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39 Q3 2016 / CINEMONTAGE by Rob Feld portraits by Sarah Shatz B rian A. Kates, ACE, counts firmly as one of New York's quintessential indie film editors. He initially came to film through the lens of post-production, visiting his music publisher grandfather in the Brill Building as a child, and traveling the elevator with Sound One personnel transferring trim bins from editing to mixing rooms. Those rides between floors proved inspirational. As a teenager he got an internship at Sound One, degaussing mag and watching engineers swapping reels. It was the summer of 1989; Goodfellas, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Valmont and She Devil were being mixed or edited there. "I was absolutely ga-ga, losing my mind," recalls Kates. "I knew that was the world I wanted to be in." Post-production is a particular environment, but the love of it remained with him through NYU Film School, where he found more inspiration from his film theory classes than his production classes. "A lot of being an editor is loving the world of editing and finding the various stages of post- production kind of delicious in their own ways," he explains. "Dailies are their own little beast. Then the director's cut, which is the hardest because you have to absorb the director's ideas about every little moment — the macro and the micro — and then manipulate them into something that makes sense. All the subsequent cuts are where the movie actually becomes good. "The deeper thematic underpinnings of the project — which you actively try to ignore while building the movie — finally present themselves, if you're lucky," he continues. "And then sound, color, music and titles are the reward you get from building something that actually works. You get to be the manager of these extraordinary layers that happen at the end." Kates recently cut Joseph Cedar's Oppenheimer Strategies, a US-Israel co-production, which will open in 2017. He is now winding up his second collaboration with John Cameron Mitchell as director (the first was Shortbus, 2006), adapted from the Neil Gaiman short story, How to Talk to Girls at Parties, due for release next year through A24. The sci-fi teen love story, set in 1977 Croydon, a town in south London, involves a punk rocker and a mysterious girl from…let's just say elsewhere. It's something of a departure for both Kates and Mitchell, but still a continuation of their interests and working relationship. "There's a lot in Girls at Parties that might remind people of elements of John's Hedwig and the Angry Inch [2001] and Shortbus," says Kates. "But it's Neil Gaiman's source material, and the lead character Enn is really the love-child of Neil and John. I feel like we're revisiting some of the flavor of Short because we were also reuniting our crew: producer Howard Gertler, DP Frankie DeMarco, post supervisor Matt Shapiro, sound editors Ben Cheah and Gregg Swiatlowski, re-recording mixer Lora Hirschberg, and animator John Bair." CineMontage interviewed Kates in Manhattan in mid-July as he was finishing the film with Mitchell. CineMontage: What is the first thing you focus on when you're pulling selects? Is it performance? Brian A. Kates: Yes, but also framing, camera movement and color. I'll use any tool I can to alter footage to make it the way I think it was intended to be. That's a very narrow tightrope to walk because you want to make it seem as if nothing has been altered. But the way to arrive at that is to alter it in countless ways. If I see a remarkable performance where the actor breaks concentration for a few frames, and I feel like the moment needs to extend, I can just remove that look by doing a morph or a slowdown. The Indie Outsider BRIAN A. KATES ON 'HOW TO TALK TO GIRLS AT PARTIES,' ALTERING FOOTAGE AND THE SEX-DEATH MONTAGE Opposite: Brian A. Kates. Right: A young Brian A. Kates, bottom right, practices "live editing" in 1988 at Long Lake Creative Arts Camp in Long Lake, New York, with fellow participants, from left, Gideon Feldstein, Nimish Parikh and Brian Glover.