Recorded live in front of a “studio audience” at the National Association of Broadcaster’s convention, editor Bob Ducsay (The Mummy, Looper, Knives Out) discusses his work on director Rian Johnson’s entry into the Skywalker saga, Episode VIII – The Last Jedi.
Bob details the pre-viz process from the ‘Battle on Crait’ scene, as well as how post-viz was a powerful weapon in his editorial arsenal. Bob also walks the audience through the “Snoke’s Throne Room” scene and describes how an editor utilizes “suspense” versus “surprise”. He also describes working with the pre-existing template of the Star Wars universe and modifying it both visually and sonically to create something new and different within the trilogy.
Bob’s work on his new film, Knives Out, has been nominated for a 2020 ACE Eddie Award in the category of Best Edited Feature Film (Comedy).
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TRANSCRIPT>>
Matt Feury
Okay, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage editor Bob Ducsay.
Bob Ducsay
Matt! Nice to be here with you.
Matt Feury
Okay, so that was a little intense. Reflections? Thoughts? What do you remember most about cutting that sequence there?
Bob Ducsay
It looks exhausting to do.
Matt Feury
It felt exhausting.
Bob Ducsay
I know. But interestingly enough, this particular sequence had challenges that you wouldn’t necessarily guess because a lot of the great complexities of the sequence were worked out in prep and in early post production. In this particular case, in early post production. This sequence was pre-visualized, which is sort of a low resolution cartoon that’s made of the sequence. But what happens in a sequence like that is you have this template that you start with, but then you start to make all of the changes in the sequence as the photography comes in, and this sequence was no different in that way. And one of the big challenges of a sequence like this is because it’s so visual effects intensive. In my editorial job, I’m heavily involved with the visual effects, and mapping all that out, and how all of those things interact, and all of the timings, even though some of those things will have been worked out, you know, as a template and a starting point in the pre-vis, there’s an enormous amount more work that has to happen. So this sequence is really a lot about the complexity of the visual effects. But you get all of these extra things when you’re shooting. And so the sequence changes and evolves over time. And another thing about the sequence is, this isn’t the whole Battle of Crait. This isn’t just a clip from it. But even what’s in the final movie was considerably shorter than what was originally envisioned and photograph but, you know, in the total run of the movie, we found that it was a little bit long, so we compressed it. So those are the sort of challenges that a sequence like this has.
Matt Feury
You mentioned the animatic part of it. I found that really interesting, the pre-prep, because I remember a lot of the talk about the original Star Wars back in 1977, George Lucas would cut together shots of aerial dogfights from old World War Two movies, as a point of reference, and this is very similar to that, where you’re literally putting together a sequence that represents what you’re finally going to do, and then laying over the new shots on top of that.
Bob Ducsay
Well, to some degree, yes. And I mean, that’s amazing what they did back in, you know, 1976, when they were making the movie. Because they didn’t have the ability, they didn’t have these tools that we have now. So, it’s a fantastic way of envisioning and it’s something that we kind of refer to as rip-o-matics. And we still do those sort of things because even in this film, there are times when you want something that just represents something that you think you need, and if we can go to another movie that we know has something like that, it could be another Star Wars movie, but it could be something completely different depending on the idea. And we’ll source that and put it that in as a temporary thing that might only represent what the camera is supposed to do. It might represent the rough length of the thing. But it’s something to allow us to envision what we’re looking for and what we need from the visual effects guys, and then ultimately what happens in post production on these movies is that you have a post-viz department. And what that is, is there’s a series of animators that are around that you can literally walk down the hall and you could say, I need a shot where the Falcon dodges this TIE Fighter moving left to right, and does this sort of thing. And they will build that shot. And then that shot becomes a template for for ILM to do the visual effect. So it’s a very iterative process, but it’s an unbelievable tool that allows us to represent things that don’t exist.
Matt Feury
So I find that, as I do these interviews, I forget until the very end to ask about the overall process and people go, “Why didn’t you ask them what they shot and what the editing room setup was like”? So, could you just walk us through a brief synopsis of the editorial process from the handoff from production into post and over to the other viz and sound departments?
