The Art of The Cut: with Andy Grieve

THE ART OF THE CUT: WITH ANDY GRIEVE

By Steve Hullfish

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?

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 com 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.

SH: In addition to the story, how do you build or create an emotional impact in your documentaries? Do you have to worry about being too manipulative with emotion?

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: What editing system are you using currently, or have you always used the same system?

AG: I’ve used Final Cut Pro on a few things but if I never saw it again, I’d be happy. I’m very much an Avid person. For every reason: media management, timeline function, effects. Final Cut has no Script Tool (Script Integration) where you can bring the transcript of an interview into Avid and link the footage to the transcript so you can do word searches. Later on in the process it just makes it very easy to say “I know someone said that, but where is it” and it allows you to do a very quick search. That for me is really the biggest “Final Cut versus Avid” thing. Towards the end of the process I try to take a pass back through all of the raw interviews to see if there’s something I’ve missed, or I might see an interview differently in the context of the story I’ve built or maybe they recorded an interview later and now something that someone said earlier has different meaning than it had the first time I listened to the interview. So being able to jump to parts of the interview in the Avid from the transcripts makes it easier.

SH: How are you organizing these selects reels you’ve got?

AG: My assistant organizes all the raw footage, so that’s got its own system. It’s not that tough. I really just keep a master interview selects reel for each interview. The interviews are organized in the timeline by subject with locators separating them. Some editors, I’ve seen, end up with a ton of sequences, but that would overwhelm me. I’d rather have fewer longer sequences than shorter ones.

SH: And how are you going in to those longer sequences to find the specific items you are looking for?

AG: After I pull my selects, I’ll have my assistant go in and put a locator at the head of each clip and sometimes even in the middle of the clip and put in the first few words of the sentence or the key words so we can search through locators within the sequences. And the last film I worked on was a little different. There were only eight key interviews. Then on We Steal Secrets about WikiLeaks, there were 35 interviews and a lot more footage, so that was a little trickier organizationally. Then I did a film about the OJ Simpson car chase that was entirely archival footage so that had no interviews at all, so that was a completely different process. You have to approach each film separately. The OJ Simpson thing was about one day in sports with the car chase and all of these sports things that took place on that day that kind of wove through that. On that, we ended up mapping out a 24-hour timeline of all the best footage we had from that day, so it ended up being a time-of-day timeline on different layers so that we could see when things were overlapping. So that was a little different… almost like detective work. Each one has its own little challenges and idiosyncrasies so you have to adapt to that. I did one narrative feature film ("The Burrowers") and other than that I’ve never been given a script. One of the things I really like about the job is really being able to own that and be in charge of that. And I like directors who will give the editor the space to run their room their way and figure out the best way to achieve all that.

SH: If you build a cut with primarily the interviews, when you go back and add b-roll and archival, do you add that in a layer or layers on tracks above the interviews, or do you try to keep everything on a single track when possible?

AG: I always work in multiple tracks for organizational reasons and also because sometimes I have multiple options stacked on different tracks, like if I am debating about using one image over another, this shot versus that shot, I will leave them all in the timeline on different tracks.

SH: What are some of those timelines you were working on?

AG: The range is probably six months to 18 months. We Steal Secrets took about 18 months. The Scientology thing I did took a little more than a year. And that’s just me as the editor. On both of those, the assistant started a good three or four months before me and before them were researchers who were trying to pull together the archival. It could easily be two years from the first interview until someone gets to see it at a festival or whatever. But we’re talking about Alex Gibney films where there are a good budget and people are getting paid and other films that have smaller budgets, like the first film I worked on, I was the third editor and I came into it five years into the process. They cut it and they recut it and shot some more and then reshot a bunch of stuff, then I came in and recut it. I mean, it’s one thing being the editor and it’s another being the producer or someone who spent five years of his life. At film festivals, people always ask “What was the budget? And the guy had the great line that he’d say: “This cost me five years of my life.” Which I think is the perfect answer. It’s a labor of love by definition.

SH: Do you get an opportunity to ask the director for additional footage or a reshoot on an interview if you don’t feel you have enough to tell a story?

AG: That’s the way Alex Gibney actually works, is that he shoots the interviews and we wait till we’re pretty much picture-locked before we do any of the re-enactments or b-roll or graphics or anything like that.