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Let's talk about editing. On that note of the Internet and computers 'taking over,' I'm eager to know what you think of non-linear video editing systems, having flourished in the era of Kems and Steenbecks.
I've been editing since the mid-sixties, so I actually started out working on the Moviola, which is the old, old way--before Kems and Steenbecks were introduced to the US. When we started Zoetrope, in San Francisco in 1968, we wanted to be at the cutting edge technologically, so we imported these so-called "flatbed" editing machines--Kems and Steenbecks--from Germany instead of getting Moviolas from Hollywood. Kems and Steenbecks allowed you to look at your film on a pretty big screen, through a rotating prism, in ten-minute chunks. The prism made the machines relatively silent in operation, and also allowed them to go many times normal speed. Whereas the Moviola is a kind of sewing machine on legs. It is a "vertically" oriented machine, with an intermittent shutter mechanism that makes a lot of noise, the screen is about the size of an index card, you have to feed the film in by hand, and it can't go much more than double speed. It was really only efficient at looking at twenty or thirty seconds of film at a time--a couple of minutes at most. I shuttled back and forth from Kem to Moviola throughout the seventies and eighties, depending on the project and the country I was working in; and then I switched over to digital in 1995, on The English Patient. I feel comfortable with the Avid and wouldn't go back--the advantages of working digitally are so great that they overcome the few limitations.
What are the limitations?
Well, ironically it has to do with the efficiency of random access. On the Kem, I would be constantly browsing for material, back and forth through these ten-minute rolls: that's how the film is stored--hundreds of ten-minute rolls. So I would often bump into material serendipitously: I would be looking for one thing and I would instead find something else that was much better. With the Avid, you get immediately what you ask for, like Aladdin's lamp. But you get only what you ask for, like Aladdin's lamp. Often, though, what you say you want is not what it turns out you really need. There are many amusing fairy tales that elaborate on this theme. So the great strength of the Avid is also its weakness, as is frequently the case with many things.
Now on the face of it, there is nothing to prevent using the Avid like a Kem, stringing clips together into ten, twenty or thirty-minute virtual "rolls." There is a subtle but profound difference, though, in the way each machine processes the image: the Kem has a rotating prism, which means that when you speed it up, you still see every frame of film--all you're doing is making this prism spin faster and faster. And it's amazing what you can still see at ten times normal speed: blinks, subtle shifts in emotion on character's faces, etc. Whereas on digital systems, the frame rate is permanently set by the computer so that the only way it can speed things up is by removing information. If you wanted to look at 10 minutes in a minute, what the Avid does is show you one frame out of every ten. So really, you're not seeing 90 percent of the material. As a result, browsing through material on the Avid just doesn't feel the same for me. I use it occasionally, but it is not as satisfying or productive as scanning in the mechanical systems.
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Mirror, Mirror on the wall... Dorothy and Tik Tok explore Mombi's palace
"With the Avid, you get immediately what you ask for, like Aladdin's lamp. But you get only what you ask for, like Aladdin's lamp."
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That's really the only disadvantage I have discovered, and I have developed ways to compensate. As I said, there are huge gains to the speed with which you can retrieve specific material and manipulate images and complex sound--you can get something in less than a second, whereas with mechanical systems, someone has to go and get the material. And it may be in another room, in a box, and you have to take it out of its box, thread it through the sprockets of the editing machine, and then run down to where it is.
But even in that complex procedure, there is a hidden secret, which is that the inefficiencies of the system forced the editor to plan more in advance. And it's a good thing to have an idea of where you're going. Whenever you're putting a scene together, you're like an explorer moving through a landscape about which you have only a rough idea--where are the mountains, and the valleys. By contrast, digital systems seem to say: "I'm so fast and flexible, you don't need to pre-plan things." But films are so complicated anyway, you really do need to have some kind of plan, an approach to the specific material you've got, beyond what's in the script. Otherwise, you can easily get into the middle of a scene and find yourself in a dead-lock, and then most of the work getting there is wasted. If you have a map to begin with, you can foresee some of the problems and avoid them before they hit you. Plus, the security of having a plan, a map, gives you the freedom to get "lost" in the material--I mean "lost" in a creative sense. I like to wander off the trail, improvise, and do things on the spur of the moment, but I need to know where the trail is so that I can get back to it, if you understand what I'm talking about.
I believe I do.
Another big advantage of the Avid is its great ability to manipulate sound. At the present time, you can have eight soundtracks running simultaneously, and that was just impossible with mechanical systems. The most you could really handle was two, maybe sometimes three, but with difficulty.
Are you performing a rough sound mix as you're cutting?
Yes. And we can load this off onto a Jaz drive and take it to a theater and run it in synch with the film. And then all the decisions that you make can be copied over to the sound editors to refine later on for the final mix. I'm working on an Avid, and I will hand over those mix decisions to the sound editors who are working in ProTools, which is now a division of Avid, so there is a great compatibility between the two systems.
Because it's less physically laborious, do you find yourself experimenting more when cutting a film on a computer?
A little, yes. But experimentation is more an attitude of mind, an openness. It's paying attention to the little voice that says--what if you try this? I've learned it's better if you pay attention to that voice: it always led to something interesting, even though the outcome was uncertain and it meant more work. But there's no question that it's easier on a digital system, and very easy to save all those experiments. Like anything, though, if you carry things to an extreme, it becomes a problem. If you have ten different versions of a scene, and you save them all, and don't commit to one in particular, you start to compromise the artistic integrity of the film. So, the crucial point is always finding the line between openness and commitment. A kind of "open closedness," creatively speaking.
