“A hundred or more hidden things”: That’s how the director Vincente Minnelli described the elusive secrets to any memorable scene in a movie, or even a single shot. Or the single second it takes to move from one shot to another.
How a movie’s footage is cut together falls to the editor. The editor sets a film’s heart rate and the visual rhythm of a scene.
Sometimes we notice editing and delight in its rightness. You can’t not notice the eyeblink leap forward in the literal match cut from “Lawrence of Arabia.” Peter O’Toole blows out the tiny flame he’s holding between his fingers, contemplating his destiny, and a millisecond later after a hard cut (not the more conventional dissolve director David Lean expected) we’re overwhelmed by the impossibly wide, vast and scorching Wadi Rum desert at sunrise. Editor Anne V. Coates, who won an Oscar for that picture, made that happen, crediting the jagged-edge French New Wave movies of the early 1960s as inspiration.
Other editing triumphs are subtle, almost invisible — sleight-of-hand conducted in plain sight. In a 2017 interview with the Los Angeles Times, the Academy Award-nominated co-editor of director Barry Jenkins’ “Moonlight” acknowledged a trick of her filmmaking trade: slipping audio from one take of a particular shot into the mouth of the same actor, photographed from behind, in a different and better take of the same shot. Sometimes, the editor said, “directors don’t even notice.”
That’s a small thing, but the editor who said it, Joi McMillon, has done many, many large things beautifully in her remarkable work with director Jenkins since “Moonlight.”
McMillon served as editor on “If Beale Street Could Talk” and, for Amazon, the marvelous adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad.” For “Moonlight,” co-edited by Nat Sanders, the Florida State University graduate McMillon became the first Black female Oscar nominee in the editing category. She’s one of several FSU film school alums, including Jenkins and producer Mark Ceryak, who are now in their early 40s and now, thanks to the forthcoming “Mufasa: The Lion King,” stewards of a well-known chunk of Disney intellectual property.
McMillon visited Chicago a few weeks ago for the Chicago International Film Festival, conducting an editing master class as well as meeting with DePaul University students. Work on “Mufasa,” she told me, started for her in mid-2021. As of three weeks ago, McMillon and Jenkins were still tinkering with a few things. The film opens Dec. 20. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Q: I want to get into what editors actually do for a living, and how that might change from project to project. But first a little background. You graduated from Florida State University in 2003?
A: Yes, and I was up for an internship with the American Cinema Editors in LA. So I packed up my Mazda Protege with my best friend Megan and her then-boyfriend, now-husband Kevin, and our friend Sandra and we drove out West. Barry (Jenkins) was just a few weeks behind me, along with Mark Ceryak. We all went to film school together, and we all worked on “Beale Street” and “Mufasa” together.
The ACE internship only had two slots for aspiring editors, but they made me an honorary intern, and through that I met editor Maysie Hoy, who I worked with for about six years. Right after the internship, though, through a friend of a friend of mine, I became what’s called a night logger on a reality show called “Outback Jack” for TBS. That was my first venture into post-production for reality TV. Which I did a lot of.
Q: What does a night logger do?
A: This was in the very early-early-on period of reality television. They’d make VHS tapes from the digital beta tapes.
Q: I’m lost already, but go on.
A: I’d put in a VHS tape, which was roughly 50, 60 minutes, and look for a good line that might help with a story beat in another episode. I’d write it down and tell the editor about it. And if you were any good at finding these things they could use, the editor would start coming to you and ask, “So whaddya find today?” And pretty soon it was, “You wanna help out?” So it was one way of starting to have a hand in telling the story.
It’s an old, old job. I’m totally dating myself. It’s so different now.
Q: What do you appreciate now, having come up using now-obsolete filmmaking technology?
A: In film school, we got to edit on a flatbed (machine) if we wanted to, instead of the digital Avid equipment. With the flatbed, you could cut 16 millimeter film by hand. A lot of people were moaning and groaning about it. But I loved it! I loved it so much I volunteered to clean everybody’s film, get rid of all the grease pencil marks and re-splice it, and make sure there were no hairs on the tape. Actually handling 16mm film and splicing it together — it’s a lost art.
However it’s done, I really appreciate a good edit. When I’m watching a TV show and I see a really good edit I’ll rewind it, just to see how smoooooth that editor used someone walking by the camera to cut to a different shot. To the naked eye it doesn’t really clock as an edit. It’s seamless. My family notices things like that now. They’re, like, “Thanks a lot. You’ve ruined certain shows for us because you don’t think they’re cut very well.”
