Documentary Editor Jacob Bricca on His Book and Editing Craft

you need solitary time to be with yourself and your own thoughts um and you need you really do need time to do that without other people around in the in the project the best work will come from people being able to come to conclusions individually and then share them collectively [Music] hello and welcome to another episode of cut to reveal i'm ricky and i'm here with my host peter peter how are you doing yeah doing well can't complain better than i deserve so today today's episode uh will be an interview with the author of the book uh that we made a video about so we made a video about the book documentary editing principles in practice and today we talked to jacob brica who wrote the book and who works in a film school in arizona yeah and he's a very very very knowledgeable person and we enjoyed talking to him and also like you know we tr we lost the track of time so this is a long interview but in a good sense you know we lost the track of time because the conversation was so engaging to us yeah for sure we got to talk about cut the nature of jump cuts um just the mindset of documentary editors and also like transitions for example right so that was a big for me that's that's that's something i wanted to know because once i worked on a short documentary a few years ago that's something i really struggled with like how to transition from one topic to the other and he he talks about this concept of hinge clips in his book and so that's what we touch on but he also like gives some examples of these things and what is his approach when he's looking for transitions so i think these are like very very valuable tips uh you know that are like spread across the conversation that you will enjoy yeah yeah yeah it's very interesting talking with jacob who's so accomplished and so knowledgeable considering that he's a professor of the art so let's uh let's roll the tape let's roll the tape how did you actually become an editor as a child i was i really loved radio i was an avid radio listener and to me the the idea of of just this the sag the the seg the the transition from one song to another was just something that that was endlessly exciting to me just how one song would come on and it would come on at just the moment where i would cut the other one off the other one would kind of like fade in the background and um so i was you know i was really interested in music and radio before i was interested in anything else and somehow in some strange way i think that has something to do with my interest in editing by the time i was later in high school i was definitely sort of interested in film and such but it was something about that idea of the of the transition was really was fascinating to me and i would even you know all the technology we had when i was like 12 and really into this was just a single record player right one of those kind where it like a little auto thing where you've got four discs stacked there and then another one will plop on as it's ready to and so i don't you know in order to like uh be a dj i had to do it entirely in my head so i would go from playing one record and then in my head i would i would like okay here's where the transition starts and i'd take the needle off and then i would put the next record on and put the needle back on and in my head i would have oh perfect a perfect saying i didn't really come around to deciding to be an editor per se until a lot later i got introduced to documentary filmmaking in college and started making my own documentaries after college and was definitely into filmmaking but it was about three years after finishing college that i made a decision to go to the american film institute and to apply for edit for their editing program so it was sort of that that choice of like what do i want to do if i if i do some kind of a graduate program that sort of forced me into thinking about oh there's this that editing could actually be a career strange but i never even i was 25 before that ever settled into place it's like oh that's like a thing that one could do you know of course i had already edited my own things but sort of that identity of because there is an editor's identity i think um and sort of a pride in process and a pride and work that really came about in my mid-20s as i started to learn about it and then uh kind of since then i think i've always thought of myself as an editor awesome and how did you like you know got into documentary editing specifically as i said i took a a fantastic class in college at wesleyan university in connecticut uh called documentary realism um with for a uh with a professor named jonathan mednick who passed away many years ago unfortunately and it was i of course had seen documentaries before but in terms of uh getting a real education in their history and thinking about them and starting to sort of practice that was that was something that was pretty formative uh just getting just to see a lot of work and to be around someone who who could really uh teach me um and really just the idea of working with fragments of real life in order to to create a statement or to to say something about the world um yeah to investigate the world by being in it um yeah it's always the way that it's funny i for um i mean i've just never really thought in fiction terms i enjoy fiction i read novels i um i enjoy fiction movies i just don't that's not the way that i create i've always feel like i've created more by just uh through in in the nonfiction realm so so it was in college that i get interested in documentaries and and then just was lucky to get to be around other people who were in that world especially starting around around well actually really right after right after college there was a pretty thriving documentary scene in the san francisco area i started meeting people there and then there are quite a few documentary filmmakers in in los angeles um and that's where i moved to to go to grad school and um just kind of started getting involved in with other people and doing projects where i was mostly the editor the trajectory of your film journey or film editing journey was it just continuous or between the end of college and then graduate school that you have like a break where you did some other stuff or more like edited films and whatnot i really the the prime thing out of college for me was i i wanna make documentaries i didn't really and i didn't again i hadn't come to the idea that i was specializing um i was and so i got a job as a doing video services essentially like a corporate video job uh in in the san francisco area for a technology research company um so sort of a silicon valley type outfit and that was fine with me because they at the time you know technology was still uh expensive-ish and just having access to tools was a huge um uh i mean there were systems like media 100 and there was there was stuff happening with non-linear editing systems but it was still a a clunky and not uh you know i mean avid existed but those were twenty thousand dollars plus you know yeah um and so just having access to tools was really um was was a great side benefit of any gig and that's um you know that that was sort of what i wanted to do and so yeah i found myself always regardless of whatever job i had uh money-making job i was just making stuff so these tended to be short documentaries on one thing or another i was really um i liked working with found footage i liked doing sort of media criticism type things uh that was sort of and and i had seen this film uh actually in high school even before i got to college called koianna scotsie with from godfrey reggio which was really the one film that ever just truly blew my mind i i was really never the same after i saw that movie it it um and if you look at my filmmaking for like the decade after i saw that when i was 16 uh i i feel like i was trying to make remake quinasquatsi again and again and again in my own way um so that was a that that played a huge role in my uh in my imagination about what documentary could be about um and just sort of pure juxtaposition you know it's a film that is just fragments of the real world mostly with some kind of time lapse or um photography but set to a music score with occasional sound embellishments but it's really just sort of images in juxtaposition with each other yeah i've seen it yeah i've seen it i i mean i i remember actually like seeing it for the first time as well like i was into photography for a long time so um you know i i was looking into that more like from my photography point of view by that time but yes but yeah i was very impressed by that by by what they could accomplish with as you said juxtaposition of images which yeah which is basically editing yeah where did you where did you grow up oh i'm from poland so i haven't had actually like any experience with editing since i was like 20 i don't know five or something like that basically i was supposed to be a civil engineer so my story is a little bit different i'm i'm like you know i just there was just a point in my life that i just realized that oh no actually my love my passion is into you know into things that are more related to to art and visual art specifically and even though i was quite good not to brag but i was quite good at you know as the math and physics and chemistry and all this stuff i just decided to just like you know put it away and focus on what gives me you know gives me pleasure so to speak yeah yeah i wanted to ask you about embracing unexpected because like that that's one of the like i think like principles you've mentioned in your book at the very beginning and uh that's the one that i hear people like talking about from time to time both you know editors and directors as well i wanted to ask you if you have like you know specific examples of embracing unexpected from your career when you ask about that and when we talk about this uh what immediately comes to mind is a uh an old friend and someone who i've edited uh his work um before um named matthew bizzell a director uh i edited his film uh luna um about about the the rock band luna uh edited the film of his called jimmy scott if you only knew um tell me you missed me is the name of the luna film and when we would sit down to edit um you know we i would be in the editor's chair and he would be sitting beside me and we'd be going through things and and it was so um common that we'd be playing things and and he would just see and like an accidental thing that i had done right i was on the way to getting to the thing that i wanted to show him and he said what's that what's that what's that wait wait you just did that was amazing what you know and so he loved this idea of uh you know he just loved these accidental moments that would uh result and that i found really fun working with him because uh you know too much of that and and you get sidetracked but nonetheless there were things that really came out of that that that were