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How would you define Black Doves, Netflix’ new thriller series? For editor Simon Brasse, “It’s a buddy movie wrapped in a spy movie wrapped in a romance. It's definitely got those elements but for me it’s more about spies and friendship.”
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Just as Die Hard is definitely a holiday movie, so Black
Doves, created and written by Joe Barton (Giri/Haji, The Lazarus Project), is
set at Christmas, the cozy gift-giving season at counter to the assassins,
drugs, mystery, violence and black humour that runs amok around London.
Brasse edited the pilot and the third of the six episodes for
director Alex Gabassi, a friend since working together on The ABC Murders,
a 2017 BBC One adaptation of the Agatha Christie mystery. They both worked on
several series of Netflix The Crown although not on the same episodes.
“Getting an opportunity to work with Alex and taking on the
challenge of creating a story world that has been shown many times before but it
in a way that keeps you off balance, was the draw for me,” he explains. “That
and being able to have a big say in the music.
“One of the things I realized quite quickly with feedback
from Alex who I was sending edits to was that we needed not to be too
reverential to the thought processes of our characters in the plotting moments.
The pacing should be quick fire, jumping from one place to another. I had to allow
myself the freedom to pull out shots that were not necessarily intended to go
where they ended up on the timeline in order to deliver information that was impactful
and full of energy.”
He cites a sequence in episode one where politician’s wife Helen
Webb (Keira Knightley) is unwrapping the present she received from Jason, with
whom she has been having an affair.
“This could have been presented showing her tentatively opening
the gift, then sitting with it and having an emotional reaction to it. Played
in real time it would probably last a couple of minutes on screen.
“What we ended up doing was using it as a trigger point to
get to the emotional impact of what Jason represented for Helen, to then give
her momentum to go to his flat. We next see Helen in his flat, looking through his
thing, bringing in flashes of their romance. Then we go back to that scene of
Helen unpacking the gift and showing all the emotion that came with that.
“Since at that moment Helen can’t talk to anyone about her
feelings (the only person she should could talk to is the icy Black Doves boss
Reed played by Sarah Lancashire) she is very alone, so how do you do convey
emotion with images?
“None of this was scripted that way, but the result
encapsulates what’s going on in her mind and gives her the agency that we
needed from her character. She wasn't overly pining, morose or mournful but
resolves to kick ass and extract her revenge. We needed to power that.”
Unusually, the editors were given pretty free reign to
source needle drops that play throughout the show. Typically, these are
Christmas songs to enhance the show’s seasonal setting.
“Only the first song (Pogues’ ‘Fairy Tale of New York’) was in the script.
Everything else was left up to us in the edit and apart from maybe one track I was
able to keep everything that I selected, which I’m really happy about.”
In episode one when Helen is in the back of a taxi lost in
her own thoughts after the shock of discovering that her lover is dead, Brasse
makes a sharp pivot to introduce the series’ other lead character, Sam, a
suave, Champagne-drinking assassin (Ben Whishaw).
“We’re alone with Helen’s mental state at that moment in the
taxi when she's surrounded by her family but unable to talk to them, and we
wanted to do a really quick pivot to the fun that underpins so much of what
this show has to offer. The Elvis Presley ‘I’m Coming Home’ track is one that
perfectly fitted that moment. The lyrics are melancholic about loneliness but
the rhythm and its tone and instrumentation is fun and quintessentially
Christmas, plus it just perfectly timed with the runway we had to go from
finding Sam, him driving to a hotel room and meeting Reed.”
Another track segueing from Sam leaving Liberties and
arriving at a flat for a dinner party is by jazz improv artist Kamaal Williams “not
particularly Christmassy, but one of my favourite tracks which I was able to
sneak in.”
For Brasse, shows including Severance and Fargo
were the go-to for references for music. “With Fargo I thought there
were there were elements that shared Alex's visual palette. While there are
brutal moments, there’s also something that's just fun and essentially human that
makes it easy to watch. And Fargo’s
music's a big part of that. We’re also choosing music with rhythm and
percussion so it sits in a slightly heightened space.”
Black Doves’ narrative contains lots of flashbacks,
integral to Barton’s script but which were reordered and fleshed out in the
edit. “Often flashbacks are used to give us just enough emotion that
will motivate the next scene or the current one. For example, for dinner party scene
at the end of Ep. 1 we put some flashes in there of Sam’s bloodied face or him
punching someone, just enough to make sure that the audience were unsettled by
who Sam is and what his past was and also to tease to what might be coming up.”
The show’s blend of comedy, romance and action thriller proved
tricky to balance. “I got it wrong in the beginning for sure,” Brasse says. “I
remember those first few days being too reverential and allowing shots to
linger too long. We had to figure out when to slow the show down in the moments
that mattered to give our characters maximum impact. Their motivation was the
key.
Everything else was just foot to the floor and not letting up on the pace. There
was definitely a push and pull, whether we were going too far one way or the
other, but once we got that pacing right and we figured out how to join scenes
together, such as the emotional pivot we make in the taxi from Helen to Sam,
the rest came together pretty swiftly.”
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