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Editor Yorgos Mavropsaridis has
collaborated with director Yorgos Lanthimos for more than 20 years and knew
from the first moment they met that he had to ditch all the rules he had
learned.
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“The first question is ‘what is reality?’ he told
Hayden Hillier Smith in an extensive interview at The Editing Podcast about the making of awards season
favorite Poor Things.
“From the first collaboration I discerned that this
is a guy who wants to say things in a different way, not the usual way we
approach themes or character. For Poor Things I discovered
many themes that existentially if you like, are about how easy it is to be in a
society, which puts some rules on you.
For Lanthimos storytelling is not a didactic
experience. “I want you to feel no, it’s more loose, it’s more open to
interpretations and feelings,” says Yorgos Mavropsaridis who is Oscar nominated
again following his work on previous Lanthimos drama The Favorite.
“All Lanthimos’ films desire a new
kind of reality, which has certain rules how an individual can behave and
questions whether this behavior is dictated by the character’s needs or by some
external force. And of course, it’s the same with Bella Baxter.”
The lead character is played by Emma
Stone in what has already been a BAFTA and SAG Award-winning performance.
Mavropsaridis says he still has to go
against his instinctive approach to editing. “And I have to surprise myself as
well, to create something new and not to repeat the same situations all the
time.”
In all his previous films, they had used classical
music mostly, but the director commissioned Jerskin Fendrix to compose the
music for Poor Things months before the shooting started. Not
the exact music as it was in the final film, but the general themes so they
could have them in editorial after the first cut.
Lanthimos also used a lot of this music on set,
having done this previously on The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017).
“Different music was played back for [Stone] to somehow get inspired by the
music — to have this surprise of — for the firsttime — seeing something.There
was also music to set the inner rhythm or their external movements because
Yorgos likesthe choreography of the actors — not only the facial expressions —
and this way, the movement,internal or external, is influenced.”
Almost every scene uses an extremely
wide-angle fisheye lens. Mavropsaridis explains there was no discussion with
the director about when to use them.
“The usual pattern was a fisheye
lens, or the 4mm lens with the iris mask, then a long take with movement
combination, zoom in or out with tracking shot. Usually, my editing brain needs
a reason to use them.
For example, the first time we used
this 4mm lens was when Godwin Baxter went down the stairs, heard the piano
playing, and then we cut to him. He looks at her and smiles. At that moment, I
thought, “Okay, that 4mm lens would be a nice point of view from this strange
man.’ Then the next time was when Max comes in, Bella runs and embraces Godwin
Baxter like a baby. I thought it was funny: a grown-up woman being like a baby,
maybe seeing it through Max’s eyes for the first time — this strange situation,
there are always small reasons. Subliminally they might say something to a
viewer.”
Another example is when they are in
the cruiser and Bella Baxter says to Duncan Wedderburn, “You’re in my sun!” so
Mavropsaridis cuts to the 4mm lens when he throws the books away, “just to
punctuate the situation. Different reasons all the time.”
It was the director’s idea from the
beginning to have the first part of the film be a kind of homage to the old
Gothic films shot in black and white. They then break that by introducing the
color picture in the beginning.
“It was broken in an interesting way
when Godwin Baxter recites the story of Victoria Blessington: how he found her,
being pregnant with the baby, was shot in color,” Mavropsaridis says.
“There was a good juxtaposition
between black and white in the office narration and the color of her suicide
and the discovery of her body, which also breaks interestingly the time
continuum between the two situations that are kept continuous with his narrating
tale. Then the rest of the film, after her leaving London, was in extreme color
and also in different hues of color. For example, the first part in Lisbon was
shot with color negative.”
The scene where Bella dances without
a care in the world was edited “incorrectly” by Mavropsaridis initially. He
felt the choreography should remain intact when in fact it had to be awkward.
The creative idea was that the dance was “a microcosm of the big world of the
film.”
“Of course, it was very nice to see
her in a situation with other dancers, and I thought it was nice to keep this
situation with the other people dancing around her that was so funny. But this
was not what it was supposed to be,” he says.
“Bella is about 16 years old at that
time. She sees people dancing for the first time, and the particular music
excites her and she wants to dance, but she hasn’t danced before, her movements
are rough and awkward, but she doesn’t care about what other people would
think. And we didn’t have to care if her movements were choreographed or
‘correct.’ It had to be spontaneous,” he continues.
“Everybody wants to control her, so
the main part of the choreography we had to keep were these movements: When
Duncan puts his arm around her, trying to manipulate it, and she reacts, trying
to free herself. This dance scene is a microcosm of the whole life situation.”
Once they had reached this point
where everything was in place the cut was three-and-a-half hours. Then they had
to deconstruct the whole thing.
“We have constructed it. Now let’s
take it apart and see what we can do to try this or that. He’s very precise in
what he wants, but usually, the edit has to improvise on how to achieve it,”
Mavropsaridis says.
“He doesn’t say much, but since we’ve
edited together for almost 25 years now, I know what he means, and I know which
way I have to tackle it. I have a lot of freedom from him to try things, even
if they were not discussed. If I have an inspiration in the middle of the
night, I will do it,” he continues.
“Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t. After many
trials and errors, many hours, and many films together, we have reached a very
understanding way of working. I believe that Poor Things was
an easier film to edit.”
A discussion at the dinner table about marrying
Bella includes flash forwards and flashbacks. This was composed in the edit to
cut length and keep the story moving, Mavropsaridis told Steve Hullfish on
the Art of the Cut podcast.
“It is a method that we developed on
the film we did together, Dogtooth because Yorgos likes to shoot his film in
continuity. He doesn’t edit during the shoot so in editorial we felt that this
big scene with a lot of discussion going on needed to be compressed.”
Typically, editor and director will
have a few issues that can only be resolved in the edit, but there is now a
telepathic connection between the pair that is only the result of like minds
working together for so long.
“There was a problem about a scene on the cruise
ship,” he told CinemaEditor
magazine. “While Yorgos was emailing me I
sent over my solution and he said, ‘That is exactly what I have in mind.’ I
have reached a point of being able to understand his thoughts without talking
to him. After so many years I know what the small things are that bother him
and what he tries to achieve. At the same time, he has helped me to overcome my
laziness of the mind, so it is now easy to me to throw a scene out and do it a
different way.
“I always have in my mind Lanthimos’
own phrase — ‘Is that all we can do?’ So I have to prove each time we can do
more and better.”
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