CineMontage

Fall 2016

Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/756468

Contents of this Issue

Navigation

Page 69 of 107

68 CINEMONTAGE / Q4 2016 elements he eventually got, thanks to Friedkin's on-the-edge, and sometimes dangerous, shooting style for that section of the movie during a famous shoot on the streets of Brooklyn. Less discussed is how Greenberg and Friedkin then made sense of all that material to ratchet cinematic tension up to the max in a way that served the story. "I always liked the fact that every time you put two pieces of film together, you have created more work for yourself than you could have imagined before you put those two pieces of film together," he says. "That was never daunting to me; I wanted that. Knowing how long the scene was going to be in terms of footage and raw material, I knew it would take all my imagination, that I would have to think about it 24 hours a day. But I loved that." The editor continues his recollection: "We had the chase on the ground, the chase in the subway itself, and the relationship between the two — the car chase and the murder that was about to happen, and with the danger that was about to happen later on with the train hurtling out of control. All those things were somehow going to have to blend. All the fantastic chases are the same in the sense that they are multi- part — mini-movies in themselves. The editing became like those Russian [Matryoshka nesting] dolls that go from small to big. We were editing four mini-films together." ON COLLABORATION Greenberg says his success on his two films with Friedkin was in part a result of the fact that his collaborator was a director "of considerable ability when it came to taking a point of view on how a film is to be presented." He puts the director with whom he has had his longest and closest association into that same category: Brian De Palma. The pair teamed on five films in the 1980s, including Dressed to Kill (1980) and Scarface (1983). The editor was initially attracted to working with De Palma when the director interviewed him for Dressed to Kill at the behest of De Palma's longtime editor, Paul Hirsch, ACE, a friend of Greenberg's, when Hirsch's schedule precluded him from taking the gig. The reason he wanted to do the film, Greenberg says, was the fact that De Palma had crudely storyboarded the entire movie himself, including minute details. "He had me down to his office, which was a residential apartment in Manhattan," Greenberg recalls. "He took me into a small dining room that was, because of the size, completely mirrored to make it appear larger, I guess. On the dining room wall, all around, he had taped three-by-five-inch file cards, storyboarding the whole film. All the drawings were his — simple stick figures most of the time, where he would try to indicate camera movement with little arrows and stuff like that. "That might seem threatening to another editor," he continues. "But to me, I thought, Jerry Greenberg, left, with fellow editors Dede Allen, Craig McKay and Richard Marks at an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' tribute to Allen in New York in 2007. Photo by Alex Oliveria/Startraksphoto for AMPAS © AMPAS Left, Jerry Greenberg receiving the Career Achievement at the 2015 ACE Eddie Awards. PeterZakhary/Tilt Photo Right, fellow editor Carol Littleton presented Jerry Greenberg with the Career Achievement at the 2015 ACE Eddie Awards. Linda Treydte/Tilt Photo

Articles in this issue

Archives of this issue

view archives of CineMontage - Fall 2016