Today on Art of the Cut, we speak with director, Rudy Valdez, and his editor Viridiana Lieberman about the new documentary, Carlos about guitar legend, Carlos Santana.
Rudy is a two-time Emmy Award-winning filmmaker. His HBO documentary The Sentence which was a Sundance Audience Award-winner. He’s also worked on numerous other projects as a cinematographer.
Viridiana - Viri, to her friends and podcast fans - also worked on The Sentence with Rudy as his editor, and she’s a director in her own right, directing the ESPN documentary, Born to Play, which she also edited. Together, she and Rudy are off on their next project already, a documentary series called Choir.
Art of the Cut: Carlos
Rudy, you've worked with Viri before. How did you meet and what what made you decide that was going to be a good connection and she would be a good editor for you?VALDEZ: With my first film, The Sentence, which Viri edited for me, some producers were bringing in a lot of different editors, some really sort of well-established, award-winning editors and Viri came in — who was a recommendation from a very trusted friend of mine — and gosh, I wish Viri wasn't listening, cause I'm really going to praise her — but I think we were 5 or 10 minutes in and I could tell immediately that we were in sync, sort of the way we approach not only sort of empathy and storytelling, but also the visual part of the empathy of storytelling and really embracing verité footage. It was the best interview process that I'd ever gone through with anybody for anything, so much so that I forgot to hire her.
LIEBERMAN: This is. True. This is true. I went home and I said to my wife, “Wow, that was the best first interview I've ever had in my life. We were walking to the train after telling each other our life stories.” And she's said, “So you got the job?” And I said, “I don't know! I actually don't know.”.
VALDEZ: I think I might have texted you.
LIEBERMAN: You did. I want to praise Rudy on that moment because not only was he so candid and transparent with me in the moment of kind of what people were asking of him and what he wanted, but also that he just kind of wanted to hear what I thought. And he showed me some footage and I just immediately started saying what I would do with it and how much I appreciate it and how powerful it was. And then most of the rest of that interview was really just us as people. It wasn't even about the project, which was amazing.
Rudy, What was the process of editing the film and how early was Viri part of the process?VALDEZ: The funny thing is very comes on way before people even know she comes on a lot of my projects. She's one of the first people I call. We've not only created this really wonderful working relationship, but just we're very close friends as well. Much like all the other films we've been able to to make together, what I love about working with Viri — and again, I wish she wasn't here — what I love about….
LIEBERMAN: I’m so glad this is being recorded. I'm really excited. I can just play it every morning when I wake up. Yeah.
VALDEZ: I'm very much an emotional director. My first pass of anything is pure gut and emotion. It's like, this is what I see this as sort of visually, emotionally, the sort of ebbs and flows of it. And what's funny is there's a quote in the Carlos film that Clive Davis says, and I always feel like it's very much Viri and I, where Clive says, “What Carlos said is he wants to connect the molecules to the light. And what he's saying is he wants to…” and I feel like I come to Viri and I say, “There's like a… and then there's a… and I really want this to be a…” and she says, “Yes, I understand.” She understands what I'm saying. I’ll say, “Then it's like a dream sequence…” She just says, “I know what you mean.” It's funny because we worked on one film where there was another editor in the room and he kind of commented that we never really completed sentences. I sort of start saying something and she’d just say, “Yep, yep, yep, yep.” Then I’d say, “but then it needs a…” and she’d say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” We just have this real in-sync thing that happens. So Carlos started with me saying, “This can't be a woe-is-me film. We really have to show the spiritual journey, this musical journey, this journey of a man and figure out how the ebb and flow of those three elements can be carried throughout this journey.” And we set out to figure that out.
Viri, do you want to talk about that opening two minutes before the title sequence?LIEBERMAN: Well, hats off to our additional editor, Sierra Neal, who came in and helped spruce that up as well. Originally, we had talked about opening the film with just a man in the desert by the fire chatting. It was very quiet, and then there was a lot of conversation and desire to really celebrate Carlos as the icon and the process of how he got there and remind the public of this epic legend. What excited me most about that section of the film is the sensory element of it, because that was something we wanted to do with the whole film. So the way Carlos processes the world, his own story, is so sensory. It's what he hears, what he smells, what he tastes and how he connects. You see it throughout the film. We have these beats that we lovingly called Cosmic Carlos beats — in a loving way, not in a critical way at all — because we wanted to celebrate the way his mind works. So that opening was to just strike you right away. That is who Carlos is: the joy of his music. Everything is at play. All of the elements are at play, with a song that kind of hits you and strikes you in your core and you almost want to jump out of your seat. So all of that was kind of embracing it and also him getting settled in to tell your story. It's an exciting stretch that just hopefully captures all the tools you'll have throughout the film to utilize and really experience him.
