Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/551510
32 CINEMONTAGE / SUMMER 2015 and those were challenging, but most of all, it was the deadlines, the pressure, the constant changes up until the 11th hour, recuts, massive visual effects, marketing requirements and, most of all, the politics." Three months after Henry went to work there, Bassett asked her to have lunch. "I said, 'If you're going to fire me, just do it; I don't need the Last Supper,'" remembers Henry. "I really didn't want to go, but we sat down at the bar at the Smoke House. Once we sat down and ordered drinks, she pushed a folder over to me and said, 'I want you to buy my business.' I was shocked, speechless." Henry went home that night, told her husband and the two had a laugh. But later that weekend, they opened the file that Bassett had given her, and realized that, for financial reasons alone, she had to do it. Henry found herself the owner of D. Bassett & Associates, but was lacking critical skills. "I was still on my learning curve with features, and I also had to navigate owning my own business, managing a large staff, dealing with the IA as a producer, and working directly with studio heads and filmmakers," she recalls. "I wasn't in Kansas anymore." In the 20 years since she's owned the company, Henry and her team of negative cutters have worked on a laundry list of well-known features from Transcendence, Interstellar and The Dark Knight Rises to Shrek and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. She was the negative cutter for Woody Allen films up to and including Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008); the director began finishing digitally after that film. "I loved cutting for Woody Allen," she says. "He has the longest takes in the world. A normal reel has 300 cuts, and Woody would have 35!" Allen isn't the only famous director with whom Henry has worked, and she has stories on many of them. "When Donah retired, she introduced me to all her clients," she says. "It was an old boy's club and many people gave me a hard time, but two people — Mark Solomon, the head of post at Warner Bros., and Jimmy Honoré, head of post at Sony — were really good to me." Bassett also introduced her to Joel Cox, ACE, Clint Eastwood's editor. She remembers, "When I had the first film to cut for him, Joel said, 'We'll give you a chance, but no one else may touch the film but you,'" Henry says. "That was really difficult because I'd have to stop managing to cut a whole feature film. For the first four or five Eastwood films, that's how it was. When Joel called for the next one, I said, 'You've got to let me get some help.' He said, 'No,' but when I started giving him names of other cutters, he finally let me get help." One of her favorite directors to work for was Oliver Stone. "It was like a circus," she smiles. "He was hilarious and would come in for a screening right around the time I was supposed to go home. He'd find me in the cutting room and was very distracting. Once he tried to convince me to put the negative up and cut it right there, with him over my shoulder. He insisted and took out his checkbook. But I told him, 'No, you can't do this; it's a terrible idea.'" Among her all-time favorite films for which she cut negative is The Matrix (1999). "It was so exciting; we'd been told about all these new, experimental things that had been done," she says. "It was insane hours, weekend after weekend with a full crew. I was later told it was the most expensive negative-cutting job ever — my bill was $100,000 when a normal film was $10,000 or $15,000. The editor, Zach Interstellar. Paramount Pictures The Matrix. Warner Bros. Pictures