Eden

Today on Art of the Cut we speak with editor Matt Villa, ACE, about working with Ron Howard on his new film, Eden.

Matt’s been on Art of the Cut before for his editing of Elvis for which he was nominated for an Oscar, a BAFTA and an ACE Eddie.

His other films include The Great Gatsby, Peter Rabbit 2, and The Lego Batman Movie for which he was nominated for an ACE Eddie.

Matt, as usual, I love Ron Howard movies and this is no exception. Congratulations on a great project. Thanks for being on Art of the Cut.

Thank you very much, Steve. Thanks for having me. Always a pleasure.

This is your first film with Ron, correct?

It is. Yes. Yeah.

He’s had a few long-term editing collaborators. How did it start with you?

Probably the truth of it is that it was being made in Australia using Australian rebates and incentives. Part of that was that the post-production was all going to be done down here, as opposed to his previous films, where he shot around the world, generally posting back in Los Angeles.

Given those constraints, they sought me out and Ron was very complimentary about my previous work. I was absolutely stoked because I’ve been an enormous fan of Ron’s since Happy Days. It was a dream come true when that call came through.

I’d actually met him previously when he was shooting 13 Lives up in Queensland, Australia. I was working on Elvis up there and we both happened to be staying in the same apartment building.

I met him in the foyer one day. Then a couple of years later, this opportunity came up.

As an example of how big a fan I am of his, I took the my first zoom call with him in my office at home, and in order to play it cool I had to pan my camera away from the Cocoon poster that was hanging in the background, but not so far as to pan in to shot the Apollo 13 poster.

The film starts with the quote: “In pain we find both truth and salvation.” Is that the theme of the film? And did it inform your editing or show up as subtext?

That quote was wasn’t originally in the script, but it was definitely the theme. We discovered it as we were cutting it.

All these characters were there because they were running away from something, escaping some sort of conflict back at home, but yeah, it certainly came out as subtext.

We wanted to lean into the pain of all these characters and the conflict within. It was always about showing that and how they were resolving that within and between themselves.

Do you think subtext is important in editing, and are there any examples in this film of you leaning into subtext in editing?

Subtext is so much fun in editing. An actor can be saying whatever on screen, but it’s what they’re conveying with their eyes or a twitch of their mouth, that’s where all the subtext lives and it just adds a layer of complexity and intrigue to a character.

When you’re spoiled with amazing talent like we had on Eden, it’s so rewarding to dig through the footage and find those little nuances and see what they’re really conveying.

There was plenty of subtext to lean into particularly with the Baroness, because she was one thing on the surface, but absolutely something else beneath that.

There’s a big scene at the lunch table where she was being as sweet as pie to everybody, but with all the looks and glances you knew she was playing them all.

That’s what makes the characters really interesting: what are they really up to? What are they really thinking? Subtext is definitely important and definitely fun to work with when cutting a film.

Early in the film there are two scenes that are intercut with each other, and I want to know whether they were written that way or written as intercut, or whether you intercut them. It’s the two scenes where the two men - Ritter and Heinz - are meeting each other for the first time, and then Dore and Margret are meeting each for the first time. Can you talk about whether the script was intercut like that – or intercut at all?

No, it wasn’t. The assembly of this film was three hours and 40 minutes long. The more we screened the film to ourselves and to internal groups, the more we wanted to get to the Baroness as fast as we could.

The dynamics of the other characters were certainly interesting, but it was when the Baroness arrived that was when the “cat got put among the pigeons.” That’s when the trouble really began.

The opening first act of the film used to be much, much longer. But we just really wanted to get to the Baroness faster.

So the intercutting of those two scenes allowed us to take a bunch of dialogue out. I just really went faster. The idea behind those two scenes is they really are trying to tell the Whitmers to go away, dissuade them from staying.

You mentioned this three hour and 40 minute editor’s cut. What do you want to call that thing? The editors cut? The assembly?