Bob Ducsay
Sure. Well, the the movie was photographed principally in the United Kingdom, outside of London, at Pinewood Studios. And at Pinewood, FotoKem, which was one of our vendors, the lab vendor, they built a digital lab there, including scanning. So all the scanning was in house and just for our operation. The movie was photographed I’d say somewhere around 70%, maybe 75% on 35 millimeter scope film. And then the rest of it was a combination of Alexa digital Alexa 65 digital and some small amount of IMAX. So the film would come in, they’d scan everything at 4K, they would build DNX 115 files for us to use in editorial but then they would generate all the other various needs for people, including pulling material for ILM, because we’re turning visual effects over while we’re shooting. And so there was a whole infrastructure put together for this particular film that was specific to this film.
Matt Feury
Early on in your career you did films like The Mummy, The Mummy Returns. And those were groundbreaking in terms of the visual effects stuff done there. There were treatments that you used in those films that became points of reference for years after that, with the particle effects that you did. Here in Star Wars, you already have this sort of, it feels like a template about the visual world there. Did you find that constraining that you had to sort of conform to this way of doing things, or did you take the existing elements and tweak them and take them in different directions?
Bob Ducsay
Well, when you talk about some things in the movie,. I mean, it is true, you know, a Tie Fighter looks like a Tie Fighter, an X wing looks like an X wing. And so there are some things that a really strong template exists for, but then there’s many, many things that are specific to this film that are designed from the ground up. I mean, if you think of the sequence with Snoke, who Andy Serkis plays in motion capture, and he’s a digital character. So that’s all very, very specific to this film, and there’s there’s a lot of things that are like that. And then even in like this sequence, you know, the the skim speeders, which are the vehicles that you saw in this clip, one of the things that Ryan Johnson the director wanted was he had a very, very specific, I’m going to call it “art direction” notion of what that material should look like, and what the colors should be. And this went into prep on the movie. In as much as there are actually physical effects of those explosions. So a lot of the ideas behind that started to be worked out in prep on the movie and physical effects that were going off in the movie. And the actual physical production led to a portion of the design work for the visual effects. However, all of that still continued to evolve in the post production process. So that, just as an example, is an idea that hasn’t been explored in any other movies and maybe some of the technical aspects of executing that were the same as some that have been used before. But for this particular film, there was a tremendous amount of focus on how that sequence, from a visual effects standpoint and even from an editing standpoint, is art directed.
Matt Feury
How about sonically? Because, if you think about the Star Wars world, it’s the sounds more than anything; the lightsabers, the blasters, the sound of an X wing and a Tie Fighter, that are so well established. But I noticed in watching the Crait battle, there’s almost a new set of sounds that were really more organic, the sort of the thudding of the guns, they sounded more like organic guns and things like that. When you’re cutting, do you just go back to Ben Burtt’s original sound effects library because you can and you start incorporating that where and when you please?
Bob Ducsay
Well, I mean, it’s a whole slew of things to be precise, because just anecdotally, the first week we were in and we started cutting the movie, my assistant does a lot of the sound effects tracking for me, and, I’d walk in in the morning and I would hear sounds that I’d heard my entire life and I wanted to know why somebody was putting Star Wars sounds in our movie. And so these are such iconic important sounds that a lot of things, some of them even go back to the original Ben Burtt designs. But then there are other things you know, we had an incredible sound team up at Skywalker. They invented many, many things that hadn’t been used and some things were modified from some of the original Ben Burtt sounds. And it’s interesting that you pointed out the the sort of thumping of the impacts hitting the ground because I love that sound effect. And it’s something that we worked really very hard on. And what that is, is that we never really got what we wanted. And then during the dub, one of the sound effects editors who’s sitting there while we’re mixing the movie, tried some drum hits. And that’s actually what those things are. So they’re the furthest thing from explosions, but they have the right sort of emotional sense that you want from it. And this is something that we’re always striving for while we’re cutting the movie, both with the cutting of the movie, the telling of the story, the sound effects, the visual effects; you’re always trying to evoke a strong emotion from the audience and, in that particular case, something quite unusual was used.
