For your reading pleasure, please enjoy this preview with 1917 editor Lee Smith from Issue 40 of Backstory.
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The Editor: Lee Smith
Oscar winner Lee Smith explains the multifaceted challenges of cutting together 1917 to appear as one continuous shot.
By Danny Munso
“You’re the guy for the job.” Lee Smith, the editor behind Dunkirk and The Dark Knight, heard that sentence ring out from director Sam Mendes, who’d been running through the idea for his latest project, the World War I epic 1917. While the praise was high indeed, Smith’s job over his two-decade editing career — including an Oscar win for 2017’s Dunkirk and noms for The Dark Knight and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World — was to be the invisible man. If the edits in a film stuck out as you watched it, that means an editor wasn’t doing their job properly. And for 1917, invisible was precisely what Mendes sought in Smith. To help immerse the audience in the experience of two British soldiers attempting to cross treacherous terrain to accomplish a top-secret mission, the writer-director was planning his film to appear filmed in one long, continuous shot. And it would fall to the editor—with major coordination from Mendes and cinematographer Roger Deakins, among others—to create this grand illusion for the viewer. Smith’s decision was an easy one. “It was certainly different than a lot of the films I worked on before, that’s for sure,” he says. “It was both the challenge and subject matter that interested me. And Sam is a great director I had worked with before, so basically all the boxes were ticked.”
Before Smith was officially on board, Mendes and Deakins had done a rough storyboard of areas where edits could easily be made. This includes moments where characters enter a dark tunnel or individuals cross in front of the camera. Smith then took a look at their work and made some suggestions for adjustments he thought would go toward keeping the shots break free. Only so much pre-planning could be done because while there are motion-control cameras that could be programmed to repeat the exact same movement over and over, Mendes and Deakins weren’t going to be using any of them during production. Some of the shots would even be handheld, making it extremely unlikely that any two takes of the same scene would be an exact match. And so the specific process of editing 1917 came down to two key decisions. First, Mendes would shoot scenes in sequential order, and second, that day’s footage would immediately be sent to Smith and a final take chosen immediately. That way, director and cinematographer would know the exact spot where they had to begin filming again and everything could be stitched together seamlessly.
“That was the challenging part,” Smith recalls of the task that lay ahead. “We had to make sure to get the selection right because each next day had to be attached to the shot from the day before, and if you pick the wrong take, you really back yourself into a wall if you want to change your mind later.” Though he visited the U.K. battlefield set several times, all of his editing was done in the production’s London office so he could view that day’s footage on a theater screen and he could see how the breadth of the work being done on set translated. He would watch each day’s takes and choose the ones he liked most. Mendes, who had already seen the footage on set, would have his own preferred takes, but Smith always chose not to know which those were until he saw them all. “Quite often our choices would line up, but sometimes they didn’t,” he says of the venerable director, an Oscar winner for 1999’s American Beauty. “So he’d ask me why I thought what I thought. A lot of the choices came down to pace and rhythm, and I’m looking at it with a fresh eye so he always wanted to know why I chose certain takes.”
Selecting the perfect take was just the beginning of Smith’s role. While it would be ideal if one complete take contained the best performances from the actors and had the best movement from the camera that could line up with the previous day’s footage, it rarely worked out that way. Often, Smith would use dialogue from one take and combine it with the visuals from another. Even more complicated, he and his group of four compositors could even take some visuals from one take and find a way to combine them with another, possibly having two different takes from two different actors spliced seamlessly together. And of course, it all had to be unnoticeable to the audience. “There was a lot we could do,” he says. “Within the body of a take, you might have a good first third of it and we’d have to find a way to combine that with another take to get the best out of everything. How I view editing is you just keep all the best bits so whether it was a designed edit or not made no difference. If I could sneak it in there and get another moment from another take, I did it.”
Despite all the ink the technical achievement of the one-take has been getting, Smith and Mendes agreed they wouldn’t talk about specific edits in the press, even though some are obvious. They want the process to remain as mysterious as possible for as long as they can. But Smith can talk about one of the highlights of the finished film that happened to be a take he picked that oddly did not have Mendes’ stamp of approval. Near the film’s conclusion, one of the two young servicemen, Corporal Schofield (George MacKay), is doing a full-on sprint across the battle-scarred turf as his fellow British soldiers are entering the fray from a nearby trench. The planned shot was for MacKay to run the length of the trench unimpeded, but on the day of the shoot, one of the extras went too early and ended up slamming into MacKay, knocking him over. Because Mendes had conditioned the actors to play through a scene no matter what seemed to go wrong, MacKay immediately got up and continued running. When Smith was viewing the takes fresh and without any context, he thought the collision was planned. “I didn’t know it was an accident,” he says. “Sam was upset on the day because his leading actor is getting clobbered by an extra mistiming their run, but I looked at it completely differently. To me, I cheered for George because he just kept getting up. He kept going. I told Sam that was the winner, and that’s the one we used.”
The one advantage to the process Smith and Mendes devised is they were essentially creating the finished edit of the film concurrent with shooting. But because of this, Smith had to add elements to his edit each day that he normally wouldn’t, namely temporary sound effects and music cues. That way, each time Mendes viewed the film, it would be as close to a finished product as they could get during filming. Sound and music are essential to an edit and often inform the cuts an editor makes. While that obviously wouldn’t be the case here, it helped Mendes better understand the proper pacing of a scene or a moment. “That’s what we were always concerned with,” Smith says. “We’d say, ‘This is too slow,’ or, ‘That should have been quicker.’ This methodology worked because if we needed to adjust something during filming, we could do that. But it all had to be figured out in one day because they had to [pick up shooting] it the next day.” And while there was an official final edit the day after principal photography was completed, Smith’s job wasn’t finished, as he and Mendes did a full performance review and ended up swapping in more dialogue from alternate takes they felt were stronger than ones they’d picked for the edit. Smith also supervised the adding of visual effects to make sure everything remained as visually smooth throughout the process. As it turned out, the seamlessness applied to the shoot as much as it did to the overall film. “It was a pretty fast film by all standards. It was 9 months start to finish, when I would normally be on a project for 12 to 14 months. But it had to be like this. We had to make decisions quickly, and before we turned around twice, we were staring at the finish.”
Smith’s name is well associated with his stellar past work, notably his lengthy list of classic collaborations with director Christopher Nolan—every one of Nolan’s films beginning with 2005’s Batman Begins. But currently, all eyes are on 1917, which is shaping up to be on the shortlist of films for which the editor is remembered. As for the future, he’s decided he will not be involved with Nolan’s summer 2020 tentpole, Tenet, for one simple reason: He is exhausted. “I did four films back to back,” Smith says. “I haven’t had a break, and I’m seriously due for one now. I’m planning on going out to Australia and reconnecting with my roots a little bit, and then we’ll see. For now, I’m enjoying 1917 coming out. It was way more complicated than I thought it was going to be, but it’s also what made it so rewarding.”
If you enjoy what you’ve read – we hope you’ll join us to read the rest of the article by buying Issue 40 as a single issue or subscribing to Backstory Magazine!
For more info about all the other amazing articles in issue 40, view our Table of Contents.