Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1536017
I could see myself in this guy's life. That was a big check mark. The mental work of being an editor is tricky. I always say when you're getting the footage in during dailies, you're God. No o n e te l l s yo u w h at to d o : I t h i n k i t should look like this. I think this piece of music should start here. And then all of a sudden, someone comes in and tells you what to do. The mental switch from God to peon is very weird. In the best-case scenar- io, it's collaboration. But Paul helped me understand how to see that in the best possible way. He always said, "At that point in the edit room, you have a voice, but you don't have a vote." That helped me. It was like, Ok, I'm always going to make myself heard. I'm always going to say what I think, even if it's not well received. That's my right. Once I do that, now you decide. Making that mental switch was helpful. CineMontage: You have a deep comedy background and history with Seth Rogen. Tell me how "The Studio" got to you. Eric Kissack: I started working with Seth Rogen on "Sausage Party." Seth was working with a very talented animation editor, but he brought me in to do a comedy pass. It was an instantly good rapport — we made each other laugh. Right after that, he asked me to edit the pilot for a show called "Black Monday," which he directed with Evan Goldberg. That went really well. Then he asked me to do "Pam & Tommy," which also went well. Then he asked me to do a comedy pass on the "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" movie. I think "The Studio" was the fifth time we'd worked together, and by then we were comfortable. He wanted to make "The Studio" a series of very long takes. "Birdman" was all a one- er [a shot, sequence, or film that plays out in what either actually is or appears to be one uninterrupted camera shot — no cuts] and plenty of other movies have tried it, but it felt like no one had tried it in a comedy. Comedy has these specific challenges when it comes to long takes, which is that so much of it is about pacing and timing. And much of what we editors do is amp up that pacing and timing in the edit. We're crunching every scene. We're taking out breaths, any extraneous word, anything you can do to create these rhythms and this flow that makes all the jokes land. It's very important. Seth knew that better than anyone. Especially if a scene has six jokes in it and one of the jokes is a B-joke, and all the other jokes are better, you need to take out that B-joke. You know as a comedy editor that it's sort of like running hurdles: If you jump the first two hurdles and then your toe hits the third hurdle, you're going to have a hard time jumping the fourth and fifth. But if you take out that third hurdle, then you're golden. Knowing that, Seth felt the only way shooting in long takes would work would be if he had an editor on set he could trust to make those changes as we're shooting. That was my job, and it was very, very stressful and unusual. CineMontage: What does that look like? That joke sucks — take it out? Eric Kissack: Yes. It would not have worked if I didn't have this relationship with Seth. He trusted me. We would shoot the scene four or five times and I would sit there with my script and start drawing lines through jokes, making asterisks on spots where the timing didn't feel right. Then Seth, Evan, and I would get together, and I would say, "I think we should lose this joke here. We need to have Ike already walking to the door so that he's ready to say his line, because otherwise it's too long a gap. And there's a moment here for a funny reaction, but we're not on that person — and since I can't cut to a reaction shot, we've got to tell the camera guy to swing over and catch it, then swing back." So it was a really fun, really crazy, and really stressful process. Usually, by Take 10 or 11, the scene was flowing. By Take 15 or 16, it was on fire because the actors had dialed it in, and we had smoothed out all the rough edges. But yeah, you had the sense that if you didn't get it then, the whole show was just not going to work. That was BEST SHOT: Seth Rogen, center, in "The Studio." P H OT O : A P P L E T V + 23 S U M M E R Q 2 I S S U E F E A T U R E