By Peter Tonguette
In both subject matter and style, “One Battle After Another” is a film out of time and very much of its time.
On the one hand, writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s widely acclaimed feature film, released by Warner Bros. in October, is the very definition of a throwback. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Bob Ferguson, a long-haired, amiable, long-retired radical whose past participation in the revolutionary group the French 75 has led him to adopt an underground lifestyle. Peaceably raising his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti), Bob is jolted from his laidback lifestyle when newly confronted with an old nemesis, the bigoted, ruthless Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn). Seeking to worm his way into a white-supremacist secret society with the incongruous name of the Christmas Adventurers Club, Lockjaw makes a fresh stab at detaining Bob and Willa to conceal from his minders evidence of his earlier relationship with Willa’s mother, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor). Using bits and pieces scavenged from Thomas Pynchon’s novel of hippie-era radicalism, 1990’s “Vineland,” Anderson fashions a fulsome evocation of an earlier era’s lively yet combustible ethos.
Even the form of the film is proudly, defiantly antiquated: “One Battle After Another” was photographed on 35mm film, using a blend of VistaVision and Super 35 formats, and finished photochemically. VistaVision and 70mm prints were made available to select theaters during its run.
On the other hand, the film is no nostalgia piece — far from it. Anderson deposits these senescent radicals into present-day America with its attendant sins, including institutional racism and the government targeting of immigrant communities. And though the film utilized many analogue elements, picture editor Andy Jurgensen and his team marshaled their years of experience and expertise to make old technology work for new audiences.
For all of these reasons and more, “One Battle After Another” is one of the major post-production achievements of 2025. CineMontage caught up with Jurgensen, associate editor Jay Trautman, assistant film editor Andrew Blustain, and post-production supervisor Erica Frauman to talk about their work on this memorable editorial accomplishment.
CineMontage: Andy, you started with Paul Thomas Anderson as the first assistant editor on “Inherent Vice” (2014), progressed to associate editor on “Phantom Thread” (2017), and was named picture editor on “Licorice Pizza” (2021). You have also edited a number of his music videos and other projects. Why do you think you and Paul are simpatico?
Andy Jurgensen: Over all these years, I feel like I’ve become more attuned to his sensibilities and we’ve developed a shorthand. I think it’s the combination of knowing the process that he’s comfortable with and actually enjoying spending long hours in the cutting room together, week after week. I feel comfortable expressing my views and saying when I think things work or don’t work. That kind of trust extends across much of Paul’s crew, too. For example, he’s been with a lot of his camera crew for 15 years.
CineMontage: So what is his post process like?
Jurgensen: We have dailies screenings during production, which I attend. He likes to review what’s been shot with the cast and crew to get confirmation that we’ve got it. For this movie, we were carting around a VistaVision projector and a Super 35 projector, and we were projecting 35mm film at all our locations. He likes the cinematic experience of watching the dailies on a large screen. After these review sessions, if something’s not right, we might reshoot a scene. He also might choose to shoot alternate versions of a scene so that if we end up cutting something out or moving it earlier, we have options.
Jonny Greenwood, the composer, sends us score ideas during production as well. Sometimes he’s writing music based on raw dailies we’ve sent him, and other times, it comes out of conversations with Paul. Paul will play Jonny’s cues or other needle drops while we’re watching the dailies to see how they work with a scene. It starts to give everyone a real sense of the film’s tone and energy. Screening dailies during production is just so valuable to his process.
CineMontage: Jay, before you got moved to associate editor on the movie, you were an assistant film editor along with Andrew Blustain and Tom Foligno. Among your duties at that point was organizing the dailies. Can you talk about that process?
Jay Trautman: I catalogued what was shot, made sure that everything the camera department said was shot made it through the lab, made sure everything they wanted printed was printed, and then helped Andy build his evening playlist of what they were going to watch and in what order. Then I would create a log for Andy, because he was on set and was sitting next to Paul in these dailies sessions. I made a cheat sheet for him of what the order was going to be, what lenses were used, what film stock was used for each shot, so that if Paul had a question, Andy would have that information right there. If they were watching, and Paul really liked a particular take or really liked to start a scene in a particular setup, Andy would be able to take all those notes and know how he was going to start assembling the scene based on what was said during dailies.
CineMontage: Andy, why is it important to screen dailies as a group?
