IBC
From an eccentric costume drama to the story of the ultimate
stadium rockers, what all the nominations in the best film editing category
have in common is that their stories are based on real life biographies.
Bohemian Rhapsody
Freddie
Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody “is the classic narrative arc of alienated
artist and inflated ego, who is then humbled and who finally brings the band
back together for triumphal come back,” the film’s editor John Ottman, ACE told
IBC365.
“We
tell it in a down to earth fashion with nothing hyper real about it except for
the concert pieces. These, I made a little more stylistic.”
The film is also a triumph of sorts for Ottman who quietly had
to battle 20th Century
Fox’s intrusion on the final cut and the firing of director and regular
collaborator Bryan Singer two thirds through filming.
Cast and crew were at pains to avoid talking about Singer during
the film’s promotion for fear that it would become the main story.
“Bryan wasn’t really there in post but then that’s fine because
he likes to give me my space to cut a film anyway,” Ottman said. “He’s more
worried that if he directs me he might not discover things about the story that
I’d create when left to my own devices.”
Ottman’s dual career as a composer mainly on Singer’s films
including The Usual Suspects, X-Men 2, Superman
Returns and Valkyrie made him
a natural choice to edit a musical.
Singer also hired him as composer with the assumption that Bohemian Rhapsodywas going to have an
underscore. In the end it was decided to stick to Queen’s extensive back
catalogue “to keep it pure”, although Ottman embellished a couple of the more
emotional scenes with opera, such as when Mercury proposes to Mary.
“It fills the purpose of what underscore would have done but
makes it more intelligent in that it’s not done with the score, which would
have been typical,” he says.
Charges that the film glosses over Mercury’s true rock and roll
lifestyle don’t seem to have impacted its success.
“This was a ten-year saga for producers [Graham King and Queen’s
manager Jim Beach] getting approval for every little thing in the script. Once
they’d agreed the script Queen weren’t involved editorially that much. But we
were in constant struggle with the studio to cut things out mainly because the
studio is always concerned about run time.”
Guitarist Brian May sourced the band’s original recordings for
use in the sound mix for which Paul Massey, Tim Cavagin and John Casali are Oscar
nominated alongside John Warhurst and Nina Hartstone for sound editing.
“As amazing as Queen’s music is they wrote it to be an
interactive experience with an audience so the music doesn’t really soar until
you hear the audience sing along, applaud and clap,” explains Ottman. “That
took a lot of multi-track work to finesse.
“I am a huge fan of watching every frame of all dailies before I
cut anything,” he says. “I want to know when I go to bed that I used the best
of the best takes that I could find. You never know – one little inflection of
an actor’s eyelid could influence the way I cut a scene.”
Vice
Vice is Hank Corwin’s (ACE) second film for
director Adam McKay following The Big
Short, a satire about the financial crisis. Both films tackle
heavyweight political topics and could easily be rendered dull and leaden in
the wrong hands.
Vice suggests that George Bush invited Dick Cheney to be Vice
President and they negotiated so that Cheney ends up with all the power with
Bush not bright enough to realise what he’s agreed to.
That set-up is also a key scene in the film. “Christian Bale (as
Cheney) is looking very intently at Sam Rockwell (as George Bush) and that’s
one level of the conversation,” Corwin explained in one interview. “But we
inserted did a jump cut of Bale’s character laughing at his fantastic win. It’s
this humourless laugh. It just conveys so much about the Cheney character and
about the situation. It could be argued that we’re leading the audience and
indulging in propaganda. And honestly, I can’t dispute that. But life is
propaganda. Life is political.”
Corwin’s previous work includes Tree of
Life, Natural Born Killers, Snow Falling on Cedars and work as
additional editor on JFK, Public Enemies and Moneyball.
The Favourite
It
probably takes an editor of extreme patience and rare insight to understand the
distinctive vision of auteur Yorgos Lanthimos.
Fortunately, fellow Greek Yorgos Mavropsaridis, ACE has worked
with the director from his 2001 film My
Best Friend, through his recent films Dogtooth, The Lobster and Killing of a Sacred Deer and has
developed an instinct for Lanthimos’ highly original artistic choices.
In the case of The
Favourite, this meant coherently piecing together self-consciously
oddball cinematic angles courtesy of director of photography Robbie Ryan, Fiona
Crombie’s extravagant production design and Johnnie Burn’s unusually modern
soundscape.
“The biggest challenge was to deconstruct the linearity of the
plot and at the same time stay true to the idiosyncratic filmic language of
Yorgos,” says Mavropsaridis. “We wanted the editing style to be used as a
counterpoint to the historic period. It had to balance the acting of three
excellent actresses and to achieve, imperceptibility, a transition from shade
of light to dark emotion.”
The Favourite deploys a range of
unusual cinematic tools; “very extreme wide angles, big close-ups, a lot of
movement also using extreme wide angles, very high angle shots, extremely low
angle shots,” lists Mavropsaridis.