VALDEZ: That opening stretch also works so well because — and I'm humbly saying this — but just like the rest of the film, it's not a letdown after that. There are so many films that come out guns blazing in the first two minutes, and then: “That's all we got!” We come out firing on all cylinders, but we're going to continue to back that up with this amazing story and this amazing music and this amazing energy.
I've got a chicken and an egg question, which is: which came first, the elements that you had or the story you were trying to tell?VALDEZ: That's a really great question. I think that the search for archive happened immediately, once we knew we were working on the Carlos Santana documentary, the first thing you do is: ARCHIVE! At the very beginning there were a lot of different ideas about what the approach was going to be, but what happened, right after this film started, was that the pandemic hit. What that meant was there was going to be a pause in when we were going to start filming because he was going to go on tour with Earth, Wind and Fire, and I was going to go to some of those dates and film with him and do all these things. But what happened instead of that was that I started doing these phone calls with Carlos to record to possibly use in the documentary, like maybe those were going to be our interviews because we had no idea what was happening in the larger landscape of the lockdown and all of those things, but what ended up happening was Carlos and I just started chatting and talking and getting to know each other, and one of the wonderful things I was able to experience was that he's an amazing storyteller. He has an unbelievable memory for all of these tiny little moments within his life. He's telling you about things from 1969, 1978, 1982.
What that immediately led me to want to do was say, “I don't want to interview 10 other musical contemporaries to reflect on who Carlos was.” I think that we could go through this film and live in his voice, live in his storytelling, and then, as as we started to discover, he's a great storyteller, we then started to uncover wonderful archive. And that allowed us to be able to live not only in his stories, but in these sections of time without having to come to this contemporary artist who was maybe there at the time, but is now reflecting back, because I felt like that would have continued to take you out of that moment in time that we were trying to express to you. So in a way, the film sort of presented itself to us as we started to uncover all of these these different elements, because there were so much great stuff there.
Viri, tell me a little bit about how you started to construct scenes. Is that the first thing that you have to do? You say, “I don't know where this is going to live in the film, but I'm going to do the Fillmore scene.”.LIEBERMAN: That's exactly what it was. So I'm a firm believer in the card wall. I love building a wall. I love putting those cards up. He saves them after every project. Someday I will go somewhere and there’ll be a gallery of all of our crazy cards.
But yes, it was just building the pieces. One of the first things I built, it's small now in the film, but early on I was trying to convince Rudy, “We can just have this giant section of him just getting ready in his seat and he's telling you how he wakes up in the morning and he washes the shame and the guilt and then he says, ‘No F — that! I'm going to go navigate the world!’” So I cut that and it was almost like a style test. I cut that and then a few other super-atmospheric kind of experimental brushstrokes of scenes and spaces and just thoughts that were going through to build this palette and this landscape and soundscape to see how it was resonating for Rudy. And he was really into that.
There were things we just knew we had to do. We knew we were going to have to cut the Woodstock scene. We knew we were going to have to do the Fillmore. There were must-do's that were on the list. But we first started on the fringe with more of the personal before we went there, because in a weird way it kind of felt easy because we knew that it had to happen and it was just about kind of capturing the best way in and honoring the way he told it. The rest of this stuff was how do we honor Carlos and the way he's wired and evoke it through a visual feast, and some kind of space to have some breath, because the other thing about Carlos, that’s so wonderful in this film — and what Rudy does with all of his films that's so powerful — is human beings.
His history is enormous and he's a legend, but he also is a person, and Rudy is so good at creating those spaces, building that trust and kind of honoring that. And so this film was also trying to do that. So I wanted to start in scenes where he felt as much of himself — away from the things that we've seen a million times or the things that everybody could read about and see and find the archive on their own. So yes, starting to build the bricks — did them very separate and thematically, but a lot of it was us trying to find the voice and the approach, which was exciting.
