Scott Vander Werf: Movie directors and movie stars are the focus of the art form in the history of the medium, but the editors are crucial in shaping the structure of the narrative. These are the mostly unsung individuals behind the scenes, arranging shots that create the pace, the feeling and the overall impact on storytelling. Randy Bricker has been editing film in Hollywood for over 30 years in movies and television known for the Chucky series, Shadowhunters and Helix. He's been involved in one capacity or more in the editorial departments of nearly 40 projects. He also attended film school with my co-host David Hast at Northwestern University. David and I talked to Randy by phone about his experience as an editor and its role in the business and art of filmmaking. We asked him about what he's been working on.
Randy Bricker: Recently I've worked on the Chucky TV series. I've cut a couple of the Chuckie feature films. I guess you would say I'm known for doing, working in the horror genre, although I have done some other things. So I've done like a Texas Chainsaw movie, I've done a Halloween movie, I've done various other things. I did the feature of The Roommate and No Good Deed and other TV series or Helix and Shadow Hunters and I've been working since the late 80s. So Dave and I went to film school together at Northwestern in the early to mid 80s and then I moved out to Los Angeles in actually 87 and I worked, I guess I would say a very a little bit of a wandering career. I mean I started out at that time… you know the only thing I could get, I wasn't in the Union, so I had to start working in non-union films. Some of those were horror films because that's just kind of what was available at the time. And then, you know, I finally got in the union and I started working as an assistant editor or apprentice editor on some big budget, well, small budget, and worked my way up to big budget stuff. Like I worked on the Will Smith movie, I Am Legend. So I've kind of done, you know, small budget, big budget, medium budget, all kinds of things, TV features. So that's kind of it in a nutshell.
David Hast: So you've worked on both feature films and TV series. Is there a difference in the way they're edited?
RB: I would say that depends. As far as TV is concerned, there's something I call TV editing, which has sort of encompassed what I have done on TV. And those shows have been, I guess I would say, they're more youth-oriented or younger demographics. And I think for that demographic, it needs to be a very fast-paced show, so that sort of informs the editing. And that’s different kind of rhythm and pacing than you might get in a prestige, kind of more adult-oriented TV show, would be not quite so rapid-paced. So that's just sort of the genre and the demographic that I've worked in on TV. You know, the big differences, I would say, are more schedule-oriented, because TV, you know, you're doing multiple episodes, and they stick to their schedule much more than a feature does. And the thing about a TV show is that it sort of sets its style in the pilot or the first few episodes, and then it's kind of replicating that style moving forward. And so there's less creativity, whereas in a feature, it basically is the pilot. And you have a lot more. You're creating its own aesthetic, and you're creating its own pace and rhythm. and feeling and that's kind of more fun. The problem with that is that I found is that you can just sort of get into notes hell… so for instance I worked on this one feature where we finished the editor's cut, the director's cut, went to the producers and we got producer-notes for the next 12 months.
And that's, you know, we did a set of reshoots in there. And I was working with another editor at the time, and we had no idea we were going to be on this movie for so long. And in fact, he left early to do another project, so I finished it up. But yeah, I mean, and that just does not happen in TV. It's like this thing has to get on air, so thankfully you can only get so many notes in that allotted time.
SVW: What was that film?
RB: Oh, I’m not going to reveal that! I don’t want to get anybody angry!
(laughter)
DH: So that does lead to an interesting question when you talk about a producer gave you all these notes, because most people assume you the auteur theory is sort of ingrained in all of this and most people tend to assume that directors have the final cut on a movie and then they work with the editor and maybe they give the editor some creative leeway, but ultimately the director has the say. And I'm wondering as a working editor, how often does this turn out to be not the case? And have you worked on any movies where the director really was shoved aside and it was the producer or the studio that was really controlling the editing?
RB: Yes. I'll give you a couple instances…the only case in my entire career that the director had final cut was early in my career, I worked on The Firm, which was a Sidney Pollock movie, as an apprentice editor, so I wasn't heavily involved in the editing, but I was in the editing room. And he basically… nobody told him what to do and he just presented the movie to the studio and there were no notes, there was no back and forth. He just said, here's the movie.
