IBC
Scenes structured ‘like Russian dolls’ present editor Paul Machliss with a challenge in completing this deadly reality TV show
If it feels too simplistic to say that The Running Man gets off to a running start then have a word with film editor Paul Machliss.
“The idea is that we kind of grab the audience and don't put
them down,” he says. “Someone will always feel that we’re rushing into it, but
I think the whole film has to have energy. It's got dynamics where we go from
intense action to longer pauses with dialogue, story and character.”
Even in the film’s quieter moments the music and the score
by Steven Price propels the story like a ticking clock. “There is always a pulse
running underneath,” Machliss explains. “We’ve got these beats like heartbeats
to give a feeling of your pulse. There can't be a let up even when our hero
thinks he's got a moment to breathe because there's always someone who know
where he is.”
The Running Man will deliver for action genre fans
and those with a fondness for the pulp dystopia of ‘70s and ‘80s cinema like Rollerball,
Robocop, Total Recall and of course the original version from 1987 starring
Arnold Schwarzenegger.
“The intention was to do an adaptation of the book [by
Stephen King] because the original film only used its game show premise inside
of a giant stadia instead of literally having the hero on the run throughout
the country.”
Written by Edgar Wright and Michael Bacall and directed by
Wright the film stars Glen Powell as blue collar worker Ben Richards who enters
a life or death TV game show to earn money for his sick daughter in a
totalitarian society dominated by the FreeVee Network.
King’s book published in 1982 was coincidentally set in
2025. The production design of Wright’s movie mixes near future tech like AI
and self-driving cars with retro ideas like having Richards record selfie
videos onto tape which then need mailing by post.
“If it feels like there's a conscious or unconscious
throwback to that era, that’s great and I’m sure Edgar and Michael Bacall
deliberately incorporated some of that analogue pre-CGI feel but that wasn’t at
the forefront of my mind,” Machliss says. “I think we were just trying to do
the next Edgar Wright film to be honest.”
This is their fifth film together following Scott Pilgrim
vs the World, The World’s End, Baby Driver and Last Night in Soho.
Machliss describes it as “complicated” to put together not
least because almost every scene incorporates a secondary filmed element. “Sometimes it’s a scene within a scene within
a scene,” he says.
They had two days before principal photography to shoot footage
for a Kardashian’s style reality show called The Americans that features in the
film. “We needed that material to be turned around first because sometimes we
had to play it back practically on screens within scenes.”
Other inserts included game show Speed the Wheel which
Richards and his wife watch in their apartment, a reoccurring behind the scenes
video fronted by a guerilla character called the Apostle and several
trailer-style adverts for The Running Man.
“We also recorded a five minute wild track of the next round
of the Speed the Wheel show, which we knew we weren’t going to see on screen,
but that we were going to hear it in the background of the apartment. The host
of Speed the Wheel talks about the life choices of his contestant but we made
sure that if you listen out for it, it's a little commentary on the dilemma
Ben's facing. Only a couple of months ago we retimed all the ad breaks and the
background dialogue to make it fit with the scene.”
Given the demanding schedule, Machliss had a couple of other
editors help him with these elements; David Webb, who runs London’s Final Cut
drew on his experience cutting commercials and promos (including for Wright),
and Jerry Ramsbottom, who previously assisted Machliss on Baby Driver.
The most extreme layering in the film happens when Richards
stumbles on an open air screening of the game show.
“Just that 90 seconds of footage took us about a week to
assemble because we always had to figure what was going on. It’s like a Russian
egg in terms of construction.
“There's the Running Man show and the selfie tapes within
the game show. There's the audience in the game show watching the game show live
and there’s the audience watching it on the outdoors screen. Then we have Ben
watching the game show and him watching the audience watching it. You can’t
spend all your time compositing the layer so we just had a lot of lot of
pictures in picture boxes to juggle.”
As on Baby Driver they prepared an animatic of the entire
film for all crew to understand what Wright wanted. This included some editorial
transitions worked out by Machliss and DP Chung-hoon Chung in prep. “So when
we're shooting we knew the outgoing frame and the incoming frame.”
As he was on Wright’s previous movies, Machliss was on set
during photography. “Edgar needs to see how the cuts are progressing, but I’m
also there so we can work on those transitions. We commit to the transitions to
a degree but not to the extent that we can’t change them in post if we decide a
shot had to come out or something had to be a little quicker.”
A staple of this genre is that the chief villain has the
ability to spy on the hero, no matter where they are and at any time – as if
they had rigged the entire world with broadcast cameras. On The Running Man
not only is this loophole solved by having Runners tracked by spherical drones
but the images from them that feature in the live broadcast appear to exhibit
the correct angle and distance.
“We're trying to shoot all the fight scenes and dialogue
scenes in the fuselage of the plane [in the film’s climax] with an A cam and a
B cam but there is always someone else covering it with a third camera which
will be one of our ‘Rovercams’,” says Machliss. “In reality this was an
operator with a Sony FX9 but it meant we always had a complementary angle or
two to build the scene. The challenge
was to make it all sync up.”
Script supervisor Lizzie Pritchard had her work cut out to
keep track of the story’s timeline. She devised a schedule mapping out the
thirty days of Richards’ run.
“You've got to make sure you don't lose the audience, which
is why we had the signage appear on the bottom left of the screen, saying ‘Day
5, Day 11’ and so on to give a sense of the time, but also as a help us in the
edit,” Machliss says. “For example, how much money has Ben earned at the end of
week one? We need to put that on screen. That's not something you normally
think about.”
Leavesden, London, Glasgow, Bulgaria
Rather than shoot in four walls of green screen the
production built the environment on physical sets and locations which ILM
augmented with extensions and replacements.
Glasgow locations provided much of the dystopian near-future
USA including the brutalist concrete Anderston Centre and Blythswood Hill. The
set for the Running Man game show was built on two sound stages at Warner Bros.
Leavesden by production designer Marcus Rowland.
“That's why Edgar was able to do that amazing unbroken
Steadicam shot when we walk with Ben out of the elevator into the studio the
day he starts The Running Man,” Machliss says. “That shot begins in the loading
bay of the sound stage at Leavesden and travels into the back of the stage,
which is dressed like a multi-camera broadcast studio. We had a whole crew
effectively running the game show for us, as well four or five main cameras on
set. Even though the game show cameras weren't technically part of our coverage
we filmed from them as well and used that footage on the quad-split monitors in
the game show’s gallery.”
The film also shot on location in Canary Wharf and Wembley
Stadium (with all bar the steps replaced by VFX). The rail station at
Tottenham’s football ground was used for scenes where Running Man buys a train
ticket. Exteriors of a US freeway and of mountainous backdrops were all filmed
in Bulgaria.
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