By Kristin Marguerite Doidge
“Where did we fall in love with the movies? At the movie theater,” Sean Baker said as he took the stage at the Oscars on March 2 to accept the award for best director for “Anora.”
Baker, who’d previously won two other awards for best screenplay and for best editing for “Anora” earlier in the night (and later made history by winning a fourth award for best picture), urged viewers and distributors alike to consider the importance of the “communal experience” of watching movies together in the theater in a time when the world feels divided. Host Conan O’Brien also invited viewers to enjoy the theater experience at his “building for movies” featuring a “big screen of iPhones put together” in a fake commercial earlier in the broadcast.
Jokes aside, that sentiment of genuine love and appreciation for the power of movies to enrich and inspire audiences was also reflected in this year’s American Cinema Editors (ACE) “Invisible Art/Visible Artists” (IAVA) panel event that highlighted the achievements of all of the Oscar-nominated film editors in front of an engaged crowd. The popular event—which is celebrating its 25th year and is part of an effort by the editing community to educate professionals, students and the public at large about the art of editing—was held on March 1 at the Regal LA Live theater in Downtown Los Angeles. The Guild sponsored a lively luncheon following the panel discussion for the nominees, board members, and invited guests.
The ACE organization’s vice president, Kevin Tent, ACE, introduced the 2025 panel, which included this year’s nominees: Dávid Jancsó, HSE, for “The Brutalist,” Nick Emerson for “Conclave,” Juliette Welfling for “Emilia Pérez,” and Myron Kerstein, ACE, for “Wicked.” Baker, as well as Welfling, were en route to Los Angeles at the time of the event and could not attend in person.
While Tent was part of the panel last year as a nominee for his editing work on “The Holdovers,” ACE president and fellow picture editor Sabrina Plisco, ACE, served as moderator for the second year in a row. She asked each of the nominees to reflect on what first inspired them to get involved in the film industry and how they discovered their passion for editing, their views on the power of editing to shape a film and impact audiences, as well as the nominated editors’ insights into the collaborative process working with directors, including the challenges of working on long, complex shoots. They also shared clips from this year’s nominated films and offered advice for aspiring editors.
For Jancsó, he grew up as a second-generation film kid in Hungary, and knew from the get-go he wanted to be an editor, though “my parents tried really everything in their power to keep me away from this industry,” he said. His father is the late Miklós Jancsó, a film director and screenwriter, and his mother is picture editor Csákány Zsuzsa.
But he ended up at film school anyway, and was one of two “film brats” in his cohort of nine who wanted to become editors and who understood how special it was. “We know what it is that we’re creating and why,” he added. He also noted that Hungary is home to two of the last film processing labs in the world and continues to have a vibrant arthouse production and post-production scene that caters to both local and international productions.
Likewise, Kerstein came to editing through the vibrant indie film scene in New York in the 1990s after studying fine art at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he worked on printmaking, photography, and painting.
‘The most important advice that I would give is to watch movies.’
But it was what he called a ‘blind Skype date’ meeting with director Jon Chu about eight years ago that would lead him to a long term creative collaboration for the pair that has included several acclaimed films.
“We fell in love with each other on ‘Crazy Rich Asians,’” Kerstein said. “It was a real bromance…and then we worked on ‘In the Heights’ together, and that was an incredible experience working in New York…I really wanted to work on a musical prior to that, so that was a dream come true, because after that, he said, ‘I think ‘Wicked’ is the next one.’ And so I was pretty excited, of course, to come on something this big because I’m a huge fan of this Broadway musical. And I’m a huge fan of the ‘The Wizard of Oz.’”
Kerstein added that he first fell in love with movies as a kid when he was visiting Universal Studios and saw firsthand the magic of the mechanical shark from “Jaws” attacking the fisherman over and over again. In a full circle moment, he said that an executive at Universal recently told him that “Wicked” is the biggest film the studio has ever made—an enormous production that included building their own backlot in London with sets that spanned several football fields in size in order to create Chu’s vision of Oz, and several years of dedication from the cast, crew, and post-production teams.
“It’s really inspiring to meet this impossible bar that Jon had set for all of us,” Kerstein said.
In a previously recorded Zoom interview with Plisco, the Paris-based Welfling said she’s also enjoyed a long and fruitful relationship with the award-winning director and screenwriter Jacques Audiard since his directorial debut “See How They Fall” in 1994. Audiard, who directed “Emilia Pérez,” also comes from a film family like Jancsó—his father was the famous French director and screenwriter Michel Audiard.
“I met Jacques because he was an assistant editor just like me when we were in our twenties,” Welfling said. “We were working in the same studio and we became very close friends…and then he became a director and he told me, ‘When I direct my first movie, you’ll get it.’ So since then, I’ve been involved in all of his projects. No question, I’m not going to miss it.”
Emerson said it was a single shot from “Taxi Driver” that inspired him to become an editor. He began working in television news in Dublin, then Belfast, and has been based in London for the past 11 years, though his editing work often takes him around the world.
For “Conclave,” Emerson said he and German-born director Edward Berger bonded over their approach to the material, drawing on another American movie from the era, “All the President’s Men,” in order to be precise and to resist the impulse to cut away from a long shot prematurely. He said he often remembers legendary editor Sam O’Steen’s advice to “never cut for a line.”
As for his advice for emerging editors, Jancsó reminded the audience to watch more movies if they’re interested in learning and achieving greatness with the craft. “The most important advice that I would give and have gotten is [to] watch movies,” he said. “Go back in time. Start with the beginning of film. That’s what helps you become a great editor, I think.”
But it’s the love of the work itself that will get you through the hard times, Kerstein said, adding: “I know a lot of people aren’t working right now, but no one said it was going to be easy for artists to make a living…I’ve been through many recessions, many strikes, and I’ve gone eight months to a year not working. But if you want to do it, you’ve got to love it, because it’s a really hard job, but it’s always rewarding if you can get through the tough times…so what I’m saying is stick with it.”
Be the first to comment