While David Fincher made Directors Guild of America (DGA) Awards history by recently garnering nominations in both the feature and commercial categories in the same year, there were a couple of editors reveling in that accomplishment in that they had a hand in the short and long of that Guild-recognized work.
Fincher of course earned the dual DGA honors for his feature The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and for three spots: Nike’s “Fate” via Wieden+Kennedy, Portland, Ore.; Stand Up To Cancer’s “Stand Up For Something” out of Laura Ziskin Productions, Los Angeles; and Apple’s “Hallway” from TBWAMedia Arts Lab, Los Angeles. Fincher directs commercials via bicoastal production house Anonymous Content.
Editors Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter teamed to cut The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, with Wall also editing “Fate” and Baxter “Stand Up For Something” and “Hallway.”
And talk about crossing over on a grand scale–at press time Wall and Baxter had earned a best editing Oscar nomination for Benjamin Button. SHOOT caught up with the two editors–whose post roost is Santa Monica-based Rock Paper Scissors–to gain their insights into and reflections on Button as well as collaborating with Fincher.
On the latter score, Baxter related, “I’ve found it incredibly simple to work with David. He’s very clear, very helpful yet is always there if you stray off the path. He will talk to me about a scene as if I’m an actor who’s going to go out and perform it. He will talk about it in an ethereal way, keeping things loose so we can consider and then use the right building blocks. As things start to form, he gets even more useful and specific to help each artist with his specific craft. You very much want to please David. You try to do things proactively to help him since he has such a great understanding of how to give you freedom and help you at the same time.”
Editor Wall observed, “David understands that the nondestructive aspect of the process is post. In production you can have the figurative gun to your head to get stuff done, It can be a pressure cooker. But in editorial you can stretch out and see what is right for the piece. David is the easiest guy to work with. Editorially he’s very clear, open and collaborative. He’s a fantastic director who can give you the big picture while also commenting on how the reading of a single syllable should sound in someone’s performance. Obviously he is going to give you all the pieces you need to put a scene together. As an editor, you just try to take it that five percent further to make the work even better.”
Wall added that his experience on Button “highlighted the fact that the creation of pictures doesn’t end with photography. Post is such a fascinating place to be because it is increasingly where pictures are being made, not just being put into a format for people can see. Image making continues throughout postproduction. The top directors understand this–that images are going to be part photography and part animation. So many creative possibilities are inherent in this approach.”
Baxter noted that “while David keeps it simple and allows us to go off and edit, he also brings others in to help us so that we all collaborate on certain scenes. Angus and I edited scenes separately but we also collaborated on other scenes. Sometimes movies are divided in half like in The Godfather I understand one editor’s work ended and another’s began at a certain point. But with David it’s an organic experience for some scenes–we’re sending material back and forth, there’s sort of a group effort involved. There was a dinner scene in the movie where Cate [Blanchett] is wearing a red dress and is out to dinner with Brad [Pitt] who had just come back from the war and is moving a lot slower. By contrast she’s moving and living life a hundred miles an hour. I assembled the scene to a rough piece of music. Angus took a crack at it later but turned the flow into dissolves. He showed it to me and I thought that was twice as good as what I had done. We then worked to continue to refine that. Based on our changes, David got Cate to re-read the voice faster to fit the pacing. We laid the new voice to the scene and it moved twenty percent faster. We trimmed the scene down and tightened it up. [Sound designer] Ren Klyce [whose spot roost is his own Mit Out Sound in Sausalito, Calif.] refined the music. We went into DI and changed the whole section of the dissolves to make sure there was no ugliness in them. Claudio [cinematographer Miranda] monitored this as well. When you think of how many hands touched that one pure scene to make it just right–with David all the while running up and down the sidelines as the coach or referee, it was a wonderful collaborative experience.”
Wall said that he and Baxter “leaned on Ren heavily. Ren helped us all the way through [Button] in terms of rough mixes, music from New Orleans that kept in time with scenes. Way before composers came in, Ren was there finding the right palette of sound to help drive our work. David and Ren have known each other since their late teens. There’s a trusting creative bond there.”
Trust came in handy all the way around as Button, while gratifying to work on, was also a daunting experience given the sheer size and scope of the project. Major contributions were made by such visual effects studios as Asylum [tugboat scenes], Digital Domain [Benjamin Button’s face] and Lola [“youth’n’izing” actors], among others. “You don’t ever want to look at the top of the peak of the giant mountain when you’re climbing it,” said Wall. “You learn to watch your feet and that’s what we did on this film…David used to ask the question, ‘How do you eat a whale?’ The answer–‘one bite at a time.’ So we just worked long and hard each day. And part of what kept us going was that the film was so well written and the project was so challenging. We would feed off of that.”
