CinemaEditor
featured in Cinema Editor magazine Awards issue Fall 2016
Following the thriller Sicario and before beginning the Blade Runner sequel (as yet untitled) director Denis Villeneuve and editor Joe Walker ACE teamed for Paramount Pictures' Arrival.
An adaptation of a Ted Chiang short story, scripted by Eric Heisserer, the thriller takes place after multiple mysterious spacecraft land around the world. An elite team is recruited by the military to investigate, including linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) and mathematician Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) to determine whether they come in peace or are a threat. As Banks learns to communicate with the extraterrestrials, who possess a bizarre verbal and visual language, she begins experiencing vivid flashbacks that become the key to unlocking the greater mystery about the true purpose of their visit.
Walker first learnt of the project in the Sicario cutting room. “That's always an interesting way into a film – you just overhear snippets of conversation, like whether or not something should have eyes. Those kind of massive design concepts were bubbling up in the background of a show about drug cartels.”
Walker would have been more than happy to sign on to any Villeneuve shoot but the script, originally called 'Story of your life' as per Chiang's novella, was a big draw.
“For me, the key concept in this story is that of time, and that's an obsession of mine. As editors we have a superpower to bend and distort time. Not even Shakespeare used flashbacks, but editors have the power to play with the flashback structure and in this film I felt I was very free. Anything could be in any order.”
Reacting to the story and Villeneuve's' vision for it, Walker describes it as an “art film masquerading with Hollywood surface”. “It is intelligent sci-fi in that the science fiction is used as a terrific way to engage people with the story but the substance itself is more profound than that,” he says.
“That there is a strong female role was another draw for me,” he says. “Everything is based around Amy Adams, the whole film is dominated by her viewpoint.
“The film is, on one level, about a woman gabbling with the horrendously difficult task of talking an alien language against the backdrop of a world falling apart with paranoia and fear, but at the same time she's grappling with her own inner tragedy related to a daughter - so the film is also about grief,” he elaborates.
“At the same time, there is a psychological discussion about language and how learning a language affects us. It's an idea that intrigues me. For example, when someone who doesn't speak the native language arrives and works in a country after a while I wonder what happens as they learn the local language. What language do they dream or swear or think in? Language is an expression of character and in this film the encounter with another culture seems to expose our own unconscious attitudes and emotions to events around us and to shape events in our past or those to come.”
While the production shot for three months from June 2015 in Montreal, Walker worked at cutting rooms in Burbank, maintaining the remote working relationship with Villeneuve that they'd established on Sicario (though for the Blade Runner sequel Walker is located with Villeneuve and the production in Budapest). Joe this piece comes out in end October so mentioning Budapest I hope is ok).
“I'd send Denis QuickTimes and early cuts and we exchanged feedback every day. I might call for something I feel wasn't there and more often than not he will tell me he's already shot it or has it planned in.
“He's a master of being able to drop a thought bomb into a conversation or indicate a mood or atmosphere without feeling being dictated to,” says Walker of his relationship with the Canadian. “That's the healthiest kind of relationship – a director who gives you a nudge of the intention he wants to go in but leaves you free to interpret and craft.”
At the first production's first assembly screening in Montreal, Villeneuve suggested that editorial needed to think of the story like a documentary – to find the film from somewhere inside the footage. “He felt like the best way to serve the story was to embrace the nonlinear way in which learning a language alters the main character's perception of time,” explains Walker.
That's not to say there was a high shoot ratio. On the contrary, the shoot was for the most part shot single camera on ARRI Alexa.
“Denis is a bit looser as a director than someone like Steve McQueen (the director of Hunger, Shame and 12 Years a Slave, all shows edited by Walker - the latter gaining him an Academy Award nomination) but he is still very economical,” observes Walker. “He likes to manipulate the story in the cutting room and to give me lots of options but this stems from rigorous preparation. He preps with a storyboard artist and art department in quite a bit of detail so that when he's on set he is free to abandon it. Everyone knows what the vision is because it's been worked through, but on the day he is very free with the actors. That follows through to the edit where we are trying to find the essence of the scene and lift the story off the page.”
One of the key images, for Walker, is of Amy walking through a meadow plagued by grief while the giant black granite egg of the alien ship lurks in the background. “Her hair is blowing in the wind, the atmosphere is super mysterious and there this death-like figure imposing on the frame,” describes Walker.
Bradford Young ASC opted to shoot predominantly with a shallow depth of field to put the background out of focus “as if shot through a mist,” says Walker. “Even on close-ups of an actors' face, their shoulders and nose would be in focus but the back of head is out of focus.
“This means that in the edit you are better able to direct the audience's attention where you want it – usually on the characters and performance – but this cinematography choice is unusual in a visual effects picture where the images are typically driven by the visual effects companies and are very sharp. We wanted a more mysterious look, a more imaginative feel.”