just um and his spirit of it was very much like here we are we don't know what's going to happen you know anything could happen it's simply like editing is such a um it's such a an intellectually demanding task uh where you're you're in even if you do all of the right work of of organizing your whole project and keeping things tidy and having places where things go nonetheless you are you are basically holding a lot of variables in your in your brain at any one time you're always trying to think about how what an arrangement is and what it could be and it's that flexibility of thinking that something something seems to have a solidity in the way that it is and then thinking this could be different this could be what if what if this what if that and so i think it's about trying to keep a balance between the the thrust that says we need order we need to take the chaos and and and buff the hard edges off of it we need to put everything into a very coherent um uh a coherent space where there's no confusion there's no uh there's really no chaos and yet you can really uh if you go too far in that direction you can kind of take the life out of something um you know there's a quote in my book from um mary lamson who says i've seen films really get lost in the final in the finishing stages where you have something that has so much life to it it's got you know it's got there has a true unpredictability right and then as you try to get towards a more perfect finished version you just you know you can rough all those edges off it so much that you end up with something that doesn't no longer surprises it no longer uh and so it's something about that dynamic that um that where just to remember that that uh there there is that sweet spot in between those things that's a great point that's a great point love it i mean i'm also like thinking about like you know the organizational aspect the importance of organization and and prep work basically or the all the things you do before you actually you know cut the story together uh yeah can you talk a little bit more about that like what's your approach to organizing assets and you know select reels you know i i started doing this it's so interesting writing the book documentary editing principles in practice was a process for me that that um that gave me a reason to reach out to other editors i of course i'm already in a community of editors but it really having a book to write is a great uh excuse to call people up and and to to chat with them and to really go do you know how do you do things how do you do it how do you and so for me it was a process sort of of discovery and realizing that things that i was doing were were actually very much common uh and that no one no no editor no two editors necessarily do it the same way but i think i think that process of select reels which is one of those one of those things is is a real constant um and it's um but i started doing it because i felt like i had no other choice like you you know i felt like well i don't know what the hell to do with this stuff so i can at least take this first step and i can i can just sort of watch things down and see maybe what i can get rid of you know maybe i can i like it it felt like a a necessary step because i couldn't figure anything else out that was better um i've come to think of it more as it is that but it's that uh by necessity and it's actually like a really productive important part of the process and you know i think it's just a so i've always thought of it also as a process of sifting where again you've got these massive numbers of variables of of what footage could be used what way could it be used in what what are the and even just like what is here like what what is what is what is in this material and you really don't get there until you start uh trying to build things into chunks and patterns and um and sort of start to see ideas just by putting things together in the same reel um that's it's just a it's a way that you can preview things for yourself where if you look at if you look at a bunch of clips in one context they start to they start to seem to have new possible meanings then if you look at them same clips but they're like those same clips might be used in a different reel and different things come out of them you know so it's really about um thinking about those the contextual meaning of everything by uh by sorting it and by um uh by grouping it and by sifting it um so there's really i don't know if there's i don't know that there's really a wrong way to do it except one that that has not enough uh rigor to it um but people come up with you know i love looking at other people's select reels on projects because you get the craziest titles you get a you get a title of a select reel that would mean nothing to anybody except for that editor and that you know whatever the team is sitting in that room but that doesn't matter as long as it means something to them you know as long as it's got something uh and some of them are fairly obvious um but some of them are really like left field ideas like like let's yeah we can there's can be a bucket for that let's yeah let's stick it over there so that we watch those down together you know um and then yeah there's just the fact that once you do start thinning things out then i think your perceptual abilities uh get much more focused they get much greater so if you're looking at uh let's just pick a number like eight hours worth of footage it's really hard to you know like there's only so much you're going to be able to to do with that once you've got something down to say two hours of footage you can be you can really start having um more uh more sophisticated ideas better ideas about how think where things might go from there once you've removed the things that at least for sake of argument are probably not gonna you you've decided maybe they don't have value or they're going to have value just over here you know and not over there so do you sometimes use like one the same clip basically in a few of the select reels yes um i mean to me it's the first level of importance is to that everything has at least one place to go so and and again it's that i think this is part of an editor's mindset is the is sort of that um it's that process oriented anal retentive thing that says we've done it we've been through it all right everything has been everything's been catalogued it's all been it all has a home right it's got some so to me that simply means that i have looked at everything that's there and i have either decided to you know at least provisionally discard it by not putting it in a select reel or i have put it somewhere you know it is it there it is you know then i've i can make that whole first pass of all the footage and now everything is either in a select reel or it's been left in the raw footage and of course we could go find it again but for now we're going to sort of move on and then the next time i'm looking at everything i'm just looking at those reels all i'm doing is looking at those select reels so it's it's like it's just a different way to look at the the raw footage and yes once i do that then i start making those are uh like source-based select reals they they in general they're grouped because of how it was that they were shot all the stuff from one interview is going to be in a select reel all the stuff that was shot in a particular verite shoot is going to be in that reel but at that point when you start going through those those uh source-based electricals you start having ideas that are possibly you know multiple and you start creating topic-based select reels where there's sort of another layer on top of that where i'm taking something from five different select reels and it goes in a new topic-based selectrio where i'm kind of seeing ideas play out and i can think of them that way you know the the technology element is interesting here because final cut x if one tries to if you know if a lot of editors don't even want to go there uh you know i think understandably but if you are you know there was a film on which we decided to use final cut x because of certain capabilities it had with uh nesting um uh subtitles and i found that it was a pretty amazing tool and in that tool it really is it really is guiding you very strongly towards um keywords yes exactly keywording yeah yeah keywording it really wants it really wants you to use keywords you know it's everything is based so it's final cut x really works it's more like a it's it's like a it's a database you know it has these database potentials so that every piece of footage very easily can can be in various places at once and with keywords and you can select a sub you know a subset of something and that becomes a keyworded part and that really has pretty powerful uh capabilities i haven't always been able to use it in like even in final cut x i still find myself doing some pretty traditional select reels with little title cards in a sequence you know and yet in in other times i really have been able to use that where uh it's uh yeah it's because of the keywording which is actually a pretty simple idea it's not a really complicated thing yeah but it isn't the way that avid works and it's not the way that premiere works you know yeah i've heard a lot about it i talked about it with a few editors who use it and yeah i think this concept is brilliant i mean yeah much more convenient i guess than you know the traditional way uh in you know at least in in some cases definitely much more convenient it can be i mean it when i first started using it i i felt very uncomfortable because you had to work really hard to get it to behave like a another like the systems that we would be more used to where everything just has one home right everything is in a bin somewhere and that's where it lives like it's not really the way it works it's everything is just there is a there's just like there's different views of subsets of the whole that's all that final cut does you know and so you kind of have to change the way you change your your expectations about how you're going to mentally understand where footage is um but i think it's a useful exercise to go through i found it very exciting to to to work there and i have actually chosen to use it on projects in the past so do you find that the project dictates what tool you use i guess what editing software you're using and then also to go back to before the i guess when you start um branching out into these different ideas are you just seeing those organically or are you when you had talked when you said you were um editing the uh luna documentary with the director being right at their your your side is that more of like them being like hey think about this or think about this or or or how is that all coming together when you're when you're sitting down well let me answer the second one first so when we were when matthew and i were sitting down in general we would we you know i think most projects work in some version