“Fast panning shots at points distorting the eye-line of the
actors, at others inspecting them from an extreme distance. At times the
actors, as in Citizen Kane,
are depicted larger than life. All these formal elements had to be combined in
a way that retained their aesthetic elegance while advancing the plot and the
viewer’s perception.”
Lanthimos and his editor conjure the mesmeric final shot as the
Queen (Olivia Coleman) and Abigail (Emma Stone) realise the unending misery of
their situation.
“The final shot is more a composition of shots and the technical
difficulties to actually construct it were enormous,” he explains. “For a long
time in the edit we finished on a close up of Abigail then we played with
different lengths [of shot], and a different order. We spent long hours adding,
multiplying, superimposing to find the specific length of time we felt was right
for the idea to form in the minds of the character’s and in parallel in that of
the audience, that their essential situation was one of futility.
“We do this with simple loops and repetitions and
superimpositions and fades, and of course the close ups of two very talented
actresses. The slight involuntary tweak in Abigail’s face as the horror of her
situation dawns on her, and the wisdom the Queen finds in accepting her pain, a
spoilt child no more.”
Green Book
Described
as ‘Driving Miss Daisy in
reverse’ in the sense that this time a black person is the passenger and the
racist is the hired help, Green Book’s
strength lies in the chemistry of the two leads and its careful balance of
comedy and drama.
Though the true nature of the relationship between
African-American pianist Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali) and Tony Vallelonga
(Viggo Mortensen), his driver and bodyguard on a tour of the Deep South in
1962, have been disputed, it’s a fact that a Green Book advising non-white
travellers which places to avoid was issued.
Much of the salty interaction between the pair takes place in a
car, both facing forward, with glances in rear view mirrors. You could imagine
it as a stage play but editor Patrick Don Vito deftly keeps the story moving
forward with tension and humour.
“That was probably the most difficult thing about it, he told
PostPerspective.“You don’t want the jokes to seem like a joke. You want them to
come out of a scene naturally. At first, I cut everything in to see what was
working and what seemed too jokey. You start eliminating things that take it to
a different type of comedy and you try to keep it more real. That was always
the mantra from Pete: “Let’s keep it real. All the comedy needs to come out of
the scenes and not seem like it’s too much of a joke.”
Pete is director Peter Farrelly, previously best known for
unapologetically un-PC comedies such as There’s
Something About Mary and Dumb & Dumber.
Green Book’s pat ending in which
Shirley seeks out and is invited into Vallelonga’s family to share a thanks
giving meal in harmony is about as far removed from that of BlacKkKlansman as is
possible to get.
BlacKkKlansman
Presented
as a kind of real-life Shaft, Ron Stallworth - the hero of BlacKkKlansman - is the
black activist who in real life infiltrated not just the Klan but also the
corrupt, racist system that was the Colorado Springs Police Department in the
early ‘70s. So inept is the KKK and its leader David Duke that at times the
movie steers into outright comedy even though director Spike Lee’s intent is
deadly serious.
“The South is a funny,
funny place, sometimes inadvertently so,” says Barry Alexander Brown, the
Cheshire-born editor who grew up in Montgomery, Alabama.
The climax of the film cuts to documentary footage of the
anti-fascist riots that ended in the murder of protester Heather Heyer in
Charlottesville in 2017.
“It carries a very overt political message but neither one of us
is afraid of that,” says Brown. “The ending is pretty brutal but very
effective. I’ve seen people come out of a screening and know that it’s got
under their skin. That’s what want to do, to make you feel something.”
By the same token, he says, the filmmakers are not interested
“in beating somebody over the head with a message”.
Ironically, the juxtaposition of past and present scenes is a
technique first credited to director DW Griffith, once revered as the father of
cinema but since reappraised for the racism in films like Birth of a Nation – which features heavily
in early scenes of BlacKkKlansman.
Brown has cut the majority of Lee’s work including Malcolm X.
“There’s no real difference between documentary and narrative films – you have
to do all the same things; a plot and arc and characters and you are still
manipulating an audience. But the narrative form is more interesting to me. Malcolm X and BlacKkKlansman would
feel at arms’ length if told as a documentary.”
Next month Brown begins shooting his ninth feature as director
on location in Montgomery with Spike Lee as executive producer. Son of the South, which Brown also scripted, is
based on the autobiography, The Wrong Side Of Murder Creek by
Bob Zellner, grandson of a Klansman.
No African-American has won best director Oscar, with Lee an
outsider despite his first nomination this year.
And the winner is…
As ever
the Oscar shortlist could easily have included a number of other artists.
The annual awards of the American Cinema Editor’s (ACE) guild
are called Eddies and these are split into multiple categories. Among nominees
for best edited feature - comedy were the trio of editors behind Deadpool 2 and Myron Kerstein who made Crazy Rich Asians.
In the ACE best edited dramatic feature section as Tom Cross ACE
for First Man, Jay Cassidy, ACE
for A Star is Born and
Alfonso Cuarón and Adam Gough for Roma.
If this is any guide to Oscar glory then the winners in these categories were
Yorgos Mavropsaridis and John Ottman.
