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Manny cross paths, and each takes in the chaos from a different perspective. "We actually meet all the characters," says Cross of the scene. "I think it was notable that we started at the beginning because Damien knew that that would be kind of the roadmap for the audience to get into the rest of the movie." The sequence is music driven and sets the tone for the chaos of Hollywood at that time. "[There's] almost everything under the sun," says Cross of the scene. And while Chazelle wanted to showcase that chaos — loud, reckless, dangerous — he also wanted to have a certain amount of control. "That's where the score came in, because I feel Justin's score was the ele- ment that sort of glued all of this chaos together, and at the same time gave me percussive moments to bounce the pic- ture off of," the editor explains. Cross calls the scene a showpiece, where all of the film's different disciplines — pro- duction design, costumes, makeup, cinema- tography and performances — all shine. "The party is made up of pieces long and short," he explains. "So you have a lot of long camera moves, some of them designed to look like [one take], but there's really some digital stitches holding some of these pieces together. Then, those moments are bridged by these quick percussive cuts that are designed to sort of throw you into the next scene. These quick cuts of a record playing on the Victrola, or a close up of a straw snorting cocaine, all of these things. Somehow, we had to find a way to have room for all of that and blend it all together." Nellie's first sound take is another edi- torial highlight, and what Cross describes as one of the film's hardest sequences to cut. "What's kind of interesting and chal- lenging about that is, that is a scene where we're going in the opposite direction of what we've just come from in the early part of the movie," he explains. "From the beginning, we're leaning into the loud. We're leaning into this maximal- ist, pushing-the-envelope, in-your-face style, both sonically and pictorially. And all of a sudden we switch to setting the table for this very moment, where silence is kind of the star in a way." Nellie is on a soundstage for a shoot, and is forced to repeat her same perfor- mance more than a dozen times. Each time, there is some sort of distraction or technical problem that blows the take. The set gets hotter and more tense with each take, and the audience finds itself in a Groundhog Day scenario, wondering if the repeating cycle will ever be broken. "Damien knew that if we leaned into the repetition, that that could be a strength," says Cross of the scene. "Often in film editing, you try to keep things fresh. We changed the angles or we change the sizes so that the audience doesn't get bored. Well, Damien really wanted to lean into the repetition, so that it would start creating almost discomfort and unease with the audience. And with each take, we started cutting that little preamble faster and faster. So we sped it up along the way. The hope was that not only are we creating a shorthand with the audience, because the audience already knows what to expect — or they think they know — but you are also up- ping the ante a little bit." Babylon opened in theaters in late December, and Cross says he's lucky to collaborate with the likes of Chazelle, as well as other filmmakers, such as Scott Cooper, Cary Fukunaga and David O. Russell. "I get great material," he states. "I get dailies with amazing performances by people like Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt and Diego Calva. I am also given permis- sion to — and directed to — work very stylistically, so it often means that my work is very visible. And people respond to that." www.postmagazine.com 17 POST JAN/FEB 2023 The feature was shot on 35mm film using anamorphic lenses. Editor Tom Cross considered composer Justin Hurwitz's score when establishing the film's pacing.