What is the nature of your director-editor collaborations?
Oh, it depends so much on the director and the material. Generally, I make the first assembly of the film on my own. That way, I may come up with an approach to the material that might never occur to the director. It's like line readings: let the actor come up with his own interpretation, and then the director can correct them as necessary. But if you inhibit that first approach of your collaborators, the film begins to suffer. We look at the assembly together, and then it depends--some directors, like [Fred] Zinnemann, almost never come in to the cutting room. He preferred to see complete screenings of the film in the theatre, and then confer in his office. John Huston was like that, too.
Would you ever prefer to have the director sitting there as you cut something?
If I'm working alone, I find that I'm much harder on myself than other people are. What I mean is that it's harder for me to satisfy myself. If we're working on something together, and a director says, "That's good," I'll think, "Oh, okay, I guess we should go on to something else." If he wasn't there, I might keep on pushing and discover something that is even better--around the next bend, so to speak.
What happened when the situation was reversed and you, an editor by trade, were directing Return to Oz? Did you find yourself taking your experiences as an editor into the direction of Return to Oz?
There were good and bad things about having that editing experience. The good part was that I completely understood screen direction and what makes a more effective cut, and how to create interesting transitions between scenes, and things like that. Also what you might call visual economy--what you can get away with.
The bad part was that my editing experience led me to underestimate the importance of master shots, not so much how they work in the final film, but how they function during the production phase. It's an interesting point, so let me explain in a little more detail.
A master shot is usually the widest coverage of an entire scene--it can be extremely simple: just a static wide shot, like the stage of a theatre, in which the characters move about and speak their lines. It can also be very complex, with a moving camera and interesting staging--a classic example of this would be the six-minute Sanchez interrogation scene in Touch of Evil. If a director has shot something as brilliant as that, there is no editing to speak of: you just choose the best take and leave it alone. With ordinary master shots, however, the editor usually just uses them at the beginning and maybe at the end of the scene, if at all, to give the audience a sense of the scene's physical geography. So as editors, we don't have a lot of interest in that simple kind of master shot.
Now, the other thing to take into consideration is that in a film like Return to Oz, there was always something to hide, because so many of the characters were large puppets, or animals. So master shots terrified me because there's fewer places to hide things: if I simply did a wide shot of the scene, I would also reveal all of the puppeteers, the cabling, the animal trainers, etc. etc. So I started out shooting the action in bits and pieces, knowing how it would all cut together. Fair enough. But what I found was that by not doing master shots I deprived the production team--the actors, the camera operator, the art director, the costumer, etc.--of a sense of where they stood, and what was required of them beyond what I could explain. So a master shot has two functions: to orient the audience, but also to orient the production team, which is just as important if not more so. Shooting in bits and pieces, as it turned out, was one of the things slowing us down and resulted indirectly in my being fired. When I was back directing again, I started doing master shots even though they might be filled with imperfections--this was at George's suggestion, and it turned out great. Some parts of the master shots might turn out to be useful after all, but just the act of shooting them made everyone breathe easier. Now, when I went in for closer coverage of the individual actors and characters, each person developed their own sense of how it was all supposed to fit together--they didn't depend on me telling them--and the work pace increased significantly.
While I was shooting, the film was being assembled by two picture editors--Les Hodgson whom I first met on Julia in 1976, and who was one of the sound effects editors on Apocalypse Now. And Peter Boita, whom I did not know beforehand. Peter helped us get a first assembly, and then had to leave because of a prior commitment, so I set up a cutting room and started doing some work myself, mainly on the sections involving the Nome King, who was in large part an animated figure, done in Claymation. But I was nervous about having the necessary objectivity to be an effective editor.
Since I was obviously present during shooting, I knew not only what was shot but also everything "around" what was shot. As a director, you know what was to the left of the frame that you can't see when you just look at the film. You know what the mood was when such-and-such a scene was shot. The editor, on the other hand, doesn't know any of this, and that's good, because then he can make decisions based only on what is actually on screen, which is all the audience will ever see. Frequently a director will think, "Oh, we worked so hard to get this shot, it's got to be in the film." Maybe it's a beautiful shot, but not right for the film. Or vice versa: sometimes shots are done in a hurry and everyone's in kind of a bad mood. And so later on you don't think very highly of them. But an editor doesn't know any of that, and has the necessary conceptual freedom to take material and put it in a place where it can really shine.
So, I was nervous about doing any supplementary editing on Return to Oz, but I found that when I actually sat down, my editor's hat fit, so to speak. I was able to look at the material in an abstract way, as if I had not been involved, which greatly surprised me. I remember one scene in particular: Dorothy running around in the hall of mirrors. She was trying to escape from the headless Mombi, and she gets into a corner and can't remember where the door is, and we needed to shorten it. Since I shot it all, I knew geographically where the camera had been, but I discovered that I was able to take some shots that were geographically "wrong"--because of the mirror, the screen direction was flipped so the camera was in the opposite place to where it seemed to be--but out of context they were exactly what I needed in order to shorten the scene. Once I found I was able to do that, I thought, Okay, I am free to just look at the image--I'm not imprisoned by my memory of how it was shot. That was liberating. CONTINUED...
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