Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1515786
44 C I N E M O N T A G E F E A T U R E finding it was another thing, and sometimes [it was] laborious to nail it. How comedic is too much? Where is the comedy leaning towards farce? How broad can this go be- fore the scene starts to collapse under the weight of a tone that's getting too broad or too farcical? How far can it swing in this direction to get the maximum laughs possi- ble, but then make sure that we're not going so far in that direction that we can't come back to some of the darker drama? It was a delicate, fine balance. CineMontage: Can you think of an example where you were testing those boundaries? Hilda Rasula: I think where we were playing with it in the storyline around Monk's book, like those scenes in Arthur's office where he is talking to publishers on the phone and comes up with the al- ternate title. We had options around how big to swing it with these amazing runs of improvisation, where they were doing wholly other things. They're such gifted performers but we needed to play with the balance of how big we wanted the comedy to get. It became clear to me fairly early on that we needed to have the balances tip more towards Monk and play a lot of things o of Jerey's expressions. By tipping the scales towards Jerey's face, we could do a lot of comic timing manipulation with the dialogue. When do you have a straight man as good as Jerey Wright? He can do tightly wound, stillness, stillness with a glimmer of sardonic humor. He can do a tiny twitch of his eye or his mouth that suggests his frustration with the situation, but in a really subtle way that ends up playing as the joke. There is a merry-go-round of absurdity happening around him, and those scenes took some balancing to realize that it was in Jerey's face that the humor was landing. He's a genius, in full command of his craft. CineMontage: Can you connect that way of using performance to the type of coverage you were receiving? Hilda Rasula: They were shooting on a tight schedule without the luxury of time and money, so there wasn't a lot of coverage. That just meant that I had to drill even hard- er into the truth of the performances. It is a performance-driven film so there's nothing to hide behind. There are no grand set pieces that would let you play a little sleight of hand with the audience. You're moving from one talky, performance-driven scene to another, and each one has to work to keep things moving forward and for you to believe in these characters. At times, it was a highwire act to find the truth of the scene with the coverage that I had. I used every classic editor trick that lets you manipulate time and space, like figuring out the timing of when to put people o-screen so that you can massage the timing of the dialogue and mix takes, which would let me add a single word from ADR, so that the intonation was Issa Rae (left) and Nicole Kempskie in writer/director Cord Jeerson's "American Fiction." 'It was a tight schedule, so there wasn't a lot of coverage.'