By Patrick Z. McGavin
Sometimes picture editors come together by chance, sometimes by a shared connection. For Andrew Buckland, ACE, and Scott Morris, it was both.
Buckland and Morris worked on separate projects with the director James Gray and have both collaborated with the editor John Axelrad.
Now their lives are connected on James Mangold’s “A Complete Unknown,” about the early career of Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet), from his 1961 breakout in Greenwich Village to his groundbreaking electric performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.
Buckland was part of the Oscar-winning picture editing team on Mangold’s “Ford v Ferrari” (2019). The two recently talked in a joint interview about their first official collaboration.
CineMontage: Given your creative relationship with James Mangold, how did your creative dynamic with Scott differ, or was it similar to that with [editors] Michael McCusker, ACE, and Dirk Westervelt, ACE, on “Ford v. Ferrari”?
Andrew Buckland: Jim and I have this long working relationship, which makes a lot of things easier and more efficient, and everyone’s relaxed and comfortable. Jim can be himself, and we can just have an understanding because we’ve worked so long together of what Jim’s looking for and what he’s expecting. It really allows for a conversation and great sort of collaboration.
With Scott, it was very similar to when I was working with Mike and Dirk. Jim’s very open to having these conversations and collaborations. It was a natural transition when Scott came in. Scott really connected well with Jim, and fit right into the dynamic of the cutting room. It seemed very organic, like we had worked together before.
CineMontage: Scott, as a newcomer, how’d you characterize the creative back and forth?
Scott Morris: Jim has been cultivating his amazing team of collaborators for a while, and I’m grateful to be a new addition to the group. There were some things about their process that were new for me, like having (supervising sound editor) Don Sylvester and (supervising music editor) Ted Caplan in the cutting rooms with us as early as the shoot. It was incredible to have them working on music and sound while we were first assembling the film. It was such a luxury to have. We’d put a scene together, and then do a quick turnover, and start developing the sound and music. Which would come back and influence the picture edit. It made us more efficient and able to maximize the material at an early stage.
Jim was shooting in New Jersey, and we were cutting in L.A., but he works during the shooting process. He’ll work remotely with us on Evercast. He’ll shoot a long day, and then at the end of the day, he’ll come work with one of us for an hour or so. That was amazing. By the time we were screening a cut of the film, I don’t even want to call it an assembly, Jim had touched more than half of it. We’d already refined many scenes with Jim, and were well on our way to honing in on his vision. We had a compressed timeline on this project, so it really helped to work this way.
CineMontage: How did you divide your responsibilities? Did you work on scenes together, or separately and then come together?
Andrew Buckland: It was a testament to how well Scott fit into the dynamic of the cutting room he came in, I guess about four weeks into it, or something like that. I’d been working on scenes, and so we sort of kept that dynamic. Since I was already involved in a scene, they would obviously be shooting dailies, and I’m just caught in a very complicated multi-camera scene. I’m now locked into that scene, trying to sort of figure it out.
So Scott would just take the next batch of dailies, and we would kind of work in that sort of organic way of whatever comes in, whatever is available to cut. We just had to get it done, because Jim’s coming in, and we had like four days after they wrapped to show Jim.
Scott Morris: Obviously, they shoot a film out of order. So if someone was working on a certain area of the film and what we thought might become a reel of scenes that would go together, we did our best to stay within sequence. Once we got into reels, and working with Jim on the cut of the film, we knew all the dailies inside and out on those sequences. So we were more reliable.
And then, eventually we all come together, the three of us, to review the cuts. The way Jim navigates the editing rooms is that he’ll bounce between our rooms. Sometimes he’ll be working in Andrew’s room, and call out, “Scott, can you come in here?,” or he’s in my room, and ask for Andrew, and we’ll review a cut and have a conversation. It’s a very exciting and fun environment to be in.
CineMontage: What’s fascinating is that music in the film functions not just as a formal element, but it’s music as character, as important as Dylan or Joan Baez.
Scott Morris: Music was interesting. They’re all musicians, and they communicate through the music. It’s how they express themselves. For instance, in the scene where Joan (Monica Barbaro) and Bob play “Blowin’ in the Wind” in the morning together, in bed. It’s kind of like a dialogue scene. There’s a lot going out between the characters, but they’re using lyrics and the music emotionally to get there. Basically all of their duets are character-driven, so the music’s there, there are tracks, but there’s so much character drama continuing to develop in every scene.