DH: Well, that's an A-list director. So of course, Sidney Pollack is going to get final cut. But you've worked with some other known directors, and you're saying they don't get final cut?
RB: Yeah, so I would say the borderline second incident of that, I worked on Herbert Ross's last movie, Boys On The Side. And these are both movies… The Firm was 30 years ago…and Boys On The Side, I think that was 95. I don't think he had final cut, but he could definitely turn down a producer note. But those are the only two instances in my career that literally the director was powerful enough to say no.
DH: Yeah, have you worked with a director on an edit and then it gets shown to a producer and they completely override the director and make you recut it kind of thing?
RB: Yes. That happens more often than you would think. I would tell you that the feature world is not an auteur world in the classic sense that we think of that…there aren't, especially today… so those two instances I mentioned, Sidney Pollack and Herbert Ross, they're both dead. And those instances were in the 90s. I don't, I mean, I suppose Christopher Nolan probably is in that kind of stature. You know, Martin Scorsese, Spielberg, you know, the guys that we think of as at the top of the profession, they probably, for the right kind of movie they probably can do what they want uh... but you know i would tell you for instance all these Marvel movies, and i have never worked on a marvel movie, but I know a lot of people who have and they're very much oriented from the studio perspective...and I would say this is true of the studios in general. They do not want powerful directors because they want to be able to manipulate and control the whole process from beginning to end. And they want talented directors, but they don't want powerful directors. And it's also, kind of at this point, if you're a director and you have a super successful movie, it's…
this is my opinion… I think it's harder to get the next job because you're naturally, you know, going to sort of have a big head and think you know what's going on and the studio is going to be reluctant to work with somebody like that. They'd much rather have like a music video director who they feel they can control and not get a lot of push back on their ideas…so when they give 50 pages of notes, it's not going to end up in the circular file.
DH: Would you think it'd be fair to say that's why some directors, it's a small number, find a way to work outside the system more? I'm thinking of, say, an Alexander Payne who just did The Holdovers or John Sayles. Directors like that must retain final cut because… would you say that's probably true?
RB: I'd say it's more likely and it probably depends on the project and the budget of that project. And I think the reason, or I would say one of the reasons Alexander Payne does the movies that he does is because they require a smaller budget, so less risk involved for a studio or a financier. And the less risk, potentially the more control.
DH: Yeah. So Randy, I want to shift to asking you, you know, we're going to talk to you about editing itself as an art and about editing historically. Having gone to film school with you, I know that you're a skilled and professional editor, but you also know an awful lot about the history and the theory of editing. Here's a straight up question: what makes for good movie editing?
RB: Well, that's an interesting question, open for discussion or debate. You know, I would say in terms of American movies and that audience, you know, the mantra would be, if you notice the editing, then it's bad.
DH: That's traditional continuity style Hollywood editing going all the way back to D.W. Griffith, right? That kind of editing.
RB: Yeah, classical Hollywood editing where the cuts are invisible, were made to seem invisible to the audience. And that's still a very, very strong tradition in the U.S. As I've progressed through my career, I've learned lots of tricks and techniques to make that happen…you know there's a guy like Walter Murch, he would say none of that stuff is really important it's all about emotions and you know manipulating the audience for emotions and that a lot of those, quote, rules are uh... not something that he would advocate… but you know I would put Murch on the edge of being… you know he did a lot of work with Francis Ford Coppola in the seventies and eighties. And that those movies are kind of pushing the boundaries of, you know, what we've just outlined, this classical American style of movie making. You know, and I think the 60s and 70s were sort of a bolder time for American films. And, you know, all those films like Raging Bull or the Godfather movies or Apocalypse Now, you know, they were pushing the envelope a little bit on that sort of editing, invisible editing.
DH: So what do you like about editing? What do you most like about it? I mean, we should say here, for people that maybe haven't thought about this way, there are many people that say editing is the most important thing in a movie. I mean, obviously you have to shoot the movie, you have to have film to work with, but an editor can work with anything they're handed, so in some ways what makes motion pictures motion pictures is the editing. But again, to get back to that, is that something you like about it, about creating it, or what do you like most about editing?