Matt Feury
You mentioned Snoke and we actually do have a scene from the lightsaber battle in the scene with Snoke and Rey and Kylo. Let’s talk a little bit about that scene and the challenges you faced working on that particular scene.
Bob Ducsay
Well, I just I really love this scene, because, you know, the the heart of the movie to me is the “Luke, Rey Kylo” triangle, and the Rey/Kylo part of it really takes some twists and turns in this moment in this section of the film. And one of the things that was difficult about doing this movie is that we never got to screen the film for an audience, because you just don’t do it because there’s too many things that can’t get out there. We cut the movie on the Walt Disney lot in Burbank and they built a small theater for us that seated 14 people. So the most, the biggest number of people that ever saw the movie was 14. So you don’t really get the kind of reaction, you have to really kind of hope that it’s working. And we had great confidence, for us, that this was awesome. And it was gonna work. But we never had any type of verification from an audience until the premiere, which happened just a few weeks before the movie was released. And for the first time, we showed the movie in front of 2500 people and the audience went nuts for the sequence and all those things that you’re excited about. People were really reacting to the way that we had hoped. But you on films of this size, that isn’t normally the case. You normally get to take them out and show them to somebody to understand things that the audience doesn’t get or things that don’t work. So that was a particular challenge and many of the things in the movie, but in this scene in particular,was something that we had really hoped would work, and thankfully it did. But I think one of the most interesting things about the sequence is, from an editorial standpoint, is that you’re working with a motion capture character. And in this particular case, Andy Serkis played this character and gave a tremendous performance of which in the sequence nearly all of what you see is Andy’s performance. There’s a shot where Snoke looks down at the lightsaber and he looks over to Rey and Kylo. That’s a keyframe shot because we didn’t have that specific shot in the movie, or in the in the mocap when the movie was photographed. But besides that, most of it’s, you know, nearly all Andy stuff. But the difficulty is that because you can take things from different takes, and you can, even within a shot within a close up, you can be switching takes, it adds a tremendous amount of overhead for the editor, because there are so many options as to what you can do. And I think that that’s a particular complexity here. And another thing about motion capture is because ultimately, I mean, nearly all those shots are completely digital shots, including the background, what you see in the original photography, the camera doesn’t have to be there. So now you could start talking about, “Well, I want the camera to do this. and I wanted to come around there”. So, the director in conjunction with me, we’re figuring those things out. So it adds an extra layer of complexity when things are not really there that are ultimately there in the final movie.
Matt Feury
To call this a big movie is the understatement of the year. But what kind of pressure does that put on you as an editor, in terms of time and in terms of expectations? Did you approach it the same way you’d approach a film like Looper or a film like The Mummy?
Bob Ducsay
Well, I think the main thing that you have to do, no matter what the film is, you have to try to do the best that you can to tell a great story and to do everything that you can to make the characters work absolutely the best they possibly can and to be true to themselves. So in that way, this movie is like every other film, because those are your goals and those have to be your goals no matter the budget, no matter what the resources. In this particular film, I would say the biggest pressure was simply the expectations of the film. Because people were very excited about the film, as they are on all Star Wars films, and you don’t want to screw it up. So that’s something that you think about every day, and all the people in my cutting room and the director and the producer, everyone loves Star Wars so much that we felt a particular responsibility to do our very best and to make [a great film]. So I would say that’s the biggest pressure because you talk about schedule and all that, I mean, we had a tremendously long schedule on the film, I was on the film 19 months, and we finished three months before the movie came out. So it’s at the long end of things and that’s extremely helpful and also it’s a little bit like driving a Maserati with a lot of gas. Because we could do so many things with it. And we had the resources to accomplish those things. So if you have an idea that might be complicated or might require some shooting, and everyone thinks it’s a good idea, you have the ability to do that. Whereas in a movie like Looper, for example, we had the photography and we did everything that we could with the film, and it turned out great, of course, and some might say that having less resources may be helpful sometimes, and I would agree with that. But you didn’t have the opportunity if you had a great idea that would require shooting something that you could do. And with these sorts of films, you have that ability and I think, you know, as an editor, it’s liberating creatively to be able to have those resources.
