Conclave

Today on Art of the Cut, we speak with Nick Emerson about editing Conclave, for which he’s nominated for an ACE Eddie for Best Edited Feature Film, Dramatic/Theatrical.

Nick has been on Art of the Cut before - about four years ago - when we discussed the film Emma.

His other credits include the feature films Lady MacBeth, Eileen, and Greta, and TV series including The Life and Adventures of Nick Nickleby and Life After Life.

Thank you so much for joining me. It’s great to have you on Art of the Cut again. 

Yes. Thanks for having me back. 

It’s great to have you back to talk about this. It was a film that was not originally on my radar, but then I started hearing about the buzz. I thought, “I’ve got to see what’s going on with this film.” And I really enjoyed it. It’s not the movie that I thought it was going to be, that’s for sure. 

That’s great. I’m super excited about it. I’m really pleased with the response. It seems to be connecting so well with audiences.

The film starts with this shot of the back of Ralph Fiennes, right? You don’t know who you’re looking at. You don’t know who he is in the movie. You’re just following this anonymous person down a street. Talk to me about the decision to start the film that way. 

There was - originally scripted and shot - actually some material ahead of that. It was sort of atmospheric establishers of Rome. There was also a very small scene of Cardinal Lawrence in his bedroom beforehand, but ultimately - through many screenings - you get a feeling about things.

It was a lot to do with first impressions of what it feels like when you arrive into the film. Ultimately, the decision was made to cut that material and land on the back of the protagonist’s head. Who is this person?

Where is he going? Where is he? Then all these pieces are drip-fed to you in terms of what you need to know and understand. He’s walking quickly. Maybe there’s some sort of crisis and then you discover, “Oh, it’s Rome!” Then, “Oh, he’s a priest.”

Then it’s really about setting up the idea of the film as a thriller. This is something that you’re just going to be entertained by and it’s going to be very exciting.

I just love that. You set up the expectation that the audience is going to follow this character through a journey, so just landing in the middle of something is an exciting way to start a film, I think.

We also spent a lot of time with the music in that area as well, in terms of getting the tone right in terms of giving the audience permission to be in that sort of thriller world. 

The first image of a film is so key because it’s completely unprejudiced. You don’t have a shot that precedes it to inform the next one. So it’s really a provocative image.

Editor Nick Emerson

The other thing I loved that you said was “the steady drip of information” that gets to the audience.

That’s so central to what we do as editors: figure out the pacing and the flow of that information that the audience receives. Absolutely! It’s a brilliant script. When I first read it, it was such a page turner. But inevitably - with any film and with any script - there’s a process of translation that takes place.

As soon as you put a lens on a camera and point it a certain way, you’re translating the text. And obviously the actors interpret it in their own way as well.

So I find that, when you shoot a film, there’s an abundance of information being communicated. It’s about being very deliberate about how and when you deliver what you want to communicate at any given time.

When to withhold and when when to reveal.That opening shot was a good example of that because there were shots that very clearly alluded to who this person was.

We managed to do that throughout the film actually, in terms of removing little bits for tension to play out for a while - to leave the audience slightly at sea for a moment or two, where they try to figure out what’s going on, and then eventually, you have to give them something.

When I was first starting out as an editor, another editor said to me, “Always assume the audience is ahead of you.” That’s good to bear in mind when you’re cutting a film because you can always put things back in if you need to make things clearer.

Talk about the montage that you cut together of the Cardinals arriving. 

It was separate scenes. That was sort of a dialogue scene at the beginning with some Cardinals arriving. There were also separate blocks of nuns preparing bedrooms and people arriving and going through the scanners with everything being bagged into lockers.

We tried it together with music, then we realized quite quickly that we were going to have to try to concertina it all together. The reason why we ended up there was because we ended up taking out a little dialogue scene that we just felt was ultimately superfluous, and that set us on the road of a montage.

It also suggests an idea or a theme that Edward was very keen to get across: which was all these modern elements in this very old patriarchy. You have people vaping and people on cell phones, and there are scanners.

