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A clue to the popularity of HBO anthology
series True Detective is that viewers themselves enjoy turning
sleuth. In the latest hit season, Night Country, directed and
written by showrunner Issa López, the task was to solve the mysterious
disappearance, and even more mysterious discovery, of eight men from a research
station in the Alaskan ice. The law enforcement officers on the case are
Detectives Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis). Mags
Arnold, Brenna Rangott (who previously worked with López on the 2019
series Brittania) and Matt Chessé, ACE all served as editors of the
season.
A chief task was to unpack a
story-within-a-story told over time — the backstory between Danvers and Navarro
using flashbacks and audio/video of Matthew Broderick’s Ferris Bueller singing
“Twist and Shout.”
“Some flashbacks organically made
their way into the edit as the series progressed,” Rangott told The Rough Cut’s Matt Feury.
“Those were places where we felt like it was helpful to nudge the audience. But
as far as ‘Twist and Shout,’ that was all very much in the script. It wasn’t an
afterthought but there were moments where we needed to add more of it to give
the audience an idea of its link to everyone’s past traumas.”
She adds, “There’s a sort of
cross-pollination of traumas coming into reality and ‘Twist and Shout’ is a
good example of it. We wanted to hit on it to give the audience an idea that
Danvers associates that song with her past trauma. There were a few more
moments where we added it where it wasn’t scripted.”
The drama reaches its pivotal moment
at the end of Episode 6. For Chessé this was “the control point that told us
how much we needed, how much we knew, and when we knew it. So, we
reverse-engineered it from Episode 6,” he said.
“It was a cool process. People would
slip stuff under the door, and I’d have to craft it into my episode. I think
that’s the way it has to be on something like this. It’s like you’re having a
dialog throughout the show with these elements and you have to work it where it
happens.”
The trio could access a pool of
shared shots to help assemble their individual episodes.
“Sometimes you need a shot that acts
like a palate cleanser,” says Chessé. “But it’s got to resonate with whoever
you’re leaving or who you’re going to. And they would double up sometimes. The
assistants had to go through the episodes and spot, ‘We’ve seen that snowman
too many times. We can’t repeat ourselves.”
Fans of the franchise enjoy playing
detective, so the filmmakers pepper the series with clues and red herrings
giving them enough rope to solve the puzzle but not too much as to be
confusing.
“We’re not beating things over the
head, leaving things for people to interpret and talk about after the episode,”
Chessé says. “I think Issa had a great sense of playing with that. She knew
what to hang on to, what to hold back, what to pay off, and what to let go. It
seems like she had great taste because everybody loved the show. I didn’t have
people afterward asking me to explain things to them. I think the takeaways
were solid.”
On reading the script, Arnold cites a scene between
Danvers and Navarro in Episode 1 where they talk about something that’s
happened in the past. “What they said made me think that there was some sort of
hinterland and that they’d had a prior relationship. I thought, ‘Not only is
this Jodie Foster, True Detective, and Issa Lopez, but now Jodie is
going to play a gay person as well. I was super excited. Of course, it didn’t
go that way. I didn’t misunderstand, but it could be interpreted either way.”
To help them assemble all the story
elements in order that ultimately made sense and that kept audiences engaged
they employed a process they call “clumping.”
Arnold explains, “It’s when, instead
of cross-cutting between characters, you go to two different characters playing
their scene and then you come back, which is how it was written, just to keep
it exciting. What we started doing was clumping things together so that you
could get a sense of being with these characters a little bit more.”
Chessé details this further, “A lot
of times you watch a show that has multiple characters and there are certain
things you’re more into than others. But you don’t want the audience to have
that feeling of, ‘I don’t want to be with this person right now. I want to stay
with that person.’ You want to feel like you’re cutting away at a point that
seems organic in terms of interest level and comprehension of the story,” he
says.
“You’re on a journey collecting
little clues so you’re going through the episode thinking, ‘I should remember
that. That seemed important.’ You have to lay that breadcrumb trail out for
people in terms of their interests and allegiances to the characters so that
they’re bonding with this entire town that they have to meet. What is their
relationship? We don’t say it overtly. You have to have those ‘reveal’ scenes
close enough together that you can track them. If you put them too far apart
then you’ll forget how everything’s connected.
“That’s the strength of being the
editor, getting to be the first responder. You’re selling it to yourself first.
So, whether the director feels a certain way or not, you can use that as an
excuse to say, ‘As the audience member, I feel like I need to know this now.
Can we try this over here?’ You have to make it make sense to you before it can
make sense to other people.”
For those following along at home,
that word again is “clumping.”
“I’m working on having it trademarked,” Chessé remarks to Feury, “Are we doing a clinic on clumping at the next ACE gathering?”
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