When Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story debuted in December, his longtime editor Michael Kahn, ACE,
was once again joined by Sarah Broshar, who grew up in a small town in Michigan where her experience of movies was much like anyone else. “We had Sunday night movies with popcorn and milkshakes at home,” she says. “I loved movies but I wasn’t really thinking about them as a career.”

Instead, she planned on going into magazine or newspaper journalism. That was before she went to a summer camp on music video production ahead of her senior year at high school.

“When I arrived at camp everyone was saying they wanted to bethe director or the producer but I didn’t know what those things were so they made me the editor. By the end of the two weeks all I knew was that I loved filmmaking. It was so much fun!”

The experience helped her conclude that she didn’t particularly like writing, a realization that prompted her to apply to film school. At Northwestern University she majored in film and following a year out teaching English in Japan, Broshar entered AFI expressly to learn editing.

“I was lucky to have such good teachers and mentors at Northwestern and the AFI including Howard Smith (Point Break) and Farrel Levy (NYPD Blue),” she says.

After her first year at the AFI, Broshar managed to get an internship with Sabrina Plisco, ACE, who was cutting 2004’s Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. “It was such a cool experience. I got to sit in on meetings and watch and ask lots of questions,” she remembers.

On graduation she landed a job editing promos for TV shows at Fox. “After six months or so I got an email from Sabrina saying she had linked me up with another producer who was looking for an intern for Kahn on the feature 10 Items or Less. I was like ‘yes!’ That is exactly what I want to do. So I did the internship 9 to 5 during the day and continued to go work at Fox during nights.”

Broshar became an assistant editor for Kahn on The Spiderwick Chronicles (2008) and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010) and with David Brenner, ACE, and Wyatt Smith, ACE, on Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides before teaming with Kahn once again on The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn (2011) – marking the first time she had worked with Steven Spielberg. “I was hired on that movie to run the Avid for them.”

Under their tutelage, Broshar graduated from assistant editor on War Horse (2011) and Lincoln (2012) to additional editor on Bridge of Spies (2015) and The BFG (2016). “In the early days there was naturally a lot of being told what to do and pressing the buttons but as I got more confident Michael would ask me to take a scene to cut.

As an assistant, if I had an idea, I’d suggest it to Michael and he would decide whether to take it to Steven. Now I feel very comfortable sharing ideas with Michael and Steven because we do most of the work together as a team,” she relates. “We don’t ever say ‘his scene’ or ‘my scene.’ If, all a sudden, we’re really slammed for time we might both take a different scene and do it separately but we always come back and look at things together.”

Of course, that doesn’t mean they always agree. “Sometimeswe have differing opinions but we’re not competitive, we’re not butting heads,” Broshar says. “There’s a value in having two people’s opinions. We decide together which version we showto Steven and ultimately, of course, it is his decision.”

In 2009 director Joe Leonard invited her to cut the feature How I Got Lost (2009) earning her first solo credit. That was followed by The Last Survivors (2014) before Broshar shared film editing credit with Kahn on Spielberg’s latest films, The Post (2017), Ready Player One (2018) and now West Side Story.

“Sometimes it is hard to get your head around what someone wants and whether something will work or not but by trusting their creative instinct and trying to execute it to the best of your ability you begin to intuit what is in another person’s mind. That’s been a really valuable lesson,” she says of learning from Kahn.

Another longstanding member of Spielberg’s editorial team is associate editor Patrick Crane, who has worked with the director on all his movies since E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. On West Side Story, they were ably assisted by Nicholas Lundgren, Kevin Birou and Andrey Ragozin. “They prepped dailies and synced everything up and they are extraordinarily professional. While some of the vocals were live, usually there would be a pre-recorded orchestra track which needed organizing. Typically, Michael and I watch dailies together with Steven. He’d pick his preferred takes, tell us what he has in mind, and we take it from there.”

Broshar says she rewatched the original 1961 film version directed by Robert Wise “just for fun” and also some other musicals purely for enjoyment rather than as any particular reference. “With Steven we really like to start fresh with the dailies and just work from what we see on the Avid.”

Her favorite scene to cut was ‘One Hand One Heart’ in which Tony and Maria pledge their love in the Cloisters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Every single time I watched that I would cry. Every single time. We’d listened to the music a lot beforehand but when we saw the dailies and the performances it really felt like the meaning of the lyrics popped out so much more. It was fantastic.”

Other favorite musical numbers included ‘America’ and the ‘Tonight Quintet.’ “Those numbers were both shot over severalmonths, so we’d get a  little piece here and another there and layit in with some black frames for VFX. That was really fun to see  come together.”

There was some inevitable COVID-related disruption. “We were about to start the final mix when we all had to shut down for a couple months and finish remotely from home. I was pregnant at the time so it was a little bit strange coming back to the office after several months of not seeing everybody and they were like, ‘Wow, you’ve had a baby!’”

Broshar is currently editing Spielberg’s next movie, TheFabelmans. “I feel incredibly lucky,” she says. “I love all sorts of different movies for all sorts of reasons whether that’s comedy or action or something that’s going to make me cry but mostly I just like being lost in a different world.”