The Social Network was edited on Final Cut

I found this great article over at Vanity Fair's 'Little Gold Men' about recent Oscar winners, Angus Wall & Kirk Baxter, editors of The Social Network, on working with David Fincher, editing on digital & getting intimate with Jesse Eisenberg:

Little Gold Men: Let's start with the obvious. What do you think as editors when Fincher comes at you with his infamous "99 takes" approach to filmmaking?

Angus: Well, he may have shot 99 takes, but he doesn’t actually send all 99 takes to us. I think it was usually 60-odd takes and 30 he didn’t like. The great thing with David is you get a lot of material. Having that allows you to do things that make the scene much better.

Kirk: It’s not like he’s shooting one shot, 99 times. He’s also getting all his coverage. He might do that master for a bunch of takes, then he’ll get the over-the-shoulder, then the close-up. He’s going to make sure he’s got a great performance from every angle.

So, you like having that much material?

Angus: It allows us to do our job.

Kirk: That opening scene was very much setting up the film, and he had a target to get to in terms of how long it took to get through all the dialogue. The first God-knows-how-many takes were really about getting it truncated. What’s normal for David is about 6 to 12 takes for a setup. But sometimes it’s as simple as three.

Angus: That said, he does shoot a lot of takes!

Was the screenplay’s structure a challenge? Was it hard helping the audience keep track of when and where the action is taking place?

Kirk: The main heavy lifting is really the writing. The traction of it all makes sense and that’s based on what Aaron wrote. Our task was—does it make sense to be overlapping this, should there be hard cuts?

Angus: Does the dialogue pre-lap? There are a couple of phrases or lines that are lifted from scenes, but in terms of the shape of the movie, it’s very much in the original script.

Kirk: We played it quite straight towards the beginning when you're jumping back and forth in time. As the audience got used to that language, we were able to get more aggressive in overlapping the lines and speeding it up.

David likes being on the technological forefront of filmmaking—shooting digitally, editing in Final Cut. How does that impact the editing process?

Angus: When I switched to Final Cut, it made me rethink how I work. It forced me to re-invent things. I love it because it’s so flexible. It doesn’t force you into a way of thinking about editing.

Oscar Predictions: Top 8 categories

Originally posted 22 Feb 2011:

Best Picture: Social Network vs The King’s Speech

This year’s Best Picture nominees cover 4 true stories, 2 literary adaptations, 2 fever dream visions & two very different ‘family’ films – one family-friendly animation that made grown men cry & one alternative-family indie.

But the race, without a doubt, comes down to The Social Network (TSN) & The King’s Speech (TKS).

Social Network picked up every single critic’s award & topped it off with the Golden Globe for Best Drama – an unprecedented winning streak that seemed to paving its path straight to the Oscar podium.

But then, along came the – arguably – more influential Guild Awards (made up of actual academy members from different technical branches) and uniformly turned the ship in favour of King’s Speech. The BAFTA’s, understandably, followed suit and fell all over King’s Speech before the Academy declared its love by nominating King’s Speech 12 times, in each conceivable category, to Social Network’s 8.

The very influential Director’s Guild also crowned Tom Hooper (TKS) director of the year over top seeded David Fincher (TSN).

What keeps the race interesting, however, is one last flash of hope for those in the TSN camp: According to Google Oscar Search Trends, since 2008 all 3 of the Best Picture winners - The Hurt Locker, Slumdog Millionaire & No Country for Old Men - have had an upward trend in Google search volumes in the last weeks leading up to the Oscar ceremony, as well as the highest regional interest from New York (in 2007, Best Picture winner The Departed had the highest regional interest from Massechusettes, unsurprising as the film is set in Boston).

This year, the film inspiring the most Google searches - with just days to go before the Oscars - is, appropriately enough, The Social Network. It sure would be one helluva exciting & trend-bucking race if the Google search trend holds up & The Social Network pulls back into first place in the final moments.

Oscar contenders - Best Actor: Jesse Eisenberg

Originally 18 Jan 2011:

Jesse Eisenberg first came to critics' attention playing Campbell Scott's nephew / sex & women protege in 2002's Roger Dodger, and, more notably, as damaged / intelligent / pretentious teenager surviving his literary parents' dysfunctional divorce in Noah Baumbach's brilliant 2005 The Squid and the Whale.

He made his name in Hollywood in two of 2009's smarter comedies - Adventureland and Zombieland.

And then he struck gold when David Fincher cast him (over Michael Cera & Shia LaBeouf) as Aaron Sorkin's version of Facebook-creator Mark Zuckerberg.

Relishing Sorkin's famous, carefully crafter dialogue, and shading his character with all kinds of secret ambitions, resentments & insecurity, his incredibly subtle performance as the less-than-popular Harvard kid who became the world's youngest billionaire is riveting from start to finish.