By Rob Feld
Brian Kates, ACE, is one of New York’s quintessential indie film editors, with a career shaped by both his deep love of post-production and his immersion in the city’s vibrant queer cinema movement. Both of his Sundance films from earlier this year, Amy Berg’s “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley” and Bill Condon’s “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” are music-based films, allowing Kates to flex a favorite muscle.
“It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley” is a documentary that explores the life and career of the late musician Jeff Buckley. The film features interviews with Buckley’s mother and two of his former girlfriends, providing personal insights into his life. It also includes animation inspired by Buckley’s own sketches, aiming to convey his perspective and inner world. The documentary delves into Buckley’s relationships, his artistic ambitions, and the lasting impact of his music.
Condon’s “Kiss of the Spider Woman” is based on the stage musical by Terrence McNally, John Kander, and Fred Ebb, which in turn is adapted from Manuel Puig’s 1976 novel. The narrative centers on Molina (Tonatiuh), a homosexual window dresser imprisoned in Argentina, who escapes the harsh realities of incarceration by imagining a glamorous actress, Aurora (Jennifer Lopez), in various cinematic scenarios. His cellmate, Valentín (Diego Luna), is a political prisoner with whom Molina forms an unexpected bond. Its musical numbers blend fantasy sequences with the stark realities of life in prison.
CineMontage sat down for a talk with Kates; excerpts follow:
CineMontage: This was a process of working with the massive amount of material for “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley”?
Brian Kates: This is an impressionistic music bio—stylized and trying to get inside Jeff Buckley’s head using his journals and beautiful animation based on his own sketches. I wanted to do it because I love cutting music. I love music performances in movies, I love music editing, I love score. And even though I didn’t know Buckley’s work well, I thought of him as a contemporary—a fellow East Village young person. I never knew him, but he felt like a neighborhood artist. The East Village in the ‘90s was full of great artists, and once I knew that part of the film would be set there, I got really excited about it. Sara Gunnarsdóttir, who did the animation, is a wonderful filmmaker. The way the animation worked was the same way the editing and music editing worked—building sequences, discovering what the film needed in the moment. She would create a draft, we’d put it in, modify the cut, and then she’d revise the animation. It was a back-and-forth process, like scoring a movie—sketch, revise, repeat. The film is indebted to her artistry and to Amy’s vision in using her. And it’s inspired by Jeff’s own visual art. So, part of it wasn’t just about telling the story visually but telling it through Jeff’s point of view.
CineMontage: Tell me about getting into his skin. What rooted you in the narrative?
Kates: I inherited a first cut from Andrew Siwoff and Conor O’Neill, so I knew the contours of the story. I didn’t realize how much archival footage we’d be able to use, but I worked with very knowledgeable producers and assistants who knew the archive deeply. It was about tapping into the essence of this sensitive, goofy guy who was possibly a genius—and who left the world heartbroken. It was a very emotional experience.
CineMontage: What was the biggest challenge—the thing you banged your head against?
Kates: The challenge wasn’t unlike other biographical documentaries—you’re always balancing being comprehensive with being poetic. And those two things can be at odds. How much do you need to know about Jeff’s bandmates? His friends? His romantic relationships? The great thing about working with a director who knows what they want is that they do a lot of that work in focusing the story. What made our Jeff Buckley movie special was that Amy had access to his mother and his two girlfriends, Rebecca and Joan. It became clear that this was the heart of the film—his vulnerability as seen through the people who loved him, and his struggles in becoming a better partner, son, and person in intimate relationships. That theme runs through his music as well, so it made sense. He also had intense relationships with his bandmates, and some of those themes resonate there too, but we didn’t want this to be a Wikipedia entry on Jeff Buckley. The key to avoiding that, for me, was listening to the music. It was a delicious challenge.
CineMontage: Tell me about working with the music.
Kates: I tried to think of his life in terms of chapters and asked, what’s the Jeff Buckley song that best illustrates this moment? Sometimes they were in the first cut I got, sometimes they weren’t, or sometimes they were there but weren’t highlighted in a way that made them take flight. I wanted the music to tell me how to cut, to show me what was important. It was all about rhythm—getting excited by the music, telling stories against it, and stripping out the vocals. I did a lot of music editing, though we also had a wonderful music editor, Michael Brake, and our sound mixer, Lew Goldstein, who took it to another level. Even in picture editing, I needed to strip out vocals, create instrumental loops, and turn the music into score, which is one of my favorite things to do. It takes a little chutzpah to take music by a great artist who’s gone—who can’t complain and say, “Why are you looping my bassline, you idiot?” But I had to imagine that Jeff gave me his blessing: “Let my instrumental stems be your tools.” Otherwise, I would have been too scared. Amy wanted me to feel ownership, and that’s why I was able to do it. If she hadn’t empowered me, it wouldn’t have worked. And if she hadn’t been so respectful of his life, legacy, and the people still here who knew him, it wouldn’t have had the intimacy and vulnerability it needed. More than anything, I just didn’t want to fuck it up.
CineMontage: How do you make a non-fan care about his story?
