People give a lot of (dis)credit to the director of the live-action Transformers movies, Michael Bay, or to the producers like Lorenzo di Bonaventura, or the writers such as Ehren Kruger or Akiva Goldman's writers room - but what about the editors of the movie itself?
Art of the Cut had a chance to talk to some of the six editors working on Transformers: The Last Knight, and discussed the intricacies of working in a team on the same footage, dealing with Bay's own selections and personal style, and their previous experiences feeding into this movie. The full, lengthy piece (which is actually three) can be read
here - we've only highlighted some passages below!
Art of the Cut takes a step into the epic – not just with the film we’re discussing – but because to cover the editing of Michael Bay’s Transformers: The Last Knight, we spoke to four editors in three separate interviews. The exciting thing for readers of Art of the Cut is that when you get six top editors on a single picture, they all learn from each other in ways that are impossible without working on the same footage and with the same director. Those important lessons are at the core of this Art of the Cut.
The six editors listed as “editors” are Roger Barton (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales), Adam Gerstel (Star Trek Into Darkness, Previs editor), Debra Neil-Fisher (The Hangover), John Refoua (Olympus Has Fallen) , Mark Sanger (Gravity), and Calvin Wimmer (13 Hours). We had the opportunity to speak to all of them except Barton and Wimmer.
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REFOUA: None of us, except Roger, had worked on a movie with so many other editors before, so it took a while for us to figure out how we were going to do this and what does Michael (director, Michael Bay) want? Eventually, you settle into a rhythm and you really have to put your ego on hold because a scene that you work on — Michael, likes to move scenes around from editor to editor. He just wants editors to try different things and eventually he’ll say, “I like that one from this guy…This part from that guy.” So that took a little getting used to.
GERSTEL: What was great is after you put a scene together, you get to see somebody else cut the same scene and it really brings to light a different way that you hadn’t thought about. And so the next time you go to cut a scene in the film that may be similar you’re already now thinking of two different way of doing it. It really expanded your view because you’ve seen so many versions of the scenes while also having an intimate knowledge of what footage was there to put them together. You knew what challenges you had when cutting them and you see how somebody else dealt with those same challenges. It’s quite a learning experience.
NEIL-FISHER: It was fun actually. It was great to see How each of us approached the material differently. Learning from each other was really awesome. Especially for me. I don’t work as often on action pictures so it was really fun to see everybody’s versions on those scenes. I was fascinated by how many versions you can do of an action scene. How exciting and interesting each one was. And then moving on from here I take that with me and use it on the next thing I’m working on.
GERSTEL: Exactly. And this was a complicated story. There’s a lot in there. It has a lot of depth, a lot of layers. And so there was constant conversation about how best to structure it. Michael loved to intercut and he also is not tied to the script so everything is up for grabs and we were always trying new ideas. We would sit, all of us in the room and just talk about what was the best way to put a scene together or put a sequence together. So it wasn’t just always one person taking a stab and then another person taking a stab. There were many times when we were all just discussing it together. Almost like a writers room for editors.
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SANGER: I like to do it organically depending upon the style of the director. All directors shoot differently so I actively avoid setting myself a particular way of working. That’s part of the fun of going into a new project with a new director: the way they shoot determines how I will assemble. But there is one key area that I won’t change and that’s how I get my assistants to prep the material only up to a certain level. Then beyond that, I will prep it myself because that’s how I learn the dailies.
The late and very great Jim Clark always used to mark up his own scripts, rather than use the script supervisor’s version. He would watch the dailies and mark up his own script as he learned them each day. Many of the old school British editors did things that same way. I was only their apprentice at the time but I’m proud to have learned from their wisdom and so what I do is my own version of that.
Some directors will shoot very quick takes while others leave the camera running for fifteen minutes at a time. I will adapt how I break down my dailies depending on how the shoot went.
With Michael Bay, you might get 10 hours of dailies for a single scene, and when that comes in you think, “How on earth am I going to get him an assembly by the end of the day?” I decided that 95 percent of my day would be spent assessing and breaking down the dailies. Then, as I was doing it I was developing a mental structure of how I was going to put that scene together. I work fast and make notes as you go. And then at the very last minute, I cut the scene and got it uploaded to him for wrap. You physically can’t go through 10 hours of material and then spent five hours editing. But you can go through 10 hours of material methodically and understand all the dailies and then put together a version at the end of the day that is solid.
That’s just what I did, the other editors have their own processes. But we all adapted to Michael’s process and combined it with our own and all were based on necessity due to the volume of material that we receive each day.
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REFOUA: Michael shoots everything live. All the explosions are live. All the smoke is live and the human stunts are live. What we have is a bunch of plates with explosions, smoke, and stunts in them. Our main challenge, in action scenes, was trying to figure out: what’s supposed to happen here? We would talk amongst the editors and say, “I think this is supposed to happen here. And I think this shot’s for that. And a lot of times, Michael would say, “That shot isn’t for that spot!” or he’d say, “That’s cool! I can use this. Yeah, this is a good place for this shot.”
NEIL-FISHER: I definitely went through each scene looking from a specific point of view. If I was starting the scene fresh, I would look through the film and pulled selects of what I thought were the pieces that would work for me. I went through the dailies and found pieces that were going to aid my version of that scene.
HULLFISH: John mentioned that Michael will create his own selects reels. Was it weird using somebody else’s selects?
GERSTEL: No not at all. They were just suggestions from him. You didn’t have to take it as final. It was just, “Here’s what Michael pulled as his options.” Often, they were the same thing we would have pulled or a slightly different version. And sometimes we even shared each other’s selects.
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REFOUA: Gradually the movie, as you put it together, it divides itself into sections. So Michael would say, “I want so and so to make a pass on this section. And I want so and so to try and shorten it and I want so and so to work on this thing that they do or I want somebody to check the jokes and make sure that we have the best jokes.” On Transformers, the editors became a team. We didn’t function as much as individuals but really the teamwork takes over. I had never been in that kind of situation to that extent, so that was cool and sometimes Michael would want three different versions of the same scene.
SANGER: He’ll look at scenes individually for a long time and then he might look at scenes assembled with a couple other scenes around them. But then we’ll start looking at things in reels. Instead of looking at those scenes within the reels for three or four weeks or four or five months in advance there’ll come a point where he’s happy with individual scenes then you’ll watch them in reels and when he’s happy with the reels, then you watch them in the movie. And so you kind of go in these much larger steps than many directors who would work on a scene by scene basis and then a reel by reel basis MUCH earlier on in the process. Michael works on a scene by scene basis for much longer and then makes these big leaps where we’re often watching the whole movie maybe on a Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The changes that are going on within those five days are huge because with five editors you can get quite a lot happening in that amount of time. But it’s piece-meal for much longer at the beginning.
HULLFISH: That’s got the potential to just be a political nightmare but I’m glad that it worked out for you guys.
REFOUA: Really you have to put the politics away because you’re making a Michael Bay movie. You’re not making a John Refoua movie.
HULLFISH: That’s the quote of the day right there.