There's great interplay between the interview pieces and the space that was left for music. With, for example, the Fillmore or “the Washing the Shame Away scene?” How did you choose what piece of music was going to be the heart of that scene?
VALDEZ: One of the first things that I showed to Viri when we were uncovering some of that home video archive was the moment when Carlos is singing, “I'm not afraid. I'm not afraid, I'm not afraid.” He's describing that moment — post molestation — and we're looking at the timestamps on some of those videos and things. And we're looking at when that Rolling Stone article came out and it felt like it was speaking to that in a time frame. So there were things that made sense and there were things that were speaking out to us. And then during the course of making the film, obviously producers and people who are working on this film with us are saying, “You have to have certain songs and you have to have certain things. You have to have Black Magic Woman.”
LIEBERMAN: More hits, more hits.
VALDEZ: Yeah: “more hits.” I think what we were very careful of and what we did NOT want to do is just go from song to song to song. “Black Magic Woman,” for example, is played in the film, but it's also emblematic of all of the different band members that he had. You see “Black Magic Woman” with three different lead singers singing that song, but that happens to fit directly into the moment where we're talking about all the different iterations of the Santana band. So we were never playing a song for the sake of playing a song. We were always trying to find those moments that allowed it to play that song, but let it be emblematic of a part of the journey because he has such a long journey. You can find moments where the song is emblematic of that thing. And so my hat's off to Viri for finding a lot of those moments and making them fit and work within the larger sort of human story we were telling throughout and then saying, “In this time frame, this is what was happening and this is how we can use that song.” So we were able to satisfy the want for the hits and satisfy our need for continuing to use those to propel the story forward, not just have them in for the sake of having them in.
LIEBERMAN: Yeah, one that came late was “Evil Ways.” When the band is spiraling out, there was a live recording of “Evil Ways” that just was such a cacophony. It was just kind of madness. That was a wonderful moment when we didn't feel forced. It found its way into a section of the film and really drove it in a kind of a wonderfully maniacal way. Yeah.
That's the other interesting thing about the music, is that you could do “Black Magic Woman,” but there's probably ten different versions of it you could choose based on the theme you're going for or the feeling.LIEBERMAN: Yeah. And having it rooted in the time — that was something that Rudy and I always wanted to try to stay true to. It wasn't: the best recording ever! Or have them all from the new album, it was about trying to make it present and in the narrative and of that time or of that space or with those band members. That stuff was really important to keep it rooted.
When you were thinking about that part of the film, how quickly did you find the music for a given section?VALDEZ: One of the other things, after uncovering a lot of that home video footage was we uncovered him playing, his his son playing the piano, there's all this other music. So we said, “it's going to be in his voice. It's going to be in his hands, in his music.” And so, Viri did an amazing job of combing through and really digging through a lot of that archive and that music — that home video music — and really making the most out of it because it wasn't always full songs. It was him jamming but really allowing that to be our bed. He was also our bed of music underneath.
LIEBERMAN: I wanted to score the whole film from those VHS tapes. It was wonderful because he would just play a beat and then he would jam for ten minutes or an hour. They were wonderful. So, I just grabbed portions and rearranged a bit. But Rudy very early on said, “This will be composed by Carlos's music in all the forms that it comes” because he plays, he jams, he tries, he practices, he warms up a guitar. Everything he's doing is such a musical language. So when we found those tapes, I was obsessed. And that moment when he tells the story about the communication with the birds that his father taught him, when we got to score that with one of his jams from those tapes, my soul took off.
Talk about the pacing of a given story using the music, because you didn't just start with a 20 second cut of music then dip it under for an extended interview bite. It was weaving interview bites and instrumental and lyrics. And the interview would come back five seconds later. Talk to me about pacing that out.
LIEBERMAN: I think what was so exciting about getting to cut this film — because I hadn't gotten to cut a music doc before — I want it to feel like a cohesive weave. I don't want start and stops. It's going to feel chapter-esque because he's telling these stories, but in those transitions and how they flow, it should feel like a conversation. And I want the music to feel almost seamless between the hits and the jams and the quiet and the nature and all of that stuff. So the pacing and the rhythm was very much as a complete piece and it wasn't kind of moment to moment. It’s just like life. It ebbs and flows and it gets chaotic and it gets quiet and it gets personal and then it explodes because the whole world is paying attention.
