Doug Liman Blog: Editing Fair Game — Freedom in a Locked Room » 30ninjas

Doug Liman Blog: Editing Fair Game — Freedom in a Locked Room

Share on Facebook posted 10-01-09 by Doug Liman

I’ve been working on Fair Game, my Naomi Watts spy thriller, with the editors, Saar Klein and Chris Tellefsen, and I’ll be showing it to my producers on Monday. This is sort of my favorite part of the process with two editors — it’s just a purely creative environment where we look at sections of the movie and just go, “What if…?” And with two phenomenal A-list editors, it’s like being on a championship basketball team or something. It’s all talent, and all creativity. When you’re shooting a movie you’re faced with things like What’s the weather gonna be like? Is the actor gonna be in a good mood? Is some location going to be OK? All things that are out of your control. The two most creative parts of the filmmaking process are writing and editing. When you’re editing, you’re basically locked in a room. What’s going on outside has no impact; it’s just you, your mind, and your ideas. You can try anything, and there’s no one saying, “No, we can’t afford that.” It all costs the same! At the very beginning, when you’re typing the words on the page, anything goes. There’s that great Ben Hur story: “The chariot race begins.” That’s the extent of the words in the script! Those words don’t cost anything. To implement that at the production stage, that’s a whole ‘nother story. That creative freedom from cost concerns doesn’t happen again until you’re editing.

On Fair Game, up until this point, we’ve edited the film to exactly match the script. And now we’re trying to go from good to great. All you can do is try; you never know if you’re going to get there, but I believe if you try hard enough you will eventually get there. The key lesson that I learned from my first editor, Steve Mirrione, was that you have to edit what you shot, not what you intended to shoot. So the process of editing is almost like a therapy session. You have to get away from what you intended, deal with what you actually have, then bring that material into focus. If you edit what you shot, and not what you intended to shoot, theoretically you’ll end up with a perfect movie, or a movie that accomplishes what it set out to accomplish. You’ve adjusted your goal to what you actually did accomplish. It’s sort of like throwing a dart against a wall and wherever it lands, that’s where you paint the bull’s-eye. But first you have to get past, “Well, I wanted to hit that dart board over there, but I missed,” and instead move the bull’s-eye to where you did hit.

A good example of this is, there’s a moment in the film where we see Baghdad under siege, and I had a shot of Baghdad right before the U.S. started bombing it. It’s very bucolic, and people are playing soccer, and then it dissolves to a scene of Baghdad under siege. Over the course of working with Saar and Chris in the last few weeks, I’ve come to see that that shot has to do with my politics, and has nothing to do with our story. That’s me, as a filmmaker, saying, “Isn’t it horrible what we did to these people,” which is completely off-topic to the story of Fair Game. That shot’s been in the cut for the last two months, and I realized that the moment could be more powerful if I focus on what’s really important for our story, not making a statement about war. This is sort of esoteric stuff that maybe, at the end of the day, your average audience member watching the movie might not even notice. But as a filmmaker, these are the things you obsess about.

On a related note, we’re rereleasing Swingers, like a commemorative DVD version with outtakes and stuff, so I went and looked at what I remember to be the horrible first cut of Swingers. I went through agony with that first cut to turn it into something I was proud of. But this time, 13 or 14 years later, when I looked at the first cut I was like, “I can’t even tell the difference.” Right now, I don’t know what I was agonizing about; that “horrible” first cut is just not that different from the version that was released. But at the time, when I was in the midst of cutting it, I was literally crying over the first cut, and I remember being so miserable. So I do recognize that it’s possible this shot of Baghdad in Fair Game might not be noticeable in 20 years if I left it in, but to me right now, the versions with and without it are like night and day. And I think that that’s a good thing. I hope I’m never making a movie where I’m complacent and … that would be a time to retire. If these shots stop bothering me, if it stops making me cry, then it’s time to start moving on to something else.