Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1492834
37 S P R I N G Q 1 I S S U E F E A T U R E character's head?" We're always looking at the way we can cut a scene where we're con- stantly cutting back to Paul, or starting the scene on him, or ending the scene on him. CineMontage: One of the most bravura scenes in the film is a chaotic family dinner with multiple family members talking, bickering, arguing, and Paul protesting being served spaghetti and finagling a way to order dumplings. How did you construct a scene with so much to balance and so many awkward, painful, relatable moments? Morris: That was one of the most fun scenes to edit. I have a pretty funny story around it. I screened the dailies on a Friday. My brother has two young nieces — very young children. We had dinner at a restau- rant. And it was on a Sunday night, and I cut the scene Monday. And it was just pure chaos [at the dinner]: I was living the dailies in my real life. It was in my head fresh, and I'm watching the kids running around the table and messing up orders and the water falls over. . . . I come in the next day and I cut the scene with all of that fresh. It couldn't have been more serendipitous — all of that energy fresh in my head. James is incredible. He's got his master, and on his master he would do the whole scene. He let [the actors] go for six minutes of improv before they got into the scripted lines. That's all covered in particularly the masters, but in all the coverage, as well. We would have an incredible amount of improv and just a plethora of dailies. . . . I'm just looking for anything that excites me, whether I find it funny or emotionally interesting or there's a look here that I think could be really interesting. I'm just looking through that and building these selects. Then I break the selects into sequences based on character. . . . I want to build the scene based on selects. CineMontage: There are several scenes presented largely in long, uninterrupted takes. One of the best is when Paul and his father are sitting together in a car following [spoiler alert] Aaron's funeral. Morris: The funeral, and the scene with the father, it was about the silence, the un- spoken. So much goes unspoken there, and in real life oftentimes almost nothing goes spoken in moments like that at a funeral. . . . This is the case in I think a lot of James' films: it's about the space in between the words. It's about what's happening in the space, and creating that space in the edit- ing. If you have shot/reverse shot and he's cutting back and back and back, it loses all of its weight and its drama. Gray: I've made car chases and space chases and all this, and those are much easier to edit than that car scene between his father and him at the end. That took us days. The nuances matter, and the dialogue matters, and the pauses matter. All of that stuff is important: what to remove, what to keep. CineMontage: James, is this your first time shooting digitally? Gray: I still love 35mm film, but it's very expensive now. I would even eat the expense, but in order to achieve the look of like a 1980 movie, the stocks don't look like that anymore. . . . In order to get it to look old, you have to do so much: you have to underexpose it two stops, push it two stops — you really have to beat it up. . . . I don't think the Alexa is as good as film, but I think the Alexa 65, which is what we used, has started to get quite close. Morris: It was the first time getting a twenty-minute James Gray take. He's always done film. . . . In this case, I think we had a couple of takes on Jeremy that were 20 minutes long. The way I screen dailies, I'm really intense, so I live in it. If it's a 20-minute take, I drink some water, I'm fully engaged for 20 minutes. I don't break, I don't look away. Gray: I don't remember doing a lot of 20-minute things, or not calling cut. It's possible — maybe the dinner scene. But I had that tendency in film, too. I remember one night, on "We Own the Night" [2007], we shot 27,000 feet of film. CineMontage: There's another scene with minimal, well-chosen cutting later in the film: When Paul sees a guidance counselor-like figure at his new private school, you stay on the push-in to Paul rather than cutting back to the guidance counselor. Morris: That scene was actually shot with coverage, and right away, it was pretty clear that it wasn't going to be cut with coverage. I don't know if James mentioned anything, but it was definitely clear that there was no way we were going to cut away from that. Gray: I had a very good take on the teacher, but what you're seeing in the movie is take one of the kid. He was great, and the movie is about him and about what he's go- ing through in ways that he can and cannot understand fully. I felt there was absolutely no reason to cut away from him. Sometimes good editing is knowing when not to cut. Morris: That was one of the scenes where [Gray] did a lot of takes. Usually, he doesn't do that many takes. Every once in a while he will, especially on some of these longer things that we could hold on. But I think he did — I'm making up a number — maybe 15 takes or something [for this scene], and it was the first take that we used on Paul for that push-in. Gray: It's like Ringo Starr is the greatest drummer because he knew when not to play. He wasn't just playing a bunch of notes that gummed up the song. He was playing always exactly what the song needed, and that's the hardest thing ever. There is no incorrect drumming on any Beatles track, and what that tells you is the guy had the greatest taste ever and knew, sometimes, you didn't play. Sometimes we don't cut. ■ Peter Tonguette is a freelance writer whose work appears frequently in CineMontage. 'Sometimes you have to fight the footage; sometimes you don't.'