like the dog’s body. I really found that I enjoyed editing the most.
TO: That’s a great start—to be exposed to every facet of the business.
KB: I was working with one of the best commercial editors there at the time, Mervyn Lloyd.
TO: Were you editing in video?
KB: No, that was still on Steenbecks. So, my first two years were assisting on film and then Avid sort of stormed the scene. I think it was a good and bad thing. When it was film, the editor was sort of clouded in mystery and no one quite knew what they were up to. You had to sit in the back seat and wait for it to be done. And it all got demystified with nonlinear. I found myself within two years working on what I think were the best commercials to offer in Australia. I decided that I was going to go to England. I got very lucky and English directors would bring me to New York and to Los Angeles when they did American campaigns.
TO: How long had you been out of Australia?
KB: I was in London for about six years working and then I hit New York and opened up my own company. So, when I did commercials in Los Angeles, I would work at Angus’s company. And Angus and I would do a back and forth so that when he came to New York he’d use my company.
TO: What finally got you to move from New York?
KB: My daughter was born and that was the moment where I decided that I was going to live in one city or the other. So, I joined with Angus. And Angus knew I had always wanted to do movies and there was a moment during Zodiac where David (Fincher) wanted to reshoot a bunch of scenes. Angus had to fine cut those scenes to make sure they were done. So, Angus needed a second pair of hands. I got off a plane from Australia and Angus said, ‘Great, you’re doing nothing right now. Come and help me.’ So I became a member of the (Editors’) Union.
TO: You started working on Zodiac as an assistant editor?
KB: No, as an additional editor. I wasn’t vetted by Fincher. I was vetted by Angus. So I met David on a Saturday while he was looking over my scenes. And he gave me feedback and I started executing, and it was that simple. And it was supposed to be a couple of weeks to help out and I think I was on it for three or fourth months and that was the baptism. And then David asked me to edit Benjamin Button.
TO: Did the commercial editorial background help you in features?
KB: I dunno. It’s taught patience. They have great filmmakers behind them; the coverage is extensive so your film ratio is through the roof just like feature filmmaking. And it really teaches you diligence in finding the absolute best of everything.
TO: How about movies that you saw coming into Australia?
KB: Oh, yeah. I remember sitting in the theatres. The biggest one I remember knocking me out was Seven—that whole title sequence.
TO: And then you wind up working with Fincher…
KB: Right, it ends up bizarrely being Angus who cut that. And it kind of floored me. I remember being knocked out by Pulp Fiction and by (The) Usual Suspects. I started to collect laserdiscs when I was 19. And then I got to understand the experience of Scorsese and Ridley (Scott).
TO: Do you feel each film is a natural challenge?
KB: Yeah. I’ve gotten so lucky with Fincher. David is an expert at what he does. With David, the amount of coverage is so extensive that you can always be wherever you want to be. So, the editing takes a lot longer. And not only that, but you also start digging into the audio performance extensively and within the frame.
TO: You’re taking audio from one take and putting it under another picture take and even more sophisticated things like…
KB: Splitting things up, retiming things, making sure that there is no continuity mistake. People often talk about continuity mistakes but due to the amount of takes and repetition, to get the very best of each thing, we can always correct it. It’s story-led and performance-led. And then technically, you can get really accurate.
TO: Are there other editors whose work you admire?
KB: I’ve tracked filmmakers and their careers but never really tracked their editors. Thelma (Schoonmaker) is the exception to that. When I started to edit at an early age, there were moments in every movie that she and Scorsese did that I found myself watching over and over and over. It was the things that were incredibly dynamic with how you got seven angles into three seconds. And that, I found, just so impressive and I found it even more impressive when I got to meet Thelma. And physically she looks like my Mom! (Both Laugh) And there is this endearing thing where you want to have dinner with her but she is so cutting edge and aggressive about how she constructs these things that’s just wonderful.
TO: Any particular examples?
KB: There’s this scene in After Hours and I spoke to Thelma personally about this. And they dropped a set of keys out of the top story of this window in New York and someone down at the bottom went to catch it. And there are six or seven shots in this sequence and I watched it so many times. So many times because it just looked incredible. The pool breaks in the Color of Money—I just watched those over and over. All the freeze frames in Goodfellas. I watched all of them over and over again before the trunk got shut. The splashing bucket of blood in Kundun that got thrown across the sand...
TO: That high angle shot…
KB: Oh, it was awesome.
TO: You really studied these. And, really you were sort of deconstructing them…
KB: Oh, what’s the name of the editor who won for The Bourne Identity?
TO: Chris Rouse.
KB: He did a movie with the same director before that.
TO: United 93.
KB: That’s one of the best-edited movies I’ve ever seen.
TO: When you did Benjamin Button, was it difficult to work on the film regarding the performance replacements?
KB: No. Again, that was more patience. It’s classic David—it just had to be done in a three-step process. We would cut the film using the actor who played the body. And I put a big, black circle around his face so that it wasn’t distracting us and so you weren’t judging the performance—it was just big black hole. And I would use the actor’s voice, as well, for my timing. So first it got blocked out like that. And then we got Brad Pitt in and he did readings of everything. So, you’re cutting it almost like radio.
TO: Right, the picture at this point isn’t that important—it’s the line readings.
KB: Yes, you’re putting Brad’s stuff into it and he’d retime it slightly. Then he’d do it on camera so now I was able to have these little side pictures in the frame of Brad’s head. So, now I’m doing a sort of separate performance and an audio performance and a main picture performance. So, it’s this three-tiered thing and once you’ve locked it off, the actual image started to get created. To me, it’s classic Fincher. You’re not just picking a shot—you’re doing it three times.
TO: I’d like to ask you about The Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. You had a huge amount of footage on these films.
KB: Yeah. David tends to shoot for about nine months. And we’re on from the second day of shooting. An assembly goes for nine months and tag another three weeks at the end of that for us to have our first assembly. So, almost ten months to have an assembly and then we go in and fine cut and that’s going to take as long as it needs to take. Probably just under 14 months by the time we’re done.
TO: That’s a long time.
KB: Dragon Tattoo—the coverage on that and some of the scenes were very difficult. It was the hardest to do so far. It was exhausting. I actually don’t know how that could have been done with one editor in that time frame.
TO: You and Angus didn’t expect to win...
KB: With Social Network, it was