By Peter Tonguette
For his new feature drama “Here,” director Robert Zemeckis settled on the right angle from which to view many millennia of action.
Based on a graphic novel by Richard McGuire, “Here” compresses millions of years into a series of short scenes that unfold during an astonishing range of epochs, including the time of dinosaurs, the run-up to the Revolutionary War, and the dawn of human flight. Yet Zemeckis limits his view of each of these eras to a solitary pl0t of land in North America, including the main storyline, set from the 1940s through the present day.
In the screenplay by Zemeckis and Eric Roth, Baby Boomer Richard Young (Tom Hanks) meets, courts, marries, and forms a family with Margaret (Robin Wright). Their joys, challenges, and frustrations are played out in the modest two-story home that has sprung up on that bit of land where so many other people once lived, loved, and died. AI tools were deployed to de-age several actors, including co-stars Hanks and Wright. The film was released on Nov. 1 by Sony Pictures Releasing.
On top of all this, in a remarkably disciplined aesthetic experiment, Zemeckis honored the visual concept of the graphic novel by filming each story strand from a matching camera angle: From scene to scene, the angle is not altered, and there is no coverage within scenes. This daring approach presented unique challenges and opportunities for picture editor Jesse Goldsmith.
“Editing the movie ‘Here’ was extremely challenging, both creatively and technically,” Zemeckis said in a statement to CineMontage. “Jesse’s profound knowledge of the art of montage was invaluable.”
Because of the nature of the filming style, Goldsmith—who began as an assistant editor on several Zemeckis films before co-editing, with Mick Audsley, the director’s 2022 remake of “Pinocchio”—could not make cuts within scenes, but the possibilities of structuring the scenes and cutting between scenes were seemingly limitless.
CineMontage recently spoke with Goldsmith about cutting a film like no other.
CineMontage: As an assistant editor or picture editor, this is your fourth film with Robert Zemeckis. Why have the two of you clicked?
Jesse Goldsmith: Bob likes to do as much as he can in the cutting room. If you’re cutting for Bob, you’re not just doing the traditional edit. You are a music editor sometimes, and you contribute to the pre-vis process, and you help with the effects. He loves to do as much as he can in Avid, of course with major assists from the other departments. I have an adaptable skill set, so I am able to do a lot of the temp effects work that he really likes.
CineMontage: So he likes to see an approximation of how the film will look and sound?
Goldsmith: Exactly. For instance, in our big opening passage through time in “Here”—we called it the grand montage—he would be in the cutting room describing the takes he wanted and where he wanted each element to come in. We would figure out the rhythm of all these big moves, and then we would go and work with the pre-vis team: “OK, I need you to give me a big comet on a blue screen that we can place in relation to the dinosaurs coming in.”
CineMontage: How was editing “Here” different than editing a normal movie?
Goldsmith: I’m still figuring it out. There was no roadmap for how to do it. When the movie was originally described to me before I read the script, it sounded like it was almost going to be in a single shot. Once I read the script and heard how Bob wanted to shoot it, I quickly realized how incredibly challenging it was going to be to edit.
There were two parts to what made it complicated. Once you’re in a scene, you’re kind of there and you can’t do much. Then getting from one scene to another was a massive challenge. It took us a ton of experimenting. We tried many different things to figure out how to get in and out of scenes. Bob shot a rehearsal of the movie from a single angle, and Bob and I took it into the cutting room and just played with it. It served the purpose of pre-vis, but it was live-action.
CineMontage: The film uses “panels” to shift from one scene to the next. In other words, a “panel” showing action from the next scene will emerge in the larger frame, and the film then makes the transition to that next scene. How did you arrive at this approach rather than hard cuts between scenes or other ways of going from one scene to the next?
Goldsmith: Conceptually, there was always an idea that in some way one time period would bleed into the next, but the panels idea came pretty late. We started out doing stuff that was much more elaborate and complicated. We would see time passing outside the window or the walls of the house would disappear. It was all very cool, but then when we sat back and watched the whole movie like that, it kind of slowed everything down.
CineMontage: Would you make an entire pass at the movie using alternate transition devices?
Goldsmith: Oh, yes. We probably had a whole version of the movie with completely different transitions. When we realized we were slowing things down the way we were doing it, somebody suggested: “Well, maybe we go back to what worked in the graphic novel.” Bob thought about it and said, “Let’s try it.” We tried it on three or four transitions at the beginning of the movie, and then we showed that to our team. Everybody agreed that that was working and it wasn’t slowing us down.
