“Unbreaking” an Industry Begins with Honest Conversations and Better Collaboration

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The industry is at breaking point in the midst of seismic change but it can survive if stakeholders act collectively – starting now, urged Jeff Rosica, President and Chief Executive Officer, Avid Technology.

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Presenting a keynote at the HPA Tech Retreat in Palm Springs this month, Rosica was frank about the uphill task faced by everyone involved in media and entertainment. “As industry leaders we need to come to grips with the fact that we’re standing at the precipice of ‘breaking an industry’ and are facing an industry-wide mess,” he said.

“I am truly worried that we could be heading for a disastrous time. Some things are already breaking and some we will have to break in future, but we can avoid disaster if as an industry we look carefully at what is hitting us, we all get aligned on the same page and we collaborate better.”

Rosica is a widely respected media technology leader who has spent nearly four decades at the top of the industry for companies including Phillips, Grass Valley and Avid. In that time he said the industry has encountered change and always managed transitions effectively.

“I’m worried that we’re in an unprecedented time where we’re facing significant headwinds from what feels like all directions – North, South, East and West – at once. We are in danger of breaking apart, but I believe we can also unbreak this trend.”

Rosica essayed four areas of change that are impacting the industry globally. These include the wholesale disruption to business models as traditional production and distribution is forced to adjust to streaming and access to content by consumers anytime, anywhere on myriad digital devices.

“We are in the midst of this change which is creating a lot of angst and pressures on each business,” Rosica said. “But if that wasn’t enough there are three other areas coming at us fast.”

We are also witnessing significant change in operating practices, he said: “Processes and workflows developed and proven over decades are being ripped and replaced.” Those practices have tended to be incremental to a linear approach of creating content, from script to production through post, that have barely changed in a century. The evolution to digital tools and IP networks has paved the way for a change in that methodology, the pace of which is now being accelerated by automation.

A third headwind comes from changing technologies and deployment patterns. Covid irreversibly altered the expectations of workers when it comes to the flexibility of being able to work from anywhere and caused the industry to rethink how content is created, he said. Remote, collaborative and hybrid production models are the new norm.

“We must get much more drastic in our efficiencies,” Rosica urged. “We are still inefficient as an industry. We need to do more.”

On top of this, Rosica expressed concern about the industry’s talent drain. When the skills required of innovators and technologists in the M&E industry are no longer purely engineering and electronics – but also computer programming and software-based skills from adjacent industries in professional AV, video gaming and IT, the M&E industry must fight harder to recruit and retain talent.

“Our industry is running out of people,” he warned. “We have to be very careful about leveraging global talent.”

The fourth area of change Rosica identified is within the ecosystem of providers and service providers. “Few companies are not facing financial challenges, which were only exacerbated by the strikes last year. In addition, companies face the existential threat of disintermediation. The nature of who is doing what with whom is changing dramatically.”

Technologies like Cloud, IP and Artificial Intelligence are game changers in their own right but the tech revolution isn’t stopping there. There are issues of data security and data integrity and combatting deepfakes to contend with. Interactive media and new depth-enhanced immersive experiences to be embraced.

“There have always been technology shifts in our industry, but we’ve never seen this many happening in parallel,” Rosica said. “Across the board, technology is creating substantive change. It is unprecedented.”

No-one is immune and everyone should be involved in navigating the industry’s future.
“No matter if you are a technology supplier, a postproduction house, a production company, studio, freelance artist, content creator or content owner – everybody in media and entertainment needs to unite in discussion. If the industry can’t function effectively we will all suffer.”

He urged attendees and the wider community to talk. “We’ve all got so much going on at once and so much coming at us that we have to spend more time talking about how we are going to prioritize, get aligned and stay aligned, and avoid a more difficult situation in future.”

His speech wasn’t all gloom and doom. There is light at the end of the tunnel, he said. “The good news is consumers have a raging appetite for compelling content and they will pay for it. We are not making something as an industry that people don’t want.