Once again, when I was building those bricks — I'm a real slow burn lady — I start way out and everybody reels me in. I mean, Rudy doesn't reel me in, thank God. He will let me do it, but at some point we will have those other cooks show up — and that's fair. There were moments that were naturally going to lend themselves to pick it up. When he was on the road and when fame was coming blasting through him, but those moments when we could rest and just be with him, that all came naturally with the pace of how he told it too. Sometimes he would really set it. And so that was lovely.
I've always joked that I could watch raw footage as a movie and be happy. I just love watching footage and playing with it and finding ways to really study a frame. I'm that nerdy about it. And so first cut's really set a nice pace that even when we do climb and have to build, things that are more of a ride, you still get something that feels natural.
Rudy, talk to me about orchestrating the overall pace of the movie. There are great moments, of calm or even sadness, and then all of a sudden you'll get a montage of crazy life. How do you determine that the audience is ready for one of those things or another?VALDEZ: Again, I'm an emotional director, and so there will be times when Viri and I are working on a project and my note won't be: “This scene isn't working” or “this scene isn't “this.”” It's: “I want to feel a little more love here.” “I want to feel happy here.” “I want to feel…” We've learned this by taking notes from executives and other producers: sometimes they'll say, “I'm bored in this section” but it's not that the scene is bad, it's that maybe what's leading up to it isn't preparing you for that thing. So we're always finding that ebb and flow of the emotional journey throughout that process. So with this, I feel like because we were always trying to find that balance of the musical journey, the spiritual journey, the human journey — the key to it, I think was always when the spiritual became the forefront of the story for that brief moment in time, we were never too far from the musical side of that or the human side of that. And when “Supernatural” takes over the world and takes over everything, it's music, music, music, music. But what comes shortly after that is the human, and the human leads to the spiritual. So it was all sort of pacing itself as long as we never allowed it to become just the musical journey, just the spiritual journey, just the human journey, we had to find the ebb and flow of never departing too far from any of those elements at once, and that helped dictate and create the pace for the film.
There's also great humor. I wanted to talk to Viri about at least one cut that made me laugh out loud, which is the story of Carlos's first joint.LIEBERMAN: Well, he describes how a joint was left in front of him and he had never smoked it. And the joint was basically saying, “Come and get me.” And he eventually says, “Well, maybe,” And then he kind of makes this noise of a lighter clicking and he then takes a hit and he makes this gesture of his brain exploding There were attempts — not by us, by others — to add sound effects to that, to make it shatter in the seats. But we liked the fact that HE made the noise. Even the click — I remember. Rudy, you thought I had put a click of a lighter in there — but that was just him making that sound with his mouth. He's such a good storyteller. So a lot of the comic timing — although of course I could wait for the cut and then blast back into the Fillmore — yes, that's in editing, but it also is Carlos just taking that moment to act it out, to think about it, to have the moment, to wait for the reaction. He's just a very seasoned storyteller and naturally sets me up for that. But that was a really fun moment.
But what you're leaving out is: that you drop the music in a cut!LIEBERMAN: Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. So it's right when he's lighting it. So the music's going and it was just ambient sound and then I cut. I am obsessed with sound cuts. I love when they're active. I mean, I don’t want to take you out of the film, but something that kind of elevates it? I did that very early on. When we cut the Fillmore scene the first time ever, it just cut out. That's so good. This is an editing podcast! That's the magic that you pay attention to those details because that was something I was very proud of.
I loved things like when Carlos talks about his drug trip at Woodstock. Jerry Garcia gives him a tab of acid and there is a great subtle heartbeat sound effect in there.
LIEBERMAN: I cut that sequence early on. When the Woodstock stage announcer says, “Would you welcome Santana!” I cut that in a sequence where Carlos is sitting there and then he hears it and Rudy was the one that landed the timing, the comedic timing of that, where he doesn't finish his sentence. Carlos says, “I'm sitting there and…” and the announcement interrupts him. So it's interacting. The past, the present. It's all kind of handing off. I loved that. Yeah, that was a good comic timing for that one, too.