Unknown Speaker
The notion of a trilogy in Star Wars is nothing new. We’ve gone through two of them already. In each case with George Lucas at the helm. Here again, we have a trilogy and there’s a handoff between stories, but there are different production teams doing them. Literally, in the case of Last Jedi, you pick up right where Force Awakens leaves off. What sort of handoff from production teams ,what sort of conversations took place to get from A to B, so to speak?
Bob Ducsay
Well, there was a very loose, I mean, Ryan has talked about this a lot. There’s a very loose connection between each of the films. There is one that exists, of course, because Ryan based his script on the episode seven script and JJ Abrams, who’s making the the next film and who made the first in this trilogy, had this movie in existence as he wrote the next movie, and there are some very broad connections or things that are figured out in advance, but the majority of it is exactly as you as you mentioned, it is a baton handoff between between the movies. But if you think about it, some of that’s not completely different than the first trilogy because there are certainly many things in Empire that happened that weren’t necessarily completely thought out in Episode Four. So I don’t think it’s completely different than that.
Matt Feury
In terms of the post production setup, you know, you have your Avid system, but how many others are “cooking”? How many assistants do you have working? And do you tie in visual effects directly and sound directly? Or is it just, you deliver a package to them,
Bob Ducsay
There were a total of 10 systems on an ISIS, plus two more software-only systems that we’re done for doing turnovers and generating QuickTimes. So that’s a dozen systems. One of them was in our theater, because everything that we made it was, you know, you could run DCP’s in there, but really what we ran in there all the time was directly out of an Avid that was in the theater. And, you know, the project, of course, is shared among everyone on the team, and then as far as the visual effects are concerned, ILM, who was the vendor on the movie and did nearly all the visual effects in the film, they essentially had the same movie. So the way that we worked with them was we just sent bins back and forth, because they had all the media for the film so, it wored really well. I mean, essentially, you’re just sending these small files back and forth from the bins to collaborate.
Matt Feury
So you’re on location at Pinewood. Most of the editorial I’m assuming down there is about dailies and putting together basic scene structure, and then you bring it back to LA to do the finished editing or is the whole thing done up…
Bob Ducsay
So the shooting schedule is long on the movie. It was like 120 days, and that’s a little bit over six months of shooting. And then I got back to LA and Ryan came in two weeks after we got back to LA and we started to watch the movie. Now, the way that he and I work is the movie was on nine reels. It was a long movie, and he came in day one, and we went through reel one and we did a pass through a reel one. And we worked our way through the whole movie. And once we made it to the end of the film, we put the whole film, well the film was together of course, but we went and ran it in the theater for the first time. And so that was, that was pretty much the procedure for us. That isn’t necessarily the case on every feature film because usually what happens is, you know, roughly two weeks after you’re done shooting, everybody comes down, the director comes in, the producer comes in, maybe the producer comes in and we all sit down and we watch the film, but in this case Ryan wanted to take a reel by reel pass which he and I did on Looper and I think that works really well.
Matt Feury
So there are multiple storylines always going on in this film. You know, one of the things you did, you sort of broke away from the A” story and you have the casino planet stuff. Are you bouncing back and forth between things or do you literally just do a hard wall like, “Okay, now we’re going to work for the next so many weeks and months on this storyline”.
Bob Ducsay
Well, look, I mean, it’s a little bit of both because what happens is you screen the movie, and every time you screen the movie you go, “Oh, jeez, that doesn’t work. It worked before but it doesn’t work now. What happened”? So you’ll go and you’ll concentrate on things that are problematic. But generally speaking, the way that we work and the way I personally prefer to work, and this is how Ryan works, is we screened the movie, and then we go back to reel one, and we work our way through the movie. And we did this process, I would say, it would take us about two weeks to turn the movie around. So every two weeks we would sit down and we’d watch the movie. And you know, we did our best within our small group to try to keep people fresh, because we really couldn’t show the movie to anybody except our group. And occasionally, you know, there were a lot of filmmakers who came in to see the film as we’re working but that was basically the process, and every two weeks we go watch the movie again.