of of this where uh there's usually a lot of work that has to get done by the editor that doesn't really require the director to to be there um and so and i mean things are so different now like you know for a lot of people remote work is the norm at this point you know and that's just a and editing quote unquote together may be like a zoom session or something these days but um or some other software that that um you know enables that uh but in general like the project starts off with these you know very um uh you know like okay we're gonna i'm gonna have two or three days to get this done and then we'll get together and we'll work on these things so it's these sort of targeted sets of time and by the end you're really looking at the final thing down you know everybody's all there just trying to hammer out different ideas what if we did it this way uh what if we you know uh just playing around with different sequences uh we're both in the room um and you know that's that's something that really is afforded by especially by in-person work i i think there is for as much as my own career has benefited from the ability to work remotely because almost all of my work in the past like decade and a half has been remote i do think that there is something there is something lost by not being in the same room together right um i think there is uh if nothing other than just an intimacy with the other person which itself can facilitate better work and in terms of the tool dictating the work i mean very specifically this was a film called marriage cops um which is still i worked on it for a while it had to go on hiatus it's being worked on in a different capacity now but it was shot entirely in india and so not in a language that either i nor one of the co-directors understood hardly at all the other one understood it fluently and yet i was the editor and the other co-director um you know didn't so essentially we needed to be able to watch the footage subtitled we needed to be able to you know and at the time at least um and this was probably five years ago there was we we did a lot of research and neither in premier nor in avid was there a really good solution for doing this whereas um in final cut x there's a way that you could uh nest things where you really could create a subtitled version of something watch it subtitled and then make a cut like from the from the source to the sequence that would then include uh by by the the nesting it would include those subtitles which could then be broken out into their original form and then adjusted so that was that was one project where that was the reason why we chose final cut x there wasn't any other reason it was just like for our need to be able to just watch subtitled versions of things in general i think these days avid and premiere they work very i have my own you know likes and dislikes of different parts of each of them but they are very very similar tools and i and i actually you know again into a final cut x plug the one system that has ever truly made me feel like wow this is kind of faster was final cut x um even though it also has some like there are things that you would there are ways in which uh you know apple just loves to simplify simplify simplify and in some cases they just do that yeah to such a strong extent that there are capabilities that don't exist in that program that you really wish that they would so no no i don't think any one of them is is um necessarily always you know perfect but um how do you find your editing like documentary editing jobs do they find you or do you find them this is not an original answer by any means but it you know it's all about relationships you know it's all about um so uh contacts etc and i think that's built through various ways like that's sometimes students are undergraduate students who are thinking of graduate school are asking me do i need to go to grad school or whatever and i always think of it as like well that's a like there are great things about it you don't necessarily need to do it in order to get a job but any situation you're in is going to afford you opportunities to make relationships with people so for instance there are people who i went to grad school with who i have now worked for and that's just because we you know in that very intimate context where we're all just working on things in a sort of a feverish uh intense way uh and with some of the more lofty artistic things top of mind you know a little bit of the the um the deadline driven uh budget-driven things you know receding a little bit to the background you develop some really great relationships in that way that are really forged based on artistic um similarities or you know feeling feeling at home with someone in the way that you the way that you you mutually see the world from an artistic point of view you know or from a from a style point of view or whatever so uh that's a long way of saying that my gigs have come about through lots of various ways but they've always come about through some kind of relationship or another the you know the big first big film that i edited uh and probably the one that was the biggest from a box office point of view than anything i've ever edited was this film called lost la mancha which came out in 2002 which was a worldwide phenomenon in theaters you know it grossed well over a million dollars worldwide it played in europe south america on tv everywhere um it was written up in every and that was uh like the directors of that film lived across the street from me that was how we knew each other you know and it wasn't quite that simple you know like the reason why we knew each other is because one of them had been friends with my roommate at temple university and so they knew each other prior they were moving to la they stayed with us while they looked for a spot when they when they were coming to live in la they really liked our street they're like maybe we can live here they've they managed to found a way to rent the place across the street um but i barely knew them at that point and then we just got to be friends you know we took care of each other's cats we had um we had dinner parties you know we got to be you know we we enjoyed each other's company a lot and then they had this project and they of course knew that i was an editor and they had a pretty decent budget for that and they had a producer who was really pushing them to find someone with more credits than i had um but they really you know we had a good working relationship right i mean we actually had never worked together before but we had a good relationship and they knew enough of my work that they they were gonna vouch for me and they actually felt better about being with me who had fewer credits but they kind of knew me and they felt like they knew my abilities and they would want to like spend time hanging out with me working um then the per people that were being pushed by the producer who they didn't know who had all these credits but what's that going gonna feel like you know so uh to their credit and thanks to them i had that first gig and so and i've worked for them at various points since then you know and so a lot of the a lot of the work that i've had are just repeat customers so i happen to have one experience literally more than two decades ago and then you know 15 years later i get a call you know it's not that we haven't been in touch in the meantime but but some combination of that kind of thing has been the case and um so you know there's one job that i got on a an early film called beyond the border and i went on to edit five films for that filmmaking team that i really did just answer an online post you know i think that's the only gig that i and that one i i speak spanish relatively well um and that was one of the reasons why i got that gig because a lot of it was in spanish it was shot in mexico so that was one thing where there was another little extra skill that really helped i don't think they would have hired me if i hadn't had that but that's the one place where oh like i just answered you know i met them through i can't remember where they were posting that but everything else has come through some combination of someone giving my name to someone else and saying this person be great or i meet them in one context and then we turn into you know work collaborators in another and that can't be underestimated the degree to which just personal familiarity and personal comfort can be a it can be a big part of a work relationship so yeah choosing someone you you want to spend time with yeah that's wise that's always wise yeah and you're going to have to you know you're going to have to get to probably some somewhat uncomfortable places where you are not going to agree yeah and and you know like in general i think really good directors they want they want editors who this is such a complicated dance but they want editors who have an opinion right they don't want a doormat you know they don't want somebody who's just gonna push the buttons and on the other hand they think you can't really deal with someone who is a prima donna you know or who doesn't know they're very strong or who doesn't know their place you know and that that is something that uh and that is a tricky balance for anyone who you know so you have to care very intensely about it and fight for your point of view and the other hand you have to know the fact that you're not the director and that you uh and that perhaps you are simply wrong so that's true jacob i wanted to watch um missing in brooks county but i can't in poland i can't watch it i was able to watch it it's very good so i wanted to ask you some questions about that in uh which i thought were really interesting and um we it's kind of funny that we had talked about building relationships and stuff because uh peter and i had done an in uh an episode about just that thing where we get that kind of okay well what about this you know what how when people ask us stuff like how do i get relationships whatever that you would talk about that when it's great to hear you talk about it because you're kind of i don't know more legit than we are in regards to like the amount of how you've been doing this and whatever so but um another thing that i wanted to ask you about in regards to uh missing in brooks county is that i thought it was this is something that we had talked about also was the the style of how editing has kind of changed over the years not just in regards to like the technology of like i mean i started editing on three-quarter inch tape with a video toaster and then once you know once it cut over to non-linear editing was like oh my god this is you know game-changing you know yeah so and so in that same sense of things evolving with the onset of like so much media coming out right now like so much content and it not being just on like amazon but also on youtube and people who aren't necessarily video editors or but they're kind i don't know if they would they would become