BB: Well, editing is the only cinematic artform that defines movies, because acting, there's stage acting, and that kind of thing. So movies took stage acting and put it in a movie. Photography existed before motion pictures did. And obviously before photography, there was painting and sculpture and those sort of artworks. And a lot of people say the invention of cinema, the motion picture, and because of that, the editing of those motion pictures is what's inherently unique about filmmaking or cinema, and it borrows all the other aspects from the other arts.
In terms of what I like about it, I mean, for me personally, what's great about it is...they give me a bunch of footage to cut, and I go into a dark room by myself, and I sit there for hours and hours and construct this thing. And that's just rewarding for me because I don't have to depend on anyone else. Well, I have to depend on somebody to shoot the stuff. But while I'm doing the work, it's basically just me, along with my thoughts and ideas. And I like that a lot as opposed to being a director on a set and you're working with a bunch of other people and there's all the dynamics of personal and physical dynamics of all of that which doesn't interest me as much. So I sort of like living in my head with whatever project I'm working on. And I guess I would say the longer I've been doing this and I've been doing it a long time, 30-something years, I’ve learned something on every project. Those things become subtler and subtler. But when you're starting out, the challenge is, you want to cut shot A to shot B. And how to make that work either in an invisible way or an interesting way is the challenge, and you just kind of go from cut to cut like that when you're first starting out. And as you gain experience and start progressing, that aspect of it becomes second nature. And then you start thinking about, okay, how is this scene working? And what are the nuances and techniques I can use to make it more effective? And then you sort of graduate and...to, okay, how is this entire movie working, and what are the rhythms and the pace, and what are these subtle nuances that make that better or worse? And then somewhere in there, you start thinking about performance and how performances work and how you can build a performance. And some performances need a lot of editorial work and some don't and when to do that and when to not do stuff. And the other thing I found, I heard this interview the other day with Anthony Hopkins and he sort of, you know, said the same kind of thing about acting. He says, the more I do this, the longer I do this, I realize the less I do, the less acting I do, the better it is. And I've kind of reached the same conclusion about editing…is the less editing I do, the better it is. So, and it's not that I don't want to do any editing or I don't think the project needs editing. It's just, it doesn't need unnecessary editing. And so that's something that, you know, over time I've come to understand better.
DH: Yeah, when you mention that your editing can shape a performance, you know, because you're given a lot of different, sometimes you're given many different angles, master shots, closeups, and all this stuff, sometimes you're given less, so in many ways you can shape the tone of that performance. And there's this notion that sometimes a movie is shot and it's not really all there, and it takes the editor to make it into a really good movie. Have you ever worked on a movie yourself where you felt, either as an editor or an assistant editor, the editing team made the movie or saved the movie.
RB: Yeah, I mean, you know, in a sense, obviously every movie or TV episode is saved in editing. And it can be ruined in editing. You know, there's, so, I'm going to go back to our film school days. You know, when we were in film school in the 80s, there was kind of this bifurcation between I'll say Jean Renoir and Sergie Eisenstein uh... Renoir would be the mezzanine technique uh... you know, very little editing, wide shot where your eye can choose where to look and so that aesthetic would be like Rules Of The Game and the Eisenstein…
DH: And that aesthetic is often just often people will simplify it and call it realism.
RB: Yes.
DH: Okay. Not that any of it's real.
RB: But yeah, more realistic, yes. Less interference in terms of editing. It's making less choices for you, put it that way. And the other aesthetic is the Eisenstein thing… so Potemkin would be the famous example, the Odessa Step scene, where it's completely constructed of...shots of individuals or objects, and those are, you know, montaged, built into a sequence, and your eye is, and your brain is very directed about what to see and what to feel and what to think, whereas in Rules of the Game, you're given much more leeway about how you want to interpret what's going on. Anyway, that was true when we went to film school. But about that same time in the early 80s, MTV happened. And this whole idea of kinetic editing, that overtook throughout the 80s, I would say, American cinema, and to a large extent, international cinema. Nowadays, you can't cut fast enough. I mean, you can't, you know, there are some TV shows that are just like, you can't have a shot more than two seconds. And that's true in general. I mean, I'm making a broad generalization here, but there's so many, you know, a lot of these Marvel shows or these big action tent pole movies, they're shot with multiple cameras. They shoot just a ton of footage. I mean, just unbelievable amounts of footage, and there are literally, there is no, there is no, what do I want to say? There is a plan, but it is not like in the old days, like Billy Wilder might have shot three shots to finish a scene, and one of those shots would be like a moving master shot, and it was all very elegant…and you know, he might do a couple of other maybe a close up here or a close up there. And then he was done. And that's for a lot of movies nowadays that would just be nakedness.