“The other good news is that we have very fine organizations and bodies like HPA, MovieLabs, SMPTE, DPP, ACES and more who can be the vehicle for organizing collective discussion and change. But we still have to get aligned between them all. Each organization has its own prioritization, messaging and agenda. Not that that’s a bad thing but there’s so much going on we’ve got to make sure everybody realigns on the same path.

He added, “I know that we all see these things from our own perspective but I’m not sure we are all internalizing them and really understanding the profound nature of what we are facing. We need to start talking about how to navigate change. We’ve got to realize that we cannot tackle all these headwinds at once. We have to prioritize.”

As the head of one of the industry’s leading developers of software tools for film and TV, Rosica’s views on the threat and promise of Artificial Intelligence and Generative AI are worth hearing.

He is adamant that Gen-AI and AI in general will not supplant the need for human editors or creatives anywhere.

“I remember when digital tools first arrived there were concerns that these would do away with the need for artists, but we have many more artists working today using software tools to create content.

“The history of technology tells us that AI will enable people to do more and will open up opportunities for them. It will definitely cause change but not even AI will eliminate the need for a creative person. Not in my lifetime do I think AI is going to tell me compelling stories from start to finish. AI will put more tools in the hands of creative professionals so that they can get their job done faster, more efficiently and even more creatively.”

He doubled down on the theme, arguing, “When more powerful tools have entered our industry it has driven efficiency but it has also driven more powerful storytelling. When it all shakes out I think that will happen again, but we first have to admit that AI is going to change the way we go about our business.”

Rosica is in his last term at Avid, which he has led into a $1.4 billion buyout by an affiliate of private-equity company STG. But he is not about to ride off into the sunset.

“I’m not dropping the mic and wishing everyone good luck! These things need to be said because I want all leaders and key stakeholders in our industry to think about them. We’ve all got to engage and collaborate a lot more.

“If I was having this discussion with Avid, I’d be saying the same thing – and I do, by the way. You can’t do everything at once. We have to face these things. We have to prioritize and we have to do this collectively as an industry. We have all got to realise that there is a lot happening here. Transformation is afoot and we have to manage our way through it.”

MWC24: While 5G Lags, 6G and Quantum Wait in the Wings

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Even while telco operators are scarred by their experience rolling out and paying for 5G, attention is turning to its successor 6G, which will begin to be adopted from 2030.

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Some operators are skeptical. Sessions at Mobile World Congress were devoted to whether 5G has done enough to ensure investment in future generations of cellular tech. “It’s a bit too early to talk 6G since we are still struggling with 5G,” said Paolo Murri, VP Business Development at Italian telco TIM. “But we have learned from 5G and we keep learning.”

Despite the slow adoption of 5G and associated ROI, some of the world’s largest telecommunications executives say 6G will likely launch in 2030.

“We believe there will be gradual introduction of 6G from 2030 onwards but mass market will be some time beyond that,” said Marie Hogan, Head of 6G Business Area Networks, Ericsson. “We must try to eliminate some complexity. At the start of 5G we introduced many architecture options but perhaps we should start 6G with a clean architecture. Maybe we launch with a 6G Standalone, for example.”

That would imply not using any 5G infrastructure, but operators will want to maximize their hefty investment in 5G equipment so some form of transition or operation in parallel seems inevitable.

From a network perspective, Ericsson view the move to 6G as an evolution rather than a big bang. “5G is only half way through its cycle, with still another 6-7 years to go,” Hogan said. “We need to take advantage of that and focus on monetizing 5G first. In 5G we went for some very extreme use cases, but with 6G we could be more focused.”

The chastening experience of 5G has made experts more reticent to shout about potential use cases for 6G.

“The speed of innovation in computing is so fast we have to be humble enough to admit we can’t predict what will come,” said Henry Tirri, CTO, Nokia Technologies, though he suggested autonomous driving would be possible with the ultra, ultra low roundtrip in signals from car to cloud and back.