Q: Let’s talk about “Moonlight.” As co-editor you were mainly responsible for the third of three parts, is that right?
A: I mostly did the third section, and the conversation Little (Alex R. Hibbert) has with Juan (Mahershala Ali) in the first section. One thing that Barry Jenkins does as a director that’s so encouraging is he’ll watch something I’m working on and he’ll say: “Keep doing what you’re doing. It’s working. It’s good.” Other times, he’ll sit with you and work on something together, when he wants to comb through the footage and watch the different takes together. When you first start editing, it’s a lot of discovery and finding the path. Sometimes he’ll say, “Huh. That’s not how I saw the scene starting. But I like it. I think from there, we can go here.”
Q: Editing “Mufasa,” what sort of footage are you looking at when you start editing?
A: I have to say, I didn’t know the journey was going to be this long. Or this intense. Here’s how it went: We started out with storyboards, the “animatic.” Barry worked with Mark Friedberg, our production designer, to help create the look of the actual scenes in the movie. Then Barry worked with the head of the storyboard department to develop what’s actually taking place in a scene.
Then Mark Friedberg draws the concept art, and the visual effects people take that and create these landscapes. Then the animators watch the footage of the storyboards, and based on the storyboards, they’ll start to animate in the virtual space how the characters move about. Once the sets are built — in virtual reality, that is — the characters are placed and animated, and (cinematographer) James goes “into” the scene virtually with a camera. … What he’s seeing through his VR goggles is then projected onto a TV, and then Barry watches him do a take, and he’ll say, “OK, cool, this next take let’s stay on Mufasa for the entire scene.” Once they shoot all of that, it goes upstairs to me.
Q: And this was new territory for you, and for the FSU crowd.
A: Definitely. Barry might say, “OK, the character of Kiara is going to run up and then say her line, “Rafiki!” So they’d animate that, and the show it to Barry and he might say, “She’s coming in too fast, let’s have her slow down a little before she gets to Rafiki.” That would take two weeks to do the animation update. So the process took a long time. But then came “quad-cap.” It’s similar to motion capture suits. The animators would put on this new invention, a quad-cap suit, so that even though they were walking on two legs, in the VR world their movement would translate to a lion walking on four legs. That process sped things up, so that within a take, Barry could direct the animators to move the way he envisioned them.
Q: Do you like this kind of filmmaking?
A: I think the way we went about it, we ended up inspiring the evolution of the technology, in a more filmmaker-friendly direction. So, yes.
Q: Back to more traditional projects. This wouldn’t have come up with any of the Barry Jenkins projects, or with Janicza Bravo’s wild “Zola,” which I loved, too. But can the right editor make a problematic performance look better than it is? Like, deceptively good?
A: Here’s one example that won’t get me into trouble (laughs). In “The Underground Railroad,” we had one scene with some day players (extras), and I spent about four weeks going back to it, going back to it. It didn’t come together super easy, but it was one part in this one episode that had to feel authentic. If one part doesn’t, it can derail everything else. Eventually we got there. I looked at it from every way I could. Should I start the shot earlier? Should I come in later? Bit by bit, the scene reveals itself to you.
Another editor once told me: “The kind of work you do is really hard.” It’s easier, he thought, to cut fast. To cut an action scene. You just cut on an explosion, or a car crash. But when two people are having a conversation, you’re trying to hide the edit. In the diner scene in “Moonlight” Barry was inspired by a memory he had of hanging out with an old friend for half a day. He told me he wanted the scene in the movie (between Trevante Rhodes and André Holland) to feel that way, like when you meet up again with someone. At first it’s, “Hey! How are you?” but you’re a little guarded. Maybe you haven’t seen each other in a while. And then time goes by, you get more comfortable, you start to reveal a little more of yourself.
That was the inspiration for the editing rhythm of the diner scene, both in the language we hear the characters use and in the camera language, the visual language.
Everything I do is influenced by performance, and by what the camera’s doing. Those things influence the next edit I make. There’s a fluidity, I hope, to what I do. Everything moving in unison. Sound, score, camera move, where I cut, what the characters are doing. I’m paying attention to all of that.
“Mufasa: The Lion King” opens Dec. 20.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