DH: Yeah, didn’t some of the great directors, didn't they like a Wilder, or I'm thinking of John Ford, because of the studio interference, they would just shoot one or two takes and that would be all the editor could work with.
RB: Right, that was their way of controlling. So, John Ford's way of getting around, getting a bunch of producer notes, was to shoot very little footage and to basically cut it in the camera. And so, the producer was not given any options to change it or very few options. And I would say that is how this whole classical Hollywood editing style came about because the studio wanted to be able to make changes. And so again, you know, John Ford was a very powerful director, but at times in his career, he had problems getting, you know, making movies, getting projects. And I would say precisely because of this reputation of…okay if you're going to hire John Ford you’re going to get a John Ford movie, you're not going to have a lot of options, you're not going to be able to change it and do you really want to go down that path or do you want to you know hire the guy we have in the lot who's done, you know five pictures in the last two years and he doesn't give us any problems, that kind of thing....
DH: Ford was notorious for treating producers horribly, if he would allow them on the set at all, or if they made a complaint, he'd go back, I guess he was famous for always coming in on time and under budget and they'd make a note and annoy him and then he'd go back and reshoot for five days and they'd go over budget just to… he'd do things like that. He was kind of a bad boy on the set when he had to deal with the studio.
RB: Yeah, he was a very ornery person.
DH: Well, you mentioned the Russian editors, the Soviet editors from Sergie Eisenstein and Potemkin as being foundational in editing. When you think back to the most influential movies in terms of editing, editing or editors who changed the way movies were made afterwards or the way editing happened, over the whole film history, American, foreign, what names come to mind to you and who are your favorites?
RB: One of my favorites is Dede Allen, who worked in the 60s and I guess up through the 90s. So she did Bonnie and Clyde, which was very innovative editing. She's a Little Big Man, another innovative movie, kind of pushing the envelope. And lots of movies, some big budget stuff like...Milagro-Beanfield War, which I don't think of as a particularly successful movie, but she just had this great reputation of being innovative and intent... you know another one who is working today is Thelma Schoonmaker…and it's hard to separate her from Martin Scorcese... but you know they uh... I don't think recently they've done that interesting of work in terms of editorial, but you know certainly Raging Bull has a lot of really interesting editing in it ... you know they have the reputation for not really paying attention to continuity. So there's this famous scene. And I'm trying to think of that what's the Robert De Niro Jerry Lewis movie?
SVW: King of Comedy. King of comedy.
RB: King of comedy. So there's a there's a scene and I guess it's the backseat of a car with Robert De Niro and Jerry Lewis. And I think it's Jerry Lewis has a handkerchief and they keep cutting and the handkerchief is in completely different hand in a different position and it's just all over the place. But again, they're sort of going for this emotional editing as opposed to continuity editing. But then, you know, those are the interesting editors. I mean, you know, I guess I would say the classical Hollywood editor, invisible editor, it's really hard to say. I mean, that can be a very fine art form. It's just hard to tell, you know, when they're doing it because they're so skilled at it and the directors are so skilled at, you know, making that possible.
DH: Yeah, because it's that, as you said before, it's that invisible editing style. So, I mean, within a given studio, you'd have an editing supervisor who often kind of controlled even what the editors did. Can you even identify differences between, if we're looking at the Golden Age of Hollywood, 30s, 40s, into the 50s, are there differences between how the different studios edited or were they all kind of marching to the same continuity style?