Murri stressed that whatever happens, 6G needs to be customer-centric. “We need to be sure that any use case we have in mind is not doable on 5G. Many times we told the world that there are applications you can only do on 5G but it turns out 4G is good enough.”

Hogan said the ability of 6G to scale applications will be its biggest impact. “AR and VR is today quite localized and indoor. If we can scale up with more data, more efficient use of network offload, then we will have mass market immersive communication. Digital twins use a lot of data quite localized today with 5G but 6G will enable you to scale to a digital twin of a city or a massive digital twin of an entire network in realtime," she continued. "With 6G we will have the opportunity to make our current mobile broadband much more efficient in terms of energy performance, and if you can do that in remote regions where a terrestrial network doesn’t reach you could make a basic level of affordable broadband accessible to anyone anywhere, anytime. That is the core direction we are hoping to head in.”

The technology itself will need new spectrum frequencies and will incorporate AI and Quantum computing both of which will power the scaling of applications running over 6G networks.

“We envisage a highly distributed computer structure hosting a whole network end to end and running in the cloud,” said Juan Carlos Garcia Lopez, SVP Technology, Telefonica. “Moving to entirely cloud native software defined solutions means extending cloud to the edge. This needs to be solved for 6G.”

IBM is at MWC showcasing its claim to have established the largest ecosystem of more than 550,000 “quantum explorers, adopters, and users to bring quantum computing to the world.” It was also touting its breakthrough in 2023 with a 127-qubit processor that is a step to allowing quantum computers to reach “utility scale” as a scientific tool to explore new classes of problems in physics and materials.

Garcia Lopez also pointed to security as a critical issue. “With 6G a new threat is possible when Quantum compute becomes available. We need to be ready to change cryptography." He added that services running over the network will increase 100,000 times “so network traffic will be less deterministic.”

Sustainability is being written into the design of 6G but it’s been a struggle to get stakeholders to agree, reported Marja Matinmikko-Blue, Director of Sustainability and Regulation of 6G Flagship at Finland’s University of Oulu. “There is consensus that sustainability is important and the Global 6G framework published by the ITU in December had sustainability as one of its criteria but there has been a lot of resistance.”

She noted that energy efficiency was also part of the 5G standard “but there was no agreement for targets. We need to include targets with 6G. It is everybody’s responsibility and requires a whole mindset change that considers sustainability in the context of spectrum management, social goals, and economics.”

Murri placed the onus on better educating consumers about the impact of data-draining applications like streaming video. “There’s been a lot of work on the supply side in terms of making data centres and radio access more to efficient but little effort on the demand side--on the behaviours of customers,” he said. “Whether enterprise or consumers, they are all-you-can-eat models. In Italy, consumers can buy infinite gigabytes for less than ten Euros. This leads to the perception that everything they do is for free. But there is a cost and mainly it is in energy consumption.”

He added, “Given that a key for 6G is sustainability we need to think about awareness. My kids leave the TV on streaming 4K and don’t perceive they are consuming energy.”

Telefonica’s Garcia Lopez charged app developers with doing more to make their app network-friendly. “We have all got to reduce total power consumption. The 6G architecture needs to build sustainability into its core and not waste resources.”

For example, said Hogan, “We could be better at energy efficiency by switching off parts of the network when not in use.”

MWC24: Consumer XR Faces Reality Check

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XR technology is forecast to rocket from a market value of $55 billion in 2023 to $490 billion by 2030 which holds both a promise and a puzzle. While business to business use of XR has taken hold, consumer applications have failed to move beyond the hype.

“There is some real value in the enterprise, but we are in a novelty phase for the consumer,” said Bob Titus, CTO, Netcracker Technologies. “That doesn’t mean we won’t, but after the hype of two years ago we are not there yet in B2C.”

