WEST HOLLYWOOD — The Assassination of Jesse James was edited
by Dylan Tichenor, whose extensive credits include Brokeback Mountain, The Royal
Tenenbaums, Unbreakable, Boogie Nights and Magnolia, and here he talks about
the challenges of cutting this feature film.
Post presented “quite a few challenges,” says Tichenor.
“They didn’t print dailies for a start. DP Roger Deakins printed selected
dailies on film that he saw in Canada,” the rest were transferred to HD, and
that’s how he saw them. “I prefer them in film, although HD looks quite good
now, but you have to watch them on a good projector and project it large. I
consider watching footage on a big screen super-important to my job of editing
the film. I need to see it at that size and have those images and performances
in my head when editing.”
To this end, Tichenor screened mainly on the lot at
Warners using a Christie 2K projector. “So from HDCAM to Christie 2K gave us a
pretty good image,” he adds. They had a lot of footage, he says. “Andrew [Domenick, the
director] did a lot of takes, and while I’m used to a lot of takes, the
challenges on this were to do with what a complicated and ambitious sort of
approach he took to this film. He wanted to make a very poetic, Terence
Malik-kind of film, so that was artistically challenging.”
The editor worked closely with DP Roger Deakins. “We talked
on the phone and discussed things during dailies, and then I saw him when I
went up to the set a couple of times,” he says. “I have to say, this is one of
the most beautiful looking films I’ve ever worked on. The imagery Roger came up
with will blow your mind, and every shot is really masterful and like an oil
painting. It is lit and composed so well that during dailies, my jaw would drop
every day — I was so flabbergasted at the absolute beauty of the shots. He’s an
amazing DP and sometimes I even felt that the shots are so amazing that they
almost overrun the theme of the film.”
Tichenor and his assistants cut the film at Ridley Scott’s
RSA Films (www.rsafilms.com) in West Hollywood. “I’ve used Pivotal Post and
they’ve always taken good care of my technical needs,” he notes, “so for this
they brought in two Avid Film Composers 12.2 for Mac and Unity.”
Ultimately, Tichenor worked on the edit for an entire year,
“because it was so complex, and the first cut was nearly four hours long,” he
reports. “There are a lot of scenes, a lot of dialogue and narration, so
there’s a lot of material that didn’t make the final cut. And then the edit
went on after I had to leave and cut Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film, There
Will Be Blood, which I had committed to. And rather than go to some facility
and bring all our HD tapes and do the online that way, I set it up so that as
we got closer to screening the film for previews, Pivotal Post then brought in
an HD Symphony for HD preview, color correct and conform to D5 that came in on
a weekly basis as needed, and ultimately also a third Film Composer system for
other editing work. I also supplement that package with several pieces of my
own equipment, like an SDI matte generator for my NTSC monitor, etc. They did
most of the digitizing before they brought it over, but they digitized all of
our selects — what was in the cut — into the Symphony. Then we did all the
color correction and play-out to D5 in-house, which is pretty unusual. They
just brought the system to us.”
As Tichenor notes, this means big savings in the
post budget. “It’s so much smarter as you pay a week or two rental on the
Symphony and you get to do all your color correction yourself,” he points out.
“It just makes sense financially. Why would you pay $450 an hour to rent when
you can pay $450 a day?”