Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1456671
26 C I N E M O N T A G E F E A T U R E IN THE SHADOWS: Washington and McDormand in "The Tragedy of Macbeth." P H OT O : A P P L E T V + working together. Instead, he wanted to have his own shot at piecing together every scene from scratch without looking at any- thing I had done so that he wasn't biased by my instincts. Basically, Joel did his version of a scene, completely unprejudiced by my version, then he looked at my version, and then we kind of combined them. It was kind of like working with Ethan, only in the sense that by the time we had finished the first half of the movie, it was really like we had made three passes of the film: my pass, his pass, and this combination pass. But unlike when he worked with Ethan, Joel wasn't working off of my assembly. He was working off of his own instincts and then he was integrating my assembly into his work. Q CineMontage: Do you think this unique process benefited the final film? Johnston: Oh, absolutely. It resulted in an incredibly polished first cut. Our first cut of the movie was 1 hour, 45 minutes, and the final cut of the movie ended up being 1 hour, 41 minutes. My experience with assem- blies is that they are usually much, much, much longer than the final version. It was very close to being there, at least big pic- ture-wise, the first time we went through it. Q CineMontage: Do you think the nature of the material contributed to the first cut being so close? Johnston: That's a big part of it. We were liberated from all the kind of macro structural things that you are concerned with on a typical film. "Macbeth" is such tried-and-true material. We weren't going to rewrite the story in the edit. We were liberated from worrying about those things. We had the luxury of being able to focus on the fine cutting and the more micro, struc- tural editing. Q CineMontage: Does Joel shoot a lot of coverage? Johnston: Every thing is incredibly meticulous and well prepared. I'd say the average number of takes per setups that Joel did was probably four. Sometimes you would get to five; some you would get to six and seven. That's a product of being so, so well prepared and having everything so well designed. Q CineMontage: How did you shape the performances in the edit? Johnston: Frances and Denzel are just incredible performers. It's one of those good problems to have because there's such a wealth of material. It's very, very difficult to hone in and pick the right performances. The film is so much about language, and so we used so much line tracking and line swapping to augment performance. You do that in every movie, but to the extent we were doing that in this film, and the surgical precision with which we were doing it, was at a level that I had never done before. We had our first assistant editor, Max Berger, who's fantastic, stack every single line in the movie in sequences. We could go to any line in the movie, press play, and hear every iteration of the line. We started doing line swaps in the movie, and then the line swaps became word swaps, and then the word swaps became swapping out other letters and other syllables. Q CineMontage: In preparing for the movie, did you study "Macbeth," including the previous film versions by Welles, Kurosawa, Polanski, and other directors? Johnston: I watched all those movies, and I read the play many, many times over. I read a lot of theory and analysis of "Mac- beth," specifically Harold Bloom's "A Dagger of the Mind." I did a lot of homework, but what I found interesting was that the best way to learn about Shakespeare, and to really engage with the material, was just to edit it. It wasn't until I started really watching dailies over and over again, and working with the material in context, that I really felt like things started to click. If every high school student could edit a scene of "Macbeth," they would all get straight A's. I would like to acknowledge all of the incredible collaborators we met with every week in post: [cinematographer] Bruno Delbonnel, [production designer] Stefan Dechant, [visual effects supervisor] Alex Lemke, [visual effects supervisor] Michael Huber, [producer] Catherine Farrell, Max Berger, and of course Fran and Joel. ■