Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/942009
55 Q1 2018 / CINEMONTAGE KF: It's incredibly exhausting. I don't think I could do it now. We dedicated a lot of our lives to the edit room. I think Terry really believes in overcoming struggle to create something. He likes the feeling that we're under attack — that we're racing against the clock, against money running out, or against financiers who want to take the movie away from us. He found a way of expressing himself, and he keeps trying to go down that path. I think for him to continue his journey, it's good for him to keep changing his crew. Terry's a kind and wonderful person, and he's a good friend. And I do think he needs young people who are willing to go the distance with him, who have the stamina to keep going. CM: Tell me about transitioning into documentary with Long Strange Trip. KF: I was terrified about starting A Long Strange Trip because I had felt that I had never done a documentary. Voyage of Time was technically a documentary, but it's kind of its own thing. Although this was working with a lot of interview material and voiceover, which Terry used a lot, as well. There was an infinite amount of archival footage, which I had also dealt with before. I was also used to trying to find the story in the images. Sometimes with a narrative film, the story is already mapped out. With documentaries and with Terry's films, you have to dig deep and find where the narrative is in each image or each sequence. So I ended up being a fantastic fit, and I had a blast. CM: Was there anything unique about the editing process of the 238-minute film? KF: When I came on board, another editor had already been cutting for eight or nine months. At the time it was only going to be like a two-hour movie. They had a rough sort of idea of where the movie was going to go. I was brought on to help finish it. We did end up expanding the film. I helped flesh out the themes and we spent several weeks just doing that, trying to figure out where we wanted the story to go in terms of the themes and the ideas. The only thing I can say that was unique about this process was that we sort of fine-cut as we went along, instead of just doing a very quick, rough edit. Of course, we would go back and change things. But we had the ability to breathe in the editing room, to take our time and really craft something that was layered and nuanced on the first pass. f "The big thing that we worked on in Chappaquiddick was performance choices. There were certain lines that read beautifully on the page, but when Ted's character would say them, they would just make you wince with utter disgust for him." - Keith Fraase