video editors but they're essentially content creators and how the style of editing has in the past no no's that we thought of specifically like the jump cut have now become like oh that's just like a thing that you see and nobody blinks a lot out of it and so i wanted maybe this is an elaborate build up but i thought it was very interesting within uh missing in brooks county there's the interview with uh dr kate's bradley i think is her name and she has with the one interview that she has where it's a close-up it's like that's the only time we see where it's like kind of those jump cup interviews and so i was curious if you wanted to if you could like talk about that where that was it was kind of the most it was first of all like very different than any of the other interviews just with the framing of it but then the way that it was the stylistic the way that it was edited was also different can you talk about that or how the how that came about this is such a great topic and a just such a huge topic uh the way that and i i love the elaborate build up because you're i think you're thinking you're thinking along the same lines that i am where in just in watching stuff these days it's so interesting to see how things are changing uh and yes youtube is having and has had an enormous impact on the way that non-youtube things are cut you know um for as of you know as one for instance and and just to talk a little bit more about that the big broad scope of that um you know in general yeah there's um the pace of things continues to in general like again this is such an over generalization but pacing i think continues to accelerate uh and there there is a study that's back there that i think is somewhat old but at the time they were doing a like a 30-year uh span of it might have been from the the 80s the 90s and the oughts or maybe it was the 70s the 80s and the 90s and they were looking at they took some cohort of films where they had some way of of doing sort of an objective analysis and they were looking at how many cuts per s per minute there were in average in in films that they you know hollywood films or whatever and you could see it was basically a straight line towards towards more cuts per minute you know yeah and so the you know the the audience which is a huge over generalization but a general audience in general is you know like our brains are tuned to accept information in a particular way at a particular moment in history and so you can't really you can get away from that to some degree but you have to understand the context you're in missing brooks county is a very um i would say a pretty deliberately edited film it has a it has a pretty deliberate pacing it uh it does not move super fast i also i don't think it's a i mean uh it's not a slow film it's not a and yet i think there are people who are used to um who are used to a certain style of something that might find it a little pokey um so we decide i mean that was decided by you know me and the two directors and just comes by the way that you're you intuit how you're doing it and then and then as you're tightening things up how far you're gonna go but we felt that the content you know to some degree seems like it should always inform the form so yeah like how does it feel should should it be related to what it's about and and what the overall style of the thing is and here this was about a very large vast space that was easy to get lost in that has the where time just sort of you know like years tick by and so to one of the major you know uh goals was to try to put the audience in that space and to let you feel like you actually spent time there and you felt what it was like to be there and that means that you have to put people in verite scenes in what feels like real time and of course real time is no matter how slow or fast you're doing it it's always an illusion in editing we are there is you know um but our version of that was one that we wanted to you know you could take a breath there are characters who take breaths i think some of the my favorite moments in it are silent moments or moments where pauses are taken and so that was the general feeling for it and then the the part that you're referring to with doctors bradley that was just a it was i don't know it was easy to do it was like well we need to we need to get these you know these are the three parts that have to you know that we need in here and there isn't a great cutaway to use and why not why not and so in a way it violates you know it violates one thing that i try to give to my students a lot which is okay well you know you ought to you know any film is going to set its own rules it's going to tell you what the landscape is and it's going to to kind of set the rules and then and then play by them right and as you noted that's i don't think that happens anywhere else in the film so it's an anomaly which in general i find distracting right your film is sort of set you up to to uh to expect one thing and then it gives you something else on the other hand yes like i think the fact that people are used to that makes that an easier uh an easier sell plus also i've always found like to me what's fascinating about jump cuts is that i think i still think even even given the fact that people are somewhat used to them there's still a way to do them that feels really wrong there's still a way to do them that feels very disruptive and feels yeah feels arbitrary and and feels kind of cheap you know and then there's a way to do them that feels somehow more organic and it has i think it usually has to do with the rhythm you have to play it like like it was a real sentence you know like like as if you have to play it as if it was one single clip that it would all that it would be a perfect you know like the the cadence would be spot on or maybe actually what you're trying to do is it's a film where you really are trying to accelerate things and you're you're deliberately jumping like you really want someone to sound very uh sort of you know like caffeinated or something right so there's so almost endless uh permutations of how one could justify the the particular editing of any given uh segment of a of a jump-cutted part but in that part it was it's usually born out of necessity right we've decided these are the and but then then i think there is a way to do it that is that is artful and that uh you know in a way like you just you know you you the you the editor and the directors you you all have to like it right and then it has to have you've by this point you've done so many uh rough cut screenings that you've definitely heard from people if they've been if that has been a troublesome thing you know so you you if if that is true then you you're going in with your eyes open like okay well some people aren't gonna like this um in our case nobody batted an eye with that stuff so yeah it's probably a sign of the times because you don't really see i mean as we pointed out like youtube is where you really see jump cuts and mostly in talking heads like that so i feel like maybe five years ago if you had done that people would be like with pitchforks and their torches but because you kind of see it on the regular it's just like oh this makes sense and um kind of how you said like there's continuity in that where even though you know it's it's it's jarring but it's not taking you out because you're focusing on what she said and because i mean missing in brooks county is so compelling anyway that even though that i noticed that it was more like oh this is interesting because seeing everything else like it's a different style but uh yeah yeah it's i thought that was very interesting um and then to go back to another thing that you had mentioned was you know obviously when you're sitting with directors and you're watching it over and over again or you had mentioned that it was everything about brooks county was very very deliberate and so i wanted to ask you in regards to not just brooks county but also any other the previous projects i know that you also have directed and produced and because you've been making as we all make our own films which you direct and produce also but within these larger projects how involved are you within i guess the production before it reaches post and this the reason i'm asking this is because i thought it was very interesting which um a favorite section that really i thought was very powerful is in the beginning of the film or closer to the beginning of the film was establishing um the man who went missing hamero and the texts between him and his mom and then just that whole sequence just was just like kind of gave me goosebumps so i was curious as to how deliberate like that was and kind of going back to what you talked about when we talked about organizing is like are those things that are are starting to like you're seeing like the twinkles of those ideas as you're going through the footage or like is that something that okay this is what this is kind of you've figured out a structure and this is how you're sticking to it you know what i mean if that makes sense in that film there are two there are two main stories that have sort of a narrative trajectory to them that we follow so one of them is o'maro's story the other one is is juan's story and there was a third story that for a long time was in the film um and in terms of editing we were taking things into so we had uh we had reels that were just character reels so there was a there was an omero reel where we had all of the scenes with omaro and we were playing around with what order we could put them in and some of it was very obvious because things have a chronology but we don't tell them in the film we we do jump back and forth some uh but so on the basic level we're just putting things in one character reel versus another character reel and then watching it through without any as if the movie was just about this one character and then from there we're going to figure out how is it that we where do we pause where do we what what is present time and then what is past when do we make those changes and such um and with respect to that one section with the texts uh if i'm not mistaken that was i think that was jeff bemis's idea so okay i i worked with two co-directors on this and then we all three produced it together and uh one of those co-directors is my wife we spend a lot of time to each with each other both both you know in our daily lives and in our film lives so we had a we had this sequence of omero and there was a you know we had all these assets we had material that for you know lucky for us uh the the his family his extended family especially his brother and sister-in-law were quite uh eager participants and collaborators with us in making the film and they had saved a tremendous amount of material from when the when from this thing that happened you know a while before we ever met them but when he first went missing so they had saved all their texts they had saved all these recordings