By A.J. Catoline
When AppleTV+ invited picture editor Adam Gough, ACE, BFE, of the acclaimed new series “Disclaimer” to Los Angeles, they threw him a dinner party on October 23 at the Sunset Marquis hotel where several Editors Guild and ACE members were waiting to meet and congratulate him.
Sitting at the head of the table as co-host was Taika Waititi, with whom Gough is currently editing the next film for the Best Picture-winning “JoJo Rabbit” producer, director and star, due out next year.
Waititi raised a toast to Gough, feting him as a genius editor and joking that, as a director, he doesn’t entirely enjoy the editing process, and he dislikes being confined in the dark space of a cutting room. However, he thanked Gough for having a talent and special sense that makes him as a director feel creatively comfortable so that he can enjoy editing.
Making directors feel that they can trust their editor’s instincts is key to a successful creative partnership. Gough has evidently achieved that familiar shorthand and trust with Oscar-winner Alfonso Cuarón, who wrote, produced and directed “Disclaimer” as a seven-part limited series based on Renée Knight’s titular 2015 novel.
Gough first met Cuarón when he was the Apprentice Editor on the director’s 2007 film “Children of Men.” They stayed in touch, Gough cutting some short film projects for the director, and their collaboration grew as they teamed to jointly edit the critically acclaimed “Roma” in 2018.
As the cinematically minded Cuarón took on making an episodic TV series, he intended to keep his feature style. He chose not to follow the traditional television workflow, where at least two editors cut different episodes of the series.
“Alfonso and I discussed how the cutting room was going to be set up,” said Gough. “He said, ‘I only want to work with you. I want to keep it consistent. Have someone else help you do the assembly cut and then we will cut it together. But how you run the cutting room is up to you.’”
“I felt incredibly proud of the consistency because it was one editor and one editorial team over two years. I don’t think you would get that balance otherwise without it. I just felt so lucky to have the opportunity of working with the people that I do,” said Gough. (Read more about his past work here.)
Cinemontage sat down with Gough to ask about his other stories from the “Disclaimer” editorial journey.
Cinemontage: The series is very non-linear in structure, we are flashing back many times to past events and then returning to different times in the present. Were all those intercuts scripted, or discovered in the edit?
Gough: The script was fascinating to read because it was written in different colors. Catherine’s story was black text on the page. Stephen was in blue. And the flashbacks were in green. My assistants colored our scene footage to match, so I had this beautiful Avid timeline of multiple colors so I could see how the rhythm of the story was flowing.
Ellie McDonnell [Second Assistant Editor] made color-coded scene cards for me which helped with the restructuring of the first chapter [“Disclaimer,” in a nod to the book, titles the episodes as “chapters.”] Watching the early cuts we quickly noticed that we needed to speed up the story. We wanted to end the first chapter having met young Catherine in Italy. In the script that was how the second chapter ended. So we had to bring that scene forward, which meant we had to cut a lot of the elements of Jonathan [played by Louis Partridge] and his girlfriend when they were going through Venice.
We wanted to keep the rhythm flowing between the story intercuts of Stephen and Catherine and Jonathan. The storylines are non-linear, and Stephen’s and Catherine’s stories are not in sync until midway through the second chapter. So that gave us a lot of freedom to move those scenes around.
It took a moment to find the right rhythm in the first two episodes. I remember we did get a studio note saying that maybe, to avoid any confusion, we should put a location and date stamp when we go to each scene. I didn’t like this idea and fought against it. We worked to find a cinematic way of telling this story by letting it reveal itself naturally and trusted that the audiences could workout the prospective timelines for themselves.
Cinemontage: There are lots of cats in many scenes of the series. Do they make picture editing continuity challenging?
Adam Gough: Alfonso really wanted the presence of a cat in all of the scenes with Stephen [played by Kevin Kline cast as a very convincing Brit] and Catherine [Cate Blanchett]. Two weeks before the shoot began, he added to the script that Stephen was going to have a cat in his house and Catherine has a cat in her house. And the reason was to keep the actors on their toes, to have some dynamic in there that you had no control over. You can’t direct a cat or block a cat. They’re going to do whatever they want and then go for a wander.
I had cutting rooms at studio during the shoot, and Alfonso would drop in between setups to edit. As he walked out the door back to set, over his shoulder he would shout out to me: “And add a cat to the scene!” I feel like I should have had an animal wrangling credit for the amount of time I spent cutting them in.
My assistants organized cat passes on my dailies so I could see when a cat pops into the take. Then one day during post Alfonso brought a cat and we had an editorial kitten, this beautiful cat named Luna. She loved the warmth sitting behind my monitors as I’d be cutting away. One day not too long after Luna’s arrival I went to the bathroom and came back right before giving the cut back to my assistant to turn over. And later she calls me and asked, “Were you meant to have done a jump cut in the middle of the scene?” And I said, “Wait, what?” I can’t think how that happened other than Luna walked across my keyboard.
Gough: The flashback scenes were shot in a kind of Italian 1960s cinema style, and it gave us the opportunity to use the iris as a transition. We did at one point play with cutting to silence for the voiceovers. I had long discussions with Alfonso about the differences of presenting for TV rather than cinema. In cinema, you have control of the theater. You can cut to darkness, you can cut to silence, and it’s clear to the audience that it’s not a mistake. You are in total control of the experience. For TV, when people are watching at home it’s a different environment. Cutting to black on TV is not the same as cutting to black in a theater. There are more distractions at home so I was cautious of this.