In 2022, you couldn’t move at Mobile World Congress for someone talking about the Metaverse. In 2024, mention of it is near absent. AI may have obliterated all discussion. But does that mean the XR bubble has burst?

“You couldn’t walk ten steps without seeing the Metaverse a couple years ago, and the promise of everything it was going to deliver for consumers such as individual experiences and making transactions with blockchain,” observed Yusuf Tayob, Group Chief Executive for Operations at Accenture. “Is it time to assess the actual impact versus the theoretical potential of XR?”

There actually isn’t much value for the mobile industry in current iterations of consumer VR because it is all conducted over Wi-Fi in the home.

“There are no 5G-enabled headsets, period. Nor is there likely to be since VR happens in doors. Out of home is where it gets interesting for mobile and where we need to provide connectivity,” said Leslie Shannon, Head of Trend & Innovation Scouting, Nokia.

ROI in B2B XR

The situation is markedly different in B2B. Nokia recently commissioned EY to survey XR in industry and found about 10% of companies in US and Europe using some kind of XR already.

“What is remarkable is the gap between those thinking about using XR and those already using it,” Shannon said. “The actual return on investment was higher than the expectations of companies which have yet to try XR. This is first time in my knowledge that a technology is exceeding expectations of business return.”

Another study, this time with Deloitte, found the average number of use cases in business by companies was six. “You start with one or two and then other departments see the benefits and want to use it for reduction in travel, for example,” she said.

Apple’s launch of Vision Pro not withstanding, the clunky, power draining and heat generating form factor of current VR/XR headgear is limiting mobility.

“Widescale adoption won’t happen until the form factor is correct,” Titus warned.

However, GenAI could accelerate XR development in B2B and B2C. “GenAI has a tremendous capacity to create content and transform the XR business by providing more realistic 3D animation and personalised experiences,” said Sabri Albreiki, CTO e& International.

“Marrying XR with GenAI will be one of the most powerful and transformative technologies in the next decade,” agreed Shannon.

However, the processing power required of GenAI cannot be incorporated into a device and worn by a person. The smartphone is already running into compute limits.

“AI will become distributed,” said Titus. “The connectivity needs to link the consumer with the AI that resides in the cloud. For that you need the low latency and high speed of 5G.”

The form factor for XR has to be very mobile. It will be glasses and a connection to your sim card and distributed data processing.”

The questions boils down to who is going to own it. “Will our industry take it quickly enough, or will it all be AWS and Azure?” posed Nokia’s Shannon.

“We are very risk averse as an industry [about] the whole idea of managing computing located in the network. But if we don’t take it someone else will.”

Netcracker’s Titus agreed saying “We need to think beyond basic monetisation.”

He said, “Yes, we need to build subscription into use cases and charge for consumption. But also offer data management and security and localised LLM as a service. Service providers can become aggregators of the ecosystem of how these services all come together and ensure they extract value out of that XR marketplace. That is the opportunity.”

The mobile industry is eyeing the convergence of 5G with AI to unlock potential for XR applications out of the home. The underlying technology of Mobile Edge Compute (MEC) is quite mature. MEC is the near real-time processing of large amounts of data produced by edge devices and applications closest to where it’s captured. Scenes can be rendered in the network and XR content can be delivered directly to headsets with minimal local graphics processing.

An example is Amazon Wavelength, a service that embeds AWS compute and storage services within a carrier’s 5G network paving the way for ultra-low latency applications.

“From ultra-low latency services enhancing AR and VR to enabling smart cities, 5G plus AI will open up unprecedented possibilities,” claims Anthony Goonetilleke, Group President for Technology and Head of Strategy at Amdocs.

He pointed to the potential of “significant transformation” in telecoms, manufacturing, transportation, smart cities, and in retail. The latter, which involves AI-assisted recommendations made to a customer in realtime while browsing a store, is perhaps the nearest the next phase of 5G will come to a mainstream consumer out of home XR experience.

