“Fall Guy” Editor Elisabet Ronaldsdottir Is In It for the Action (and Maybe a Little Bit for the Romance)

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“My whole career is based on stunts,” says editor Elisabet Ronaldsdottir, ACE. “Every movie I’ve worked on at least for the past 12 years has been stunt-based. We wouldn’t have those movies if it wasn’t for the stunts. We wouldn’t have John Wick or Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings or Bullet Train. They’re all based on stunts.”

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Nor would we have The Fall Guy, the recent action-comedy starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, which she edited for director David Leitch.

Ronaldsdottir was also in the editing chair for Leitch’s Bullet Train, Deadpool 2 and Atomic Blonde, as well as the first John Wick, which laid the template for balletic stunt action.

“Those [stunt] guys and girls are a powerhouse,” she explained to Steve Hullfish on the Art of the Cut podcast. “They just throw out stunt-vis all the time and it’s amazing. Sometimes it ends up much better than what we end up with, because when you start shooting it, you can run into all kinds of issues. It can be the location, it can be all kinds of stuff. I love that both [producer] Kelly McCormick and David and [production company] 87 North are so focused on making stunts story-based.”

She is underselling herself, of course. Editing is never simple no matter how good the performances, the VFX, coverage or direction.

“On a practical level, a lot of that is about communicating with the stunt team early on and collaborating with them — which Elisabet does and which I haven’t seen other editors do in the same degree of intimacy,” said The Fall Guy’s first assistant editor, Matt Absher. “They can practice their stunts and storyboard and previs, all day long, but they quickly bring what they have to Elisabet before they execute it to make sure it’ll actually work.”

The core of The Fall Guy is not in fact the stunts, it’s the romance between the lead characters.

“We wanted to showcase stunts but, at the same time, we don’t want to lose the love affair between Jody and Colt. So that was kind of the focus we had: the stunts, and how can we keep that love affair going through that sequence?” she said.

“The film was a tricky tone because it’s a love story within an action extravaganza, but it’s also amurder mystery. It’s two movies. There’s a lot happening, so finding that tone took us some time.”

There are a number of scenes which are intercut, showing parallel storylines. One such involves a karaoke scene with Blunt while Gosling is engaged in a garbage truck fight with Ryan. “Every time we intercut it’s to not lose sight of the lovebirds, because they are so amazing together. So if we would have stayed with the garbage truck sequence for the whole time, we would have lost Jody. And vice versa — if we stayed in the bar with the karaoke, we would lose Colt. So it was an effort to keep them together basically, and also amp up the excitement of it.”

She reveals the craft behind one scripted shot in the sequence: When Gosling drives past the karaoke bar and Blunt is singing. “That was shot specifically for that moment. It was tricky because we had to get to that moment, but we also had to keep the song in sync. And it’s an epic song. You can’t cut it to pieces. So we had to keep that moment going long enough for the drive by to hit at the right moment in the song.”

It’s like carving out something. You just keep going. And once I have the scene assembled, I start going through every single shot for certain moments — what’s going to work best.” The Iceland-born editor also has a background in dance, which informs some of her visual sensibility.

“For me, it’s such an emotional thing but it’s extremely important that I get that feeling of the flow that one cut leads to the other. I use different techniques. It’s the movement of people. You can use a movement to have it flow into the next cut — or use the characters eyes, to help you flow into the next shot,” she said. “I like the flowing of cuts. That doesn’t mean that sometimes you just wanna cut, because we’re always thinking how we can manipulate the audience into certain emotions or intrigues or keeping the story going. But in general, I like the flow until we need something else because of the story.”