By Rob Feld
As a film-loving kid growing up in the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn, with no industry connections, a career in film seemed remote and unreal to Eric Kissack.
That changed during a semester abroad at the Prague Film Academy, where the craft of filmmaking suddenly revealed itself as something human, tactile, and achievable.
“We made short films, and for the first time, it felt doable,” Kissack recalled. But it wasn’t until a bitter winter shoot left him sick and sidelined that he found his true calling. “I went into the edit room to recover. I was physically getting better, and creatively, it just felt like home.” Amid the warmth and focus of the cutting room, he discovered his place. “It was calm, it made sense. It formed this primal association for me — this is where I belong,” he recalled.
His instincts for story and structure are on full display in the Apple TV+ series “The Studio,” a much-talked-about parody of modern Hollywood from Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. A longtime collaborator of the duo, Kissack joined the project from the outset, not only as editor but as a key creative partner on set. The series unfolds as a workplace satire about beleaguered film executive Matt Remick (Rogen) navigating the absurdities of a struggling movie studio. Told entirely through meticulously choreographed long takes, each episode is a breathless single-shot descent into chaos, a masterful blend of comedy and technical ambition.
With the opportunity to make comedy play through the creative limitation of editing constrained by the single-shot rule, Kissack became a crucial presence during production, rewriting the edit as the cameras rolled. Whether coaching camera operators on what he would need to hide cuts or guiding actors through real-time pacing tweaks, Kissack brought the tools of the edit bay directly onto the set. It was a rarified experience for any editor.
CineMontage: Did you have a mentorship experience that stuck with you?
Kissack: One of my best friends in college happened to be the daughter of Paul Hirsch, one of the most acclaimed editors of all time. He was the first professional editor I ever met and talked to. It was the first time I got to sit down with someone and witness their life as a working professional in the industry. He had a good life, he was respected.
I could see myself in this guy’s life. That was a big check mark.
The mental work of being an editor is tricky. I always say when you’re getting the footage in during dailies, you’re God. No one tells you what to do: I think it should look like this. I think this piece of music should start here. And then all of a sudden, someone comes in and tells you what to do. The mental switch from God to peon is very weird. In the best-case scenario, it’s collaboration.
But Paul helped me understand how to see that in the best possible way. He always said, “At that point in the edit room, you have a voice, but you don’t have a vote.” That helped me. It was like, Ok, I’m always going to make myself heard. I’m always going to say what I think, even if it’s not well received. That’s my right. Once I do that, now you decide. Making that mental switch was helpful.
CineMontage: You have a deep comedy background and history with Seth Rogen. Tell me how “The Studio” got to you.
Eric Kissack: I started working with Seth Rogen on “Sausage Party.” Seth was working with a very talented animation editor, but he brought me in to do a comedy pass. It was an instantly good rapport — we made each other laugh. Right after that, he asked me to edit the pilot for a show called “Black Monday,” which he directed with Evan Goldberg. That went really well. Then he asked me to do “Pam & Tommy,” which also went well. Then he asked me to do a comedy pass on the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” movie. I think “The Studio” was the fifth time we’d worked together, and by then we were comfortable.
He wanted to make “The Studio” a series of very long takes. “Birdman” was all a one-er [a shot, sequence, or film that plays out in what either actually is or appears to be one uninterrupted camera shot — no cuts] and plenty of other movies have tried it, but it felt like no one had tried it in a comedy. Comedy has these specific challenges when it comes to long takes, which is that so much of it is about pacing and timing. And much of what we editors do is amp up that pacing and timing in the edit. We’re crunching every scene. We’re taking out breaths, any extraneous word, anything you can do to create these rhythms and this flow that makes all the jokes land. It’s very important.
Seth knew that better than anyone. Especially if a scene has six jokes in it and one of the jokes is a B-joke, and all the other jokes are better, you need to take out that B-joke. You know as a comedy editor that it’s sort of like running hurdles: If you jump the first two hurdles and then your toe hits the third hurdle, you’re going to have a hard time jumping the fourth and fifth. But if you take out that third hurdle, then you’re golden. Knowing that, Seth felt the only way shooting in long takes would work would be if he had an editor on set he could trust to make those changes as we’re shooting. That was my job, and it was very, very stressful and unusual.
CineMontage: What does that look like? That joke sucks — take it out?
