Editor Matt Chessé is having quite a year. He earned his first Academy Award nomination and American Cinema Editors (ACE) nod this year for editing Finding Neverland, and he cut Neverland director Marc Forester’s next film, Stay. Currently on a break from feature work, he is available for commercials through bicoastal/international Cut + Run. Meanwhile he is preparing to deliver a keynote on editing at the upcoming National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Convention (see separate story p. 1).
Last week, Chessé and I took a break in Santa Monica. He was winding down production on Stay, which has production offices on Main Street; we go around the corner to a relaxed little café that looks more like a library with its stacks of books. Chessé examines everything, carefully selecting tea and an almond cookie that was “aesthetically pleasing” with its powered sugar design.
He lights up when asked about the Academy Awards; he tells me how beautiful his wife looked, and how he kept an eye on the red carpet to be sure to avoid stepping on movie stars’ gowns–advice that he got from some friends at Skywalker Ranch, Sa Rafael, Calif. He took in the whole experience–from the Governor’s Ball to the Vanity Fair party.
Chessé had just been back East for the opening of Cut + Run’s New York office, and he relates how exciting it was talk to the agency clients about Finding Neverland, the story of J.M. Barrie’s friendship with a family who inspired him to create Peter Pan; the film moved a lot of people, he enthuses.
He looks forward to doing commercials, where his roots are–he starting editing at the now-shuttered West Coast office of Crew Cuts, New York. Among his numerous spot credits are ads for clients such as Visa and Charles Schwab.
Chessé is passionate about both long and short form work. He likens an editor in both disciplines to an athlete who plays two different sports–“You’re still an athlete, you just use different muscles.”
Among the techniques he has brought from the commercial to feature world is the ability to compress time. It may not be a :30, but in features you still need to figure out how to lose time, Chessé related. “You look for redundancies,” he explains. “Maybe you already said what you needed to, and you are just winding down. That keeps people interested in the story.
“I’m lucky that I came from commercials and know what that world feels like,” he continues. “Both are really fulfilling. I’m thankful–I couldn’t have done one without the other.”
These are among the topics that Chessé plans to discuss at NAB. He emphasizes that he wants to stray from the tech talk at the show, and focus on the creative–including what he describes as personal style versus movie style. “You are expected to have a style,” he explains, “but the material dictates the style; you don’t want to push the material to a place that isn’t right.”
For instance, one will see a departure from the classical style of Finding Neverland in Chessé’s work on the upcoming Stay, a film about a physiatrist who tries to unravel a mystery surrounding a troubled patient. The editor describes his latest film as more experimental, relating that Forester wanted the pace to accelerate, becoming disarming.
Later this year he will embark on another Forster feature titled Stranger Than Fiction; his work with the director has also included Monster’s Ball.
At NAB, he plans to show clips from some of the films that he cut for Forester, as well as indie film Ellie Parker, a feature based on a short of the same name that debuted at Sundance in 2001, featuring a then little-known Naomi Watts. Director Scott Coffey and Chessé collaborated on the film as producers. At press time, they were waiting for news from the festival circuit. Chessé is grateful for the opportunities that he has had. He relates that editors can sometimes be identified only for one particular style, and he believes that he sidestepped that situation thanks to Forester’s choices. ‘I’ve taken a cue from Marc, who doesn’t allow himself to be pigeonholed,’ notes Chessé. “That’s smart.”
