1st Qtr, 2020

Celebrating its 20th year, ACE’s annual Invisible Art, Visible Artists (IAVA) event again attracted a capacity crowd for a panel discussion with this year’s Academy Award®-nominated editors. Held Feb. 8, the day before the Oscars, it took place at the American Cinematheque’s Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood.

ACE President Stephen Rivkin, ACE, an Academy Award nominee for Avatar, opened the program and introduced the panel. Alan Heim, ACE, Academy Award-winning editor of All That Jazz and President of the Motion Picture Editors Guild (MPEG) served as moderator. Joining him were each of this year’s Oscar®nominated Editors, including Thelma Schoonmaker, ACE (The Irishman), Tom Eagles (Jojo Rabbit), Jeff Groth (Joker), Yang Jinmo (Parasite) and Michael McCusker, ACE, and Andrew Buckland (Ford v Ferrari). McCusker and Buckland took home the Best Editing Oscar the next day, as well as the BAFTA® the week prior. Two weeks earlier, Eagles and Yang won Eddies for Best Edited Dramatic Feature Film and Best Edited Comedy Feature Film, respectively.

With Schoonmaker and McCusker having participated in the IAVA panel in years prior, they helped welcome the larger contingent of newcomers as the conversation flowed through each nominee’s uniquely varied starts in editing and the paths that led them to the Oscars. Buckland began as a production assistant on Seinfeld where he learned his passion wasn’t in production, but followed a colleague onto her next film. “When I said I could do anything, they mistook that as confidence and I was hired as an apprentice editor on The Devil’s Own,” he related.

McCusker studied at Emerson College and then worked briefly on The Tracey Ullman Show, including segments of The Simpsons. He then went into features and almost called it quits when his mother reminded him how much he enjoyed the editing process in college. This led him back to the editing room.

Eagles, hailing from New Zealand, began as a video jockey at a music television station and moved up to a promo director before he landed as an editor on a children’s program. Groth had an early start thanks to a local station that donated cable equipment, which allowed him his first taste of tape-to-tape editing. In college he landed an internship with an Avid training facility, where he would take an editing class and ultimately became an instructor and took on some small side jobs. He then moved to New York and did Avid support for the Tribeca Film Center while working on independent features, eventually moving onto larger projects.

Schoonmaker had originally intended to become a diplomat, but after having passed all of her State Department exams, she was discouraged from entering the field by those who felt she’d be unhappy there with her liberal leanings. She went on to take a course at Columbia University where they were training Peace Corps volunteers, but saw an ad in The New York Times that read: Willing to train – assistant film editor. “This terrible man was butchering the films of Fellini, Truffaut, Visconti for late night television – he took a reel out of Rocco and His Brothers! Even I who knew nothing at this point said, ‘You can’t do that!’ I couldn’t take the job for long, but I did learn how to hot splice.” It was at NYU where that new skill led her to Martin Scorsese. She was taking a course there and her professor asked if anyone knew how to cut negative – the negative for Scorsese’s film had been cut incorrectly and Schoonmaker said she’d give it a try.

Yang, who grew up in Korea, attended Bard College in New York where he had an opportunity to work on the sound team for Todd Solondz’s Palindromes. While in New York he met director Lee Myung-se, who was very well known in Korea and trying to make a film in Hollywood, but when it didn’t work out he asked Yang to join him back in Korea to work on a film. Yang served as Lee’s on-set editor, which, while uncommon in the United States, is pervasive in Korean filmmaking.  On-set editors receive a live feed from production to create an immediate assembly on set so the director and crew can see what’s been captured so they have everything they need before moving onto the next scene.

Heim, through his involvement in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, had recently been looking at nonAmerican editors to invite into the Academy’s editing branch and met two Korean brothers with hundreds of credits to their names. He asked Yang if this was possible because of the accelerated post process. “This also has to do with the on-set editing system. Korea doesn’t have a dailies system, but rather a live feed from production straight into the editing suite. After production and reviewing everything from set, we’ll then
take 2-3 months for the full assembly. I don’t actually like that system because it can take away from the quality of the picture, so I try to limit my features, but I do end up doing two to three pictures a year.”

Groth described the journey director Todd Phillips’ story took in transitioning Arthur Fleck into the Joker, noting that even an hour into the film, viewers were all largely still wondering how it  would occur. “Todd is incredibly good at estimating time,” said Groth when the conversation turned to length. “The first day he walked into the edit room and watched everything; as we were wrapping up he said, ‘I feel like this movie is going to be an hour and 53 minutes’ – which without credits, it’s an hour and 54 minutes of content.”

Yang noted that Bong Joon Ho is one of the few directors in Korea who can make a film as long as he wants while keeping in mind they never want to bore an audience. “Our objective was always to get Kim to infiltrate the house as quickly as possible,” remarked Yang about Parasite. “We took every bit of fat out of the lead-up while still building the characters and leaving comedy elements at the front.”