There’s a little bit of absurdity to this very old institution. So being able to meld those images together helped create that theme, which was carried through the rest of the film.

Also the idea helps later on as well in terms of Sister Agnes breaking her silence - setting up the idea that the women in this world very much tend to the men and and look after them and don’t really have a voice.

There’s a tension that builds continuously through this film. Talk to me a little bit about how in editorial you built tension with pace and music and any other tools that you used. 

Tension is so much about context. It’s to do with the context of the script in terms of where you are in the story. The script sets up these opportunities for an editor to exploit. Also, the way that Edward shoots gives you plenty of opportunity to exploit the tension.

There were several ways in which we approached it. One was removing certain bits information beforehand to allow periods of tension or wonder.

Then we did some quite shocking visual interruptions which unsettled the audience and allows you to create long passages where previously you might have been under pressure to shorten, but because you’ve had these sort of jarring visual instances beforehand, it gives you a bit of capital in being able to let these sequences play out a bit longer.

It’s also about the little bits of scenes that were taken out of the film and connective tissue. It helped create the tension that we come out of a scene as early as we can and enter the next as late as possible.

So you get this sort of friction and tension between the scenes that you carry one thought or one idea from the previous scene straight over into the next scene. A good example of that is when Cardinal Lawrence has the papers that he’s found in the bedroom.

Previously there were scenes of him going to Cardinal Bellini’s rooms, but we just cut straight from Lawrence with the papers to Bellini with papers. So it’s just connecting all these things up, creating tremendous tension because you’re arriving into the scene wondering and just leaning into things. 

Tension was also created in the way that Edward approached the film formally and how you wanted to shoot it. We spoke a lot in the beginning about, the films of Alan Pakula, the Paranoid trilogy, Klute, All the President’s Man and The Parallax View, and we spoke about those in terms of: wouldn’t it be great if we could aspire to the form of those films?

There were very rigid set ups that we would not revisit more than once within a scene, so that creates this unease of tension, It’s so deliberate. You’re able to fracture that from time to time. That helps create tension as well in terms of being bold and just holding the shots for as long as we can.

Edward’s very interested in that in terms of seeing how long we can stay on a shot before the impulse to cut arrives. Also, music helps the tension.

We had a hard time temping this film. It was tricky. When I was assembling the film during production I tried to add a little bit of music and nothing seemed to set right. It was quite tricky, so we ended up taking a lot of it off, which actually helped us see these scenes for what they were and being able to let them play longer without music.

Then, when the music came in it was about choices: where to place it and when not to have it, because there’s a lot of silence in this film, which helps create tension.

But I think it’s very noisy silence: a lot of breathing and a lot of pens and paper being folded and people coughing in rooms that helps create tension and punctuate the air, I suppose. 

You mentioned that you discussed Klute and some other films. Did you go back and watch those again, or did you feel like you had enough of a mastery of them from some long ago viewing?

I’d seen your All The President’s Men recently, so I didn’t rewatch that, but I definitely watched The Parallax View and Klute. There’s one scene in particular that we adored and I love talking about: it’s a dialogue scene in The Parallax View where he goes to see his ex-girlfriend, who is very agitated about what’s happening to her and the conspiracy.

It’s a really long dialogue scene, but most of the scene is on Warren Beatty’s back in a mid-shot in the dark. You don’t see his face. He’s the star of the film and you don’t see it until the absolute key moment where she says something very specific and you cut to his face to see the reaction.

That is what we aspired to. Just to cut to the key moment for the reaction. It was really a useful reference. It’s a challenge as well to do that: to try and keep that form and that rigor, while telling a story that you want to be thrilling and you want to be entertaining.

Fiennes delivers a homily at some point to the Cardinals and there’s a use of slo-mo after that. Can you talk about the use of that slo-mo footage and what the value of that was to you? 

They shot that both ways. There was a slo-mo version of that shot, then there was the regular speed. It’s just such a crucial moment. He has made this homily and has sort of put his head above the parapet in terms of saying something quite left-field for a homily.