Monetising media and entertainment while on the go still needs its killer app.

MWC24: Operators Struggle to Make 5G Pay Off

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While AI was the future buzz at Mobile World Congress, operators are exercised with today’s problem of recouping money from the millions of dollars poured into 5G networks.

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There were repeated calls for better regulation, wider cooperation, and promises not to repeat the mistakes of 5G, such as letting streamers like Netflix extract all the value from data carried over their networks, when it comes to monetizing AI.

“5G is the fastest-growing mobile standard in history but there are big challenges ahead,” said Mats Granryd, Director General, GSMA. “Mobile revenue growth has gone down but capex gone up. We have to keep investing in new infrastructure to keep the world connected.”

As ever, the GSMA and the leaders of the world’s leading mobile operators make grand claims for the importance of their industry in serving both the world’s business community and solving societal problems, for instance, by bridging the digital divide.

Operators will spend $1.5 trillion between now and 2033 on their networks and 90 percent of that will be on 5G, he said. “We need innovative business models to make it happen.”

One slice of potential revenue lies in getting more people to use mobile devices and mobile networks. Today over 4.6 billion people use the mobile internet—almost 60% of the world’s population. During 2022, 200 million more people started using mobile internet. There are 3.4 billion people still not using the mobile internet, which could add $230 billion to the mobile industry. But the GSMA say the pace of progress is slowing down.

“We know the barriers such as affordability and concerns around security but this is frustrating in an increasingly digital world,” said Granryd. “It is a moral and a business imperative [to close the gap].”

The GSMA is heavily promoting Open Gateway, an initiative to build a unified 5G ecosystem with a framework of open APIs so that businesses can build new services and businesses across national boundaries. A year from launch and it has 240 operators signed up representing over 65% of mobile connections, and over 90 APIs.

Microsoft is a partner and came to MWC in force touting updates to its Azure platform for network operators. It describes this as “a carrier-grade, hybrid cloud platform, and the foundation of network modernization with AI.”

Microsoft EVP Jason Zander said, “We don’t want developers to have to write their app 50 times. They want to deploy it with 50 major operators across all continents at once.”

Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith gave a keynote and said, “We are creating a new AI economy. Fundamentally for us it is about partnerships. We are not vertically integrated. We do not have an app store for consumers. We don’t make chips. If there was a time for new partnerships it is here and now.”

Dell Chairman and CEO Michael Dell made a similar pitch for telcos to tie networks with AI running on its data centers. “Telcos need to be a winner in this next wave,” he said. “For network operators it is not just about productivity it is about growth. Growing those relationships is the opportunity we see for you.”

Telcos have an enormous competitive advantage, he added. “The vast majority of data is created at the edge. Clouds and apps are moving to the edge. AI will also be at the edge. You want to bring AI to your data not the other way around. Let’s move to a network that is software upgradable and a true platform for innovation. We understand transformation is hard, but the bigger risk is if you don’t do it.”

Europe Falls Behind

5G rollout has been particularly sluggish in Europe where the European Union even warned in January that low 5G deployment risks delaying other technologies dependent on fast internet such as AI. Although 5G has reached 80% of EU population, it is far below the 94% in Japan and the 98% in South Korea and the U.S. Around 40 million people in EU countries will still have no access to a fixed gigabit connection by 2030 according to the EU’s own figures, and will therefore fail to meet the block’s target of providing 5G to all households.

Accenture CEO and Chair Julia Sweet into bat for telco clients. “Today regulation is not allowing us to do what we want across borders,” she said. “It is an industry issue too. Individual operating units in different countries have deep cultures which make change challenging.”

Paolo Murri, VP Business Development at Italian telco TIM, said, “The hype before 5G was a mistake and as an operator we take our share of the blame. We were too [intent on] following our hopes and wishes, we didn’t do the math and we didn’t share the experiences beforehand with the vertical markets. We overestimated demand. We thought everything would have happened much more quickly.”