And Rudy, you were mentioning multiple times that you're a director about feel. And there are great sensory moments, like when Carlos talks about leaving home to be a full time musician, strange, like dreamy musical vibe, funky choices of archive. Talk to me about those. And it felt more like you were going for a feeling than to tell a story.VALDEZ: Yeah, it's very much about finding the feeling and not just pacing and sound, but also the visual. Because I think the visual when you're seeing the birds go and you're seeing the butterflies there's just like a palette-cleansing that sometimes happens. I think that that's kind of our job as filmmakers — and this is one of the reasons why I really love working with Viri — is that neither of us throughout this process go into any of our films and say, “We're the expert on this and we're going to tell you the best version of this.”
I've worked with other editors who become “experts” on things and it loses a certain element of humanity — of empathy — in the storytelling when you're all of a sudden the expert. How am I ever going to be an expert on Carlos Santana? I think our job is having the patience with the story that's being given to us and figuring out the emotion that it's evoking and how we can enhance that. How we can use the tools in front of us through the archive, through the music, through the visual palette and say what is being said in this amazing storyteller that's in front of us and how can we make that even better? What are they trying to say emotionally? Or what is emblematic of that that is at our disposal — not taking something out of thin air and being like smash cut! Star wipe! It's like, no, like what is of the element of the palette that we have that can continue to do that?
LIEBERMAN: Rudy's been wanting me to do a star wipe in one of his films since the day I met him.
VALDEZ: She's unable to do a star wipe, so we can't use that in any of our films.
LIEBERMAN: I noticed that Ron Howard is an executive producer on the film and he's done a bunch of great musical documentaries: the Beatles documentary, the Pavarotti documentary. Notes from him?
VALDEZ: What's fascinating about having Ron Howard as a producer on this — and Imagine Documentaries themselves — is there is an expectation, there is a world into which we're coming when we're making an Imagine Documentary produced by Ron Howard film. There's an expectation. We received wonderful notes from Imagine and from Ron and from everybody throughout this process, but I think what they also embraced with us was that we had a unique POV on this and we had a unique vision on this. I will say that they're wonderful about supporting my vision and letting me, and my team that I bring together really explore that and let us go as far as we can with it, and we're able to sort of live up to the expectations of what they want to put out.
I worked as an editor for a few years and technically when I was making my first film, I could have edited it, but I knew right away that I was too close to the subject matter and needed somebody else to help bridge that gap of understanding why I love this story. It's a plus that Viri and I have such a shorthand and are like-minded in our wont to stay in verité and go far out and do all of these things. But a great editor isn't a tool: somebody that you tell, “Go and put that star wipe in!” It's somebody that you're collaborating with equally to say, let's together tell this beautiful story hand-in-hand. And I think it's a very special relationship: a director and editor. And I sometimes feel bad when I speak to other editors and they say, “I don't have that experience!”.
Santana's sister, in an interview from the film.
LIEBERMAN: I am very spoiled. I am very spoiled that a majority of my career has been cutting with Rudy because my norm, my desire, the way I work best, is in a collaborative way. I want a seat at the table. Of course I'm honoring someone's vision, but I'm so excited to pitch ideas and try things and sharpen the machete and take something out and see what happens. And to have that confidence and that space, and of course, at the end of the day, it's what Rudy wants and honoring the themes and the tone and the space that he wants to cultivate. I don't want to be a set of hands. I want to do more. So few people know what editors do. And for those of us that are editors, whenever we kind of all gather in a room, it's this real world magic moment where we're kind of like: “I get it! I know! I know what we do and how important and how wonderful it is and how exciting and how vital,” and Rudy has made me feel more seen than anybody. So I'm very lucky and spoiled and now completely entitled. It's a mess.
VALDEZ: She’s a monster now.
But she will not execute your star wipes so it only goes so far.LIEBERMAN: I WILL execute his star wipes. I’m just waiting for the perfect moment! I'm saving it for some kind of perfect comic timing, someday in the future during his most serious, dry, deep...
Some of those Cosmic Carlos montage moments could have used a star wipe.LIEBERMAN: Wait. There was archive in this movie with a star wipe. There was a piece of archive that utilized star wipes between every one of his songs and I sent that to Rudy and I asked, “Well, is it time?”
What you did use was split screens during Woodstock.LIEBERMAN: We should be completely transparent about this. So the Woodstock film….