He’s also inadvertently made himself a candidate as well. To be with the character and feel the weight of all those people looking at him as he leaves was the reason for the slo-mo. And so that as an audience member you see every single one of those eyes and you can really feel that sort of pressure. It’s a beautiful shot, right?

We cut at a certain point. But I do remember he gets really quite close to the camera towards the end of it after that walk. We use slow motion in moments where it was very connected to Cardinal Lawrence’s interior mind: where he’s at in his journey or his inner anxieties or stresses at those moments.

There are various breaks with the continuity of time, like, where the second vote is announced as we see both what has happened - cardinals walking up to vote - and the votes being burned - which is in the future. Then also when the African cardinal sits and prays with Lawrence, it’s intercut with later voting. Can you talk to us about those breaks in time?

The voting scenes, were very deliberately storyboarded and shot-listed because we were very keen that we didn’t want to repeat ourselves and for those to be boring so that we were able to have many different styles of shots for those to manipulate them. That was just to create an unusual rhythm that you have not seen before. 

Let me interrupt for a second to explain to anybody who hasn’t seen the film yet that there are multiple votes that the Cardinals have, and you don’t want them all to be the same, right? You’ve got to make a variety between one vote and the next vote.

Absolutely. You have to change the rhythms so that they’re interesting each time you come to them, but also that the rhythm of these ballots or these votes reflects where the story is at as well. It’s 100 men in a hall, writing and pieces of paper. So the one you mentioned about Cardinal Adeyemi I’m particularly pleased with that.

That strange altering of time was because when we were putting it together, I just had this instinct when they’ve had the conversation in the bedroom and he’s confronted him and they sit down and he comforts him.

I just have this instinct just to cut to a huge close up of Rafe (Fiennes). I knew it was coming. I cut at a certain point, and then there was still some interesting footage from that scene, so we decided, let’s return to that.

Then as soon as we started playing with it, we realized that it actually created this effect of Cardinal Lawrence looking back on what has just happened. He was being a sort of a voyeur on the previous scene.

It was him sort of reflecting on, “Oh my goodness, I’ve finally stepped over the line and I’m beginning to police these cardinals, and get involved. He’s described his character as a reluctant detective and that that is really the moment where he essentially confronts him, so it’s him reflecting on that move that he’s made to get involved. It was being able to cut to that and cut back, and you get a sense that he’s thinking about it.

There’s a moment in one of the hallways in the dormitory where Fiennes and John Lithgow’s characters are talking, and you stay on a single two-shot for the entire conversation. Let’s talk about the choice not to go into coverage, not to use close-ups. 

That’s entirely Edward’s choice, because that was shot one way. There was no other shots to go to. There was a reverse of that, which was mainly just an exit shot from much further away - sort of on a telephoto lens of John Lithgow striding off towards camera in the reverse shot, but we elected not to use it because we wanted to stay with Cardinal Lawrence and on Rafe’s face, thinking about what just happened without having an exit shot. That was a deliberate directorial choice.

Interestingly, with the music we scored where we might have a close-up, if that makes any sense. We had these little punctuations of music or stabs - just these little accents - and they were actually your close-ups - just a gentle accent underlining a certain moment.

Those were placed very strategically. If you go back and look at it, it was all one shot. That’s very much Edward’s style. He likes to have these moments of unbroken photography. He doesn’t indulge in that either. He really believes that they have to be earned and they have to be special moments.

Quite often what you do in those instances is a lot of editorial landscaping around those scenes to allow them to be able to sit. It’s one shot and I think you do lean into those shots. As modern audiences, we do expect cuts, and when they don’t come, it’s a bit unsettling as well.

You use that word “landscaping,” which is a word that Joe Walker used with me when he was talking about 12 Years a Slave. 

I probably stole from Joe.

It’s a good steal. He used it for the same idea. There was a big, long shot, and he said in order to have that be able to sustain for that length, there’s landscaped moments - like you’re faster earlier or you get out at a certain time abruptly - that makes the longer shot hold and gives more impact 

100%. That’s what it is, is setting it up. Like I was saying about “creating capital” for these moments - for these longer scenes. Another instance of where I think we did it quite effectively.