of calls they had with border patrol and with these with these coyotes and so there was all this material that they gave to us and so we're just trying to think about how to put the audience back as if we're in real time and we are that family who has their loved one go missing and o'mara goes missing and so there were these texts and and just first reading them like there's just this awful you know it's just text on a page but knowing what what the outcome was seeing these one-way texts where it's like you know where are you and then yeah a paw a very long pause and then nothing comes back and then another one out there it was just a it was a simple question of how do we dramatize this and and i think it was just an idea that well let's let's put the text on the screen and and jeff is kind of a whiz at i mean it's very simple uh animation and then it was just about how much time do we wait in between those um and then how do we let the sound design in those moments because we're using drone shots over places that are in brooks county that he could have been you know um how you know how do we let the sound design fill in these gaps and how do we make you wait just long enough to feel uncomfortable but not so long that you are getting annoyed you know or that you don't understand the purpose of the pause you know right um so anyways that's an example of something that was one person's idea you know in any editing in any post-production process you're looking for ideas from here there and everywhere and you know in general you're just trying to find the best way that something can work and the most important thing is that that all everyone who is who is part of the creative team can you know either starts at or can arrive at a similar sensibility as to what the right thing to do is you get real trouble if you have just basic fundamental disagreements about what what is good you know or what works or what doesn't um and sometimes you have to try these things out you have to like go in this direction for a while and see how the film feels if you do it this way and sometimes you do have to have those arguments so that you can get to that consensus you know um luckily i think we came to a pretty nice cohesion on that and you know i mean the amount of time that we spent deciding exactly how much pause there should be until a particular music cue hits you know like we loved going over that kind of stuff like how long can we how long can we wait so that it's not telegraphing the action it's not like telling you something too obviously but it's also still giving the immediate emotion you know uh so we were by the time we finished we were all feeling very in sync about what the um you know what the right quote quote-unquote right thing to do would be at any given moment how how do you deal with getting fresh perspective because like i think this is a struggle for every project that goes on for a long time that after you know seeing like 20 versions of a film you're losing fresh perspective so how do you deal with it well that's just a given and it's um it's a given that every every practitioner has to has to deal with and i think it's just what are your strategies for doing it and how how much experience do you have in in doing that i mean i think one of the major qualities of an editor is the ability to somehow sit down you know and watch something that you've seen for you know this is the 147th time that you've seen it yeah and to somehow bring yourself back to that place where you're uh you're a fresh viewer you've never seen this before what am i going to get out of it you know what can i and so that's a muscle that i think you can develop i i think i've gotten better at it over the years i think that simply you know you're learning by doing you do it again and again and again and having you know if you do that enough where you go through these you know periods of like of not being able to see it afresh and then watching it with a test audience or with trusted friends or whatever and having that experience of seeing it through someone else's eyes that's a really important part and that's why those those screenings are important to get that those perspectives from other people i think that helps you build the muscle of being able to do it even without the other people in the room and then there are times where there's no way that you can you you simply need an outside perspective you need somebody who doesn't know it because there's a limit to how much you cannot know you know hopefully not know you are going to be over familiar with it you know so um it's a combination of just it's it's just a rigorous process of uh of finding the right moments to share rough cuts uh having those screenings in a way that solicits the very best uh feedback um and and you know finding ways to be neutral and non-reactive sometimes you want to tell people why like no you're wrong that you haven't liked it you know but that's almost never true you know like that's almost never you can't you can't win an argument with an audience that way by like by you know trying to brow beat them into something that just isn't working there's also things that i do where i will like even if i just have to like push my chair a little further back from the screen turn the sound up just a little bit more turn a light off just something that will physically change the way that i'm looking i'm always trying to do it on full screen you know any little thing that can that can like break up your facilitate that feeling of of of not knowing uh is is helpful being the audience member yeah get it the thing that that like i often think about when thinking about the commentaries is this concept of someone who actually does very long takes i just always think about werner herzog and how he deals with his films and you know he he talks a lot about this concept of uh ecstatic truth and this is like this is a super fascinating topic to me because basically you know he he says that let me actually quote him here he says that as excited to ecstatic truth is mysterious and elusive and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization in your book you say that you know uh to determine if your film is still like you know on the right side of ethics so to speak you should ask yourself a question does this series of small lies tell a larger truth but you know werner herzeg like he sometimes takes it too extreme i think and i i can't remember the the the title of the film but in one of his films he like puts a quote from i don't know albert einstein i think on the screen that is like totally fake and you know it's and you don't know it's fake you don't know if it's fake you don't know it you're done with the film you don't know it i just know it because i've seen like you know in interview with him where he just said that he made it up and so the question that i yeah i always ask myself is how far is too far like can you think of good examples where you know fabrication of the stylization fabrication actually leads to something that is like you know speaks a greater truth well i think the operative word within his phrase ecstatic truth is ecstatic it's not truth it's the uh it's the place where one feels emotionally something exciting and something that that feels feels true it feels it feels like you've been you know like it it it's that ineffable thing where you it yeah it hits you in a certain way one way to talk about this is to think about it from the point of view of uh you know coming at it through fiction there's a interesting um this is director barry jenkins uh who made moonlight and uh and then he he made um the his most recent thing was this series the underground railroad um and he talked about in an interview how uh you know the underground railroad was a it wasn't a literal railroad it was a it was a way it was a set of sort of um relationships and connections that uh you know black people had slaves had of trying to find uh passage you know safe passage uh in a you know a dangerous uh world to try to escape but he literalizes it in you know in that uh and i have i regret that i haven't seen that yet because it's i've heard that it's it's amazing um but he talked in an interview about how there was you know when he was growing up in school and he was learning about the underground railroad you know he read about it in a textbook he and he never really understood it until he read beloved by tony morrison which is this fiction book right but it's about slavery and it's and so for him you know only coming at it through a fictional point of view did he really understand its i you know i guess you could say it's emotional core it's for him he didn't understand the truth of it until he got at it through fiction um like the the and so that's you know that's another way to sort of think about it is there are what are we trying to convey to an audience and how do we get there i tend to feel in a documentary that um [Music] it's hard because there are documentaries where i i don't i feel wrong about it i feel that i have been tricked and that that somehow someone wasn't playing by the rules and i react i react in the negative uh there are other films that do that and yet i feel ecstatic i feel uh i feel very excited and i feel like there there was something very uh you know something kind of amazing that that got at that um you know there's um the act of killing the joshua oppenheimer film where they are um you know using staged reenactments to try to get at some kind of emotional truth and in that film there's an arc with anwar who's uh who's this killer admitted you know uh genocidal killer who is trying to explain these places where these things happened and the arc of that film is that at least the conceit of how it's shown is that even someone like that has like there is something innate in humans that will eventually cause someone like that to reckon with with their with their past and so there's a scene at the very near at the end where he just starts wretching he starts he starts like dry heaving because he's like there's just something emotionally that's coming to him about what he's done and what the you know even though he's talked very dispassionately about it for sure here was the place where he killed them here's the place we did that there's something that happens through the process of having really gone through being the subject of the documentary and doing the reenactments that has brought him to this place where he can no longer like his body his physical body is starting to realize it even though his brain hasn't yet you know so that's the conceit in that film um so to me like if like that felt very true to me i i would like to believe that that is true that there are not even the most evil people we can imagine there's something at the core of all of us humans that we none of us can get beyond right so because i believe in that i bought into that truth of that film even though there's a lot of manipulation that it takes