So you’re just going to blame this on Thelma Schoonmaker and Martin Scorsese?LIEBERMAN: Yes. My first cut of Woodstock, we were utilizing footage from multiple sources. The price to use that footage in that way was more than the entire film times ten. So we had to retain those shots and you could only do a certain amount of cuts. Every time you made a cut: cha-ching! I think creatively we've made peace with it. It is a bold choice, and I think for that film it was a phenomenal choice. But to utilize that footage, we had to honor the way it was used originally. So I wouldn't say it was a choice of OUR film, but ultimately did kind of add something from the time. I think it really did. And we were able to emphasize some of the squares. We made a couple choices to work with it and honor it for what it was, but that was like a coping process with a legal and a price tag. But it's magical. I mean, that Woodstock story, that performance… that was one of the first things Rudy showed me. We just watched Soul Sacrifice together, and that was such a otherworldly feeling. Wow, we have to really experience this. You have to be able to play it and have that moment there.
VALDEZ: That process is such a reality of documentary filmmaking at its core, because especially when you're telling a story that spans 50 years, most of what you're running into are barriers, are brick walls! There is nothing that exists from this time to this time, figure out a way to tell that story. And with this, we had this amazing footage and we were just sort of going at it with reckless abandonment. We wanted to see what we could build out of it first without any restrictions. And we built something that we thought we really, really loved and worked very well. And then we were told, well, to do that. It's going to be a very large number because they charge you by the cut and you're not allowed to manipulate their footage. But what ends up happening when you're in a room of creatives is: “Oh, here's our sandbox. These are the parameters.” So we sat back for like a day or so and then we thought, “Okay, let's figure out what that means.” And you find something that works. That's the fun part of this. Even though there was a moment of: “UGH! We can't do what we want,” as soon as we get over that brief moment, we thought, “Awesome! We get to find a creative way out of this,” and that's the fun of doing this. How do we still do it with these blinders on or with this light off? We have to figure out a way to brighten up that room after they told us, we have to turn this light off and we figure out a way.
Limitations are always a huge plus for art.LIEBERMAN: Yeah, especially in docs. I haven't cut a ton of narrative, but I will say in docs it’s so exciting to have to work with what you have: true verité and limited archive and all that stuff makes for some really inventive moves and that's so exciting.
VALDEZ: Which helped me early on with my style of filmmaking because I never like inserts and super wide shots. And so what I started to do when I was a DP. I just wouldn't shoot them. It forced my editors of that time and it created a style for me because I'd rather live in this medium and like move with it and do this stuff. But if I give them insert, wide, insert, wide they can cut my material up as much as they want, so I just stopped giving it to them, which forced them into a style.
VALDEZ: We had to find that footage. It was a big search for that.
LIEBERMAN: Oh, boy. Especially Tijuana.
VALDEZ: There's obviously a lot of footage of Tijuana, but for it to feel like the right era, we were very limited. We had a great team sort of scouring and looking for that footage.
LIEBERMAN: Well, especially when he refers to it as “Star Wars Cantina,” you're sitting there thinking, “How do we do this tastefully? The way that he means, without dishonoring it in any way or making fun of some aspect of Tijuana?”
VALDEZ: He was painting a picture for us, and we had to figure out the visual version of that.
Can somebody talk about your additional editor Sierra Neal?LIEBERMAN: Sierra was wonderful. She came on as an additional editor at the end and really sprinkled some magic on some sections of this film and just amplified all the things Rudy and had dreamed of doing in the race to the finish. That open was certainly a part of that. We also had a slew of incredible archive come in of Santana touring. I had moved on to another Rudy project and she came in and we got this new archive, so she really expanded and brought it in for a landing in an amazing way with all the additional archive that we had. We had a whole other archive team come in. It was really this wild final chapter, and Sierra was wonderful.
VALDEZ: We have to also shout out Lizz Morhaim, one of our producers: instrumental in the edit as well. She's amazing.
LIEBERMAN: She was somebody who loves to watch every single frame and hunt for the absolute best thing. She would send me the most wonderful things, just that great head turn or the teeniest minute details that allowed us to make such an epic weave. I know she and Sierra were in the trenches making sure — until the very last second — that only the best got in there.
Thank you both for joining me to talk about this film.