He indicated that the hype in the runup to 5G spectrum auctions had inflated the price. “In Italy, we have to pay €2.4 billion for frequencies probably driven by hype.”

He quoted a report by Barclays banks stating that the return on 5G capital spend for telcos is running at 5.2% with the cost of capex at 8%. “This is an issue for future innovation,” Murri said.

With the industry only just starting to tap into 5G Standalone—networks that do not rely on 4G—there is hope that higher performance and lower latency will boost applications such as remote production of news and sports events.

Operators are looking to the sports world as 5G promises new opportunities to personalize fan engagement.

“When you make an investment, you don’t make it emotionally but without the emotion of the fans any investment will be questionable,” said Bryan Bachner, GM for Barcelona FC’s Barca Vision and MD in the USA and APAC. Speaking at a two-day long Sports Forum running as part of MWC, he said, “The fan is the author of their own viewing experience. The player has new connected performance technology that allows them to create and share their own media.”

Justin Castillo, Founder of Javelin Advisory in L.A., works with athletes and sports franchises. “The traditional athlete endorsement has changed. It’s no longer a photo shoot and a smile. The overall lifespan of fan engagement should be 7 years plus not just time in the stadia. Mobile technology strengthens the bond between talent and fan.

He cited work his agency had done with New Zealand-based Soul Machines to create avatars of leading sports personalities to engage in real time with fans wherever they are in the world.

“These hyper real digital avatars can democratise fandom by connecting with top tier athletes.

[Golfer] Jack Nicklaus may be 84 and lives in Florida but he can now communicate with fans across multiple languages on a one-to-one basis and have a legacy in perpetuity in the metaverse with fans.”

Spies Like Us: The Collaborative Post on “Mr. & Mrs. Smith”

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The premise for new Amazon Prime Video series Mr. & Mrs. Smith is like online dating. “You show up and meet somebody and you see how far it goes,” says the show’s lead editor Greg O’Bryant.

It is of course a riff on the 2005 hit feature starring Angeline Jolie and Brad Pitt, a married couple who are also spies working sometimes for and sometimes against each other to ‘hilarious’ effect.

The Amazon redo is from the storytellers from critically acclaimed series Atlanta, Donald Glover, and writer Francesco Sloane. Glover and Maya Erskine star as the two title characters (John and Jane), who operate as an undercover married couple while working for a mysterious spy agency.

“Technically, it exists in the same cinematic universe, which there are some hints about in episode four. But it was everyone’s intention to tell a different story with a different tone,” O’Bryant explains in interview with Matt Feury on The Rough Cut.

Showrunner Francesca Sloane used the analogy of the “storytelling sandwich.”

“That means the characters’ relationship is the bread and the spy stuff is the meat of the sandwich. It’s there, but the ratio should be skewed towards the relationship parts. We wanted to tell a story about modern relationships, why we get into them, and why we stay in them. If you think about it.”

He adds, “John and Jane had a pretty dire and immediate reason to stay together, but I think it was more about the heart than it was about action. Hopefully we achieved both.”

There were multiple editors across the eight episodes, including Kate Brokaw, Kyle Reiter and Isaac Hagy, but O’Bryant cut the pilot, has a hand in each episode, and is also a co-producer on the show. “I tell everybody that I know just enough to be dangerous,” he joked.

“I think it’s helpful to have an editor’s perspective on everything, whether it’s reshoots, color, sounds, visual effects, or music. It’s different on a film. Film is a director’s medium. TV is a writer’s medium. Writers usually appreciate having a technical head in the game.”

He was heavily involved in creating the score with Sloane, composer David Fleming, and Donald Glover, approving the VFX and working with Harbor Sound on the audio mix.

“The idea is, once we start editing, everything comes through my room before it’s done, whether it’s another editor’s cut, a VFX shot, a music cue, or a score cue.