I often call it the kitchen sink because it’s the cut that has everything in it, including the kitchen sink. I call it the assembly. I’ve put it all together during the shooting process.

I will never take anything out at that stage just because every scene that gets shot deserves its day in court.

You clearly knew three hours and 40 minutes wasn’t going to work. What were some of the things that you lost, and what were those creative discussions about how you’re going to do it?

Every scene in an assembly runs long, so you can usually trim at least 20 minutes out just by taking the air out of dialogue. But then we did have to dig in because there was a lot of story in this film.

They shot a lot and it was all really good stuff. For example, the section when Alan Hancock, the millionaire, came to visit was much, much longer.
There’s a short silent film called The Empress of Floriana that the real Alan Hancock shot with the Baroness as the star. You can actually look it up online. It exists. So there was a whole scene where Alan Hancock wooed the Baroness to act in his film.

They recreated the shooting of that short silent film and recreated the film itself. We tried so hard to play it as part of the credits or something because it was just such a fun re-creation.

There’s a scene where the Baroness shot one of Hancock’s shipmates, who was going to stay and explore the island for a few days.

She actually shot him! This was apparently true, in order to keep them there, because she didn’t think that he’d be able to travel with a gunshot wound.

The opening of the film was also much longer. We had lots more of Doctor Ritter philosophizing and talking to Alan Hancock who had visited hime previously. So the film opened a couple of years before it currently does.

As far as the creative decisions, we just knew that it obviously could not sustain that length, and it’s just a slow process of going through and figuring out exactly what is required to tell the story as best we can.

At the beginning of the film Heinz and his wife are trying to live in a cave and get water and have food and and sustenance, and there’s a lovely montage of that. Was that cut down from longer scenes?

It was. It was always intended to be sort of montage. Basically everything you see in the montage was shot as a scene. The digging of the well, splitting the bamboo and being attacked by mosquitoes were shot as little scenes, so that definitely ran a lot longer than it does currently.

But it was always intended to be sort of a montage. We also played a lot more with the contrast between how bad the Whitmers have it compared to how easy the Ritters have got it.

Intercutting between the Ritters having their crazy sex scene while the Whitmers are battling it out against nature.

You had these lovely little scenics or shots of predators as transition devices. Do you want to talk about deciding when those went in? I’m assuming they weren’t scripted.

They weren’t really scripted. Although this film is a study of human character and how it deals with various adversarial conditions, a big character of the film was the island itself. It was always the idea to showcase how hard it was.

The film was shot in Queensland, Australia, but they did do a two week plate unit around the actual Galapagos, to get the vistas and wildlife and so on.

We would just pepper those in as the conflict between the humans and the nature around them. It wasn’t specifically scripted, but it was always a little device we had in mind just to really juxtapose what was going on in the human world with what was going on the island in nature.

One of the other places where you had some intercutting was between Heinz and the wild cow with Ritter and the wild boar. Can you talk about that intercutting?

Those two things were very, very individual scenes. They played out in full. It was another case of how do we shorten this film down?

Also how do we juxtapose what’s happening between the two families, because the Whitmers were struggling, but then they got their first little taste of success with the cow.

Meanwhile, the Ritters had been rattled by these new people arriving and their decline began. There was a lot more to that montage.

The boar featured a lot more in the film, originally. Ritter was going a little bit mad and was obsessed with getting with this boar.

He set dynamite to blow it up. He set traps to trap it. But losing a lot of it was a consequence of needing to shorten the film.

Out of those constraints and devices you find a narrative way of making it relevant. And in this instance, it was relevant to juxtapose how the two families were changing, the Whitmers being successful getting their cow, getting their water, and the Ritters losing their only source of food because they’re vegetarian, which ultimately leads to Rittter shooting the boar.

You already alluded to the celebratory lunch. The Baroness is just deliciously evil while trying to show what a great host she is. It was just fantastic. I loved the tension after she sings, and the rest of the lunch is played without music, correct?

Yes. That scene was absolutely delicious to cut, but it was a slog. There was 25 hours of footage shot for that scene.

