[MUSIC PLAYING]
Editing is central to what we do.
It's the most important part of the process,
and in a way, of course it is, because it's
the synthesis of all the stuff that you've gathered.
But this has to be seen in the context of an entire process,
in which we never stop researching,
and we never stop writing.
So editing is something that is beginning.
And while it is ongoing, we are still
engaged in many, many other aspects, all feeding
in to the editing, and all with the idea
that we are somehow making this developing script,
this developing cut, better and better and better.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I have never really, since college, been my own editor,
where I've cut the film and marked it.
I've done all that.
I've cut A and B rolls.
I've done the old, arcane stuff, worked even
with upright moviolas and steambacks
and flatbed moviolas and Cam machines,
and all sort of stuff.
But since I began my professional life post-college,
I've had someone physically editing the film.
And the single best thing you can do is get good people.
And they don't have to be good necessarily artistically.
They're just good people.
Because you can learn all of this stuff.
And so I've converted housewives to producers and kids
that were interns into unbelievable editors.
And the biggest thing you have to do is to trust them.
And so what I don't want to do is hang over them
every single moment.
I try to limit my contact to those screenings, where
I can focus all my attention and benefit
from a bunch of other eyeballs looking at it.
But a lot of it is trust.
And that's true with cinematography.
It's true with other people that you're
engaged in who work on the project with you.
It's a wonderful thing when you can
love the people you work with and begin to trust them.
So it's not a singular exercise, is the first law of filmmaking.
Nobody, no matter how great the auteur, not Orson Welles, not
anybody does it alone.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
After our experiences with "Civil War", "Baseball",
and "Jazz", in which our editors were spending
an inordinate amount of time adding picture
to the first assembly, we created
what we call a blind assembly, in which we
have worked on the script through several iterations.
I, as the scratch narrator had recorded that material.
We've dumped in whatever talking heads,
however cut up they might be, into places where
we think they might work.
And then we listen to it, look at it, as a blind assembly.
Whenever there's the narration, you're seeing nothing.
Whenever there's a first-person voice, you're seeing nothing.
There's no music.
It's just to sort of hear it, almost as
if you had heard a radio play.
We would do that to help us understand the larger
shape of the narrative and what was extraneous
and what we needed to do.
And that permitted us in the next pass
to go and begin to add picture.
In some of the longer series, we now
have two, sometimes three, blind assemblies,
because we are really wrestling with complex structures,
Russian novels, in which you've got dozens
and dozens of characters.
But in essence, that permits us the possibility
to see the rough shape of it.
And then we can turn to the editors and say,
we're not going to waste your time.
We're not going to pull that 45 minutes
that you took two weeks to edit out just because like that, we
realized it was extraneous.
We'd rather do that when it's blank,
and we can just cut it out on the script, and then move on.
And it's really tightened our game in a really good way
and then permitted us a great deal more latitude down
the line, as then we move to a true assembly with images,
to an intermediate cut, to a rough cut,
to an intermediate pass, to a fine cut,
and then work to lock.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Your first assembly should look terrible.
It should be way, way long.
If it's not terrible and it's not way,
way long, something's wrong.
It's not an assembly.
You're farther along.
The idea is probably not good.
I've learned-- it took me a long time--
to learn to welcome the kind of terror
that comes from the daunting task.
I mean, when you look at an assembly,
you're basically at the base camp of Everest.
And you go, well, OK, you know, there's
a lot of stuff we have to do here to make it
a real thing, to make it the place where you can pull away
the scaffolding and pull away the false work
and pull away the props and the crutches,
and all of those things.
I have never had an assembly where it hasn't been like,
yikes.
And I've looked around at my colleagues, and they've been,
you know, there's a kind of panic look on their face.
And one of the other jobs I have is to go, oh yeah,
I know what to do.
I would just wish, absent any sort of list of things to do,
that I would just wish that you could find a kind of enthusiasm
for the process and for what you're doing.
Having that kind of enthusiasm gets you
through those big speed bumps of when
you look and your assembly is twice as long as it should be.
Or you need to cut an hour out just in this pass to get it
down to within fighting length.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I wear a lot of hats in the things that I do.
I'm the executive producer.
I'm the producer.
I'm the director.
But my most important thing is an ability
to go into a screening and see the film new
as if I knew nothing about it.
And that's the single greatest talent you have to have.
Because as you get deep into a project,
you begin to assume knowledge.
You know the back story.
And you make leaps and connections
that are not necessarily there.
And it's super important to realize
I'm taking somebody who has not yet
decided to commit their attention to you,
and in the first few minutes of the film,
I have to let them know that the thing I'm
going to talk to them about for the next hour and a half,
or 2 hours, or 18 hours, is, in fact, worthy
of their attention, and that I am going to lead you
so the point that you wish to know more and ever more
as you proceed.
So if there's a place where they fall out in the first episode,
that's it.
You're gone.
They're going to go to something else
and look at something else.
My job is to try to anticipate that in advance.
And I think everybody can do it.
You just have to understand that,
when I say the first shot, that has a certain value.
The second shot-- already something new is happening.
And you've got to make sure that I haven't jumped
over either metaphorically, a few shots or a few bits
of information or a few bits of commentary,
or whatever it is that you just take along.
And editing is, in fact, weeding out the extraneous
and rewriting so that you get a smooth narrative
arc within the context of parts of a scene, an entire scene,
a chapter, an entire episode, and then
of course, when all those things are put together,
an entire series.
If you can do that, you can do just about anything.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
You definitely want to have screenings.
I would urge you to do that.
And if you have a subject that in any way
relates to history or the Academy or something in which
scholarship would aid you in getting it right,
you really have to do that, you know,
whether it's about housing, or they're
about prisons, or whether it's about the Civil War.
Once we're probably at the rough cut or beyond,
we start inviting in our historical advisors.
They've been involved in the treatment and scripting,
but we sort of left them out until we
did a little bit better job of filmmaking
and we had some pictures to show.
Then we invite them in, and we have these incredibly complex,
very energetic discussions.
And it won't just be the historical advisors.
It might, in the case of a war film,
be the veterans that are in our film.
It might be warm bodies from the neighborhood.
It might be colleagues from PBS.
So we've got a lot of bodies there,
and it's my job to sort of manage after each episode.
It's a very slow process.
We convene in the barn.
We look at a two-hour episode.
We talk about it, and we listen.
We just invite.
And I take, you know, very particular notes
about what people are saying--
less the good things than the bad things.
And they provide feedback.
They're not filmmakers, so you don't ever
give them scripts, because then they'll
spend the entire time looking down at the script.
It's literally-- it's hilarious.
We are given scripts, the handful of us,
but everybody else has to write on a notepad.
And we want them to write like this, looking.
And so we get some information, and we can weigh it.
All provide a measure of feedback.
All of them are giving you raw data,
which you have to sort of take in
with the immediate colleagues that are working on it,
and then figure out how to digest it.
You can honor most of it in the spirit of it,
if not necessarily in the letter of it.
And it's extremely helpful.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
We're talking about how you make a film.
And for the most part, the forces that work on that desire
have to do, obviously, with money.
Clearly, talent and intention and plan are important.
But the single greatest thing is time.
My only wish would be that each one of you, in some ways,
can try to recreate the conditions that best give you
the most amount of time.
Because that time will deliver you those seasons.
That time will deliver you that extra archive.
That time will give you a chance to think
outside the box in the editing room
and make new associations and new connections.
That time will make sure that your film is better.
Everybody knows what quick and dirty means, you know.
Let's not do that.