CineMontage: Was pacing one of the biggest challenges in cutting “Here”?
Goldsmith: The movie was a real brain-teaser. We did a lot of playing around with where scenes landed. Lots of editors have their big wall of scene cards, so that you can see the movie laid out. We went through a phase during the director’s cut where every day we were rearranging rearranging, rearranging. We found early on that we needed to keep each families’ story moving chronologically. At first, the movie was even a bit more nonlinear than it is now. You might find out the end of someone’s story before you saw the beginning of it, and we figured out that that wasn’t working. There is too much going on in the movie to not only be bouncing back and forth through time, but then bouncing back and forth through time in a single family’s story.
We were doing that in conjunction with trying to figure out how to make the transitions work. Luckily, we figured out the transitions at the same time we were starting to feel pretty good about the scene order. And at a certain point, it just clicked, and everybody was pretty happy.
CineMontage: Since each scene is presented from one camera angle, and there was nothing you could cut to, what tools were at your disposal to manipulate an individual scene?
Goldsmith: There is stuff you can do with sound and music, but outside of that, there aren’t a ton of options. There were two things. First, one advantage of having a still camera is you can very easily do things like split. Every once in a while, we were able to sneak in some timing changes. The other thing that really saved us when we wanted to keep things rolling was the panels idea. If you could find the right place, you could start playing another scene and divert the audience’s attention to something else. The panels, in a way, could sort of work like coverage.
CineMontage: How was the digital de-aging of the actors done?
Goldsmith: That was one of the coolest things I’ve ever gotten to work with in the cutting room. Each day, I would get the actual raw dailies as shot, and then I would also get, if the scene required it, those dailies with a preliminary de-aged pass. And it always worked. It helped remind us of where these characters are in their lives. It was preliminary, but it was very, very good. It was some of the best temp visual effects I’ve ever had to work with.
The movie involved so much unconventional thinking about what a movie can be. Many members of the editorial and VFX teams made a huge impact in cracking the story and transition design, so I just want to acknowledge their contributions. There is no way this movie could have been made without them. By the end of post, it really felt like editorial and VFX were the same department.
CineMontage: Did Zemeckis shoot a lot of takes on this movie?
Goldsmith: It depended on the complexity of the scenes. There were a couple of scenes that had maybe 25 or 30 takes, something like that. Those were the scenes that had a lot of people in the, like the Thanksgiving table scenes where you had a lot of different actors doing a lot of different things for a long time. Of course, you watch everything, but you kind of know that if you have 25 takes, probably at least the first 15 Bob wasn’t happy with. You can narrow it down pretty fast.
CineMontage: What is Zemeckis like to work with in the cutting room?
Goldsmith: Bob loves the cutting room. He’ll spend as much time as he can with me while he’s shooting. During the first week or two, while they were getting their sea legs on set, I was mostly working on my own, putting together an editor’s cut and playing around with transition ideas. Pretty quickly, he started to spend an hour with me and we’d work remotely maybe three days out of a five-day week. [Note: The film was shot at Pinewood Studios in England while Goldsmith was cutting in Los Angeles.]
CineMontage: What was the approach to music in the movie?
Goldsmith: From very early on, we knew we wanted period-appropriate needle drops throughout the whole movie, not only to be fun but to help sell where you are in time. Bob loves music. Music is a huge part of every movie he’s made. He came into the cutting room with a good sense of what he wanted where—maybe not exactly what song, but he knew the tone, he knew what he was going to want that music to do.
CineMontage: The Everly Brothers’ “Let It Be Me” is Richard and Margaret’s song—was that something in the script, or something you arrived at after trial and error?
Goldsmith: We tried a few different tracks that could be used as Richard and Margaret’s song, some of which either weren’t the right tone or were a bit too recognizable to the point of dominating the scenes. We found that “Let It Be Me” worked on a few different levels. First, it’s romantic and a bit melancholy, which captured the mood of Richard and Margaret’s relationship. The song is also soft enough that we could let it sit in the background and set the mood without becoming distracting, then we were able to dial it up at the right moments when we really wanted it to hit.
Peter Tonguette is a freelance writer.