“What makes TV special is when it feels like it’s all done by the same hand. It’s not just me. Francesca might be in my room. The other editors might be in my room. But it’s all going to come through the same tiny pipeline and, hopefully, that adds a level of consistency to it all.”

There was some pretty extensive reshoots, which O’Bryant says was helpful. “I know the larger world tends to think, ‘Oh, reshooting? Something must have gone wrong,’ [but] I think it almost always helps to go in and pick up a couple of shots for this or that episode, or even add in scenes,” he says.

“We redid whole scenes for the Mr. and Mrs. Smith pilot. They reshot two scenes entirely in the same location and everything. The team looked at what we had and said, ‘Hey, we’ve learned some things about this show. Let’s go back and do it a little differently.’”

In one episode, John and Jane are seeing a therapist about their marriage troubles. Within that we see vignettes of different missions they’ve been on.

O’Bryant says this episode had the most straightforward comedy and the most improv. “There’s a fair amount of improv in the show. Donald and Maya are both comedians, so there’s a lot, but that one had the most improv.”

Episode four was originally planned with an extensive action sequence in the Mexican jungle but the trick was making it work with comedy as well as thrills in the edit.

“We tried it a bunch of different ways. We spent weeks tweaking just that little sequence. We really beat the bushes before coming up with that fast, vibe-y, out-of-control thing we ended up with. I think we found a good middle ground. But more importantly, that’s the tone of the show. The tone of the show is about how to get that hard cut to be funny. We need to remember that these guys aren’t that good at being spies.”

Shadow of a Doubt: The Very Deliberate Editing for “Anatomy of a Fall”

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There are no easy answers to “did-she-do-it?” mystery Anatomy of a Fall, but neither is this the switch-back sensationalism of Hollywood courtroom dramas like Presumed Innocent or Jagged Edge. Keeping the audience guessing without tilting their bias either toward or against the accused at the center of the drama was the key for director Justine Triet and editor Laurent Sénéchal.

“We didn’t want to play a game, having the audience feeling that she’s guilty for 15 minutes, then she’s not guilty,” the editor told Steve Hullfish’s Art of the Cut podcast. “We wanted the audience to keep their doubts about her, but to start to be endeared by her — to start to be with her in these intimate moments. It was a challenge for Justine to ask the audience to do both keep doubts, but also ask the audience to love her.”

Anatomy of a Fall won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, is nominated for five awards at the Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Editor for Sénéchal, who is also nominated for an ACE Eddie award.

At the beginning of the film, a man dies and like many thrillers, there’s a pacing of the revelations — the things that are discovered about the death. Triet and Sénéchal however are constructing, or deconstructing, the courtroom drama genre.

Sénéchal says it was really important to be precise with these elements to maintain the ambiguity around Sandra, the accused (played by Sandra Hüller, who is nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress).

“The idea was to start like a thriller movie. We were aiming to use this genre movie to lead the audience as far as possible in the complexity with our characters. It’s a movie that is not straight forward.”

The film questions the nature of love and married relationships, what is to be an individual in a couple? asks what is to be a father, what is to be a son, quizzes our memories and how we construct truth in real life and in the movies.

“It’s really complex. So, you’re going to see a thriller, but an unusual one. We had to pay attention to this idea during the editing process.”

Sénéchal goes into more detail in discussion with Awards Radar, telling Maxance Vincent, “It was really challenging because as soon as we had scenes in a certain order or scenes showing some things between her and her husband Samuel [Theis], you could have a total derailment. We could derail the main contract between the audience and the movie because we’d edited scenes in a certain way, where we felt like Sandra was being manipulative towards Samuel.

“So we had to rethink, screen the movie, and redesign some scenes, to make sure that we find her endearing, even if we have doubts about her. It was really hard to build the path of the audience. You are free as an audience to make up your own mind about what you see. My job as editor is to build very wide roads for the audience to make their own journey into the movie.”

