While White Lightnin’, which premiered at this month’s Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, marked the feature directorial debut of noted spot helmer Dominic Murphy of bicoastal/international Partizan, the dramatic film enjoyed the benefit of an artisan with feature and commercial experience, editor Sam Sneade whose European and American roosts are, respectively, Speade, London, and Beast, bicoastal and Dallas.
Meanwhile also making his editorial mark at the 2009 Sundance Fest was Cary Gries who cuts commercials via Griot Editorial in the Detroit market, and Red Car throughout the rest of the U.S. Gries edited the offbeat comedy Manure, a Sundance Premieres presentation directed by Michael Polish (who wrote the film with his brother Mark Polish).
Then there’s editor Kim Bica, who has partnered in the recently launched edit house Arcade in Santa Monica. Bica, formerly of Lost Planet, edited The Kinda Sutra, a Sundance short directed by documentary/spot filmmaker Jessica Yu of bicoastal Nonfiction Unlimited.
SHOOT gained insights from this trio of ’09 Sundance editors on their projects as well as reflections on crossing over from one filmmaking discipline to another.
Sneade Sam Sneade is no stranger to crossing over. He had a re-cutting hand for instance in Sexy Beast, the feature filmmaking debut of lauded spot director Jonathan Glazer. Sneade later edited Glazer’s Birth which starred Nicole Kidman, and then Stoned, a British rock bio which was the first movie directed by film industry entrepreneur Stephen Woolley. Prior to embarking on White Lightnin, Sneade cut the Spanish Arabic drama Arritmia, a.k.a. Guantanamo Bay, for helmer Vincente Penarrocha.
Sneade received a call out of the blue from Dominic Murphy about editing White Lightnin’. The two had worked together some 10 years ago on various commercials. “Dominic knew me from commercials and I guess gravitated towards me for this film based on my experience editing features,” related Sneade. “The way White Lightnin’ was pitched to me was as a true story of a schizophrenic hillbilly mountain dancer who is tormented by thoughts of revenge for the murder of his father. How could I resist that? Actually the story is extraordinary and that coupled with Dominic being one of the brightest guys I’ve ever met drew me to the project.”
The film stars newcomer Edward Hogg playing opposite Carrie Fisher, making for what Sneade described as “an interesting May to September romance.” As for the biggest challenge he faced as an editor on this project, Sneade related, “Like most films, the challenge is to get the narrative flowing in a watchable and engaging way, to pull the viewer through the story to a kind of logical conclusion. This story makes sense within its own world, meaning the editing challenge was to give structural integrity to the crazy world within the film. And then there are the levels of giving the plot plausibility through the editing while at the same time leaving room for doubt. Is this main character telling us the truth? Is he lying? And of course the third major level of the challenge is to keep the film entertaining.”
The working arrangement with Murphy proved stimulating, according to Sneade. “Dominic can be quite a formidable editor in his own right and at one point in time we were communicating digitally. We were each inhabiting separate cutting rooms, simultaneously doing our own selects. We are communicating via Avid rather than his being in the room looking over my shoulder. And our work came together in a sense, with two pairs of eyes looking at everything, both parties bringing something to the table. If I missed something or he did, I could choose what worked best and edit accordingly.”
Sneade has found his commercial editing experience, which dates back to the late 1980s, as invaluable to his occasional feature endeavors. “There’s a plastic nature to commercials where you can mold and shape things, take bits from everything to make a greater whole,” said Sneade. “That made me able to treat a film like Sexy Beast [released in 2000], for example, in that same way which helped greatly in the editing.”
Sneade also hearkened back to his earlier spot days cutting for director Tony Kaye. “At times there was no real script,” recalled Sneade. “There was footage from which you could write your own idea half the time. That sort of freedom to improvise, which commercials teach you, was a great learning experience when you get into features and hit problems.”
Sneade’s earlier ad collaborations with Murphy include work for Sony, Caffrey’s beer, and a BBC spot encouraging people to acquire computer skills. Among Sneade’s other notable credits was an American Express commercial featuring Kate Winslet.
As for how his feature experience has informed his work in commercials, Sneade observed, “I’m not altogether sure. I’d say the discipline of a narrative in features teaches you to respect the discipline of the idea behind a lot of commercials. Does this idea make sense and are we exhibiting the idea in the best possible way? It’s not just a case of flash, whiz, bang, wallop in thirty seconds. At the end of the day it is all about communicating something in a commercial, doing justice to the idea.”
Gries Cary Gries has known feature director/writer Michael Polish and writer/actor Mark Polish for some 15 years, before the brothers had ever made a film. Gries met the duo through his brother, Jon Gries, who lived two doors down from them in Hollywood. Jon Gries has gone on to act in several Polish brothers films over the years, including Twin Falls, Idaho and Northfork, The Astronaut Farmer and Manure.
But it wasn’t until recently that Cary Gries had occasion to collaborate professionally with the Polish brothers, getting hired to cut Stay Cool, a comedy that’s cut from the John Hughes filmmaking cloth. Cool, though, become hotter when an editor the brothers secured for another movie, Manure, had to leave that project. Suddenly Gries was offered Manure as well, giving him a pair of Polish brothers’ features to edit pretty much back to back (with some concurrent work as well).
