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Posted: Sun Jan 13th, 2008 12:13 pm |
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Edit A Film
There are two different sides to editing. On one hand there are the various issues that arise from thinking about the technical process of putting the pictures and sound together, on the other there is the larger but perhaps simpler issue of putting together the story. A good example of this duality is Guy Ritchie's abomination "Snatch" which contains some nice examples of the technical process of creating feeling and mood through the juxtaposition of pictures and sound and shows how it is possible to create an emotion simply through altering the pace of the cutting. It is also a load of gibberish which, when viewed as a whole piece of narrative fiction, produced in most right thinking people nothing save a feeling of bilious hatred. There is a rather nice story that there was a cut of this film which made much more sense, however Guy and his friends destroyed it accidentally one night whilst recutting the original 35mm negative in a state of intoxication and the resulting nonsense that made it into the cinema was the editors desperate attempt to construct a story out of the remnants. I have no idea if this story is true and it may well be total hearsay, however I hope it is true because it would at least give some sort of justification for the film.
Another, still possibly apocrful, story that demonstrates the way in which these two sides of the editor's job can sometimes come together powerfully is that of Francis Ford Coppola's film "The Conversation". The story goes that after shooting a radically different story to the one that eventually made into cinemas Francis was offered the Godfather and left his Editor , the Genius Walter Mersch, to put the thing together largely in his absence. There were some big big problems with what the big FFC had shot and Mersch ended up getting hung up on a particular sequence with two characters discussing a murder. There was a take in which one actor delievered the line wrong, putting the stress in the wrong place and changing the meaning. Walter is supposed to have used this take and recut the entire film to tell an entirely different story. The confusion that Gene Hackman's character feels about what is actually going on is, something which drives the story and makes the film so fascinating is, apparently, entirely Mersch's invention and something that grew up entirely in the edit suite.
Just to complete the sense of being surrounded by the film makers equivilent of a gossipy bunch of mums waiting at the school gate I'll add that apparently the Full Monty was originally intended to be a much more serious film than it ended up and it was only when this wasn't working that it was recut with an accent on silliness and comedy.
I have no idea if any of this is true but I can well believe it. Partly because I'm gullable but mainly because I've seen the power of the edit at first hand. All film making is about telling lies however it is in the edit that this process becomes most exaggerated. For starters it is quite incredable what you can get away with. We shot "Free Speech" in a series of long takes, running the script from start to finish each time. We did this because it felt like the best way of getting the relaxed and naturalistic performances we were after and also because, wit h both characters basically lying still in a bath, continuity was less of a problem. There is, however, a moment towards the end of the film where, well, it doesn't cut. We've gone from a moving shot to a static one of roughly the same size and the performances are right but both Danny and Jacquie are moving and doing so at different speeds and, well, if you watch carefully it's a jump cut and it should be messy and ugly. To get it to work we even had to take out a line of dialouge so you can actually see Jacquie's lips move and say nothing. But no one has ever noticed it. The story and the edit both throw the focus of the eye onto Danny. His movement cuts and that pulls you through it - you just don't see the jump in Jacquie in much the same way that you don't see the black between the frames of a strip of a film when it spins past your eyes at twenty-five frames a second.
The whole process of film making is about kidding the eye and thus kidding the mind. That's the joy of editing, a nice edit is, in many ways, like a good card trick. Two pieces of motion filmed sometimes days apart are placed side by side and they look like one event. We shot "Burnt Bernard" very badly and whilst the live performances had been very funny the first cut was very very flat. We'd not picked up any reactions and so when something squrimy and embarrassing happened there was no sense of how squirmy and embarrassing it was. Luckily, shooting on video, we had lots of reactions in the rushes because we'd generally just left the camera running all day. Most of the reaction shots in the film come from between takes when we're talking to the cast. There's a superb a shot of Simon filling his wine glass whilst clearly thinking "wanker". This is cut into the film to make it look like his character is dismissing one of the others and it works a treat, but the truth was I'd just wrongly pulled him up on his delivery of a line and the bile in the look was directed at me.
Once you've seen how a change in pace, rhythm or focus can utterly change the meaning and understanding of a scene the stories at the start of this page start becoming all the more believable. The process of fooling the audience into seeing what isn't there is a vital part of the story telling process and we have learnt more about writing and directing from editing than anything else. Editing a film shows you that in order for the audience to be emotionally engauged with a certain persons view point they need to be shown how that person is feeling. If there's something in the scene that you want to bury, information that you need to tell them without really wanting them to take on board, then, again like a card trick, you distract them by cutting the scene to focus on something or someone else. This is a narrative trick that works just as well in a screenplay, or at least it does as long as it isn't over used. In most TV crime drama's it's quite easy to see who the bad guy is because they tend to be the character who is introduced at the start as a nice person and then disappears from view for no readily apparent reason for most of the story.
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