to get you there you know um so uh you know i i mean it's so hard because it's getting easier and easier to to do a lot of to to fabricate a lot of these things and what i fear is that is that people are getting more and more used to assuming that documentary is just another made-up thing that feels a little dangerous to me um yeah and that's hard because i do think some of the most interesting stuff happens at the margins you know it happens uh you know there's this film uh by the ross brothers um bloody nose empty pockets uh from a couple years ago that showed at sundance that purports to be the last night in a um in a bar in uh las vegas and it's all the regulars who are coming back and it's documentary that's how it was that's it's in the documentary category at sundance it's billed as a documentary and it's just one long evening a verite evening shot with several cameras of of the like the place is going to shut down you can see there's all these regulars there all these you know regular drinking folks and it's just one long night there and in fact it was the only thing that was shot in las vegas was the exterior to the club like it was actually shot outside of new orleans and in fact what they did is they solicited uh bar flies like regulars not at one bar but at a whole host of bars around the area and said hey come to this one for one night we're gonna shoot this thing and then people kind of essentially they sort of played themselves they said here's the general idea of what the idea is of what's happening it's as if you're at your bar and it's the last night you know and then they just shot the whole thing so essentially there's like everything about the way that you're led to believe about what you're seeing is a lie it's not in las vegas these people don't actually there's not one bar it's a it's an amalgam it's a but there are really really great moments in that film there are you know moments that feel very very emotionally true and i think their justification would be that that's what they're going for and uh and if you you know uh if you read up enough on it like nobody's hiding like they didn't actually hide what their process was as soon as you start getting interviews coming out they they're very frank about it and if you look at the sundance uh you know the festival blurb very carefully it's a very coy like in so many words they're telling you there's something there's something you know that's made up about this you know so part of it is that we have to take all of the extra filmic things in into context so no film ever actually exists just on its own we always come into it having some we've we've been brought there by something there are things in the poster there are things even in the title itself that give us clues and i don't have any answers as to what's too far it seems like so contingent in every but but i do you know like any other audience member i think i have a place where i feel i feel right about some things and i feel wrong about others and i maybe i feel like it like it's just something about the have you have you have you gotten to that place in a way that that feels like you've respected the audience in some fun way i don't know yeah yeah i love the examples you gave really good really good another thing i wanted to ask you about from from your book actually so you know i i only edited one short documentary in my life uh the one i worked on i really struggled with like you know with moving between like topics so that that's something that i really struggled with this it was a few years ago i'm pretty sure that i would do a little bit better now but but it doesn't matter so you you talk about this concept of uh hinge clips in your book so kind of like thinking about do you have other tips or strategies for you know moving throughout the the content from moving throughout uh you know the narrative of the film first of all don't i would say don't try to create the the hinges too quickly um it they don't mean like they they're you don't you won't know until you're relatively far along uh what you need you don't know you won't know until you're relatively far along where the transition points might be you won't know even like even like what these various things that you're coming back and forth between a b and c is it going to be between a b and c or is it going to be between a b c and d or is it just going to be between a and b um so you sort of have to do enough work to get the structure functioning in a in a way that is semi-coherent at least um it's only at that point that you uh that that you kind of need those things um and then it's sort of like a it's this it's this thing that i think editors get good at of just trying to keep your awareness level up so and you're you're keeping your awareness level up about various various things all at once but one of them is just what could make an interesting transition um and so it's really sort of having those feelers up and going oh this is listen to way listen to how this you know listen to the how the the end of this little interview bite goes they go from here and then they go over there that would could we employ this you know could we um or it's a more manufactured thing where it's just a purely visual thing there's something that i've uh written about in the uh there's a new book that i've just turned the manuscript in for and there's a point in this film uh asif kapadia film uh diego maradona which is about the maradona the the the footballer um very famous footballer and there's a great very simple little moment in that film but i just think it's extraordinarily well done where they're you know there's all this archival stuff he's at the top of his fame he's playing for napoli he's playing in naples italy he's like uh the quotes in there are so great like like basically the you know naples was like quote unquote the armpit of italy it was like it's like the the part of italy where that just gets uh gets no respect right and so the fact that they had that they were they had maradona playing for them and they were winning winning winning people were just going nuts the italians they were just going nuts they there's a quote where they're like yeah you know almost everybody in town had a picture of him a lot of them put it right next to jesus you know it was that level of it was that level of adoration you know um and so you get this montage with with audio clips like that and it goes to this this um non-dialogue montage where you just see all these still frames and he's getting his picture taken with these people and with those fans these old people these young people these like it seems like everybody wants their picture taken with maradona right click click click click click click and then there's one final click and it's with a new guy this one pause is held a lot longer and there's this very slow move in and then there's this very very subtle underscore music that comes in that's slightly ominous and we are going away from maradona and toward this other dude and that's the hinge clip into we're like wait a second i've seen this guy before and he is it's or it's been seated like 15 minutes earlier that he was kind of he was you know he came to italy and there's this there's kind of a crime family that kind of runs things around there and we've been introduced to this this character the main like boss of this crime family and we're like oh my god that's this dude right and then we go into that guy and we realize uh-oh like maradona has been palling around with mobsters you know so um but it's this it's a silent transition because we go from he's everybody wants a piece of him he's super famous the mob people also want a piece of him and he's gotten in in with them right and that's exactly and the transition happens purely visually and that's the hinge clip is that one it's that one of the picture of the two of them because it connects to both of them it's part of yes he's getting his picture taken with a bunch of people but it's the first clip of this whole segment which is about i'm forgetting the name um carmona whatever his last first name is carmona and it's going to be about that right so um so who knows how they came up with that like um but in a way you have to know what the need is first and then you can find your way to it um and it's no good if it's just like it's super clever but it's just showing off how you can do it and it makes no it has to make sense with what's the next logical thing that we want to hear about so it has to you know like really the more important thing in a way is like what is the narrative flow and then that's kind of like the that's the juicy very important but in a way it's kind of icing on the cake that that leads you there in a way that feels uh like more artful you know and more subtle beautiful so i like to ask editors about how they stay productive and efficient in their editing pay so do you have tactics for that that you use on in in your editing sessions it's a great question because it's i think it's very hard these days um yeah the um calls for our attention are real like it's yeah you know the whole yes the you know the whole social media world is built on on attention you know and it's it's our attention that they make their money off of so they find very and there's just and there's just so much out there that one could look at so i i feel like in some ways i have am not successful at this i uh you know depending on what's going on with the news i may be checking in with you know various things several times an hour you know like little tiny little little like or just like that i'm going to check my email you know so i will start simply by admitting a certain amount of defeat um that you know just like i'm only so successful at this um but the strategies i have i mean um it's you know it's it's kind of simple like what are what is the time that i can actually just carve out you know like i i need to i need to not have anybody need me between you know these hours you know and i need to uh have some one way or another some distance you know um even even if it's not physical distance i'm just in the basement but i'm nobody's expecting me to be anywhere i don't have to check the email i don't you know so it's i think it's really about carving those times out and then i think paying attention to your own to your own rhythms so for instance i'm definitely a morning person uh i and i've only grown i used to you know get a lot done editing late into the night but as i've gotten older that doesn't work for me anymore and i don't think it ever worked that well to begin with you know so like i know that i'm i have better ideas i'm more productive in the earlier hours of the day and i might as well just knock off at four o'clock because i don't think i'm going to come up with anything great after that anyways you know so it's just like you know arranging your life around what your natural proclivities are and when you're maybe at your best is another uh is another