Jurgensen: On a lot of movies, they’ll post dailies on PIX or another system. We don’t do that. If you want to see dailies, you come to the screenings at the end of the shoot day. It’s a chance to experience the footage big, evaluate any technical issues together, and see how the performances or jokes land in a communal setting. It also gives the cast and crew a real sense of accomplishment, energizes everyone for the next day, and helps them better understand when Paul decides something needs to be reshot. It’s wonderful!
CineMontage: Were there things on this movie that were reshot based on what you saw during the dailies?
Jurgensen: We reshot part of the opening. We wanted it to be clearer that the characters were at an immigration detention center at the border. Paul also thought he could capture the first meeting between Perfidia and Lockjaw better — that’s such an important initial encounter. We reshot it at the end of production and it turned out better. Then there were some pickups for the “river of hills” sequence.
CineMontage: That’s the car chase that, over sloping, hilly terrain, features various characters in pursuit of each other, including Willa and Bob. How did you assemble that very complicated and gripping sequence?
Jurgensen: You have to go bit by bit. It was a lot longer at first, and slowly I started whittling it down. Once we had the music, that kind of helped drive the cutting pattern a little bit — the percussive beats in the score. Of course, the sequence went through probably a hundred versions of trying different things. Paul was always riding the line of wanting the audience to feel just a bit of motion sickness. The footage gets kind of shaky at times, but it helps add to the effect.
CineMontage: Andrew, can you talk about some of the technical process of cutting the movie?
Andrew Blustain: It was a challenging and unique workflow in that it was shot in two different formats. We had the 8-perf VistaVision and the 4-perf Super 35. We had two separate sets of reels to conform. All of the selected takes were printed to work picture, and then we would print B-roll takes as needed during the cutting process. During the course of a reel, or even in the course of a specific scene, the formats would alternate. We would slug out the sections of the alternating format for length when we come across those situations.
CineMontage: How did that impact your job?
Blustain: It was kind of double duty. Based on the recut or what scenes were being worked on, I would get lists: this is a VistaVision scene or this is a Super 35 scene. We had the big dry erase boards on the wall, but we had two sets of those, tracking the version number, the length, how many holes for visual effects and opticals. Everything was doubled. And those two versions, never the twain shall meet until after the neg-cutting when the 4-perf got blown-up to be slotted into those sections.
Trautman: You can see the difference in the footage, depending on what camera it was shot on, but it doesn’t really change the workflow once it’s in the Avid. By then, it’s kind of like every other movie, except we’re tracking all of the key numbers so that we can get back to that original negative. We set it up so that we had metadata in the key number field and in the ink number field, and basically one of those was for 4-perf and one of those was for 8-perf. We had to make sure we were using the right numbers for the right footage, so we basically just color-coded everything in the Avid: if it was shot in VistaVision, we made it orange, and if it was in Super 35, we left it the normal color.
CineMontage: Andy, the movie is all over the map tonally: it can be antic in the manner of “The Big Lebowski,” especially in the scenes with Bob, but also suspenseful, as in the “river of hills” sequence. Was that tough to manage?
Jurgensen: Even in the script, it was apparent that the movie was going to have a wide range of tones. You have to trust your instincts. When we first built the movie, we realized we had some really intense scenes that needed to be broken up with some lighter moments — to give the audience a moment to exhale. We also didn’t want it to be too preachy. Movies that are complicated and can thread the needle of different tones and take you to unexpected places are just more fun to watch.
CineMontage: The performances are also eclectic: DiCaprio is very loose, while Penn is the definition of stern and fearsome.
Jurgensen: The actors were able to channel genuine humanity through their performances. Lockjaw is a despicable guy, but you almost feel sorry for him at the end — he just wants to belong, whether it’s finding love at the beginning with Perfidia or being part of the organization. All the actors added so many interesting layers. As wild and zany as Leo plays Bob, he’s grounded in those more heartfelt scenes with Willa. Like the movie itself, you want to find peaks and valleys through the performances.
CineMontage: When Lockjaw is closing in on Bob at his home, there is a time cut between the last time we see Bob and when we see the authorities, led by Lockjaw, crashing through the door. In fact, Bob has already pulled up stakes and departed through an escape hatch, but we don’t immediately realize that time has elapsed. Why did you decide on that?
Jurgensen: We had footage of Bob running from the couch. I don’t know if we actually saw him go down the hatch, but we did see him get out of the room. As we were piecing it together, we felt it was a great misdirect to try, because the audience would think Bob would be sitting there as Lockjaw entered. It just worked really well and also shows how stealth Bob can be. That’s a fun moment for people who haven’t seen the movie because when the door explodes, people jump.
