THE ART OF THE CUT: WITH ANDY GRIEVE By Steve Hullfish partmentalizing information, so as not to get completely overwhelmed. SH: How do you keep from getting overwhelmed? How much footage do you think you went through on the Scientology film? 120 hours? 130? AG: I’ve never really done the math. Probably 25 hours of interviews and easily 100 hours of archival. I had an assistant and researchers helping out. But easily 75 to 100 hours. I start by watching the interviews if that’s possible because it clues you in to the kind of archival footage you should be looking for and because you kind of start to see threads through stories and can see that, for example, these two characters shared an experience and can be intercut, or they talk about the same thing. So if the driving thing for the film is going to be the interviews, for me that guides the rest of it. Those are the characters you want, so even though they are “talking heads” you want people to feel that these people are live characters that are driving your storytelling and don’t feel like experts sitting in a chair, blabbing on. So I really let the stories just come out of people’s experiences and let that guide me.
Editor Andy Grieve has an impressive list of mostly documentary features to his credit including Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief; The Armstrong Lie; We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks; an episode of ESPN’s 30 for 30; The Carter; Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure; and others. He also directed and edited Can’t Stand Losing You: Surviving The Police. STEVE HULLFISH (SH): Your background is mostly documentaries. Talk to me about cutting docs. They’re so much more freeform in their storytelling than a narrative feature film like the one you cut (The Burrowers). What’s your approach to this vast sea of material that you have to draw from to create the story from the ground up?
SH: In addition to story, how do you build or create emotional impact in your documentaries? Do you have to worry about being too manipulative with emotion?
ANDY GRIEVE (AG): Before the project that I’m working on now, I did the HBO Scientology documentary Going Clear (with Academy Award-winning documentary director Alex Gibney). The approach depends on whether it’s a “talking heads and archival film” or is it an archival film or is it a verite film? I’ve edited all of those styles, so it’s kind of different for each film but my general process is that I like to watch everything before I start cutting. I can’t really cut and screen at the same time. I like to watch and absorb things and not really make choices at the beginning. It’s all a process of comn
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AG: I am always concerned with cause and effect. I am OK with manipulating things for emotional impact or story arc, but I never want to be creating a false sense of cause and effect. In the end, documentaries are about finding truths and you have to be honest in that pursuit. SH: Talk to me about organizing this stuff. How do you approach this stuff so you don’t go crazy? n
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SIGHT, SOUND & STORY
