Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/942009
54 CINEMONTAGE / Q1 2018 CM: What is that process like? KF: I don't put together a rough cut, show it to the director and then have 10 weeks to deliver a final. It's much more like a documentary. I make selects in a different way than I would for a narrative film, where there are actually takes. Instead, I'm making selects for behavior. I'm looking for interesting things that the actors do. It doesn't have to include all the lines of the scene. Terry isn't shooting scenes of a script; he's giving situations to the actors for them to improvise, and is interested in what surprises him. So I'm just looking for moments of life that don't feel like a line delivery. That takes a while to figure out with Terry. If I go through a scene and it wasn't successful because nothing moves me, I might not select anything. For Terry's films, I'd make three different cuts of each scene, trying to use all of the footage that I had selected from however many hours they shot, to see the different ways a scene could go. We called that "triangulation." By the time I'm on that third cut, and I've used all my main line selects, I'm usually working with scraps of things. I'll end up making something that I wouldn't have otherwise intended to make. And sometimes that can produce interesting and surprising results. CM: How does that work with multiple editors? KF: I think we ultimately had five for To the Wonder. We divide up the movie, differently for each film. We didn't know exactly how they were all going to fit together. We'll sit down, all three editors, and spend about a week looking at the different scenes and moving them around in the timeline, trying to find a structure that makes some sort of sense. This is all before Terry gets into the cutting room. The first assembly we did of To the Wonder was nine or 10 hours long. We find the few kernels that are actually igniting and that we think we can make something from. Then we choose a representative cutout of the three cuts we would have made, and Terry comes in. He goes through every scene, every cut. It's also incredibly frustrating because he is a phenomenal editor in his own right, but he refuses to learn Avid. He basically knows three buttons. He'll say, "Just do something like this," press those three buttons and do something amazing. I would beg him to let me teach him Avid but he refused to do it. I think he likes not having the power himself. CM: Please explain. KF: Terry is all about letting go of intention. He feels his job is not to create, but rather to recognize and select. When something happens, he'll say, "That I can recognize as strong. We need to hold on to that." Accidents are like the universe saying, "Hey, this should go here." I think that's why he likes to sit back as much as possible. Then we're not locked when we mix. We mix, and cut, mix and cut four or five times. He wants the soundscape to be part of the creative process. CM: That sounds amazing creatively, but isn't it exhausting? Advertising art for The Tree of Life. Fox Searchlight Pictures