Jim’s goal was to make sure that in the musical performances, we were focusing on the character arcs and the emotion of how these songs are affecting the people in this space, whether it’s our lead characters or just a more general idea of the audience, or the times, how the world’s affected by the music. It’s about how these musicians are communicating and affecting each other emotionally with the music.
CineMontage: It feels like with few exceptions, almost all of the numbers are played in their entirety. How did that uninterrupted process shape and influence the editing rhythms?
Scott Morris: I don’t believe any of the songs are played in their entirety, but there’s a trick in the editing process where we hold in these shots and we linger, and you become so wrapped up in the emotionality of what’s happening with the characters that they feel like you’ve gotten the full experience. We never wanted to truncate it to a point where it felt rushed or like we were kind of glossing over a track. We really try to make it feel like you live in it.
Andrew Buckland: That first moment when he’s playing a “Song to Woody,” I think that’s pretty close to the full length of the song, but that’s a song where we wanted to allow ourselves to linger in that song, because it’s the first time we’re seeing Timmy play to his heroes. So we wanted to sort of experience that moment through the eyes of Pete Seeger (Edward North) and Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) observing him, and just the sort of natural, raw talent and the very simplicity of what Bob was doing is so engaging. And then later in the film, with the spirit of these songs, these aren’t at full length, but I think they’re sort of driven by the emotion of the scene.
Once you experience what the song is really conveying, it really allowed us to move onto the next emotional beat. So we were very conscious about that in the process of cutting this movie, that we didn’t want to linger. We didn’t want to overstay our welcome, and we wanted to keep the pace, keep it moving into the next moment and have each scene fall into the next scene, not have a beginning, middle and end. Just really unite all these songs together in that way.
Scott Morris: Using music to transition, we discovered where we could have a song playing in a live performance during a scene, and then we can kind of turn into either a transitional piece or a montage piece. We would either strip out the vocals, in some cases, like during the party scene in the middle, when there’s this duet between Edward and Timmy, that becomes kind of a score piece as it transitions out of the party.
CineMontage: The setting is the 1960s, but before the Vietnam era protests really gathered force, so perhaps it feels different than many people remember or imagine. Did you talk with Jim about how you wanted to capture the movement and pace of that era?
Andrew Buckland: There was a momentum created in the movie intrinsically with how we were cutting the music, and how we were transitioning and providing this idea of falling into the next scene. I think the only impactful moment of a transition where it’s clear that we do a time jump is 1965, where we cut to black and hit the title card. He’s in a new era, and so is Bob. He’s been transformed. That was on purpose. It was the only time we did that.
Scott Morris: The world changed so much in 1964 and ‘65. We acknowledge that, with the music, and what’s happening on the street. At the party, you hear mentions of the Beatles, and Bob moving into rock and roll, and the British Invasion, and later on, we hear The Kinks’ song. There’s definitely a part one, and a part two, with Bob transforming more into the icon we know, with the hair, the sunglasses at night, and it definitely felt rhythmically a little different between the first half and second half of the film.
Andrew Buckland: I think what’s interesting going back to the momentum of the movie is the transitions of time jumps are very interesting during the first half. They don’t really reveal themselves as time jumps. They’re pretty subtle and nuanced. We don’t make it clear, in the sense of using a chyron or anything like that. It just becomes a natural progression. And I think those nuanced transitions of time jumps create this propulsion.
CineMontage: What’s the most artistically or emotionally satisfying part of your work?
Scott Morris: For me, it’s all about collaboration, working with people like Andrew and Jim Mangold, it’s about the spark of creativity and finding the film, and working with performance and actors. I like working in an office for the community environment, working closely with directors, other editors, the assistants, the whole team. Making a film is a shared journey. I love the collaborative process.
Andrew Buckland: I think having that real collaboration, this real back and forth, is the sweet spot for me. It allows me to present and explore and be able to have that conversation on if it’s working, and then executing an idea that maybe Jim has. It’s just having the conversation and collaboration that is the key, and what keeps me going. I can’t just be in a room, and do it without contact.
Patrick Z. McGavin is a Chicago-based writer and cultural journalist. He writes on film at https://patrickzmcgavin.substack.com/.
Be the first to comment