Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1359892
24 C I N E M O N T A G E F E A T U R E editor Gifford said. "In the Avid itself, you kind of, in some ways, become infused with this." O n " H e m i n g w a y," E w e r s f o u n d himself leaning on his gut reaction more than on most projects. Not only had he not read the writer's work in years, but, in the early going, he felt he didn't fully grasp what he was all about. "I, on 'Hemingway,' felt more unstable than any other project in 30 years," he said. "I didn't have a feel for his language. I didn't have a feel for those micro moments that we were pulling out of his books. I didn't have the understanding of the greater context of the books, because it had been so long" since reading them. For Burns, the key was to embrace, rather than flee from, the contradictions of his subject, whose lifetime of brawling machismo came with dire consequences, including three divorces and his own sui- cide, by gunshot, in 1961. "His first wife, Hadley, had said that he had so many sides he defied geometry," Burns said. "He did those macho things — big-game hunting in Africa, hunting, fishing, all of that sort of stuff — but underneath it is 'We're talking about a guy's life that has a lot of drama and he's very interesting, but there's nothing like . . . a long battle scene or anything like that.' White, who assures that schedules are kept to and budgets are maintained. "The ship comes into the harbor, and the cap- tain doesn't always know all of the rocks that they don't want to run into." He oversees not just the editorial team but other finishing work. "I disseminate all the information between the post hous- es, between the directors, the producers, the editors," he said. "It is just making sure that everything is beautiful and perfect and sounds terrific . . . before Ken sees it, and hears it, for the final time." Beyond the technical pleasures he fo u n d i n e d i t i n g, E w e r s d i s c o v e re d that working on projects centered on historical topics spoke to something deep within him. "I was a very sensitive child — troubled in some ways," Ewers said. "My earliest memory of connect- ing it to history was at age 13. I read a Vietnam narrative. It was f ictitious, but it was based on real events. Just a short paperback book. I kept imagining, 'How would I act? What would I do in these life-or-death situations — these terrifying moments?'" In jumping into each new documen- tary, Ewers applies the same mixture of empathy combined with intuition. "My secret — and for a long time, it had been a secret from Ken and Paul and Geoff Ward and [writer] Dayton Duncan and Lynn — is I don't read the scripts before I start editing," Ewers said. "I don't look past page one. I react to each page. As I flip the page, I have no idea if this chapter or section is going to end and a new one is going to begin." E m b a r k i n g o n a p ro j e c t w i t h o u t h a v i n g u n d e r t a k e n e x t e n s i v e o r extraordinary research seems to be com- monplace at Florentine, almost an article of faith. "Having some kind of special- ized knowledge of a certain subject can actually hinder you in how you want to translate things to the audience," picture this incredible other life." Burns points to "A Farewell to Arms," which uses World War I as a backdrop to the love affair that emerges between an ambulance driver and a nurse. "As Edna [O'Brien] points out, he gets the boy stuff right — the guns — but what people remember is a woman dying in childbirth," said Burns, whose film links Hemingway's writing to his youth, much of which was spent in the company of his father, a doctor. "The father is leaving in the middle of the night to try to deal with difficult pregnancies," Burns said. Ewers, too, came to realize that two Hemingways would have to coexist in the documentary. "You can't just hate him, and you certainly can't love him," Ewers said. "You see the complicated reasons why he became such an undesirable person with his mother and the suicide in his family, which was also seemingly somewhat genetic." The theme is stated in the first mo- ments of Episode 1, during which Michael Katakis — among numerous writers interviewed on-camera, including Paul Hendrickson, Edna O'Brien, and Tobias Wolff — comments: "Hemingway was a writer who happened to be American, but his palette was incredibly wide, and delicious, and violent, and brutal, and ugly — all of those things. It's something every culture can basically understand." (The opening of Episode 1 was cut by Gif- ford.) Ewers said that Burns is a believer in what he calls "Aristotleian Poetics": "Part of his Aristotleian Poetics is to have a prologue that is some moment, event, thought — something — that kind of throws you far ahead into the film to give you just a glimpse of how it might feel or be," Ewers said. "Then the intro follows [and] is kind of our table of contents, getting the viewer to under- stand what we're going to talk about in the film."