Most mainstream films are akin to spectating on sport. If you’re watching as a neutral, and not rooting for anyone, then you’re never quite as engaged as are you when you’re cheering on a team, or backing the underdog.
The way a film is edited has a lot of influence over whether or not a viewer feels engaged with the characters, and ensuring that viewers are engaged is a key job of the editor.
Characters are people too
Films are generally told through their characters. We as human beings have a natural affinity for other human beings (although the world at large sometimes suggests otherwise).
Though we’re engaged by the questions a story raises – whether intellectual or thematic, or simply about resolving the dilemmas of the plot – we engage as much if not more with the people we see on screen.
When we see characters who have the same fears and flaws we have, have experiences we wish we could have, or end up in situations we would be terrified to be in ourselves, we naturally identify with them on a human level.
A fundamental part of an editor’s job is to ensure that we engage with the characters as much as possible. The characters are not just our entry into the world of the film, but we are their companions through the emotional rollercoaster of the story, much in the same way that we accompany a team or an athlete when we watch a sport we care about.
How do we engage the audience?
There are times when it’s interesting to view a character’s story from the outside, such as those moments when we are aware of danger before the character is and we fear for their safety. However, the closer we feel emotionally and psychologically to a character, then the more as an audience we feel part of their journey. In other words, the more we know about what the characters are thinking and feeling, the closer we feel to them.
Think of those times when you meet someone, a random on the street, a new colleague, a friend of a friend. They make an initial impression on you and often you make an immediate judgement.
But then you start to get to know them, have a simple conversation with them, and it immediately humanises them. An initial impression that may have been negative is altered by a growing understanding of the person. The more you get to know about what they’re thinking and feeling, the more you engage with them, understand them, and like them.
It’s the same with characters. The more we get to know about their thoughts and feelings, the closer we feel to them. However, unlike a novel, or a Shakespeare play, in film we generally don’t have direct access to their thoughts and feelings. We can’t ask them questions, and rarely do characters actually verbalise what they’re thinking.
So as filmmakers, editors have to find ways to externalise those thoughts and feelings characters are having.
Using actor’s performances
As editors of fiction films, we spend enormous amounts of time watching, studying, and assessing actors’ performances. We also shape, reshape, and manipulate those performances, attempting to find ways to tell the story of the film in interesting, intriguing, and economical ways.
One of the things we’re looking for in a performance is those moments where we see inside the character, where we understand what they’re thinking or feeling. It may be a big moment, or it may be tiny, but it’s a building block for the film.
Arguably, the worst type of performance an actor can give is the one that I and most other people would give, just speaking the lines while still being unconvincing doing so. The next step up are the actors who can give a convincing impression of a real person on the surface, but who don’t seem to have an inner life.
Years ago (I make myself sound old, but it was years ago), I cut a film in which one of the actors in a major role was of the second type. He had mostly done theatre, and didn’t have much film or TV experience, and he probably would have been fine except that his character was one half of a key scene, a two-hander with another character.
The problem we struggled with was that when he wasn’t delivering a line, he wasn’t giving us anything, it just always looked like he was waiting for his next line.
Finding Moments
When building a performance, obviously the dialogue is important and useful, but what I’m also looking for is all the stuff when the character isn’t talking. Films are built up of action and reaction, and the same goes for a dialogue scene.
A dialogue scene isn’t (or shouldn’t) just involve a character dispensing information, ideally what the audience should be intrigued about is how the other character will react, as much as the information the dialogue contains.
So what I’m looking for in a performance are those moments when I get something interesting from an actor. When struggling with a bad performance, I’m often heard muttering under my breath “come on, just give me SOMETHING”. It may be as little as a flick of the eyes, a shuffling of feet, whatever it is that suggests some inner emotion being expressed externally. It doesn’t even have to be big, as I look to calibrate the size of reaction to the moment, as a quiet dialogue scene requires a much smaller moment than a big action set-piece.
In the example above, we had to mine as many little moments from his performance as we could find, and lean a lot on the other actor. If I remember correctly, we also leant into the idea of our guy being disengaged in the conversation for as long as possible (the other character had instigated it). I think we also had to lose the idea of him becoming more sympathetic as the scene went on.
Of course, no matter how we played it, it would have been far stronger, and far more engaging if we had been able to get more into his head.
Putting theory into practice
A great action scene is as much about how strongly you can engage the audience in what the characters are feeling during the scene, as it is about the action itself.
This sequence from Raiders of the Lost Ark is a great example of how important it is to externalise character’s thoughts and feelings.
I’d suggest watching it through once as a normal viewer, then watching again to look for all the moments where we cut to Indy, or Marion, or the Mechanic’s face in order to read their eyes and their expressions. Notice how we rarely go in closer on the other characters. Notice too how frequently these cuts to the main characters come at the moments where we are shifting to their perspective, or are used as reactions to a development in the narrative.
The edit of this scene is not just focused on the punches and the explosion, or even the danger our character’s are placed into, it’s looking to balance these elements with a real sense of what Indy, Marion, and the Mechanic are thinking and feeling, in order to draw us the audience into a journey of emotion.
Dialogue Scenes
What about a smaller, quieter scene, where we don’t have action set pieces to entertain us, just the writing and the performances? Editing has a lot to do with timing, and finding the right moment to use a flash of externalized emotion can be the difference between a scene working or not, or between a scene being great or not.
Watch the dinner scene from Whiplash, and how cutting to Andrew allows us to read his face and his eyes, and see the flickers of emotion that momentarily cross his face, showing the audience how he really feels as the scene evolves. Notice the moment the shot holds on Andrew as his cousins enters and his answer is cut off, or his disinterested look as they discuss various football achievements. These and many more are deliberate choices by the Director and the Editor to reveal a characters thoughts and emotions without them saying a word.
Even the short scene with his father in the kitchen beforehand is a great example of how we can read so much detail from an actor’s performance. The pause before Andrew answers, his father holding his look before he leaves. This is not a scene about a question and an answer; the writing, the performances, and the edit turn it into something so much richer psychologically.
Interested in other concepts editors use to refine their work? Check out the site’s Concepts category.