CineMontage: You incorporate so many little moments that feel improvised or at least incidental to the action but tell us so much about character, such as a particularly grotesque moment when Lockjaw licks his hair comb.
Jurgensen: We kind of live for those kinds of moments! If I saw that during a dailies screening, it would be something I would mark right away: star, star, star! Paul encourages the actors to try things too. In “Licorice Pizza,” when Gary [Cooper Hoffman] and Alana [Alana Haim] are having their first date at the restaurant, there was a take in which some extras knocked over a bunch of glasses. It disrupted the set a little bit and Gary nervously turned to look, but it felt real. It made its way into the movie. We embrace imperfections. Paul doesn’t like to use split screens or speed ramps to manipulate performance. We can always make it work through editing.
Paul has mentioned in a couple of interviews that this is his first movie in a while set in the present day, and because of that, he could be a little looser with how some of the scenes were shot. It’s not like he was locked into period cars, sets, and costumes. He had a larger sandbox to play in. If we needed to get a crowd of people the next day, we could just get extras to come in their own clothes. It goes back to screening the dailies, because in watching the footage, a new idea might spark between Paul and the actors. If there was time, it was relatively easy to just go back to the set and reshoot it a different way.
CineMontage: Jay and Erica, it’s one thing to shoot on film, but it’s even more unique to finish on film. Can you talk about that process?
Trautman: VistaVision is shot and projected with film moving horizontally through the camera or projector, so it’s oriented 90 degrees differently from Super 35, which moves in a standard vertical orientation. Their frames are different sizes. They can’t be spliced together. In order to make a complete print, we knew we had to convert something. We didn’t know exactly what we were going to do.
Erica Frauman: Knowing that we wanted to make a VistaVision print, we needed to figure out how to cut negative joining the Super 35 4-perf to the 8-perf VistaVision. Jay and I would knock our heads together, then we’d talk to the lab about the best way to get all of this into VistaVision. We made lots of tests — filming out 4-perf sections to IMAX and to 70mm, reducing those film-outs to VistaVision and cutting them in — without satisfactory results. Months into this process, FotoKem found an Arri film recorder that could film-out to VistaVision, and when they dropped that on us, that solved all of our problems for converting the 4-perf.
Trautman: We were able to convert the Super 35 into VistaVision negative, and then that negative could be cut alongside the VistaVision original negative. That took a lot of bookkeeping and tracking in the Avid to make sure we knew what’s going where.
Frauman: We worked with a negative cutter for a long time named Mo Henry, and she passed away unexpectedly about 10 days before we started shooting this movie. That was something that we were faced with. We knew we were going to cut negative. I made a call to Jim Hall, who had cut our negative on “Phantom Thread” (under Mo Henry). He has a day job working on restorations for Sony, and he said he wouldn’t be able to do it. Then our schedule moved around. I called him back and said, “I know I’m probably bothering you, but what do you think?” We ended up putting him in a room at FotoKem and moving a million-and-a-half feet of film over to where he could catalogue and start breaking down to cut the negative when the time came.
CineMontage: Erica, the color timing was also done without digital tools, right?
Frauman: Once we had a cut VistaVision negative that got sent to the lab, Don Capoferri and Alex Lake were our color timers. Alex is a kind of color timer in training at FotoKem. Don Capoferri has been doing it forever. He’s great at it. He postponed his retirement to color the movie photochemically. We were not grasping at straws; we were pulling people back in to be part of it. I think we got what we needed. We also had to make a 70mm print and tested filming-out, but went back to the tried and true optical blowup from a VistaVision IP to a 65mm internegative. It’s just a far better representation of what Paul wanted for this movie.
CineMontage: Andy, beyond the refinements you made during production through reshoots, and the obvious experimentation that always takes place, did the movie evolve substantially from start to finish?
Jurgensen: It’s pretty much the same movie, just shorter and funnier. We did test screenings in different parts of the country to gauge the pace and confirm that the humor and tonal shifts were working. We knew it was going to be a balancing act. Above all, it was important that the father-daughter bond resonated with audiences and remained at the film’s emotional core.
CineMontage: Erica, what difference do you think these old tools make on the audience experience in watching “One Battle”?
Frauman: It’s been incredible to encounter people after they’ve seen the movie. In some ways, there’s been a lot of hype about it, so you wonder whether it will live up — how beautiful the VistaVision is. My experience with having people come out of a VistaVision screening is that they feel alive. I had a friend text me, saying, “I want to run in the streets, I want to be free” — after she had seen it in VistaVision in London.