Sénéchal spent 40 weeks in editorial to shape the picture. There’s a section in the trial where an audio recording of a fight is being played in court, and it starts with just the audio, then it jumps to flashbacks of the actual fight.

“I asked them to shoot it in a way that we have options,” he related to Hullfish. “We can stay long in the courtroom before going in the flashback if we want to because I knew that this moment was going to be tricky for me. They got very long shots on Sandra Hüller. Also they got the audience in the courtroom.”

He continued, “What worked was to be long enough for the audience to be a bit lazy; they start to get used to the audio, and that’s when I go into the flashback, and you are very soon taken by the fight itself. Then, coming back into the courtroom we wanted it to be at the highest climax of the fight. But the climax — the words — what she’s saying to her husband — is so harsh. It’s really violent. The words are like weapons.”

Sénéchal had previously collaborated with Triet for 2016’s In Bed with Victoria and 2019’s Sibyl. Director and editor discuss their relationship in an interview recorded for Deadline’s The Process, as well as filming scenes with the film’s canine character and the choice to use different languages.

In Anatomy of a Fall, the characters live in France, but since the main character, Sandra, is not herself French (nor does she speak it very well), most of her dialogue is spoken in English.

This includes her appearances in court where after attempting to give her evidence in French, she gives up and speaks in English for the rest of the case, resulting in a rather strange scenario of her being questioned in French, understanding perfectly, and responding in English.

Triet seems to be putting the nature of truth under layers of translation, telling The Process the question of the language is at the core of their work.

Sénéchal adds, “We also wanted the movie to be simple for the audience because the subject was so complex. There is a complexity in the empathy for the main character.”

Even when the verdict is reached in the case there’s still a lingering sense of ambiguity which bleeds into the moment that Sandra is reunited with her son.

“What we wanted to show is the arc of a boy who is growing up,” he explained to Awards Radar. “You still don’t know the mother, you are starting not to know how the boy is feeling. When they’re reconnecting in the house, everything is so complicated.”

He adds, “The movie shows how you must stop thinking of life as straight, simple, and compact. Becoming a grown-up for him is becoming opaque, too, because at the end, when he is doing his second testimony, we see him calling on memories, but it feels like an invention. We want the audience to feel that when we have these images, who do we ultimately suspect? There is a tension between truth and doubts and what is on screen. We don’t have access to everything he’s thinking, and he may become like his mother, someone we don’t know. But it’s our condition to listen to them and make up our minds about what is on screen.”

Elaborating on this to Kara Warner at Vanity Fair, Sénéchal said he identified that the flashback argument was “a very strange scene” in the script. “At the beginning, I was wondering if it was going to work because it’s nobody’s point of view at all. Then I saw the material and when we started, it was obvious that it has to be like that. That’s the power of cinema. It can seem weird when you read it, but when you are in front of the actors, the characters, it’s so vivid. It’s at the heart of the story.”

Speaking on The Rough Cut podcast, Sénéchal discussed turning the thriller into Kramer vs Kramer as the drama pivots on how we view the relationship between husband and wife as we learn more private details about them.

The nuances in their relationship script stem from the script but the writer-director and editor still had to extract the right balance from the coverage in editorial.

“It’s not a movie which was heavily recut in post so much as redesigned,” Sénéchal told Vanity Fair. “The main aspects of the movie were really well-scripted. We made deliberate choices like the fact that we didn’t use any score music. I think it was a good choice because if we had divided the argument in pieces, in sections, it would’ve been another movie.”

Sénéchal compared the delicate juggling act to playing Tetris. “If [we] changed some slight details in the beginning, you could really see another movie emerge. Sometimes we had some derailment of the ambiguity around Sandra. The movie was no longer very interesting when she was becoming too innocent or too guilty, or too manipulative. The main challenge for the editing was this arc of ambiguity for her, how to stay with her, how to be endeared by her with this ambiguity still around her. It was really hard to do.”