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85 Q4 2017 / CINEMONTAGE ever since." Although his TV movie Don't Drink the Water (1994) had been edited using the Lightworks system, Lepselter had been informed that Allen preferred to cut on film. "I would've happily edited on film if that's really what he wanted, but this was 1998, and it didn't make a whole lot of sense to me," Lepselter observes. "I just mentioned it to him: 'I know that people say you like to work on film, but I think you'd really enjoy working on the Avid.'" After explaining the value of using the digital editing system, Lepselter persuaded Allen to try the technology. "What I learned was that a lot of people assume he's set in his ways, but he actually can be quite flexible." For her part, Lepselter was enthusiastic about Sweet and Lowdown, a serio-comic study of musician Emmet Ray (Sean Penn), whose talent with the jazz guitar does not disguise his personal faults. "It's one of my favorite films of all the ones I've worked on," she comments. "I remember when I was given the script, I thought it was the most extraordinary screenplay I had ever read; it was so funny and also so moving." Yet Lepselter's years with Allen have been marked by experimentation. The three films that followed Sweet and Lowdown were unabashed comedies: Small Time Crooks (2000), The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001) and Hollywood Ending (2002). Then, in 2004, Allen decamped from New York to Europe, making a series of films in England (2005's Match Point, 2006's Scoop, 2007's Cassandra's Dream), Spain (2008's Vicky Cristina Barcelona), France (2011's Midnight in Paris) and Italy (2012's To Rome with Love). "It was really refreshing," Lepselter says of Allen's European period. "I thought that it was liberating to have people who were speaking in such a different way than the usual Woody Allen-influenced inflection." While Allen was globetrotting, however, Lepselter remained in New York, where he joined her for post-production after filming was complete. "As an editor, I feel like being on set can be harmful to me," she explains. "I like to know what's happening based on the footage and not because I was there and saw how hard it is that he's working. There have been times when I'll think a scene should be cut, but if I think, 'Oh my God, they worked until two in the morning and there was a crane…,' it's harder to cut. It's easier for me to be a little bit more ruthless if I haven't been on the set." Lepselter does not claim to be prophetic about which Allen films will make an impact with the public. "I loved Midnight in Paris, but I thought it might be a little more esoteric than it proved to be for mainstream audiences," she said. "So I was really happily surprised that it reached so many people." On the other hand, she was taken aback by the commercial failure of Cassandra's Dream, a drama centered on an uncle who prevails upon his nephews to commit a crime. "That's the one that surprised me the most," she says. "I enjoyed it so much, but it really didn't find an audience." Hit or miss, however, Lepselter continues her collaboration with one of America's foremost filmmakers, including on A Rainy Day in New York, due next year. "This is the long haul," the editor reflects. "Woody likes to work with the same people over and over again." From Rosenblum and Kalish, to Bricmont, Morse and Lepselter, Allen has always worked with talented editors (some for lengthy tenures) who have enhanced — and more than once reimagined — the sometimes comic, sometimes tragic and always inventive material he gives them. f Below left: Sweet and Lowdown. Sony Pictures Classics/ Photofest Below right: Match Point. DreamWorks/ Photofest