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.
