For your reading pleasure, please enjoy this free excerpt from our 2900 word interview with editors Fred Raskin and Christian Wagner about their The Suicide Squad experience from Backstory’s brand new issue #44!
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Chop Block
The Suicide Squad
Fred Raskin and Christian Wagner on overcoming the challenges of editing during a pandemic and straight up killing it
By David Somerset
Between them, editors Fred Raskin and Christian Wagner have worked with some of the most famous names in cinema. Among Wagner’s collaborators are Tony Scott, John Woo, Michael Bay and Justin Lin. Raskin started climbing the ladder as an assistant editor on films by Paul Thomas Anderson and Christopher Nolan and then made his way to the editor’s chair to work with Lin, Eli Roth, James Gunn and a certain slightly well known filmmaker named Quentin Jerome Tarantino. Yet it was his prior experience with Gunn that led to these two talented editors to have a threepeat collab, this time on the highly anticipated reboot of The Suicide Squad franchise.
Gunn’s movie is a sprawling, violent, funny poke in the eye of more traditional comic-book adaptations that is unafraid to butcher its characters and stomp on convention while managing to color inside the lines of audience expectations. Despite carrying over characters such as Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn and Joel Kinnaman’s Rick Flag, it actually has very little to do with David Ayer’s critically lambasted yet financially sound Suicide Squad from 2016. The setup is simple: Viola Davis’ ambitious head of Task Force X, Amanda Waller (another Ayer holdover), rounds up a group of convicts from the maximum-security prison Belle Reve who have a variety of special abilities. Among them are Bloodsport (Idris Elba, replacing Will Smith’s Deadshot), a master of various weapons; Peacemaker (John Cena), a fellow weaponhead who also happens to be a douchebag committed to peace no matter how many people he has to kill; King Shark (Steve Agee on set, with Sylvester Stallone voicing him in postproduction), a humanoid shark; and Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian), who, er, shoots weaponized polka dots out of his arms. Their mission? Investigate some seriously creepy experiments happening on the combustible island nation of Corto Maltese, a location that originated in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. Their reward for success? Ten years off their sentences. The punishment for deviating from the mission guidelines? Implanted bombs will blow their heads clean off—or messily off, to be more accurate.
Having cut both Guardians of the Galaxy films, Raskin was an early call for Gunn when he joined the DC Universe. Coming aboard shortly before production kicked off, Raskin soon realized the huge workload was too much for one editor. So, he reached out to Wagner, with whom he’d worked on Fast & Furious and Fast Five, for his thoughts on finding a co-editor. “Fred literally called me and asked for a recommendation for an editor on The Suicide Squad,” Wagner recalls. “And I said, ‘Wait—James Gunn? Can I do it?’ He’s like, ‘They’re paying nothing.’ ‘I don’t care.’ It was a three-week gig. It turned into a year.” Raskin comically corrects his friend that it was in fact a five-week job that ballooned into a year. Wagner is under no illusions that having an impressive set of credits and past collaborators means you walk into jobs like this one. “I’m gonna insert a little bit of my philosophy about editors and directors. You might assume I can walk into a cutting room and have a director hire me based on my résumé alone. But that has nothing to do with the hiring of an editor. The relationship between the editor and the director, and the other editor if it’s two together, has to be paramount. It just has to be because we all know how to edit.”
The friendship between Raskin and Wagner, forged on the Fast films, was cemented via their Squad collaboration, as the pair supported each other for the duration of such an intense assignment. “I do wanna talk about our collaborative process, because one thing that was interesting about this movie is for the most part the scenes we [each] initially cut remained our scenes,” enthuses Raskin. “Which is really nice from the perspective of when you’re watching the movie, you can feel, Oh, I can claim ownership over this section. I’ve worked on movies where you pass scenes back and forth between multiple editors and you end up feeling less connected to the material, because then you watch it and you find yourself thinking, I did this cut and this cut, but that wasn’t me.’ Allowing us to remain on our own scenes really gave us a nice sense of ownership over those sequences, not to mention the movie as a whole.”
SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t seen the film yet – stop reading here and come back later!
The pair did cross over occasionally, including for the giant, effects-laden finale, which finds the surviving Squad squaring off against an angry giant alien starfish called Starro. In the sequence, we begin in the lab of the slightly friendly villain the Thinker (Peter Capaldi), who’d been experimenting on and controlling Starro for years in the towering secret base Jotunheim. “We started with them going down to the basement and seeing the Thinker’s lab, and then when Starro bursts out of Jotunheim, Chris cut the first half of the sequence where the top of Jotunheim falls off and they’re running to escape it, which is just magnificent work,” Raskin says. “And then I cut the second half after Starro breaks out [to terrorize the city]. But we divided it a little too evenly, and the point at which they crossed over needed to be intercut a bit. I had said to Chris, ‘Feel free to take my second half and incorporate the beginning of it into the end of your first half to make it sing,’ because it was a little clunky the way it had been laid out originally. When Chris did his pass incorporating the two, that was what was needed to really make it work.”
For Wagner, the advantage of having Raskin as his sounding board kicked in before Gunn saw the work. “On this film, Fred having worked with James before, it was a lot more of me asking Fred to come in my room and me saying, ‘What do you think?’ ” he recalls. “ ‘Is James gonna shoot me in the back of the head when he looks at it?’ ” Raskin can point to one major reason he respects Wagner and why he felt comfortable handing him a number of the movie’s big action set pieces: “Chris Wagner is the fastest editor I have ever seen. And I’m not saying he rushes through and does a crappy job. His work is exceptional, and he gets there in no time. I don’t really know how he does it. I am regularly blown away.”
The task of cutting action has certainly changed in the years since Wagner was working with Tony Scott. But he’s thrilled with some of the advances. “I pray to the gods every night thanking them for the invention of previs. I really do,” he laughs. “Because the previs is planned out by the director. Now, I’m not saying it’s paint by numbers because the previs doesn’t necessarily represent the final footage, but it’s such a great guide. There are many films I’ve done, like Man on Fire. If I’d had previs for it, it woulda been…well, I don’t think that would’ve been possible because we shot two and a half million feet of film on that. Tony said, ‘Put something together.’ I was like, ‘I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.’ But we did it. I love previs. I love storyboards—I mean, anything that’s gonna inform me personally. My rule has always been I would love to get out of the editor’s cut on my own having gotten 65 to 70 percent of the way to where the director wants it. And with the director and the other editors, we’ll get to 100 after the shoot. Getting there with boards and previs and all that stuff is just so much easier—a delight. I know it makes me sound lazy, but I’m a lot older now, so…”
In contrast to the great technology the team could access, Raskin notes that one of the bigger action pieces in the film had no previs whatsoever. The scene in question is when Harley escapes her captors, and in a violent frenzy the world around her becomes animated, as flowers intermingle with blood for each of her gory kills. “Since this was primarily a hand-to-hand combat sequence, previs wasn’t really necessary, as there were no special effects,” he says. “James wanted his stunt coordinator to come up with the fight without tying his hands to make the best one versus a huge group fight sequence. The scene was shot with three or four cameras, and then I saw the footage and began to figure out how to make it as exciting as possible while setting it to Louis Prima’s ‘Just a Gigolo.’ It was freeing to create the pacing and flow in the editing suite without any previs.” So how were the animated flowers added then? After the scene was cut, animators were handed the sequence so they could add imagery on top timed with the music for their first pass. When they completed the first pass, Raskin made further tweaks and had their “postvis” department make improvements as well. What’s postvis? It’s a rough first animation pass rendering, done by one of the companies who did previs for the film (in this case, Halon Entertainment) at a resolution roughly equal to a videogame. In postvis, they figure out the placement and movement of digital characters, effects and sets, which are then composited into shots as drafts and guidance so the bigger VFX companies can riff off that footage as they complete the film’s special effects.
–End of Free Excerpt – another 1,500 words await you in the full article in issue 44!–
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