“We never intended it to be this long,” said Schoonmaker of Irishman’s 3 hours and 30 minute run time, “but when we started invested not only in our two main characters, but even the guys who are the antagonists, so that when we get to Le Mans, we know how much is on the line for all of them. The trick was figuring out how much time we could spend with these guys before irritating the audience because they want to see racing.”

Buckland added, “In an example of how a scene is found, when we first received the footage and put it together, it looked like the [Willow Springs] race was one lap.” Because there wasn’t coverage that gave the impression of length, it’s actually Buckland’s voice as the announcer that was the device used to extend the race with limited footage. “So much of the length of the race was created just by calling it the Willow Springs 100 and counting down laps,” said McCusker. “It’s the announcer who tells you there’s a passage of time.”

Schoonmaker’s challenge was in conveying mob violence without showing much of the actual violence. “Scorsese wanted to strip down the film,” shared Schoonmaker. “There’s no flashy editing or camera moves. It was about the opaqueness of the way the Mafia speaks, they never say they’re going to kill someone. Marty wanted the killings to look bland.

“You’ll notice the killings are all very quick and they’re wide shots. You’ll see De Niro walk toward the camera and then pan away. He kills someone and walks off. There are no close-ups because Marty wanted to show the killings as the equivalence to the Holocaust and how while people were on trial they kept saying, ‘It was just a job,’ and he wanted to make the statement that you shouldn’t join the mob. He tried to do that screening it for people length never came up. When we asked how long they believed it to be, most felt it was 90 minutes.”

In speaking to his own film and his emotional reaction to Schoonmaker’s work, McCusker remarked, “There’s two ways I look at pacing in general – ideas are very quickly absorbed by audiences and so when you’ve presented your idea in a particular scene, you need to move on. If you overstate your weight, you’re losing the audience. On the other hand, where audiences will stay with you is emotional content and a scene where actors are doing great work they’ll hold the screen for a long time.

“I think the hardest part of our film was the front end,” continued McCusker. “It wasn’t even the racing – the racing had its own challenges. [It was] the beginning of the movie where we had to lay out so much pipe for all these characters so you’re invested not only in our two main characters, but even the guys who are the antagonists, so that when we get to Le Mans, we know how much is on the line for all of them. The trick was figuring out how much time we could spend with these guys before irritating the audience because they want to see racing.”

Buckland added, “In an example of how a scene is found, when we first received the footage and put it together, it looked like the [Willow Springs] race was one lap.” Because there wasn’t coverage that gave the impression of length, it’s actually Buckland’s voice as the announcer that was the device used to extend the race with limited footage. “So much of the length of the race was created just by calling it the Willow Springs 100 and counting down laps,” said McCusker. “It’s the announcer who tells you there’s a passage of time.”

Schoonmaker’s challenge was in conveying mob violence without showing much of the actual violence. “Scorsese wanted to strip down the film,” shared Schoonmaker. “There’s no flashy editing or camera moves. It was about the opaqueness of the way the Mafia speaks, they never say they’re going to kill someone. Marty wanted the killings to look bland.

“You’ll notice the killings are all very quick and they’re wide shots. You’ll see De Niro walk toward the camera and then pan away. He kills someone and walks off. There are no close-ups because Marty wanted to show the killings as the equivalence to the Holocaust and how while people were on trial they kept saying, ‘It was just a job,’ and he wanted to make the statement that you shouldn’t join the mob. He tried to do that in Goodfellas, but everyone loved it so much they all wanted to join the Mafia.” Thinking of how this had differed from their other mob films, she shared, “We were so stripped down that we didn’t even have Foley. These people are quiet – they’re not wild and crazy like Joe Pesci is in Casino. When you’re a boss you don’t have to yell and scream, you just kill people.”

“I think a film finds its own length,” said Eagles. “We never cut for duration, but rather clarity of story. We didn’t want people getting bored with being in a room for 30 minutes and needed to stick with the story of [Hitler youth] Jojo getting to Elsa [a young Jewish girl]. We wanted the perspective of a slightly ADD teenager and to have the first act move quickly.” In introducing Elsa and Jojo, Eagles and director Taika Waititi leaned on horror while relying on their comedy mantel. Said Eagles, “Even after reading the script, I knew we had a mini horror movie within a comedy. Taika said, ‘Yes, because to Jojo, Elsa was the scariest thing he could find within the walls of his home.’ But we wanted to be delicate and not insinuate that she was a monster. It needed to be from the point of view of a little boy.”

After the panel concluded, nominees and guests attended an MPEG-hosted lunch at Hollywood restaurant Liaison, where the Guild’s National Executive Director Cathy Repola made welcome remarks. Congratulations to all the nominees and thanks to sponsors Adobe, Avid, MPEG and NAB for their generous support of the IAVA program.