part i mean there are these apps out there that will uh forcibly you know uh restrict you theoretically from internet access for a certain amount of time but you can always just go and undo it you know it's like um so it's um well i you know it really it's like whatever works um uh but but i i still do very much believe in the idea that you do need you need solitary time to be with yourself and your own thoughts and you need you really do need time to do that without other people around in the in the project like because the best work will come from people being able to come to conclusions individually and then share them collectively so every editor has probably had situations where they've felt over they've just felt like the director has been on top of them you know there's been no space to have them to have their own private imagination about things and i've definitely been in that situation before and uh somehow there's something about the autonomy of of silence and the autonomy of aloneness that that is necessary even if it's not sufficient like you know you also very much need the the collaboration and the all the other ideas and the um and other people to tell you that your ideas aren't working you know one of the biggest problems of young generation is that they don't have time to be bored right and it has been proven that you know the most creative work actually happens when you're bored when you allow yourself to be bored yeah i i i'm fascinated with like you know this this concept of of productivity and you know i'm guilty of that as well i'm defeated like daily yeah yeah but but at the same time i think like you know i think many people do not recognize how important it is to to hone on that skill on the skill of you know staying focused and you know carving as you said carving out uh you know a period of a day where you just you know don't allow anything else to distract you from from the work that you do you know editing is a this is such a this is a a common place it's not but editing and editing is a editing is an exploration it's always an exploration and you don't really know whether something is going to work until you go and and try to put it together and and you you kind of play it out a little bit um and so you really do need to like sort of in order to think things think something through you have to actually put it into you know you have to put it into action you have to build that idea of a part of a sequence or of a in order to see whether the thing that would that was that was the idea whether it has any merit or whether you know it maybe yet on its own didn't have merit but the thing that it brought you to was the good idea you know so um so you need that that time to just play out the idea and figure out what the best version of it is you know and every editor has their own compass as to how long that's going to take like you do get you know like i can look at something and go okay this is probably going to take me about 45 minutes to figure out to sort of build it and and decide for myself whether it's worth pursuing beyond that you know or this is going to take x amount of time or that's going to take this amount of time but you need that time in order to do it in order to even to just get to the point where you can decide okay we're not going to pursue that but but you wouldn't know you know you it would have been you know if you don't do that then you've got several unexplored avenues some of which would have been the right thing to do you know so you need all those false starts you need all the that that exploration in order to get to where the good ideas are and um you know as i think jeff richmond says somewhere in in the book you know you need the bad ideas to get to the good ideas i'm paraphrasing but um a lot of times you never really know where something really cool is gonna come from and sometimes it comes at the end of three hours of absolute torture you know something that just you know was not fun at all and didn't work you know do you have like your personal i don't know career struggles you know connected to editing i've chosen to have kind of a dual career so you know i'm an academic and i'm an editor and that has been a wonderful very fortunate thing for me but it's not without its compromises you know there have been times when there were projects that i've really wanted to work on that i essentially just couldn't because my my academic career demanded certain things of me you know if you're a full-time teacher there's you know like uh i've you know i've chosen to have that uh that arrangement and i've gotten to work on great projects despite it um but there was a project recently that i am sure is going to be just a freaking fantastic film and i had a very long two-hour two-hour plus conversation with the director followed by another you know like we went very deep into the to the possibility of me editing this film and in the end she concluded that the hour the the way that i was going to have to do it like when you know when it was the schedule on which we would edit it just wasn't going to work for her and and that you know like i actually was when she made that determination i was actually glad that she did that because it would have made even with that schedule i would have been i would have been more busy than i would want to be you know and so um so in a way like the hard thing got done for me but still that's too bad because that's a project that i would have loved to have been on just because i saw the potential in the raw material and i really liked her so much and what what she seemed to be trying to do with the film um so that's something that's that's um like i wouldn't trade it though like i think i've just gotten so much out of um having just i think i think being able to to teach is is uh it's a gift it's an honor it's um it's hard but it's really really rewarding um getting to and and it really brings you back to some of the more simple joys of of this process because you get to be with people for whom a lot of this stuff is brand new you know we all get after you know enough years and enough you know struggles with our own careers or or the way the business works or whatever you know i think a lot of us are even if we don't know it we're somewhat jaded but when you're dealing with students all day long who are just like thrilled like you wouldn't believe that something is working in their film you're like you know it's amazing to be around that that's that's uh so so i guess that's maybe the one thing about my career that is is uh you know very specific to me um that is a minor struggle but again like i've been fortunate to have situations that have allowed me to continue working on really interesting projects at various times so with that idea of you being a teacher and seeing like this new generation kind of introducing this new generation of editors for in your opinion i guess what do you think are the most important qualities to a great documentary editor i think tenacity uh there's a like uh commitment tenacity i think you have to you have to love i don't know i might be just generalizing from what i love about editing to over generalizing it for anyone but um but i think one of the greatest joys of any editor is finding finding a piece of material that that never really had life to it before and you've finally found it it's found its home within the film it's it's either like a part of a scene that wasn't working that is now has now is like a just an electric brilliant you know wonderfully emotive part of a scene or it's a scene that never really had much meaning or or or excitement and and now it's in a place where it's full of meaning and excitement so it's um i think just a a a drive to find those moments like that's that's what that's what gets me up in the morning it's like how am i gonna find how am i gonna where where is everything gonna find its home you know um [Music] and humility uh that's this weird combination of of um ego and humility um because i do think you need a certain amount of of again independent thought independent like i know how this can work what if it worked like this you know or and also like a um i know how this can feel i know how we can make this have a certain rhythm you know like and that you know that takes a certain amount of ego and of a very specific individual thought and then the humility part is the fact that um just that there's it's going to take a lot a lot a lot of work to find the stuff that actually stays in the film um and that thing which is no longer so painful to me but i know earlier in my career you know coming to rough cuts where uh where i was you know just completely convinced that we were almost done or whatever and you know you have a crickets you know yeah um like that that you so that i don't know what is that that's a uh is that um like say to masochism or or uh you know or is that just a um it's you know you have to like you have to be willing to go go to those places and to come back from them you know um uh good sense of humor um you know i think any editing any edit with a certain number of people after a while develops a certain gallows humor um related to the topic because you've just you've been through a lot together and you know nobody else would possibly make these jokes about the real lives that are going on screen because it would be wrong you know but uh because you have been there you know you you know like you're forced into that role um and uh you know creativity of course um uh and then yeah like to some like i think most editors have some love of process of just like you know for instance i don't know what i love making little spreadsheets for my work where like you know it's like and then there's certain tasks where i can i can like put it all in green meaning that i've finished it you know and then the next one is you know things like that where you're like you know this is again the sifting process or the whatever where you take a certain amount of pride in just having actually just completed the work in an organized fashion and being able to have put things in a way where you can find things quickly and like you know to a lot of people that's understandably like really dull you know uh so i think you have to have a certain amount of um you know even if a lot of that is assistant editing duties i still think a good editor has at least some pride in uh in just that pure process organizational stuff yeah i agree that's kind of uh the the problem-solving aspect of it anytime i think of editing or the thing that draws me to editing or when i explain it to people is my love of the problem solving is kind of like how you said before like kind of finding that diamond in the rough and giving it purpose and it's the same like because for me i every time i start on a new project it's always i'm always anxious about it because there's that kind of um that idea of uh i can't even think of the concept we're always talking about where um the