It’s not an unbroken shot I’m referring to, but it’s quite a slow sequence of Fiennes in the papal apartments working his way around and looking through things.

It’s quite a slow sequence, but in the build up to that - when he breaks the the seal to enter the room - there’s a series of 4 or 5 very fast cuts on the seal itself, which is not necessarily landscaping, but it’s just a this punctuation of a shattering of the rhythm that then hopefully unsettles the audience, and buys you a bit of unease and capital to let this kind of sequence play out.

There’s a great one scene with Stanley Tucci’s character and Fiennes, and Tucci’s saying “It is a war! It is a war!” I didn’t notice it when I watched the film, but I noticed in the promo clip that you jumped the 180 on the most critical line where Tucci says, “It is a war!” Talk to me about the decision to do that. 

I do remember when I was looking at the rushes, “Is this a mistake?” It absolutely wasn’t. It’s precisely for the reason that if you break a line at the right moment, it can just be so arresting and very shocking. But you have to be quite careful when you do it.

In all of the shots that lead up to the jump, in the whole scene there’s probably six cuts and it’s probably three pages of dialogue.

This is Edward’s brilliance. He knows what a shot does. He knows what a certain kind of shot does so well that he really plans for these moments into these dramatic peaks. We took a long time on that scene to arrive at where it was at in terms of where to cut and where to have the reactions.

I’m pleased with how it turned out. It was entirely intended, but, not to cut back and forth but just for 1 or 2 key moments with it within the scene to really shatter that line.

I also noticed in that scene that the coverage is mostly over-the-shoulder two-shots.

You’re able to see both parties react and listen and respond. That’s a choice to shoot that way, because we wanted to create this rigor of being able to actually look at Stanley Tucci, but yet feel what Feinnes’ character is feeling just with the way he moves, or that you feel the reaction to things without having to cut every time to see a reaction.

We want to stay on Stanley Tucci delivering a line. We can we can feel the reaction to it. You can feel the discomfort.

So that’s why there are a lot of two-shots and mid-shots in the film. Then we withhold those close-ups - generally for Fiennes. And actually Sister Agnes has quite a few close-ups.

I’m going to misquote somebody terribly here, but, Hitchcock always used to say about having two humans in the same frame together that it just creates such a tension, whereas if they’re separate, the shots you lose a little bit.

Especially when you’ve got such strong actors that can hold those shots without having to go into shot/reverse shot/reverse, you can let them be. That’s all part of his approach to this film.

Edward’s approach to this film was that it could be very spare with those cuts. 

Is this your first movie with Edward? 

Yes, and it was a brilliant experience. We’re doing our second together at the minute. So yeah, it was a good collaboration.

Clearly, if you got picked up for the next film! That’s great. Do you know, how he chose you or what movies that he’s seen of yours before that made him want to work with you. 

The producer on the film, Tessa Ross, is someone I had worked with before. I think, Tessa had suggest me to Edward. He’d seen Lady Macbeth, which he particularly liked, and I think there was something in there.

The approach of that film in terms of its rigor appealed to him. It was such a great experience. We clicked very quickly in the cutting room. He has this wonderful way of working, which was quite different to what I was used to. We had an assembly of the film, but we didn’t watch it at all. We just watched the first ten minutes, then got started.

We focused so much on the detail early on, really fine-cutting the film in those first days of the edit, and what I find for me was it allows you to sort of focus on the detail, and you can set aside the part of your brain that’s maybe thinking about the overall picture because you’re so focused on this detail.

Then when you come ‘round to watching the whole film, it’s this great gift because it’s so fresh.

When you watch it as a whole piece you can really get a sense of, “Wait. This is way too slow.” or “We need to pick up the pace here.” or “Something’s not working as well as it needs to be in the story.” So it’s really a brilliant way for me to work.

For Edward, if a cut jars him, he is unable to get back into the film. He needs it to be a certain degree of perfection, even in those early stages, so it gives you a kind of objectivity.