What do you think the end result of screen time for that lunch? 7 or 8 minutes?

Yeah, something like that. It was a big slog, but it was crammed full of the most incredible performances from them all. I never actually had temp music.

We didn’t even try to temp because it was so tense all by itself that you didn’t need anything to uplift it until the very end when the Baroness really starts circling around Dore and going a bit crazy.

It was very much the idea to leave that music-free, because the tension was in the performances.

Do you remember preparing the edit for that scene? I would think it would be so much about finding the reaction shots.

Yes, and that’s where the fun stuff was. It was in the reaction shots. They had four cameras shooting and they would shoot the entire scene for each take. With a few different set ups for each character That’s why there’s so much footage.

We talked about subtext earlier, it’s all in those reactions. The line where Heintz very blatantly says, “Can you pass the stolen meat?” Then the Baroness reacting to that.

And they catch her reaction to Ritter putting the false teeth in! There’s so much going on. Then when the Baroness rounded on Dore and talked about having children it was delicious drama.

There’s a giant close up of the Baroness before she starts in on talking about the children. Talk to us about that choice of when you use specific sizes of coverage.

This is a great example because it sort of naturally spoke to me that this was the approach that needed to be taken.

Ron did design the shots so we could creep slowly in on each character as the tension built. The way he shot the lunch scene was all about the Baroness.

She’s like a shark circling around all these people and waiting for the kill. I used that structure to build the tension. You’ll see it at the opening of the scene: It’s a lot of wide shots or over people’s shoulders and keeping it sort of wide or mid.

But then as she circled ever so deviously and picked on each character we would come in on those people’s faces. But then the big close-up that you’re talking about was when she first mentions children.

She’s very calculated…she puts down a fork, and very much considers what she’s about to say and then goes in for the kill. It’s awesome that you picked that up, Steve, because that was the very deliberate fulcrum point of the scene: to go in for that close-up to say, “Here she comes.”

Generally speaking, from close-ups comes more and more tension. So that was the device that we used.

There’s a fevered writing montage as Ritter starts making headway on his manuscript. Can you talk about building Mad and your creative considerations?

That scene very much didn’t exist. We made it up in the cutting room. We really needed to sell the fact that the drought was taking over the island and they were all being driven by desperation, and that Ritter and his plan of saving humanity was just completely falling asunder.

So we really wanted to get into his mind. The little bits of internal dialogue that we hear from Ritter throughout the film were a late add. We wanted to hear his philosophizing.

We really wanted to track his descent from his grandiose philosophizing and theories of life at the beginning through his getting angrier and more desperate.

We wanted to keep on revisiting what was going on in his head. So that sequence was constructed completely in the edit.

If you look closely enough, you’ll see that there’s a couple of shots that are reused from when he’s writing at the beginning of the film, because we ran out of typing footage.

I really love that sequence because it was a complete construct, and I think it really shows exactly what’s going on with one of our lead characters.

I’ve talked to many editors about these scenes that seem so crucial to a movie that are made in the editing room.

You’ve got a problem to solve, and a bunch of footage, so let’s see how we can reimagine the footage into what we need.

There is a big scene for Sydney Sweeney as she kind of changes from who she was to who she will be. How are you supporting that change in her through editorial or enhancing?

The character of Margaret is interesting because while this is an ensemble movie it becomes her film.

She had the biggest arc to follow because she arrived completely unprepared, and it ended up that she was the one who stayed. You see at the very end, she outlasted almost all of them.

So it was always on our mind to make sure that we tracked that. But we didn’t want to say from the outset that it was going to be her film because we wanted to keep the ambiguity of who was going to survive.

We do quite deliberately put a quote at the beginning: “These are the accounts from those who survived.”

So we always knew someone was going to die. Something was going to happen, but we wanted to keep it ambiguous.

It was a double challenge of tracking Margret and not giving away the fact that she was kind of taking over and ruling the roost.
The other thing that might be of interest is her voiceover.