Matt Feury
The original editor’s cut…how long was that first cut that you did?
Bob Ducsay
The very first cut of the movie was three hours and ten minutes. And the finished film, the actual run of the film without credits is I think two hours and twenty-one minutes. So what is that? That’s fifty minutes of material. I mean, a certain amount of that is fat. I mean, I try to get to where we want to go immediately. So a little bit of it is just, “well, you really don’t need that”, but a lot of it’s actual sequences and scenes and the blu-ray’s got a lot of deleted material. It’s over thirty minutes worth of material. And of course, there’s other stuff that we didn’t include on that. So, you know, it’s a good amount of material that’s cut out of the film.
Matt Feury
Yeah, I think one of the things that, when the blu-ray first came out, there was a lot of talk about the, you know, Finn vs. Captain Phasma scene. How different that was {from the theatrical cut]. What was the decision, and you probably have to set it up for everybody, the difference between what was in the movie and what was cut out, what was your decision making process in terms of like, “No, we don’t need to see her, you know, the stormtroopers around realize that she was a traitor” and all that?
Bob Ducsay
Well, if you’re familiar with the film, what we’re talking about is, there was a there was an encounter between Finn and Phasma on the top of an elevator, he basically calls her out to what she did in Episode Seven, basically kind of being weak. And she kills a couple of stormtroopers. And the he kills her in a different way. And it was pretty good, actually. But the thing is, when you got to this sequence, you felt that it was way too long, like, way too long. And so that was the biggest cut we made in the scene, although we did a lot of other compression in it, to try to get the time down. And in fact, we actually considered cutting the whole sequence. You know, literally not having any of that in the film. And ultimately, everybody that we were showing the movie to including the studio really liked the sequence. And we didn’t think it was enough of a problem to take the scene out. But that is an interesting area, and that has specifically to do with pace. Many, many things that came out of the movie came out because of pace.
Matt Feury
So you went right from Last Jedi into Rampage. How much of a break did you have between the two because it seems like after a campaign like this, whether it was an easy cut, or it was a challenging film, you’d want a little bit of a break and some down time.
Bob Ducsay
Well, I knew the director on Rampage and I knew the picture editor that started it because I didn’t actually start the film. I came on right after they finished the director’s cut. And, so I came on to help, which they absolutely needed help because their schedule…we just got done talking about nineteen months to make this unbelievably complicated movie here…on that movie (Rampage), they were, from the time they started photography to the time that it’s in the theaters is less than a year and it has an enormous amount of creature effects in it which are extremely complicated and time consuming, etc. So that film had a very, very compressed schedule and Jim May who was the principal editor on the movie, he’d done an incredible job getting the movie in the shape that it was in, but there was just too much work to do for one person.
Matt Feury
You know, from a career standpoint as an editor, looking at your body of work…heavy in science fiction. From The Mummy, The Mummy Returns and Looper and Jedi and Rampage. Do you feel like that’s the lane you want to stay in and continue building in that genre? Or do you get to this point and go, “You know what, I’d like to do a romantic comedy or some sort of smaller indie drama”?
Bob Ducsay
It’s a complicated question, because the thing is, the kind of movies I got to do are the kind of movies that I loved growing up. And I can’t believe that I got to do this. And, you know, this movie in particular, I was a huge Star Wars fan. And to be able to live this dream was, I mean, I honestly, I still can’t believe I got to do this film. So I love these sorts of films. But I find that I go to a lot of movies that are not these sorts of films. And so my interests are extremely wide. And I mean, to me, the most important thing is, is it a good story with good characters, and those are the things that interest me the most, but you know, I feel a little bit like Michael in The Godfather Three, every time I think I’m out, they pulled me back in. And so because I do these sorts of films, people want you to do these sorts of films and so it becomes a little bit of a, you know, a self fulfilling prophecy. But that’s okay though. I’m not complaining. I love it.
Matt Feury
Well, I’m glad you got to live that dream. I’m glad you got to do that film that you always wanted to do, being a Star Wars fan, and I’m thrilled that you we’re able to be here with us today. And I’d like everybody to help me in thanking Mr. Ducsay for being here today.