|
| |
Cutting for Coppola: A Conversation with Anne Goursaud
From: American Film Institute
| By:
|
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Expert film editor Anne Goursaud's sure hand has made her highly sought after by some of the most respected directors in America. Goursaud  collaborated with Francis Ford Coppola on his lyrical valentine One From the Heart (1982), his moody The Outsiders (1983) and the sumptuous Dracula (1992). For Hector Babenco she cut the somber Ironweed (1987) and for Jack Nicholson, she shaped the sultry The Two Jakes (1990). Across such a divergent body of work, Goursaud has consistently brought a delicate sense of rhythm and composition to her work.
In an AFI seminar held in 1991, Goursaud spoke of the translation and selection skills key to expert editing. Given a pile of takes, the editor casts a director's "concept" into a specific string of images. This involves, Goursaud emphasizes, both creative collaboration with the director and a confident, discriminating eye. |
 had just finished my very first feature, The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia (1981), directed by Ron Maxwell, and it was quite an accomplishment for a first feature: 450,000 feet of film. A typical amount of footage is 150,000. If you work with someone like Bruce Beresford, and I have, it's only about 100,000. Four hundred and fifty thousand is an enormous amount of footage, considering that a finished feature film will be around 12,000 feet. |
So I got a phone call to come to Zoetrope Studios. I was interviewed by Fred Roos and Gray Frederickson, who were the two producers, and Francis Ford Coppola. Francis had requested samples of my work, and I sent him the feature I'd just finished. |
I decided also to give him a documentary I edited on the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders, A Great Bunch of Girls, which was made by Mary-Ann Braubach and Tracy Tynan for only $60,000. I'm still very proud of this film. Documentary cutting is probably the best way to learn how to cut: you're forced to create a coherent reality, and once you've gone through that, you're not afraid of tackling anything. |
When Francis saw the picture, he said, "She can cut." |
The beauty of meeting people of great talent is that they are the ones who actually give people a break. When you meet mediocre talent, they always say, "Oh, where is her Academy Award?" Great talents go on instinct. |
When I was coming up through the ranks as an assistant editor, I worked on movies with a lot of problems. I think people who immediately work on very, very good things lose something. |
Maybe that's my vision of the world because I had to struggle so hard--because I come from France and I come from the working class. If I had had everything easy, maybe I would not feel this way. But I think that when you work on difficult material with a lot of problems, you actually learn a great amount trying to make it good, to make it work. |
It's through the difficulty and the problem solving that I learned the most. |
On collaboration and realizing story
Film is a collaborative medium and you might come up with an idea the director didn't have. I've been given enormous freedom to pursue my ideas. A lot of people come to me and say, "Don't you hate it when a director makes you change things?" I don't, I really don't. Most of the time, I feel that there is a whole investigation that has to happen, and I want to do it. I want to try it 40 different ways and I would be very frustrated to work for someone who doesn't want to do that. |
Francis [Ford Coppola] always talks in terms of concept, which I like. I think it's much more useful to any creative person to get the concept rather than specific orders. On The Outsiders he wanted a certain mood. He wanted a symphonic score. He wanted to build the characters into mythic figures, which is why you have all these enormous close-ups, and it was important that the editing support that. |
It's most important to really understand the story, because as you get the dailies in this haphazard order, your subconscious has to keep track of certain things. You're going so fast, you have to come really prepared, really understanding what the film is about--really seeing the curve, the profile of the film. And you have to really understand your characters and what each scene is about by itself and in the context of the whole. The more work you can do before, the better off you are. |
You always work for the director in the final analysis. It's always his or her movie, and if you don't remember that, you're really in for a big surprise. When I choose a project, I always choose by the director, because as an editor your choices are limited. You might have 10 pictures offered, but it's still only 10 pictures. It's not like being a director, where you can say, "OK, I'm going to do a film about..." and get it going. An editor doesn't have that same range of choices. As an editor, you express yourself through the work of the director. |
Watching the dailies with the director is the most important part of the process, because that's where you have your creative dialogue. You can ask them all the questions you want: performance selection, intent of the scene, etc. You need to feel that you are in sync with the director in order to work freely on your own. |
On enhancing an actor's performance
There are a lot of things an editor can do with a performance. You can cut it out. If you have an actor who can't memorize lines, which happens a lot, you can fake a line in his or her mouth from another take. |
There are a million things you can do to change the timing. If somebody is really bad, I don't think you can ever make them good. But if somebody is mediocre, you can make them good. A performance can be rebuilt or cleaned up from the best parts of all the different takes. It's a bit of work--sometimes a tremendous, painstaking amount of work--like being something of a lacemaker. |
Our job as editors is to protect the actor. It's not like the theater, where their work stands. In the editing room, they know that the director and the editor have control over their performance. Maybe the most important part of an editor's talents is selection--to be able to recognize what's good. |
To me, the biggest compliment was when Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson saw an early cut of Ironweed. They didn't ask for one performance change. |
On developing a confident eye
Some sequences make you incredibly fearful. Once I had close to 50,000 feet of film for one sequence. That is half of a feature, and some people with a low budget could shoot an entire feature with that. |
I had film everywhere. You couldn't get into my room. It's not just creative anxiety. The clock is ticking, the film is piling up. They're shooting today--you know you're going to get more. It's not like you're going to have all week to do this, so you get tense. |
Getting a lot of film for one scene doesn't always mean that it is perfectly covered. Maybe the director was tense, too, and you're looking through, you know, A, B and C cameras, and you still don't have that one piece you need. |
But the worst situation, of course, is when you get on a sequence that has three shots. And you think, "Ah, one, two, three and I'll be out of here." And you can't cut it. There are matching problems or some other problem. With experience, you learn that it's like climbing Mount Everest: one step at a time. |
The key is to relax and trust yourself. You can be as insecure as you want socially, but you've got to have confidence in your work. You can learn all the techniques and work very hard at it, but in the end, there is no formula you can apply, no rules you can follow. |
You can listen to 100 filmmakers explaining their methods, but in the end, you will be alone with that pile of film to cut, and you'll have to follow your intuition. You have to risk it on your own. |
|
| |