Those letters that she was writing in voiceover were added later.

Despite our want to keep Margret hidden as the person who was ultimately going to triumph, we did want to set up what was in her mind when she arrived. She was completely unprepared for this place. She was there as a duty. But ultimately embraced it

She had the big birth scene surrounded by wild dogs. It had her fighting nature and triumphing. This was her turning point.

And by the time she has her scene with the governor at the end, she says “You’ve got no proof of anything,” then proceeds to unbutton her blouse and breastfeed the baby, That was the ultimate woman-power move.

Hans Zimmer wrote the score. What did you temp with? Was there discussion of his music and the direction before you edited?

Yes. We always knew Hans was going to do it, so we used Hans’ scores from other films.

We were very, very lucky early on to have Hans’ music editor, Ryan Rubin on the show so Ryan, the assistant editor and myself filled the film with temp that leaned heavily into a lot of Hans’ tonal pieces.

The music took a little bit of finding what it needed to be because the film was a number of different things. Thriller, drama, period, nature adventure. It was a tonal challenge to get the right temp until Hans came in.

Thankfully we had Ryan with us who knew roughly what Hans was probably going to do musically. So he was able to guide us in the direction of good tone.

Were you able to go to all or many of those screenings in person yourself?

I went to one of them. We had two in New York. I love those screenings. It’s always so essential because you can really read the room when you’re watching.

It’s not what the audience says at the end of the screening, but it’s what they’re saying by shifting in their seats and so on. Very informative.

How do you take notes on what you’re learning from those screenings?

They do a focus group at the end and they write out cards, so there’s lots of studying after the fact of notes and feedback. You’re always looking for the consensus there.

You don’t take every single note on board. If only 1 or 2 people say something it doesn’t matter as much.

You’re looking for what the consensus is. Plus there’s oftentimes the challenge of finding out what the note behind the note is. People might say a scene is long and boring, but it was actually a couple of scenes prior that’s long and boring.

By the time they got to the scene that they’re pinpointing, that’s when they’re bored. It’s a little bit of taking your own notes, but it’s a little bit of just listening to what the feedback is, then looking at what the real problems are.

Is it hard when you’re taking out such large chunks or sections of the film to have it tonally do the right thing dynamically? Because you explained that the millionaire brought this lightness to the film, so if you start cutting him out, then you’re losing that needed lift.

Yeah, absolutely. That is a challenge. That was a perfect example: when we took the majority of the millionaire out, it took away some of the kindling that sparked the fire that started when he left the Baroness.

That’s what triggered the Baroness to take over the island. So when we took that out, there had to be another reason why she was so triggered.

We did that with the drought and the lack of food. That’s also why we had to have the Ritter writing scene. We really had to use that to emphasize how bad this drought had gotten and how much food had dropped. That’s why they were so desperate. We had to patch it back up.

Talk to me about your collaboration with Ron Howard.

It was a really lovely process we had on this film. Ron is an incredibly collaborative man. He’s such a joy and a pleasure to work with. We did it remotely.

I was in Sydney and he was in New York. We used Evercast every morning. We would overlap Sydney and New York as much as we could. He would come in for 4 or 5 hours at the end of his day - the very beginning of my day - and we’d jump on-line.

We had a really robust connection where we were cutting as we went and he could see what I was doing.

Sometimes we’d have Noah Pink, the writer in on sessions with the producers, Bill Connor and Karen Lunder. We would often sit in sessions together and just sort of figure things out.

It was a really great collaborative way of honing things down. it was a lovely process.

Were Noah and the producers in person with you?

No. They were all on Evercast. You could never have done this even five years ago. Covid No. They were all on Evercast. You could never have done this even five years ago. Covid kind of accelerated everything.

Matt, thank you so much for talking to us about this movie. I hope everybody gets a chance to see it in theaters.

Thanks so much, Steve. I really appreciate it. I love these chats. Let’s let’s do it again very soon.