Collaboration: Directors and Editors at the
Asian-American Committee Event

From left: Richard Chew, Jessie Nelson, Matt Reeves, Stan Salfas, Steven Cohen, Walt Louie and Henry Chan (standing). (Photo: Robert Hale)

In his brief welcoming remarks on behalf of the Asian-American Committee, Henry Chan introduced panel moderator associate director Walt Louie, editor of the award-winning documentaries, Forbidden City, U.S.A. and Maestro Mehli. Louie kicked off the panel discussion by delving right into the heart of the evening. "How can this most intimate of relationships thrive in the pressure-packed environment of the cutting room?" Louie asked, gazing down the table to the most celebrated editor on the panel, Richard Chew. With credits that stretch back to the original Star Wars, along with recent hits like That Thing You Do!, Waiting to Exhale and Singles, Chew outlined his first meeting with writer-director, Jessie Nelson (Corrina, Corrina). Chew and Nelson are currently in post-production on the Sean Penn-Michelle Pfeiffer drama, I Am Sam, a handheld, pan-and-zoom-shot tale of a mentally challenged father's fight for custody of his 7-year-old child.

"After having cut a picture like Shanghai Noon, which is a studio film targeted for a specific audience, I wanted to find something that spoke to me," Chew explained. "I started in documentaries so I was used to working with footage that did not match, or structuring a film from improvised work. Handheld camerawork is very common today, but Jessie's film was going to have arbitrary panning and zooming as well, and I was looking for a project which wasn't about the traditional seamless style of matching cuts. Regardless of what the camera was doing, of course, I knew my job would still be to find the emotional continuity of a scene, the emotional momentum of the story. After Jessie and I talked about her intentions I basically just said sign me up."

Next up in moderator Louie's sight line was the directing-editing team of Matt Reeves and Stan Salfas. Reeves outlined to the audience how his insecurities on choosing an editor for his feature film debut, The Pallbearer, nearly got the best of him. "I had no idea how to go about choosing an editor on my first film," Reeves explained. "All the sample work I saw was really good, so it just became an intuitive feeling of which person I could sit in a room with for days and days and days. Stan seemed like a guy I thought I could sit in a room with," Reeves laughed. "And since we've worked together nonstop for more than four years now, I guess my intuition was right. In fact, we've moved so close toward each other's own sensibilities, that I couldn't even imagine doing a movie without Stan."

Steven Cohen was the odd man out on the panel in so far as his director, John Herzfeld, was in Japan readying the premiere of the pair's last film, 15 Minutes. "These relationships are very peculiar and specific and hard to explain and predict," Cohen observed. "Everybody's ego is on the line when you're trapped in a room struggling to make a movie work for days on end. I think for directors it's a very scary process: will their vision actually be achieved or not? There's really no place to hide in the process."

Following an extended video clip from Chew and Nelson's work on I Am Sam, Chew talked about the difficulty of cutting a film shot with a wandering pan-and-zoom method. "The limitation of this kind of camera style," Chew said, "is that the camera might not be on the character who has delivered a series of perfect moments for that scene, as Sean Penn frequently did. You don't have the choices you would have with conventional coverage of singles, over-the-shoulders, masters, etc. So, I really had to study the material for a long time to figure out where the strong moments were, because those moments might not even occur on camera, or they may arrive too late. It was a challenge to identify the moments you can use and then attempt to hook them together."

No sooner had Chew outlined the more difficult aspects of working in the documentary style Jessie Nelson used, than he countered by adding: "But I want to also say how liberating it is to work with this kind of material. Where you start or stop, whether a cut matches or not, has no bearing on the scene. All you're looking for is the emotional truth for any given moment in the scene."

Walt Louie followed up Jessie Nelson's clip with a long offering from Reeves and Salfas from their premiere episode of Felicity, the hit TV show Reeves co-created. Topping out at more than eight consecutive minutes, a rarity by network television standards, the clip highlighted Reeves' preference for holding a shot on a character to illuminate their emotional inner life within the scene.

"The primary reason we brought in this clip," Reeves explained, "was that it shows the kind of aesthetic within the show that Stan and I like the most, and the networks probably like the least. We both like long pauses and not rushing the character through the moment. The more Stan and I work together the more we understand how to trust when an actor is doing something truthful and not to cut away. Working with Stan I've come to realize that editing is very musical. It's interesting to just stay on a shot and find that musical rhythm which reveals a character's epiphany, that moment of truth."

After Steven Cohen presented his clip from 15 Minutes, a complex scene with two characters, a digital video camera, a motel-room television, and several layers of story line, the editor elaborated on his work with John Herzfeld. "What makes John unique as a director," Cohen noted, "is that this is the kind of scene he absolutely loves. He wants as many things happening at once as possible, beyond even your ability to take them all in. Essentially all the different action in the scene is happening simultaneously. But it's cut sequentially so the audience can follow it. In John's view, if the scene looks clean and simple, despite all the different storylines tracking at once, I've done my job."

Audience from the Asian-American Committee event discussing current movie trends

"I don't believe in always using a temp score," Richard Chew said. "Using Hans Zimmer or John Williams works so well that it's like glue, or wallpaper, used to cover up imperfections. Jessie wrote her script with certain Beatles songs in mind. So I tried to intentionally challenge her preconceptions for those moments by using a different Beatles song to create a new feel. I want to give the director as many surprises as I can. They can always revert back to what they had in mind after they've seen the ideas I brought to the partnership."

"The studio executives don't even read the cards," Steven Cohen marveled. "They read a summary someone else has written and recommend changes based entirely on the numbers. Higher is better, that's all they know about the previews. It's a tremendously unscientific process and unfair in its application."

Even after Walt Louie was forced to bring the evening to a close due to the late hour, members of the Asian-American Committee present were still brimming over with enthusiasm. "Seeing a female director like Jessie Nelson talk about having such an open creative relationship with Richard Chew was really inspiring," said Bachooali Dureyshevar, a first AD member of the Asian-American Committee who is preparing to direct her debut feature. "I did hundreds of hours of my own editing at film school at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh," the Indian-born-and-raised Dureyshevar noted, "so I believe I have a natural feel for editing. Three years of editing student films and marriage videos in India makes it much easier for me to speak the same language with my editor."

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