Making this dual duty much simpler, said editor Gries, was that he found himself “on the same wavelength as the brothers. We hit it off immediately. I had always gotten what they were doing, I love their work and sensibilities. It’s intelligent comedy with a mix of sophisticated drama, balancing both to convey a poignancy while keeping the humor flowing. And because they were working on two films, they let go and gave me the freedom to work. Right after Manure, they went on to the next movie. They felt comfortable going on to the next film trusting that I would do well by the work they had already finished…By the time they came back after shooting both features, I had three versions or variations of Manure for them to consider.”
Manure stars Billy Bob Thornton, Tea Leoni and Kyle MacLachlan. Leoni plays Rosemary, the estranged daughter of the just dearly departed Mr. Rose, the mastermind behind Rose’s Manure Company. Rosemary is in line to take over the family business but is unaware of a plan for an unfriendly company takeover by a ruthless fertilizer rep (MacLachlan). Whether she likes it or not, Rose must trust her top salesman Patrick Fitzpatrick (portrayed by Thornton) to save the day.
Manure was shot almost entirely on stage, recreating the Kansas farmbelt. “There were maybe three exterior shots in the whole film,” said Gries. “But the biggest challenge was on a technical level because the movie was shot on the Red camera. To some degree it felt like we were beta test participants. There were scenes for instance where we had guys falling out of the sky wearing parachutes. When panning or tilting a Red camera, it makes it difficult to do the cable removal we needed to do on those chutes. So there were things like that to figure out all along the way.”
Manure and Stay Cool are the sixth and seventh features cut by Gries, but they are the first to gain major theater play. He started his career cutting documentaries before diversifying into music videos. Then in the late 1980s, Gries moved into music video and spot directing. “I had tired of editing but then Avid and nonlinear came along and I fell back in love with editing,” he recalled. “So when I moved back into editing, I added commercials to my repertoire since I had been directing commercials.”
Gries’ spot editing credits span such clients as Dodge, an international Scrabble campaign (which was out of Y&R in Irvine, Calif.) and a classic Budweiser Clydesdales commercial, “Champion,” directed by Geoffrey Barish for the 1996 Summer Olympics. Gries cut “Champion” out of the former edit house Superior Assembly.
Gries’ work has also encompassed television programs, including Emmy-nominated efforts for the series Real People and the special Rowan & Martin’s Laugh In: 25th Anniversary Reunion.
As for what he thinks Manure and Stay Cool will enable him to bring back to his ongoing spot editing pursuits, Gries related, “I hope it will enable people to see that I have comedy chops, that there’s a larger range to what I can do. Much of my work in commercials has been of the visual anthem variety, which is great. But I believe anyone who can cut well can cut anything. So I would like my work for the Polish brothers to translate into more dialogue and an even greater range in the opportunities presented to me for commercials.”
Bica While she was still at Lost Planet, Kim Bica (who has since become partnered in edit house Arcade) cut The Kinda Sutra, which was selected for screening at Sundance in the U.S. documentary shorts category. The film was directed by Jessica Yu, an Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker for Breathing Lessons in ’97, and who has debuted such feature-length work at Sundance as The Living Museum (’99), In The Realms of the Unreal (’04) and Protagonist (’07).
The Kinda Sutra shows various people remembering back when they were kids how they thought babies were born. The short combines documentary interviews with charming Karma Sutra-inspired animation.
Being a long-time admirer of Yu’s work, Bica–whose high-profile spot credits include Nike and American Express–jumped at the opportunity to cut the short. The editor described the best part of the project from a personal standpoint as “meeting and working with Jessica. She is a really smart filmmaker, very decisive and very clear on what she wants to do with her film.”
After their initial meeting to discuss The Kinda Sutra, Yu had to go out of town on another shoot. “So I started cutting on my own,” said Bica, “and we discussed the work every evening after her shoot. Because the animation was not done yet, I had to imagine what would happen as each person was telling their story. I used sound to help me time it out and depict what was happening. For example, one guy believed that when women went swimming, little pollywogs would swim into the woman and make her pregnant, so you can imagine how that could be depicted. We refined at each stage of the animation and Jessica and I only worked together twice to finish it off. But even though we had so little face time, I was so impressed with Jessica and what a smart filmmaker she is…She found really interesting stories but ones that everyone can relate to. This a subject matter that everyone can participate in as a viewer, very smart.”
Yu said that Bica “naturally understood how the film was going to work–the humor and the tone, that there is poignancy in the fact that all of these adults were slightly confused kids (or in some cases, adolescents) at one time…The second thing is the pacing. Because Kim works in spots, she has a sense of how to keep the story moving.”
Noting that she was on another shoot during the rough cut stage which facilitated her and Bica sharing cuts back and forth and providing feedback, Yu related, “I trusted her to be able to interpret everything.”
Of working in the short film format, Yu added, “The nice thing about a short is that you have the freedom to make something the length you feel it needs to be. That was a fun thing to play with; you don’t have the restrictions that you might with specific broadcast limitations. I think we both felt that the version clocking in right around eight minutes felt right.”
Promos
Bica’s former Lost Planet colleagues also made their mark at Sundance. To help commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Sundance Festival, editors Jennifer Dean, Bruce Herrman and Tyler Temple-Higgins of Lost Planet created montages that highlighted filmmakers who were able to use Sundance as a platform to launch their now flourishing careers. Noted editor Hank Corwin, founder of Lost Planet, oversaw the cutting of each film, with company editors Jesse Haas and Josh Schaeffer contributing to the overall Sundance project.
These promos ran before every screening during the entire run of the festival from January 15-25.
