Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1014407
37 Q3 2018 / CINEMONTAGE DM: The scenes were well written and performed, so there was reason to go to them, but I was conscious of not letting the audience forget about any one person. There's a scene toward the end with John and Dexter [Black], which we reworked a little bit, and some of that was to get the emotion right for what was on camera. It's a very emotional scene, so to get the most out of it, who do you see on camera at what point? GVS: In the group scene, there were often ad-libs that we really liked, but they were not caught on camera, only on mic, so sometimes to show who was saying that particular line, we fudged it with reaction shots. DM: That's true. There was one scene in particular where there was a punch line, and it was off camera, so we actually had to play it on the reaction in one of the group scenes because they were shot really documentary-style. CM: Talk about the restructuring that you did in post. DM: This is an interesting case. The script was written to be fairly nonlinear, and I think maybe it became even more that way in the edit. Gus was really playing around with that and trying all kinds of different structures because the film takes place in multiple time periods and is kind of fractured. There were almost no constraints in a way. It was really freeing. So I think it was really about finding what felt right. I remember that we moved the scene in which John sees Donnie [Hill] for the first time to much earlier because it became clear that the movie is so anchored by their relationship and it just seemed like Donnie was coming into the story a little too late. GVS: We had edited for about a month and were having screenings — and there was one particular comment that a friend of mine, Bryce Castle, made. We didn't notice how important Donnie's character was, and the comment from Bryce was that every time you're with Donnie it was the most exciting thing in the film and, when you go away from him, you miss him. We realized that we weren't really spacing Donnie out correctly. Sometimes we would have two Donnie scenes together when we actually needed to break up those two so that we could keep the Donnie ball in the air. So we'd separate those scenes and it buoyed the energy of the film quite a bit. That was our most important comment in the editing of the film, and we didn't really see it because Donnie was always there. He was like Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars; the teacher, the mentor. CM: In making those structural changes, did you use cards on a wall or some other method of rearranging the elements of the movie? GVS: We did it right in the Avid. I think that's one of the benefits of computer editing. It's easy to move sections around. We were doing it in the timeline. CM: So once you get through the initial edits of the individual scenes, when you're restructuring and treating the edit, do you, Gus, rely more on David in a traditional director-editor relationship, or are you still operating during that stage? GVS: The one big sequence that I didn't touch from David's original editing was during the climax — the big psychological breakthrough — when John's crying and there's all kinds of stuff going on. I liked the original edit David had made so much that we never really went back in there. We just kept it the way it was, right? DM: There was a tag we added and a few things we eliminated, and maybe a couple reactions... GVS: …but, for the most part it's pretty similar to how it was at the beginning. That scene was so successful that it just wasn't touched. I think it was working so well that we just thought, "We're not going to get further than that." CM: And definitely not any further on foot! f Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot. Amazon Studios