THE ART OF THE CUT: WITH KATE SANFORD, ACE By Steve Hullfish Editor Kate Sanford, ACE has been working as a professional in post since 1987 and has been in the editor’s chair since 1994. Her credits include Sex and the City, American Buffalo, The Wire, Boardwalk Empire, Show me A Hero and – most recently – HBO’s Vinyl. Her next project is David Simon’s The Deuce starring James Franco.
David Tedeschi was with Marty (executive producer Martin Scorsese) in a different location, finishing the pilot. When we came on to start Vinyl a year ago, we were invited to see the pilot in progress. They hadn’t finished cutting their first pass yet and they showed us about half of it. But because it wasn’t finished, everybody had a little bit of a different interpretation of the tone and style of the show. So it was not only a creative project, finding the balance of style, music and drama, but also trying to find consensus among all of these different producers and all of their ideas.
HULLFISH: Tell us a little bit about the schedule for an episode of Vinyl? How long were they shooting? You were getting dailies and then how much time did you have to cut? And then they’d go into on-line. Give us the nuts and bolts of it. Is it different from a network TV schedule?
HULLFISH: It sounds like collaboration wasn’t so much with the director as with some of the producers and the other editor on the show. SANFORD: We, as editors, really do enjoy the benefit of collaboration with directors. It’s a mini movie. We really had a very intense relationship with each director. But then like all television shows, that relationship has to end. They move on to do something else and our primary relationships are with the showrunner and executive producers and our music supervisors.
SANFORD: The schedule for “Vinyl” was vastly extended, much more so than even the most liberal cable schedules. Each episode shoots for about 12 - 14 days and, like most shows, we have 2 more days to get our editor’s cut ready, and then we invite the director of the episode to come in and work with us for four or five days. It’s usually about three weeks of cutting and then a week with a director and typically, two or three weeks with the producers before it goes to HBO. After that we wait for notes and that typically takes a week or so. In this case, it took even longer. So by the time we got notes back I was already well into dailies on the next episode or even the director’s cut. There was a lot of overlap.
HULLFISH: Let’s talk a little bit about the nuts and bolts of actually editing. How do you approach viewing dailies? SANFORD: I really do try to sit down and watch all the dailies. Especially at the beginning of the episode, I watch from start to finish. I really find that the best take could be anywhere and I want to make sure I’m thorough. What’s really scary is, sometimes I’m the only one watching, right? The director doesn’t have time to watch everything. The producers definitely don’t have time to watch everything. So, I really want to know the footage well enough to have a meaningful conversation with the director .
HULLFISH: Wow. SANFORD: On the one hand, it was very exciting, just Tim Streeto and myself editing the remaining 9 episodes. Alongside that, n
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SIGHT, SOUND & STORY