Brian Kates: The themes are durable. It’s a love story, a breakup story. It’s about someone who wants to be better—who knows his flaws when it comes to intimacy, communication, and not being petty. He was also incredibly ambitious. He wanted to be one of the greats. His musical inspirations were Nina Simone, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Leonard Cohen, Edith Piaf, Led Zeppelin—what an odd mix of geniuses. He loved things intensely, studied hard, and went deep into everything surrounding the things he cared about. It started with music but radiated outward. He was a Renaissance person. And what’s fascinating is that, on the surface, he was also kind of a bro—just a shaggy ‘90s dude in a flannel, drinking a beer. But at the same time, he was learning Urdu. He was a seeker, not a dilettante. He wasn’t just interested in being good—he wanted to be great.
CineMontage: You then moved on to “Kiss of the Spider Woman.”
Kates: Stacey Gold took over “It’s Never Over” for me when I started “Kiss of the Spider Woman.” She finished the film and left an indelible imprint on it—she’s very much one of its creators. Bill [Condon] and I had worked on a pilot together 15 years ago. He’s a huge fan of the Broadway musical, and his adaptation is a hybrid of the book of the musical by Terrence McNally and the original 1976 novel by Manuel Puig. A lot of people know the 1985 film, but Bill took the best elements from every adaptation—the novel, the film, and the Kander and Ebb musical—and found a way to make it all sing on screen. When I read it, I thought it was one of the most brilliant adaptations I could imagine. The way he integrated the songs was such a magic trick of screenwriting that it literally made me laugh and cry. I felt like I’d hit the jackpot because I had never edited a proper film musical before. And this isn’t just a film musical—it’s a movie musical about movie musicals, about the history of movie musicals.
CineMontage: What was the work of this project?
Kates: I watched a lot of musicals. We knew our template was movies like “The Pirate,” “Les Girls,” “An American in Paris,” and “Silk Stockings.” I watched the Broadway production at the Lincoln Center Library and the 1990 SUNY Purchase workshop production, which had a very different book and songs. I studied various productions and rehearsals, and I knew the soundtrack by heart. We had a huge Dropbox filled with choreography and dance rehearsal videos, sketches, costumes—more pre-production than I had ever received. It was a bigger, more complicated film with a longer rehearsal period. Having that material early on was important for inspiration and for learning what choreography would be on screen. I wanted to understand the vision. In a film that pays homage to the golden age of musicals, you cut as little as possible. It’s about single-camera coverage—showing the dancing, then dancing off. You cut when the choreography takes you to another setup. It’s not about shooting multi-cam and cutting between setups just because they exist. Everything is designed. I needed to get a sense of that design to understand the style. Within that, of course, there’s still creativity in editing—you compress things, cut things out—but you want to honor the form. Two numbers in our movie aren’t in the film-within-the-film, so they were shot in a different style. One, “Where You Are,” is Molina’s fantasy. It was shot with three cameras and much more coverage, and I was empowered to be much more cutty—more like an ‘80s music video, since the film takes place in the ‘80s, not the 1950s. The other number, “Only in the Movies,” is also in Molina’s mind. It’s a projection, a fantasy. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t coverage, but it was structured differently—a master from one side, a master from the other, a special shot that transitions between them. And then there’s dialogue. Sometimes it’s intercut with the numbers in specific places, but sometimes that changes too. It’s all about rhythm and storytelling.
CineMontage: It’s another music film. How did you approach working with it?
Kates: We had two music editors, a composer, and I think five orchestrators. Just being included in that part of the process was a delight. I pray I get to do it again—to sit in meetings, listen to orchestration sketches of songs I know so well, and figure out how to transition between song and score, back to song, back to score. It’s all about the connective tissue. Sam Davis, our composer, knows the score inside and out—he’s a John Kander protégé. Every piece of connective tissue he wrote was Kander material, either from a song that was cut from the film or one that didn’t even make it to the Broadway show but was in the SUNY Purchase production. In fact, we have two songs in the movie that never made it to Broadway—Bill resurrected them. For Kander and Ebb nerds, it’s a treasure trove of B-sides and hidden gems. Sitting in meetings and discussing which piece of Kander’s music could fit into a certain spot—making sure it was thematically relevant—that was such a rewarding part of the process.
CineMontage: What’s a piece of this film of which you’re particularly proud?
Kates: I’m going to tell you something really stupid, but I want it on the record in case people think it was a mistake. When I got the footage for the final scene of the film-within-the-film, it ended with a fade-out. And I knew there was no way I could fade out that image without showing a tape splice and a color degradation before the fade—because that’s how classic Hollywood films looked. You had to cut from negative to negative to show an optical fade. If you watch any of those movies, it looks like a jump cut right before the fade, the color shifts, it usually turns green, gets a little soft, and then fades out. So, I did that, unprovoked, and Bill loved it. I felt so validated because if you don’t know what it is, you might think it’s a mistake—a jump in the projector. This whole project was an environment of validation, where everyone was excited by the mission and brought their own expertise to it. Mine was thinking about how those movies were edited and knowing that a fade-out had to have a jump. It’s kind of an inside joke, but it also shows reverence for the era. We weren’t trying to imitate that style or make it campy—we wanted it to be just as pleasurable, silly, and beautiful as those films were. That came down to everything: Jennifer Lopez’s acting, her makeup, her hair, her lighting, the color correction, how much grain we used. But it all started from the top—it’s Bill’s knowledge, and all of us getting on board with it.