When you see the iris transitions you are seeing the perspective of the book’s story, and I think it becomes clear to the viewer that this is [the book’s author] Nancy’s interpretation of events. Nancy [played by Leslie Manville] knows who her son Jonathan is and she’s trying to rewrite history for herself. There’s so much detail in her trauma. I’m still amazed by some of the details Alfonso comes up with in person while shooting. One of my favorite moments in the series is when the police come to Stephen and Nancy’s home to break the news of her son’s death. And after they leave, Nancy is sitting there and she complains about the tea that the police woman made being too milky. She’s broken and she’s destroyed. It’s a powerful moment.
Cinemontage: How do you choose among the performances of an Oscar-winning actress like Cate Blanchett?
Gough: It’s hard, because she’s great. The options she gives are so nuanced. Sometimes she has a tiny tendon on her face twitching, sometimes it’s just a rhythm. She’s giving us options but they’re so nuanced and it’s so sublime. Cate’s worst take is sometimes far better than the best take of another actor.
I’ve had to learn to articulate why I like a shot in my conversations with Alfonso. Sometimes a take just feels right, but Alfonso really wants an answer for my choices. When we were editing the scene in chapter seven — where Catherine is sitting at the table with Stephen in the kitchen — we were going through all of Cate’s performances and we got it down to two takes. And Alfonso asked, “Which is it?” And I said, I like the second one. And he goes, “Why?” And I said, “Bear with me. I don’t know. Watching them twice now, I know it’s the second one.” And Alfonso just said, “I agree. And I also don’t know why.” It’s a gift to have those problems of choosing the best performance of Cate Blanchett. I’ll take that problem any day of the week.
Cinemontage: Alfonso hired two cinematographers for the series, his longtime collaborator Emmanuel Lubezki (who goes by nickname “Chivo”) and Bruno Delbonnel. How did you work with both their cinematic styles?
Gough: They are two of the best cinematographers on the planet working together, and also challenging each other. They each had characters to shoot. Chivo did all Catherine’s scenes, including all the Italian scenes. Bruno did all of Stephen’s scenes and also did Robert [played by the comedic Sacha Baron Cohen in a dramatic role.] So their distinctive lighting styles and the way they shot those different characters, they had a slightly different grammar for each. There was a little concern about how it would cut together, so as soon as I had footage from both of them I lined up some scenes to see how it felt to cut from what Chivo had shot into what Bruno had shot. And it just flowed beautifully.
Cinemontage: What was one of your biggest challenges editing the series?
Gough: This was the first time I’ve ever cut sex scenes. We had an intimacy coordinator on set during the shoot, so I asked the producers if the intimacy coordinator could come into the cutting room to speak to me and my assistants. If the set was going to be protected, I wanted post to be protected as well. I thought this was an important thing that we needed to do.
You can have fun when you’re cutting the playful sex sequences in the early episodes, and then later in chapter seven it’s different when you’re cutting an intense sexual assault. Alfonso and I had a shorthand which came from working together on “Roma.” In that film there is this scene in a hospital with a stillborn, and it’s an incredibly emotional, heavy moment. I remember the day we cut that. We did it in silence. We went through dailies and just gave looks and nods to each other. We were watching, we were analyzing. We were feeling the emotion of the scene and trying to make the best judgments and choices accordingly.
So when it got to cutting the sexual assault scene in chapter seven, we fell into the same method from “Roma.” We went into this silence between us where we could get through it methodically, in a way which was as comfortable as it could be for each other.
When you’re editing a rape scene and you’re trying to get those rhythms of the breath correct, that is a very uncomfortable day of work. I really want to give a big shout out to my assistants because we started a dialog where we could be open between us. We would talk about the dailies coming in so everyone was comfortable dealing with this footage. If anyone was working on footage that they were uncomfortable with, we could just say, “Time out. I need to go for a walk or pass it on to someone else.” So we had each other’s back.
And as the cutting room is the source for the rest of post production, my Associate Editor, Steph Tighe, would keep everyone informed of the content of turnovers. Handling the footage correctly was an ongoing job for the duration of the project. It was something I hadn’t needed an awareness of before.
(Editor). PHOTO: Courtesy Adam Gough.
I would be editing away, going through the timeline, working at speed with Alfonso making a mess and then turning it over to [Additional Editor] Caitlin Squyres to tidy up behind me. She’s incredibly attuned to my choices and my takes as well. So it was very fortunate to find someone with the same taste as me, which is also why Alfonso works with me. I found myself outsourcing more and more to Caitlin as the edit progressed because of the quality of her work.
Cinemontage: What advice do you have to editors to grow in their craft?
Gough: I always wanted to be an editor. I was very lucky to get my foot in the door of the cutting room. I progressed under some amazing editors and learned the politics of the cutting room, watching their work, seeing the workflows, seeing their styles. And that’s my advice to assistants: take all the experience you can from the editors you are working with. Observe, ask; you are currently learning the craft.
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