RedShark News
Editor Nathan Orloff proves you don’t need experience editing action to edit a wall to wall action movie.
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A massive ‘car fu’ chase and fight around
the Arc de Triomphe is arguably the highlight of John Wick
Chapter 4. While the stunts themselves are as real as ever with physical
crashes, stunt performances and Keanu Reeves driving, this all took place on
tarmac in Berlin. The Parisian backgrounds are virtual but piecing the
geography of it all together was a complicated task for editor Nathan Orloff.
“The Arc de Triomphe sequence is one that I'm really, really
proud of, especially since this is kind of crazy and difficult to put together
because all the hits [of the cars] are real,” Orloff says.
“The way I look at geography is that you should be able to
explain every shot to a blind child very quickly. What I mean by that is that
in the simplest fashion of ‘John runs, stops, looks around’ that's the story
and it’s 2 seconds long, but it's a story beat and it's important to convey.
“If you're cutting too fast, if you're just punching things
up for the sake of punching things up, you're confusing the audience. You're
disorienting them. Sometimes you want to that intentionally but those moments
should be incredibly selective.”
He talks of approaching such kinetic action scenes as he
would a dialogue scene. There may be no dialogue per se but John Wick is
interacting with the bad guys albeit with cars or guns or nunchucks.
“It's a conversation between villains and heroes, and it's
just as important as is a dialogue in terms of following what's going on,” he
says.
Getting to the final version, Orloff had to whittle down
take after take of cars hitting each other, hitting John Wick, until he had the
mix of performance, pace and story that felt.
“I did this massive trim pass and was kind of ruthless in
removing some stuff and reimagined one part. We lost one car hit so that we got
to the one that we wanted to show earlier.”
Even to get to the Arc de Triomphe there’s an extended
street fight which Orloff had to blend into each other so there’s no break in
the action.
“The question was how do we want to make that flow as one?
Because it could become very clunky.”
A clue to the puzzle lay in the music. “To me it became
essential to cut to the DJ, how the needle drops change, to keep the energy
flowing across scenes back-to-back.”
This is all the more impressive given that Orloff is not
only new to the franchise, but green when it comes to action movies. That’s
precisely why director Chad Stahelski picked him when regular editor Evan
Schiff proved unavailable.
“Chad told me he interviewed a lot of different editors and
I think one of the reasons we gelled was that I haven't done a big action movie
like this before. I wasn't bringing something to the table that said ‘I've done
this before.’ I was bringing an approach to learning something new and being
open to new ideas.”
Orloff
had worked as an Assistant Editor on J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek: Into
Darkness, as well as a Digital Intermediate Supervisor on Abrams’ Star
Wars: The Force Awakens. He was an Associate or Additional Editor on
such projects as Tully and The Front Runner, both directed by
Jason Reitman, and more recently sole editor on Reitman’s Ghostbusters Afterlife.
“He wanted a blank slate of someone that would find the
style within the movie instead of sort of putting their own stamp on it,”
Orloff says.
Stahelski seems to have trusted Orloff to find his own
rhythm to the film’s wall to wall action sequences.
“I didn't get a lot of direction during production about how
to put these action sequences together,” he says. “It sort of was like out of
necessity, how do these pieces fit? So it was kind of cool and a little bit
validating that when we got back to LA that most of the stuff we did was just
trimming and removing versus reconstruction.”
Musicals and slapstick
Stahelski did though give his editor a number of films to
study. Those films include Sergio Leone’s Dollars westerns, Kurusawa’s The
Seven Samurai and Singing In The Rain.
In films like Singing In The Rain the camera stays
generally static and wide with minimal edits so the viewer can take in all the
brilliance performed by the film’s stars.
Another influence is the slapstick comedy of silent screen
legend Buster Keaton. A clip form Keaton’s The General appears in John
Wick 2. Keaton famously devised and performed his own extraordinary stunts.
“You're watching Buster Keaton do these crazy things and
you're just going, that is unbelievable. Similarly, there was an influence of
these big wide shots. They made sure they could capture everything in shot.”
Keaton or Chaplin aren’t the only comic styling. The
absurdity of the situation where John Wick can be repeatedly shot or bounce
down stairs, albeit protected by a Kevlar suit, makes the film a sort of Looney
Tunes for adults.
Tick Tock Mr Wick
John Wick – Chapter 4 clocks in at 169 minutes, more
than an hour longer than the original. The first cut came in at 3 hours 45
minutes. Stahelski and the edit team gradually cut that down but even if they
took out just 30 seconds, they would watch the whole film beginning to end, to
ensure the pace of the film stayed intact.
“There is definitely a risk of overkill if something is too
similar to something else,” Orloff says, “but going back to the music was a huge
help in alternating what we were doing to avoid things feeling the same.”
A three-and-a-half hour runtime was no deterrent to
audiences watching David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, a point that
Stahelski has made in interviews.
In JW 4, he pays homage to that film’s famous ‘match’ cut,
one of two (along with the bone to spaceship time-jump in 2001: A Space
Odyssey) of the most celebrated in cinema history.
“I wanted to make sure we did the exact number of frames
when the fire was blown out before cutting to the sunrise,” Orloff says. “I
wanted to do it justice.
“Chad told me he’d rather swing and miss than do the same
thing over again. And so that match cut is indicative of [telling the] audience
what we're aiming for.”
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