So often I’ve talked to people about how do you maintain objectivity. So that’s a way to do it, which is kind of funny because it’s an immersive way that you would think would be do the opposite, maybe. But it clearly worked.

It was really valuable and sort of freeing. On this next film we work through very chronologically. We very seldom jump around the film. We’re very meticulous working on these ten minute sequences. Then eventually you get to the point where you maybe watch a reel of the film then you go back.

I feel like - when he’s directing me in the edit - it’s almost like he’s directing an actor. He’s a very good communicator and he knows what he wants but is very open to collaboration. He’s a great explorer of the film.

He’s very keen just to look down every single avenue that it’s possible for every sequence of scene, because he thinks we spent all this time and money on set, and the actors and crew have done all this great work. We owe it to them to spend as much time exploring every single shot and option that we have.

Were there any structural differences with the script? Any scenes deleted for some reason or another? 

There were a few scenes that were deleted. There was nothing wrong with them particularly. It was just for dramatic reasons. For example, we were talking earlier about Cardinal Lawrence and going to confront Adeyemi in his chambers about his past.

There was a scene that preceded that to give you a little bit more information about what you discover in that scene. We took it out because something’s happened in the cafeteria where they’re eating. Fiennes wonders, “What is that?” Then he investigates, so again, you’re drip-feeding.

There were a few little scenes like that, but structurally it was very similar to the script. There was one thing that we moved up a little bit earlier, which was the scene where Lawrence goes to Cardinal Tremblay to confront him about what Archbishop Wozniak has said about the rumors.

We just felt - watching the film, on balance - that Cardinal Lawrence held that information for a little bit too long before acting upon it or confronting Tremblay so we moved it up a little bit. The script was super. The architecture of it was so strong. We always felt we had a strong structure which allows you to go into those details early on.

You mentioned that Edward collaborated with you in the edit room almost like he would an actor. How do you feel like he was treating you like an actor? 

The consideration, I think, and the care and the communication. I don’t spend a lot of time on sets, so maybe that’s not the way it is, but it’s certainly how I imagine it.

It’s the eloquence of how he explains things and the logic of it. And sometimes it’s not logical, but it’s just a sense of something or a flavor of something.

He sees things in the rushes that I don’t see. Then, as soon as he points them out, I think, “Wow! There really is something there in terms of performance” and things like that. It’s generally just about his careful way of working.

And his consideration. He’s very kind. Communicating and being both freeing and collaborative, but also being very instructive as well. You just feel like you’re in safe and confident hands and this person knows what they’re doing and what what they want to get out of this material.

What was collaboration like before he came to the cutting room? 

During production, I was in London and he was in Rome. I would send him scenes as soon as I had them ready, then we would catch up over the weekend after he’d had a chance to look at them. Also I made a few visits to Rome to work with him on the weekends during production.

If there’s something I thought was not working well or something we needed to work on, he would be very open to me. There was basically nothing that I had to ask for.

Any special technical stuff that we can discuss on how you were getting footage since you were working remotely or how you were sending him cuts? 

Basically rushes were processed in Rome, then were downloaded to us via Aspera. I think. Then cuts were shared on PIX. We didn’t do any remote sharing of screens or anything like that.

I had another question about the closing images. After the smoke goes up to announce the new pope, there’s a series of images there - a montage. Can you talk a little bit about wrapping up the film? 

We’d always intended to end on the shot of the nuns, but there were the scenes shooting around the bedrooms, then you hear the cheers through the walls. It’s a really nice transition because it allows the time to pass.

So you nearly end where you started with this one man in this room and then this wonderful moment where the light is let in. It’s a neat way of finishing the story of the plot of who is elected in the end.

But also landing back in the personal story with the cheers echoing through the halls, and then you land back in this very sort of small, modest room, straight back into the personal, into windows opening.

Lawrence has found this sense of freedom. He looks at the window when you hear the laughter of the nuns and that’s looking towards the future. I think it’s a very positive ending to the film for all sorts of reasons. Positive, because he sort of finds a sense of peace at the end. 

Nick, thank you so much for talking to us about Conclave. Good luck during awards season.

Thank you very much.