RB:: Yeah, I mean that's such a murky question because…well one problem with talking about editing is you don't know what the editor had to work with…and so it's very difficult to… you know, I sort of decided if the movie works, if it's a really good movie, than certainly the editing contributed to that. And I don't know that I can say the editing saved it or, you know, because it's so well edited is, you know, why the movie is so good. I mean, I think, you know, as we know, it's a collaborative art. And a lot of people have their hands in making a great movie... you have a recent film Op-enheimer, Christopher Nolan is the director and at the top of the chain of that but he has an editor who just won the Oscar for that, and the cinematographer who just won the Oscar for that and so these are very significant contributions and he's running the show but he obviously getting this expertise that he doesn't have. And I think this is true of the editor and probably every crew member is they want to give the director his or her vision better than they imagined it. And that's kind of the job of all these crew members is to support the director and his vision and make sure that that gets on the screen.
DH: So when you're editing…I'm going to shift gears here a little. You know, I've done enough editing as someone who went to film school to know that sometimes you make an edit and it's your favorite thing you did in the movie. When we look back at film history, there are not only famous editors and famously edited movies, but there's famous individual edits. Do you have a few? Can you name a few edits in movies that are just, that stand out for you?
RB: Well, one that a lot of people talk about is in Lawrence of Arabia, the cut from... so there's a scene where Peter O'Toole uses his fingers to extinguish a match, and then there's a direct cut to the desert landscape, and the sun slowly coming over the horizon. And there's a story behind that, in that that was originally intended to be a dissolve. But in that time, the technology was, this is 1961 or 62, cutting on film. And you could not create a dissolve unless you sent it off to the lab to do an optical printer to create the dissolve. So when they're in the cutting room, instead of that, what you used to do is take a grease pencil and you would just…this is the frame that the dissolve begins on, and it extends from shot A through shot B. But shot A and shot B were just butted against each other. They were just spliced against each other, as in a normal slice, a normal cut. And so the editor made this grease pencil mark, and they looked at it. And they said, why are we doing the dissolve? That's what was in the script. But it works better as just a straight cut. And then there's obviously the shower scene in Psycho is awesome. Again, Hitchcock planned that out all ahead of time. That's what we would call a pre-vis nowadays. But he did it all on storyboards and paper. But nowadays, he would just go into computer and you would just create a mock-up of that, that you would then and this happens in almost every big budget visual effects movie nowadays is they do all these pre-vis sequences uh... because they want to plan it out so explicitly and also to know how much the thing is going to cost uh... so they can ask if they you know if the sequence has a hundred shots they can say, okay, we're budgeted for 100 shots. Each one of these shots is going to cost approximately X number of dollars. And, you know, that's how we can figure out the budget. You know, another. And I can say, you know, Bonnie and Clyde, I mean, the Bonnie and Clyde death scene is another famous one, to very rapid fire editing. There's a lot of slow motion involved. You know, The Wild Bunch, you know, the shootout at the end of that. I mean, there's just, you know, so much, I mean, those are all textbook examples of editing.
DH: Randy, it's interesting when you talk about innovation in editing, how often you're mentioning the 60s or the 70s.
RB: Yeah, well, I think that's when, you know, the studio system didn't work anymore. And this sort of young blood was coming in and changing things and coming up with crazy ideas. So I'll mention something. It's a 60s movie, but it's not an American movie, which is Jules and Jim, which is a movie I love. But the first 5 or 10 minutes of that movie is just absolutely, it must have seemed crazy to the people. And I think that's 1962 that watched that, because there's just so many ideas, unconventional ideas that are thrown at the viewer and it's like every, everything you can think of is in there uh... and it works great and it has such a great energy and enthusiasm to it and I think that what missing or what missing at that time you know obviously the sixties culturally were very intense time uh... and the old ways were not satisfactory anymore.
SVW: Well, Randy, we only have a few seconds left. And I want to thank you very much joining us and talking about your art form.
RB: Well, thank you. I appreciate it. It's fun to talk about, you know what I do. And I love cinema and I love talking about it. So this is kind of right up my alley.
SVW: Randy Bricker, editor in both movies and television in Hollywood for over 30 years. For Have You Seen, I'm Scott Vander Werf.