Celia Beasley on Finding the Right Edits for Netflix Wilderness Drama ‘Penelope’

 

 

The French-American picture editor Celia Beasley is a rebel who likes to cut against the grain.

 

The Oakland-native showed no hesitation in making her first plunge into series television by cutting all eight episodes of the Netflix program “Penelope.” 

 

Created by Mark Duplass and the director Mel Eslyn,  the series is an impressionistic portrait of a 16-year-old girl (Megan Stott) who flees civilization to explore the Pacific Northwest wilderness.

 

Beasley sat down with CineMontage to talk about the shift from film to episodic series, what it’s like to edit without formal training, and the great outdoors as a character. 

 

Celia Beasley: I have known Mel Eslyn for about 15 years. She and I came up through the same Seattle independent film community, working with Lynn Shelton and Megan Griffiths. “Penelope”s DP Nate Miller was also part of this group. This is the third Duplass project I’ve worked on. Mel and I had never worked together as director and editor, but we’re just so familiar with each other’s work, I really feel like I know her sensibility from having edited so many projects that she’s produced. 

 

When she first told me about the show, I could already see it in my head because we have so much common history. What she was describing was unique and immersive, and sounded like a really fun challenge for me as an editor, being in a project that was out of genre, and being able to stretch myself creatively, try a lot of different tools, techniques and vocabularies. 

 

 

Beasley: I’d never done scripted TV before. I’d only done features, so it was really interesting to delve into that different format. I loved it. It is really fun to craft a beginning and an end eight different times – how to set it up, and how to pace it, and how to end it, whether it’s a cliffhanger, or whether you’re wrapping something up. 

 

The show was shot like a feature in one giant block, so I was editing it as they were shooting. It’s such an experimental show in a lot of ways. Having eight individual episodes allowed us to explore creatively within each one, without having to feel constrained that everything we were doing had to carry over across the whole show.

 

 

Beasley: The landscape is essentially a character in the show. We really were going for this very immersive experience with Penelope. The whole show is her experience, being in her head. We’re like a mouse on her shoulder, seeing things through her eyes. Though the wilderness is grandiose, she has a very intimate relationship with it. She has to pay attention to all the details, because her life actually depends on it. When she’s foraging for berries, for example, if she doesn’t pay attention to the minutiae, she could pick the wrong berry and be poisoned.

 

So it’s really a very different relationship with nature than that of a spectator. I love how Nate Miller and his camera department found these beautiful little moments – a caterpillar crawling up a blade of grass, a dead leaf spinning off a spider web – and let the action unfold in the frame. That was really essential to creating that immersive experience not just for us in the wilderness, but us in Penelope’s experience as well.

 

 

Beasley: In the pilot, for example, there’s a scene where she seems to be aimlessly walking through a grocery store. At one moment she is drawn to the camping equipment and we transition from watching her to being inside her head. It was all shot at high speed, so I used a speed ramp to bring us into slow motion. Now we’re in her head as she’s gathering supplies. Then, she’s pushing the cart down the aisle, and I do a smash hard cut to the checkout counter with the “beep” of the register.  It was a way to wrench us back to reality, where she’s gotten a slap in the face and pulled out of her dream state. Most of the time, I work to make the edit invisible. We don’t want people to see the seams. But this is one situation where it’s a little wink to the audience.

 

That’s one example of the whole experiential shift that happened throughout the show. Another example is when wakes up under the big tree, and it’s pitch black, and she tries to put her tent together. We need to feel the struggle of her putting this tent together and failing and trying and failing, so I used a lot of jump cuts and fast-paced back and forth to emphasize how repetitive it feels for her.

 

 

Beasley: That’s the way it felt a lot like a feature. It really allowed me to get into this flow, and feel the cohesion of the whole season, while also being able to really focus on what was going on in each episode. I knew how it was all connecting. We established these editing vocabularies really early on, like asynchronous dialog or condensing time with jump cuts. We were trying things that sometimes felt a little crazy, but those that stayed became part of our editing vocabulary for the series. If you do something crazy once, it might throw people off. If you do it three times, it just starts to feel like part of the show. 

 

 

Beasley: One of my first filmmaking mentors said, “Performance is king.” It’s always where we start.  You’re constantly asking, “What is the emotion that we’re trying to get out of this moment, and how can we do that with the tools and the footage we have?” 

 

When I was working on the first assembly for “Outside In,” I asked Lynn Shelton if she wanted to see a script version of  scenes, before I started making my version. She said, “I don’t want to see anything that you don’t feel is authentic.” That has guided me for so many of the things I do where I just focus on whether or not it resonates. Of course often you’ll end up putting things back in and taking things out, but it always starts out with a feeling You can feel if it’s working or not, and everything else goes around that.

 

 

Beasley: I didn’t go to film school, so I don’t have any formal training. When I got to Seattle, I actually was interested in photojournalism and video journalism. There was a non-profit media arts center here that had workshops, rented gear and held screenings. I took all the workshops I could. I became a volunteer, and that’s how I met my community and started working on all kinds of projects with people who became friends and collaborators. They’d say, “I’m shooting a Manga film this weekend, and I need somebody for costumes,” or “Can you do sound for this doc I’m doing?” I really got my hand in everything. 

 

The reason I came down to editing is because I realized very quickly this is where it all comes together, or doesn’t. This is where the power lies. I saw very quickly that this was an area where I responded very instinctively and I could be confident in my response. You really need to have very high emotional intelligence to be able to edit, because you’re reacting to emotion. You’re reacting to people’s faces. Film is just telling stories with people’s faces and the sounds that come out of their mouths, not even the words. You have to be really, really attuned to that – the nuance in a sigh, the shift of the eyes, the tension in the jaw. And that really spoke to me. 

 

 

Beasley: It’s funny you mention that because my dad is a sculptor. He never related to the idea of ‘liberating’ the sculpture from  the medium – he was more of a builder. I’m more of a builder as well. I’m French, and in French the word for editing is “montage,” which is closer to the idea of building, or assembling. I don’t like the word “edit,” in English, because that implies that we’re starting with something complete and extracting from it. But it’s not an extraction. It’s building, assembling, like anything where you’re starting with a lot of pieces. 

 

When I explain editing to somebody who’s not in film, I say it’s like I’m getting a huge bin of Legos with the hope of making a house. Maybe the architect’s drawing was for a house that was three stories high, but with the pieces I have, the three stories aren’t going to be very solid, so I end up building a house with two stories, and a pool. It’s still a house, but it’s going to be a little different from the original plan. Some of the Lego pieces are not going to fit. Some of them are amazing, golden, beautiful Lego pieces that I never imagined. My job is to build a house that is true to the core vision, with the pieces I have.  

 

 

Beasley:  I don’t know if someone watching my work would say, “That’s clearly Celia Beasley’s editing.” I think my biggest impact on a project is in my collaboration with the director. The two things I need to edit well are: a clear vision, and trust. I need to really understand the vision, but that doesn’t mean that the director has all the answers. I’ll often ask questions during the edit. It’s totally fair to ask questions. I really need to understand what they’re trying to say and do. 

 

And then there’s the trust. Everything I’m doing is always at the service of the film. I need to know that I’m in a safe place to put all of my creativity and my experience and my tricks and all of those things at the service of their vision. And I won’t always do it exactly the way they have it in their head, and maybe I’m bringing ideas that they didn’t have.

 

I’ve always become either good friends with the directors I’ve worked with, or we’re already good friends, because we end up having this very intimate relationship. We spend all this time together and we share a lot of ourselves. The relationship with the director is my favorite part of the entire process.