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42 C I N E M O N T A G E F E A T U R E Daughter " was no longer Gyllenhaal's debut film, and Gonçalves was no longer a first-time collaborator. During the long run-up to shooting "The Lost Daughter," Gyllenhaal was tapped to make a short film for an anthology series released by Netflix, "Homemade." She asked Gonçalves—pa- tiently waiting in the wings to start work on "The Lost Daughter"—to cut her short film, "Penelope," which turned out to be her directorial debut. "She sent me the script and said, 'I'm doing this— do you want to do this? We can work together first,'" Gonçalves said. "I said, 'Absolutely.'" Not only did Gyllenhaal get her directorial feet wet, but she found herself validated in her decision to hire Gonçalves to cut "The Lost Daughter." Although t h e t w o w o r k e d re m o te l y o n "Penelope"—Gyllenhaal was in Vermont, where her f ilm was shot, while Gonçalves was in his home base in Los Angeles—they realized that they saw movies and moviemaking the same way. " I t w a s l i k e w e go t to e x - periment and see: Do we really u n d e r s ta n d e a c h o t h e r ? A n d what I realized right away was we do," Gyllenhaal said. "Of course, I've worked with people in my life—not ever an editor, before t h i s —w h o d i d n' t u n d e rs ta n d me, and it's really hard. Instead, I think we hit something really unusual and special. We could read each other's minds in the way the dearest friends can." By the time Gonçalves and Gyllenhaal sat down to work on "The Lost Daughter," then, the two were already veteran collab- orators of a sort. "It was super-smooth, and it just confirmed the feeling that I had that I really wanted to work with her," Gonçalves said. "I can say that I worked with her on her very first film she directed, and the second film. She wasn't a first-time director at that point." A native of Brazil, Gonçalves has, during the past quarter-century, accumulated a long list of impressive credits in indepen- dent film and beyond. His best-known films include Debra Granik's "Winter's Bone" (2010), Benh Zeitlin's "Beasts of the South- ern Wild" (2012), and multiple projects for Jim Jarmusch, including "Only Lovers Left Alive" (2013), and Todd Haynes, including his latest documentary, "The Velvet Under- ground." When his name was proposed as a possible editor on "The Lost Daughter," Gyllenhaal jumped at the chance. "Someone had told me he was a great editor, and then I realized I'd seen many of his films," Gyllenhaal said. "There's some- thing alive and buoyant about his work. It's not plodding; it's confident. It's not one foot in front of the other. It's got a different kind of emotional logic, which I found really compelling." Fo r h i s p a r t , G o n ça lve s wa s d raw n to "The Lost Daughter" not only on the strength of the script but his discussions with Gyllenhaal about the project and her approach to filmmaking. "Immediately, I was really taken by the ideas she had for the film and all the plans she had for making this movie," Gonçalves said. "I really wanted to be involved." While watching dailies in his cutting room in New York, Gonçalves could tell that the footage was not only strong but redo- lent with editorial possibilities. "It wasn't like I came in with preconceived ideas of, 'This is exactly how I'm going to do it,' but once we started watching the footage, it was like, 'OK, I think I got it,'" Gonçalves said. "I had a sense that I could experiment, [especially] with the transitions between the [present] Olivia world and the [past] Jessie Buck- ley world. . . . It is free in the sense of how you work with coverage. I play with the sound sometimes, not syncing with the image, and there are some jump cuts." He added: "I knew that I could apply that to the flashbacks." When production wrapped last autumn, Gyllenhaal returned to New York where Gonçalves had been preparing a first pass during the shooting. "She needed to quarantine a little bit before she came in," Gonçalves said. "It came time for me to finish, do another pass, and then she came to the cutting room. And then we started working together." After Gyllenhaal viewed the assembly, the two went back to the beginning and p ro c e e d e d o n e s c e n e a t a t i m e. S o m e elements—including an opening sequence that took place prior to Leda's vacation— were dropped almost immediately. "I came back not with the movie cut in my head—I don't really know what that means," Gyllen- haal said. "But I did come back with a real sense of my way through each scene. And I was holding it all in my arms—all of it: these