The vfx workflow itself meant an extended postproduction period which only ended the day before final delivery when the last vfx shot was dropped in. “When we began editing there was a lot of green screen to fill up, not only of the aliens but also various TV monitors waiting material to fill them and used that to show that in the wider world of the story there's rising political and military tension as background to our intimate encounter.”
Canadian vfx shop Hybride did the heavy lifting on the project including the creation of the aliens. Oblique added the spaceship and additional elements like helicopters while Rodeo FX was tasked with the gravity walk material inside the spaceship. “Framestore came in towards the end to help us with designing the spaceships’ in motion - they did some great work,” adds Walker. A variety of smaller companies like Renault and Alchemy worked on TV monitors, matte shots and little fixes.
Walker worked initially with the concept art and by first assembly editorial had previs animations to approximate an idea of where things were placed. “Over the course of postproduction the degree of mist, the alien's translucency, its specular movement, the texture and dimension to it, how much it was quivering and a dozen other variables all changed, but the length of each shot didn't alter for the most part from our editorial decisions made about three weeks in,” he says.
“We had to work this out really quickly and live with those choices and make it work. “For me, working with vfx has been a learning process working on what to be patient about. It was less like a conventional film more like a continual shoot.”
In any case, Walker was more interested in finding the quietness of the story and swerved away from flashy space hardware. “A main challenge was to find a way to realise a scene without key alien characters being present (their movements were tracked on set by actors wearing latex costume and carrying poles with tennis ball-like tracking markers on them, Walker describes). “I had to find a way of expressing what they are like without being Disney,” he says.
To help, Walker brought in sound designer Dave Whitehead whose work on District 9 had impressed the editor. “We sent him a rudimentary cut 3-4 weeks into post and the previz animations and 3D concept art of the 'heptapods' and he and partner Shell Child created an incredible vocal sound and speech pattern for them. That enabled me to open up the cut a little bit. In the story these beings are meant to make a noise that no human can emulate and there was very little in the script to guide us, but their work gave us the key to be able to unlock their character.” (Nb there’s a viral site where you can hear a lot of these sounds but listen with good headphones – HYPERLINK "http://www.whyaretheyhere.com/"http://www.whyaretheyhere.com/).
Walker, whose career began in the sound department, also credits the Montreal dubbing team of Sylvain Bellemare and Bernard Strobl. “They ran with Dave’s tracks but brought an incredible attitude towards things like the sound of the spaceship and created a whole world of talkback and comms traffic between all the hazmat-suited army teams crawling around the landing site.”
Comparisons will inevitably be made with Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Walker says this was indeed a reference for him.
“When an editor look at dailies you are only the second member of the audience after the DP to see them and you draw on inspiration from all the movies you've seen. I didn't need to see Close Encounters again, I just remember that the film moved me beyond belief and knew I could draw on that.
“I can't speak for Denis but other references that got me in the zone included the artist Can Pekdemir who makes digital transmographies of human forms and the Imperial court music from Korea, known as Gagaku, was something we talked about with composer Jóhann Jóhannsson. He didn’t emulate it in any way but it was my reference for the idea of encountering some opaque ritual from an ancient culture, making the entry into the spaceship a passage into some kind of super scary nave.”
The TV series Space 1999 was another touchstone in terms of the odd quietness of its mood, according to Walker, as was the work of Terrence Malick. “I didn't need to see Tree of Life again to understand exactly the sort of mood and tone of that film and how it might relate to our story. These references were discussed or thought about to just find keys to unlock Arrival,” says Walker.
There was one scene, described as his favourite in the cutting room for the whole year, which initially presented itself as a problem without resolution.
“There was a big piece of the story in the middle of the film which we felt we needed to remove to smooth out the narrative, yet when we lifted it out we realised that some key key information mentioned in the scene just had to be kept in. We struggled to find a way of just keeping the key information in without the rest of the scene but nothing would work.
In the scene Ian (Renner) and US Colonel Webb (Forest Whitaker) visit Amy who is in a winnebago. They are concerned for her mental state. Ian is asking whether she is dreaming in their (alien) language and Colonel Webb is shown talking to camera (to Amy) while Amy is shown looking off screen. In the cutting suite we all ended up not knowing what to do until Denis suggested going into another room. The first thing we saw in this adjacent room was an animation of a heptapod in the mist, looking like a giant elephant. ]
We went back to the suite and simply inserted the shot of the heptapod right there into the corner of her room. Now the scene is a dream sequence and it's extraordinary. We gloriously jump cut from a section of Ian's speech to Amy looking away from them and at this heptapod. You would never normally make this cut but I proved a perfect way of out of a situation that otherwise made no sense. Suddenly, the viewer experiences Amy's thoughts and realises it is fused with the thoughts of an alien culture.
“For all the planning you do in editing you just live for these moments of inspiration, of accidental arrival.”
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