As well as being a film nerd, I’m a sports nerd too. As a long-time fan of the NFL and the other sport also known as football, I’m fascinated by what makes a good team good, and a bad team not good. I don’t mean just the players, but the organisation as a whole. It’s possible to be a good team with not-so-good players or to be a bad team with good players, so it’s clear that there’s more to winning in football than just having good players.
Take Manchester United and Manchester City, both have spent enormous amounts of money over the last decade while having very different levels of success. And why do teams like the Steelers, Ravens, and (until recently) the Patriots, have strong teams year after year, while the likes of the Lions, Bears, and Jaguars almost always have bad teams, despite the supposed advantage of continually having access to the best college players in the draft?
Director of Football and former Manchester United manager Ralf Rangnick has described the job of a football manager as having a vision of how they want their team to play football, and then successfully communicating that vision to the team. This sounds a lot like a film director’s job.
What are we trying to achieve?
I’m a firm believer that, in the same way a successful sports team or successful business needs to have a clear vision and a plan for achieving that vision, a film director also needs to have a vision or central idea that everyone on the film is working towards.
As the Editor, knowing what this central vision is allows you to ensure that all your decisions are working towards this idea.
The vision can be something thematic, it can be about executing the film’s genre, it can be about communicating a message, or it can be aimed at delivering a particular emotional experience to the audience. If you’re making a thriller, and the Director wants the audience to be on the edge of their seat, then successfully executing a “thriller”, and all that this entails gives you an objective to work towards.
You know the audience is being sold a thriller, so your job is to deliver the best thriller possible.
That doesn’t mean you can’t do other things with the film, that you can’t have some digressions, or comedic moments to provide levity, but you do need to make sure that every choice you make in some way supports the central idea, rather than detracting from it.
The simple fact is that not having a unifying vision, and not communicating it effectively to the team, means that people will be pulling in different directions.
Preparing for the Edit
My process when starting on a project involves reading, studying, and breaking down the script so that I can understand what the vision seems to be, and how the Director intends to enact it. Once that’s done I will talk to the Director to see if what I’m finding in the script is what they want me to see in the script.
If it is, then that’s good, if it’s not, then we need to figure out why. Sometimes that’s simply because I’ve gotten the wrong end of the stick and missed certain elements while overly focusing on others. If that isn’t the case and the tone of the script is reading wrongly, or an arc isn’t clear, or whatever the problem may be, then the Director and I need to have some conversations about that.
Once I get into the Assembly stage and start cutting scenes, I want to use all my preparation to guide me in putting together versions of the scenes that contribute to the vision.
If I start sending comedic interpretations of scenes to a Director who is trying to make an intense thriller, then I’m likely going to disorientate and disappoint the Director, and ultimately I may get replaced on the project if I can’t adjust.
Maintaining or Developing the Vision
Inevitably, a Director’s vision, or at the very minimum, the execution of it, will change as the project progresses. Rarely will everything happen as planned on set.
Locations will be changed, extra ideas will spring to mind, actors will bring layers and nuances to their performances, and so very rarely does a Director come out of a shoot saying “I got exactly what I planned”, whether for better or for worse.
Once you get into the edit, things will often move further away from the original intention too. Some Directors have very specific ideas of how they want to achieve certain things, but will have to accept that not all of those will work in the way they had hoped or intended.
Other Directors will have a looser approach to the shoot, treating it more as a material-gathering exercise for the edit, with the aim of discovering exactly how to achieve specific intentions by exploring the possibilities of the material with the Editor.
However a Director prefers to work, and whatever they intend when they begin the edit, they will also change some of their big ideas as the film evolves. Things frequently emerge out of the material that nobody foresaw, and at other times, ideas will be dropped or diminished once it becomes clear that pursuing them is less effective or interesting than expected.
How should an Editor deal with the evolution of the film?
The Editor’s role in all of this is to ensure that the material is fully explored, and that the Director does not just accept that the original plan is the only way we can do things. We should be challenging them to re-evaluate their decisions in order to ensure that they’re making the correct ones.
But we should also be there to help them treat the material with honesty and rigour, to ensure that they keep hold of their vision when they need to, and let it go when that is required instead.