In the Netflix feature Don’t Move – released October 25th — a grieving woman hopes to find solace deep in an isolated forest. While there, however, she encounters a stranger who injects her with a paralytic agent. As the agent gradually takes over her body, she must run, hide and fight for her life before her nervous system shuts down.
The feature stars Kelsey Asbille, Finn Wittrock, Moray Treadwell and Daniel Francis. Sam Raimi, Zainab Azizi, Alex Lebovici, Christian Mercuri and Sarah Sarandos served as producers. Josh Ethier, ACE (pictured), edited the project and recently shared with Post insight into how the feature came together.
Josh, can you tell us about your setup for this film?
“Don’t Move was edited on my home system in Avid Media Composer. I use Blackmagic Design’s UltraStudio 4K to feed a 65-inch OLED and a pair of JBL speakers. Lately, I've been a huge fan of Soundly's software for moving quickly through my sound and music library. It has so many features that help me create temp sound design lightning fast. Paired with RTAS in Avid, I’m able to get a temp mix that plays big in both the edit suite and at screenings. Because COVID was spiking for the summer and holidays while we were editing, we also leaned on Evercast if we ever needed to have one or both directors working remotely with me.”
What was your approach for this specific project and did your past work influence you at all?
“As an editor, you always want to be cognizant of what your characters and your audience needs to know and when they need to know it. Don't Move was a perfect chance to stretch those editorial muscles. With Iris (Kelsey Asbille) literally unable to move for a majority of the film, I had to make sure that the audience was acutely aware of what she was seeing. That way their experience is tied to hers. Don't Move also relies on action set pieces, fight sequences and chase scenes, so I had to strike a balance between holding long enough for information to come across while also moving fast enough to keep the audience on the edge of their seat. It was rewarding to work on a film that needed such a strong hand in editorial and it was an incredible experience shaping that together with directors Adam Schindler and Brian Netto.”
Is there a specific scene that stands out to you from a storytelling or editorial perspective?
“In the middle of the film, Iris is completely unable to move and ends up in the care of a lonely widower who has no idea who she is or how she got on his property. At that moment, the villain shows up and tries to reclaim her. It's the scene that excited me the most on the page, and my enthusiasm for it probably helped me get the job. It's such a bold idea, having your lead character basically hand off the film right in the middle.
“On our first assembly, we realized that we didn't need a lot of the information that was there, and we started to boil it down to as few words as possible, relying instead on looks, silence and some interesting perspective tricks. Through that compression and distillation, the scene took on this heavy, dramatic atmosphere. It was my favorite scene to test with an audience because you could hear a pin drop in the screening room for the whole sequence. It's scenes like that which made me fall in love with film editing as a teenager, and it was a blast to have an opportunity to work on one.”
What was the biggest challenge you faced on cutting this feature?
“The biggest challenge we faced was the first 15 minutes of the film. We had to carry Iris to the edge of the cliff and then ask the audience to hold on while she talks to a stranger named Richard (Finn Wittrock). That dialogue on the cliff was the scene we went back to most often. On one of our later revisits, we had the idea of rearranging the beats to draw a stronger emotional arc through the scene. On the page, Richard was supposed to badger Iris into giving up her story, and then he would share his own, after ultimately gaining her trust. It always felt unmotivated. Why would she give up her story so easily when we can see the pain that she's in?
“I was able to reorder the scene so that she remains stoic while he fills the silence with his own story, eventually winning her over and getting her to open up. Giving Iris the power to share her own story when she felt ready was the key to the scene.
“To embolden that, we removed a lot of Iris' dialogue before her story, so that her first moment of opening up is also to the audience, not just to Richard. Folks always ask about editing the action beats, but my favorite part of editing is shaping dialogue sequences like this one, and I'm very proud of the work we did on it.”
What can you share about the collaborating with different departments?
“Working on a genre film, an editor has to be conscious of the effect that sound and music can have on an edit. My background as a musician and my love of sound design really helps me shape these genre beats into fully-realized sequences. On Don't Move we had two extraordinary composers: Mark Korven (
The Witch, The First Omen) and Michelle Osis (
Dark Match, Knuckleball), and it was a beautiful experience collaborating with them on the rhythm of the film. I have to shout out our re-recording mixer Darin Heinis as well. When you consider that a large focal point of my editorial effort on
Don't Move was clarity of information, it only makes sense that a good mixer was needed to underline that in the mix.
“Darin brought clarity to those bigger, louder sequences that strengthened all the decisions we'd made in editorial. Likewise, on the quieter sequences. He gave them real dramatic weight with his tasteful approach. When you're the editor on a film, you're the one who's trying to get all of this information and emotion across for the first leg of post, and it's so rewarding when you have a passionate team of artists behind you reinforcing your work. I really look forward to working with all three of them again in the future.”
What from this project will you take with you into your future work?
“We were blessed with a fantastic producing team on Don't Move. As a lifelong horror fan, I've been a huge fan of Sam Raimi's since I was old enough to know what a film director was. Having the opportunity to work with him on a film and discuss approach and technique was an otherworldly honor. I've worked on a couple dozen films in my time in the industry and I've never met a producer so intensely focused on both the story and supporting his directors and department heads. As a director who's spent a considerable amount of time in the editing room, Sam had an innate trust of the process. He would have insightful feedback and listen carefully to our responses. More often than not, he'd say, ‘Thank you, I see exactly what you're going for. Let's not touch it.’ I hope to have a career as long and storied as Sam's, and I aspire to keep chasing the consideration, playfulness and kindness that I saw him exhibit on
Don't Move.”