By Tony Maglio
How much can an editor really change a scene? A whole lot, Gary Levy says while speaking to his crucial work on that wild cliffhanger at the end of “The Diplomat” Season 2. If you somehow didn’t already appreciate the pacing of the crucial scene, well, hop on a Zoom with Levy and then rewatch the big reveal unfold. I did, and it was even better the second time around with inside info on Levy’s first-class editing.
If Levy doesn’t answer your Zoom call, just take his boss’s word for it.
“The end of the episode all rests on intercutting between a Hal (Rufus Sewell) scene and a Kate (Keri Russell) scene,” series creator, writer, and executive producer Debora Cahn told CineMontage, “and Gary did amazing work building these two relatively quiet scenes in two different places into the climax of the season.”
In the scene, the U.S. Ambassador to the UK, Kate Wyler (Russell) feuds with VP Grace Penn (Allison Janney), whom Wyler has been tapped to replace mid-term. There’s just one problem with the plan: unbeknownst to Wyler, Hal Wyler (Sewell), Kate’s husband and a former U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, just effectively killed the ailing POTUS (Michael McKean) with a bombshell reveal. A quick check of the U.S. Constitution tells us that Penn just got promoted to president — the literal opposite of stepping down.
“The Diplomat” is not Levy’s first rodeo. He’s been editing TV shows and feature films since 1999, winning an ACE Eddie award in 2013 for his work on the Showtime comedy-drama “Nurse Jackie.” Levy’s television work also spans three seasons of USA Network’s “Royal Pains” as well as NBC’s “The Office,” Fox’s “Running Wilde,” and The CW’s “Life Is Wild.”
For the big screen, Levy’s work includes “Face” for director Bertha Bay-Sa Pan, which screened in competition at the Sundance Film festival, “Just a Kiss” for Fisher Stevens, “Maze,” directed by Rob Morrow, and “Maryam” for director Ramin Serry. He was also an editor on the Farrelly brothers’ “Outside Providence.”
Levy is also not the only editor on the hit Netflix political-thriller series. He and Agnès Challe-Grandits alternate episodes, and Levy is insistent on sharing that information and credit when discussing a season of “The Diplomat” in totality. Together, though separately, Levy and Challe-Grandits help shape the show’s narrative with Cahn, which is exactly where we pick up our conversation…
CineMontage: Can you talk a bit about your collaboration with showrunner Debora Cahn?
Gary Levy: Debora’s writing is incredibly brilliant and she loves to experiment in postproduction. She’ll rip apart her own work more than anyone else will. She is laser-focused on the rhythm of the dialogue and we work hard at achieving that. The editors have learned a sense of her rhythm, but she always surprises us.
Everything we do in the editing room is about grounding the material. Debora may write something that is deliberately over the top, and we have to underplay it. We never want it to seem like we’re trying too hard. We take everything we get and we rein it in.
Often, we’ll put music over a scene and she’ll say, “No, just play it dry.” Everything has to start by working as natural as possible for Deb. And then once we get that, we’ll ease in some more cinematic elements. We’ll sneak in some music or heighten the scene in some other way. She’s very aware of anytime it feels like the filmmakers think they’re being funny or important and she doesn’t want that. She wants it to play out naturally and let the audience decide for themselves.
CineMontage: What scene in the Season 2 finale was your personal favorite?
Levy: The scene that I’m most proud of in the finale is Allison and Keri in the Map Room. It was an incredibly hard scene to edit. Usually when scenes are that hard to edit, you end up saying to yourself, “Ok, we got through that — it’s fine.” But I think this ended up being a great scene.
What was so hard about it was combining Allison’s powerful performance with the technical aspect of her actions. Allison was asked to do so much. She’s got a long monologue and she’s got a blank map that she has to mark up very precisely at the same time that she’s giving that monologue. She did an amazing job, but it was really hard to cull the pieces that led to the right performance while simultaneously making sense of what was being marked on the map. In the end the scene works great, which is because of Allison’s brilliance and professionalism.
CineMontage: It’s kind of counterintuitive that scenes with one long monologue would be harder to edit than one with more cuts. So why is
that the case?
Levy: Because you’re dealing with subtle performance changes. You’re shaping a scene’s arc from beginning to end over time. In the case of the Map Room, lots of technical issues creep up that seem to limit your choices, and you have to fight a little bit with the material to get it to where you need it to be. I always think that a long character scene is much harder than an action sequence. Many action sequences tend to lay themselves out for you. The trick is to carve out the character moments that make you care while keeping the action going at a fast pace.
CineMontage: Is it different editing a finale with a giant cliffhanger versus a midseason episode?
Levy: I don’t think so, because most of the episodes are structured with their own cliffhanger. You’re building each episode to a moment at the end. The one at the end of the finale happens to be bigger than others, but it’s the same process.
CineMontage: What choices did you make in the edit bay for that final scene?
Levy: The toughest calls in that scene were about when to ratchet up intensities. We had a lot of different levels of performance from each of the three main characters. Hal (Rufus Sewell) was going to the SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) room to call the President and then revealing on the phone to Kate what he had done. [We had to decide] how frantic he was, how calm she was. On the lawn between [Kate and VP Penn], the intensity of their fight — we had a lot of ability to shape that. We had a lot of control in the editing room of how to arc it up so that everything rose in intensity at exactly the right time, such as when to reveal the Secret Service running out and Hal’s lines about the President dying. We did a lot of work to create a slow build of tension so that people were not too frantic too soon.
CineMontage: Who is the easiest and the hardest to edit among Keri, Allison, and Rufus Sewell?
Levy: Keri is the easiest of the three to cut because she’s very consistent and always spot-on the character. Allison gives you more variety. It’s not technically hard [to edit Janney], but her performance changes with each take and you’ve got to breathe with her and track where the performance is going.
Rufus is an incredibly talented actor, but he’s a bit harder to edit because his whole style is a little looser. He always seems organic in a very loose way…. Sometimes when I’m watching dailies, I think he’s all over the place. I sometimes think, “Oh my God, how am I going to put this together?” And then when I’m cutting it, I realize no, he’s actually doing something very similar [in the rest of the scene] and really has a well thought-out plan.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Tony Maglio was the Executive Editor of News at IndieWire and was previously TV Editor at The Wrap.