imposter syndrome yeah like someone's going to know that i'm dead i'm not worth it this is you know i know that there's a problem here and it's going to get too far away from me i won't be able to grab it but then having that moment where then you it clicks whether that be within like okay i'm looking at a mountain of footage and i need to get through it and like organize it in a way that then it becomes like that's one problem and then after that it's just a constant set of solving problems and then to go along with like crossing those off the list i've completed it i'm being i'm accomplished and stuff so yeah yes yeah all that stuff for sure brings true so true and then i think also like i think a certain love of collaboration has to be there um where uh you know because you're not gonna the editor doesn't get a ton of glory in general you know like you're not you're you're not the i mean most people don't know the names of the editors you know like you're not either yeah yeah you're not you're not a household name even though you know you were a a completely integral part of why the movie works you know so you have to be okay with that and and i i think i'm only okay with it when i am in a when i feel like i'm working with people who it's them that i'm performing for you know it's it's like they are they know why right they know how certain things came to be how they were and even if it's only there's only a few of those examples ever mentioned in an interview or whatever um you know that's between you and them and that's what your that's what your professional pride comes from you know so for instance i don't know why i'm choosing this this super old example but on lost la mancha i mean we wanna like the daily telegraph in london gave it the peter sellers award for best comedy of the year which is and it's a documentary and it's if it's a comedy it's a very dark comedy um but there are definitely comedic elements to it part of that is made possible by miriam cutler's score um which is is is whimsical in some ways um but you know i mean uh not to toot my horn too much but you know a fair amount of it is possible because of what i brought to it in the editing and there were whole there were sequences that we knew were going to be interesting scenes but it was only once i put them together and showed them to keith and lou who just bust out laughing they were like oh my god i had no idea this was going to be so entertaining you know where there's a um you know there are just various scenes where it's i mean it's a story of like anything that can go wrong in this production goes wrong and it's just a it's a it's this horrible tragedy playing out before your eyes but but you know the stakes are low it's just a film so yes you can and it's also a you know it's about uh terry gilliam's film about don quixote uh not not getting made he eventually a decade and a half later or so didn't finish it but um but there are scenes where you know like they're out there in the middle of the desert in in uh in are they in andalusia anyways they're in spain and you know like one thing after another has conspired against them being able to shoot this damn scene and there they are johnny depp's there he's ready for his take it's all going well and then there are these fighter jets that just blow over the you know it's like like it's impossible like just these mach 2 whatever where like they can't record sound like they can't do any dialogue now right and you just have all these people who just they're just uh one after another they all just look up at the sky and it becomes this moment of like what now right um so there are various moments in that film where like you had to have the you had to have the intuition right you had to have the feeling like okay there's something late in here there's something that's here that that like it's only funny because we took it out of context and we put it together but there's something very true about the emotional experience of it for the people who are there who live through it that that makes it real you know you're kind of like you're you're taking something and you're grabbing it's it's pure essence you know it's like it's the little drops you know where you've distilled down the juice into the the most bitter you know potent form of it um where like that yeah like that's the thing that that i think those little moments where like you know you saw the potential and therefore you just for yourself can take some pride in it and you know that you had that little you know that little important part of it um even though there were other things that you tried to do that didn't work and um but you were uh you you you made it through without getting too upset about those you know do you have your own favorite editing book or filmmaking book except your own of course the the two books that i take excerpts from uh in in my editing class are welter merches in the blink of an eye which is um maybe the we made the video about this one as well the you know it's one of the most uh cited um books and then there's this film by uh the the director and editor edward demetric called on film editing um that i also like uh from the it's from like 83 or something it's from the early 80s and a lot of it is somewhat dated clearly because technology has changed so much but there are certain principles in that and that's not about documentary editing um but uh there are there are concepts that he's getting out there that i think are are strong um i mean there are loads of different little articles about documentaries that i bring in that are not really about editing per se but are about breaking down what's the underlying logic of any given film um that i just love there's um i just came across this author sandy flitterman lewis who turns out as a facebook friend of a former student of mine and her name came up and she was criticizing you know um uh david bogdanovich just died the other day and i i put in an unkind comment about him that i was i wasn't endorsing the comment but i was saying that someone else made it that she was criticizing me for and i was like sandy flitterman lewis oh my god anyway she wrote this great article on this film night and fog um which is this holocaust film from the 50s and you know like when people can uh take their intellectual powers and look at a film and kind of um make you look at it in a new way and think about how why it works the way that it does she talks about how the past and the present are are used in that film in very interesting ways um so different individual articles that uh where i think someone has had a really interesting take on something that by reading it you can kind of you can think about something in a way that you didn't before and oftentimes it's not really about the editing per se but it is about they do tend to i do tend to uh be attracted to things that are about structure which by its nature is about editing you know yeah yeah sure and unless ricky has some other questions uh i just wanted to ask you what's next for you what are you working on right now and where can people people follow your work uh well i've just turned in the manuscript for a new book it's called how documentaries work and it will be published in 2022 uh probably late late summer um by oxford university press and it is um it's not a so the book that we're talking about today is a is a textbook it's a how-to book that leads you step by step through the process this one uh is not that but it's so it's more of a think piece but it goes through lots of individual um aspects of documentaries and thinks them through with uh with lots of quotes from practitioners and so it's a little more heady but there's a lot of as with this book there are a lot of very specific examples um and i sort of tried to tease out all right well what are a lot of the common conventions in documentary how can we think about how these conventions work and how can we kind of uh bring them to the surface a little bit this is stuff that you you probably somewhere in your brain kind of have noticed this but you maybe haven't thought about it in that way before so um so anyways that has been my major project for the last year plus um [Music] and um i have a couple of editing projects that that may be the next thing for me that i'm not quite sure about yet um but the first uh and then i am also writing a second edition of this book um so apparently there are people who really wanna uh one thing that has been one thing that's been in demand is is a chapter on short documentaries uh specifically oh yeah i love that actually as well so well i meant to buy another one okay this is good i'm in your i'm in the same boat because i don't know what i'm gonna write yet so because i didn't i have i mean i i i i instruct students on making them all the time but i haven't done a lot of thinking yet about what what i can say specifically about shorts that isn't also applicable to to longer form documentary work so i'm going to have to figure that out so those are those are things that i'm working on and you can yeah i mean i i do have a website jacobricka.com and uh you know if you google me you'll find the the films that i've worked on and the the book and now books soon that i've written well thanks so much jacob for for your time hopefully we can thank you this is have you back on the podcast for when the new when any of your new books come out well thank you it's it's a genuine pleasure to to chat with you guys who who clearly are thinking about uh all this stuff in a you know in a in a substantive and interested way i really enjoyed it [Music] okay so that's it for today i really have to tell you that uh you know after reading the book it made me want to edit a documentary so i might you know start working on one myself if i have to if i if if no opportunities come my way i completely agree i mean i've done a number of documentaries myself already and so talking to jacob was like super inspiring and i mean he's done over 12 documentaries that i know of at least with his latest being missing in brooks county um which if anybody's listening to this right now i highly suggest that you check out uh so i hope you enjoyed the episode today folks and um until the next time shoot and i did like there is no tomorrow [Music] thanks for taking time out of your busy day if you like what you've heard please rate review and subscribe on whatever podcast platform you've listened to this on your reviews helped more people discover this show you can also follow us on instagram just search for at cut to reveal and tell your friends and if you have any questions or comments send them to podcast cut to the point.com and who knows maybe we'll use them in the future episodes and as you say around here until the next time shoot and edit like there is no tomorrow [Music]

Channel: Cut to Reveal Podcast

Views: 3,208

Keywords:

Id: YbXucLx9m44

Length: 94min 31sec (5671 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 24 2022