When film directors demand a “final edit”, it’s because of an idiotic studio executive’s idea. You’ve heard the stories. A filmmaker works tirelessly on his film, but then someone with more authority and usually less artistic integrity comes along and demands the filmmaker cut the film. “Shorten it for more screening.” “Control it for better ratings.” “Delete that scene so we don’t get in trouble.” How often this actually happens, no one knows, but it’s certainly a story that people in the film business hear and tell.
For his new film, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out MysteryWriter and director Rian Johnson decided to use that personality to his advantage. This is how he described his “ass studio cut” of the film at a recent screening of the film hosted by Collider.
Johnson said, “On this movie, I got very close to the end of the process, and I did something I had never done before so I started doing that on every movie because it was really useful.” “We were out for a week [sound] Mixture. So we should have basically locked it. And I was very insecure about the running time of the film, as it is the longest of the three. I thought, ‘Am I working hard enough on the film? is anything valuable [I] Hold on?”
“And so my editor Bob [Ducsay] And I went into editing over the weekend, just the two of us, and we made a copy of the movie in Avid, so it was an exercise in what we were doing,” he continued. “It wasn’t going to be the real movie. And, basically, we did the Asshole Studio Cut. And I enjoyed it a lot. I take on the persona of, like, an asshole studio executive. I said, ‘Yeah, why are we still in church?’ Stay away from this shit! Nobody wants to see him!’ And basically anything that could actually come up, we cut it out. And we, basically, cut about 30 minutes out of the movie that you guys saw.
“And it was, in a way, really cathartic,” Johnson said. “It’s a kind of anger chamber. Because… at the end of the editing process, you hate your own movies so much [that] It feels good to go there with a knife and just cut it into pieces. But at the same time, it was very helpful because, to some extent, there were some things that we found that were really like, ‘Oh, some version of this could be a really good cut.’ However, more than that, it showed me why the stuff that was there had to be there. To sit and watch it without all these things and realize, ‘Oh, if you don’t have it, in the end, you don’t feel the emotional impact of it.’ It was so incredibly helpful for me to be able to kind of take a breath and put most of it back in and say, ‘Okay, now we can mix.'”
And, trust us, it worked. wake up dead man is fantastic. In our opinion, the best of the three films. But Johnson has made several big revelations in the editing. In the same quiz, he was asked about scenes that were particularly difficult for him, and he immediately thought of one of them Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
“When we made The Last Jedi“The opening sequence was like a big bombshell where things go really bad,” he said. “That was something that was clearly written, and then I storyboarded the whole thing, and I worked with the previz, we put it together. And then it was just kind of fat. This didn’t work at all. And so that’s something that we’ve recreated and integrated in editing… Any of you who are filmmakers know, in editing, that thing where you just literally say, ‘Wait a minute! Can we take this thing and stick it here?’ It was that kind of thing. And then when it clicked together and it felt like a Lego set that was designed that way, it was just like [deep sigh]It’s a moment of sigh of relief when you execute the sequence, So, I don’t know if it’s the hardest [sequence I’ve ever done]But this comes to mind.
The Last Jedi Currently streaming on Disney+. wake up dead man Will be out in select theaters on November 26th and on Netflix on December 12th.
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