Eric Kissack: Yes. It would not have worked if I didn’t have this relationship with Seth. He trusted me. We would shoot the scene four or five times and I would sit there with my script and start drawing lines through jokes, making asterisks on spots where the timing didn’t feel right. Then Seth, Evan, and I would get together, and I would say, “I think we should lose this joke here. We need to have Ike already walking to the door so that he’s ready to say his line, because otherwise it’s too long a gap. And there’s a moment here for a funny reaction, but we’re not on that person — and since I can’t cut to a reaction shot, we’ve got to tell the camera guy to swing over and catch it, then swing back.”
So it was a really fun, really crazy, and really stressful process. Usually, by Take 10 or 11, the scene was flowing. By Take 15 or 16, it was on fire because the actors had dialed it in, and we had smoothed out all the rough edges. But yeah, you had the sense that if you didn’t get it then, the whole show was just not going to work. That was the process.
CineMontage: What other considerations came into play?
Kissack: There were two other things I was always thinking about. One was transitions. Normally, you have a crazy, wild scene and you can’t just plow into the next scene. You need to let the audience take a breath. So you’d put in an establishing shot of a building, or create a couple of montages of people playing in a park — whatever — something to establish the rhythm. We couldn’t do any of that because we had these rules: essentially, anytime we did a cut, it had to be a big time jump. It had to be the next day or that night. So, establishing cuts wouldn’t work. I always had to say, “Remember, this scene is coming off that previous scene. We need a breath, so we can’t just start the shot with someone talking. We need someone walking into the room, or we need to pan up from something to allow that breath or that moment for the viewers.”
The third thing I was doing… well, we did very little improv on this show, but we did some. Like, Kathryn Hahn — you can’t tell her not to do improv. She’s a genius. And there were a couple of actors like that, where we just had to let them do their thing. But with improv, no single take can be used as is. You have to combine it with other things. So I would realize where the improv pockets were — like a moment where Kathryn could do something crazy — and I would work with the camera operators. I’d say, “Okay, before this moment, you need to swing off of her and then onto someone else and then back,” so that in that swing, I could switch takes and combine different bits if I needed to.
The swings are the easiest place to hide cuts. A five-minute scene with no visible cuts would probably have five or six (or more) cuts hidden in the swings. We got better at all of it as we went along. On the first day, I was nervous to say anything because we’d never done this before. But by the end, I was like, “This line sucks. Cut that. Mark, you’ve got to swing over there at that moment. Do that.” We got pretty good by the end.
There are some things I still see in the first episode, and I’m cringing because I’m like, Oh, why didn’t we put the camera there? That would’ve been more elegant. But by the end, I was pretty proud of some of those scenes. There’s crazy shit we do, but you can’t really tell that there were any shenanigans.
CineMontage: Were you glued to a monitor to judge it properly?
Eric Kissack: Monitor was the only way to visualize it. Now and then, we would pop our heads onto set, which was always hilarious because the simplest thing you’d imagine was happening was always 10 times more complicated. There’d be a moment where the camera would move past a chessboard and up to Seth’s face as he paced, and then you’d look over at set and there’s like eight dudes standing there — one passing the camera over the chessboard, another one grabbing it, another one putting it on a Steadicam — all this stuff.
But yes, the monitor was the only way I could track how all those things were working, especially the beats where I knew I needed potential stitches. It had to be very consistent, and the only way it could work was if our camera operator was a genius. He had to memorize the script for each scene because he had to move the camera consistently at all the same moments and all the same places on the set. And I had to change his blocking sometimes. So he would do it five times, and then I’d say, “Now this time you have to wait for her to say one more line, and then you have to swing the camera so I can use that as a cut point.” And he would remember it and do it exactly as I told him to every single time.
CineMontage: It seems the most collaborative of experiences.
Eric Kissack: My favorite part of all of this — of film, of TV — is the collaboration. The fact that you’re working with people who are at the top of their game, all coming together to make something great. Normally, there’s this weird break on film and TV where editorial is so removed from the set. Maybe you’ll visit, but it feels like, What am I doing here? I don’t really have a job on set. You collaborate with sound and music and all that kind of stuff, but this was just so great — to get to know everyone on set and really understand what they were doing, and maybe inform them a little bit on what we do and how it all interacts. Then getting it into post with our composer and visual effects artist elevated it all. I got a wonderful kick out of the whole process.