Baxter and Wall added, though, that the challenge wasn’t added to unnecessarily. “We didn’t get caught up in the aging process being in reverse for the lead character,” related Wall. “Even though that’s a departure from the norm, it’s still a very linear story. That’s one of the aspects that’s interesting about the movie. It doesn’t make a huge deal about Benjamin’s predicament. The movie treats him as an everyman who just happens to be aging the other way. That’s the approach David took for the film. It’s an approach that brought realism to the story.”
Debt of gratitude Wall met Fincher in 1998 back during their days together at Propaganda. “I was the vault guy and he generously give me a commercial to edit,” recalled Wall. “Originally Jim Haygood was supposed to edit it but he had to leave for a family emergency. So I got the chance.”
The commercial was “Mr. Robinson’s Neighborhood” [featuring basketball star David Robinson] for Nike and it helped to launch Wall’s career as an editor. “I owe David a huge amount for the opportunities he’s given me.”
Those opportunities span assorted spots, including some memorable Nike fare, as well as the Fincher-directed features Panic Room (which he and Haygood edited) and Zodiac. Wall also was an editorial consultant on Fincher’s Fight Club (edited by Haygood).
Baxter doesn’t have quite as long a history with Fincher as Wall, but the collaborations have been notable, the first feature being Zodiac for which Baxter did some cutting before landing the full-fledged editorial gig with Wall on Button. And the commercials Baxter cut for Fincher along the way include the earlier alluded to “Stand Up For Something” as well as the new Apple iPhone launch.
Asked to compare cutting features as opposed to commercials, Baxter assessed, “Commercials are harder from my experience. They’re constantly underestimated in terms of how hard they are to put together.”
Meanwhile Wall observed, “With commercials you know when you’re done. You can work on a movie seemingly forever. The quantity of work on a movie is so that you have to make good choices all along the way. You’re building a skyscraper and if you make a mistake in the construction, you’re dead. Movies live and die by everyday decisions.”
Wall also finds a greater connection with characters in feature films. “You build a relationship with the characters which you don’t really get in commercials. There’s a depth to personalities that you rarely get in commercials. Sometimes you can get that on a music video. You can end up falling in love with characters.”
Another difference between spots and features, continued Wall, is that “people are so polite in offering their opinions on commercials. That’s not always the case in features. And in a way it’s nice to hear from people who can be brutally honest about the work but not get personal. It’s purely about what’s best for the work. People don’t beat around the bush, they’re very direct and that kind of feedback can be very useful.”
In that vein, Baxter said at one point he and Wall “toyed” with the idea of removing the hummingbird from the end of Button. “Ren let us know that wasn’t a good idea. He came a few degrees short of abusing me about the idea of losing the hummingbird. But what he said was all good. It was all about making the work the best it could be.”
Wall affirmed, “I have no problem with Ren ringing and telling me his opinion. I think that’s part of my not feeling like the movie is mine. You get your mind in that place where this isn’t for yourself, it’s to help David realize his art and vision. You’re always the rubber man at the ready, poised to re-do whatever needs to be done to make the film great.”
Review: Director Jon M. Chu’s “Wicked”
It's the ultimate celebrity redemption tour, two decades in the making. In the annals of pop culture, few characters have undergone an image makeover quite like the Wicked Witch of the West.
Oh, she may have been vengeful and scary in "The Wizard of Oz." But something changed — like, REALLY changed — on the way from the yellow brick road to the Great White Way. Since 2003, crowds have packed nightly into "Wicked" at Broadway's Gershwin Theatre to cheer as the green-skinned, misunderstood Elphaba rises up on her broomstick to belt "Defying Gravity," that enduring girl-power anthem.
How many people have seen "Wicked"? Rudimentary math suggests more than 15 million on Broadway alone. And now we have "Wicked" the movie, director Jon M. Chu's lavish, faithful, impeccably crafted (and nearly three-hour) ode to this origin story of Elphaba and her (eventual) bestie — Glinda, the very good and very blonde. Welcome to Hollywood, ladies.
Before we get to what this movie does well (Those big numbers! Those costumes!), just a couple thornier issues to ponder. Will this "Wicked," powered by a soulful Cynthia Erivo (owner of one of the best singing voices on the planet) and a sprightly, comedic, hair-tossing Ariana Grande, turn even musical theater haters into lovers?
Tricky question. Some people just don't buy into the musical thing, and they should be allowed to live freely amongst us. But if people breaking into song delights rather than flummoxes you, if elaborate dance numbers in village squares and fantastical nightclubs and emerald-hued cities make perfect sense to you, and especially if you already love "Wicked," well then, you will likely love this film. If it feels like they made the best "Wicked" movie money could buy — well, it's... Read More