F1

Today on Art of the Cut we speak with Oscar-winning editor, Stephen Mirrione, ACE about editing the summer blockbuster, F1.

Stephen’s been on Art of the Cut before when he edited The Revenant, for which he was nominated for an Oscar, a BAFTA and an ACE Eddie.

He was nominated for a BAFTA and an ACE Eddie for Birdman. He was nominated for an Oscar and a BAFTA and won an ACE Eddie for Babel. In 2006 he won the Cannes Film Festival technical Grand Prize for editing.

And he won the Oscar and was nominated for a BAFTA and an ACE Eddie for editing Traffic. Not to mention - though I guess I AM mentioning - editing The Monuments Men, August: Osage County,  Hunger Games, and Oceans 11, 12 AND 13.

Tell me a little bit about the opening montage. There are these wave images and ocean sounds. What was the thought behind that? Was that scripted? 

It was scripted as kind of a dream with just the waves as Sonny tries to decompress and be in this private space before his race. It really went through months and months of that being the opening of the movie as we were doing screenings.

We were getting a lot of feedback from audiences and our internal team that we were missing Sonny’s back story and where can we show the thing that’s driving him? Where can we start to plant the seed that there’s something that’s haunting him?

You really have to listen to people that are watching something for the first time and not ignore that note if you keep getting it. A lot of the people we were working with - producers, etc. - were saying, “Just put that whole crash that happens, in the front instead of him dreaming about waves.”

We tried it and it just was so dark and it didn’t make sense at all. We were really struggling. At one point Joe said to me, “What if there’s a way we can get both of them in there?”

And the minute he said it, it made perfect sense to me. Once you do it, it’s just so obvious. Of course, that’s the solution! 

So then it just became a matter of intercutting some of it. What it did immediately was completely change how we framed everything about his character as he’s walking in.

Because now there’s this thing that happened to him that’s haunting him, that’s trying to invade that meditative space.

There’s this constant tension within him, and it reminds me of the very first draft I read of the script. The issue with his injury was there throughout the whole movie and kept getting referenced, but never directly. There were all these hints at it.

I remember having conversation with Joe early on saying, “If we’re going to shine such a spotlight on it to the audience, then we’re way ahead of Rubin, his friend, when he finally confronts him.” So that eventually changed.

The pendulum swung too far in the other direction to where it was almost completely hidden, so we spent a lot of time figuring out ways to put it back. Even the little documentary that his teammate Joshua is watching on the computer.

We moved that around in terms of where does that happen? Where does he see that so that that can happen at just the right moment? Every time they start to come together we have to break them back apart again, so there’s just this slow build to them understanding each other.

During the tour there’s this whole montage where we’re getting to know Sonny Hayes’ backstory. That was never intended to be part of that. It was just a little line of dialog about a crash that he had in the script, but we realized if we can show some of that - if we could plant that earlier - it just helps make it more real for the audience.

Every time we did more things like that the feedback we were getting was definitely that we were going in the right direction.

That little documentary that kind of gives Sonny’s backstory could have gone anywhere in the film. As you said, it could have gone at the beginning. So what was the creative discussion around finding the right place?

That’s essentially where it was scripted to go. There are so many characters we have to meet along the way, so it was just measuring that. Measuring when do we meet Ruben, and how much do we need to know about that story?

When do we meet Josh and the rest of the team? It’s a big team and we have to get acquainted with who they are so that we can understand their relationship to him and vice versa.

It just made sense where that happened. We did experiment with moving it earlier, but then moving it earlier meant other things lost momentum.

Because of the actor’s strike and the way our schedule evolved, we had a lot of time to really examine the structure of the script before we got to actually shoot most of the movie, which was summer of 2024. Originally, it was going to be summer of 2023.

With all of that exploration we were kind of feeling pretty confident that - structurally, at least - we were pretty close by the time we got to that summer.

Editor Stephen Mirrione, ACE

Tell me a little bit about the pace and editing of the races and the rhythm.

Having worked with [director Joe Kosinski] a few times now, the way he gets all these great details and just the nature of how we were shooting this with just miles and miles of footage to choose from, I already knew that the only way to feasibly get through it in time and efficiently is to work in layers.

The first layer is just making sure I have the material to tell the story that’s in the script, so that might mean picking a nice long take of a performance of the actor’s face going through a specific point. It might mean some of the pit crew dialogue and just sketching that out. Imagine a sculptor taking a big block of clay, then slowly it starts to form that shape.

The difference is that the sculptor probably wouldn’t bring people in to take a look at that blob as it starts to take shape. We really had to - as we were going – to  get feedback on things and check things and make sure that things were making sense. One of our producers, Chad Oman, would come in and start to give notes, stop himself and say, “Okay. I know. Layers.”

They got tired of me saying, “Guys. Be patient. Eventually, all these things you’re saying-  when we get to that stage in the process - you’ll be shocked that they’re just going to suddenly appear.” So a lot of the process for that was first figuring out what I had.

Some of that was going through selects that Joe had done on set with Matt Sweat, the first assistant, who was on location with Joe at all the races.

They would occasionally mark up selects of different racing moments. I’d have my bucket of that stuff. Then I would have my broadcast material. 

The other brilliant thing that Joe came up with in making this was that - through the partnership with F1 - we got access to all of the broadcast track cameras for all the days of practice, qualifying and race day.

I think in total that was something like 2500 hours of B-roll that we could then reskin and change any car to another car or turn a car into our car and our driver if we needed to. These are for the wider exterior, ground-to-car shots.

Any shot that’s attached to the car or pointed at our driver or from another car on the track at the same time, those are all our cameras. Those were all shot by us. But anything that you see that is of a car going around the corner from somewhere outside of the track, those are shots from the broadcast.

I don’t mean that they were in the broadcast. I mean we got the entire race from each particular camera set up.

Notes on race footage

The ISO cams. 

Yeah. So I had a crew that was also going through as we got that stuff in, and they were marking up all the important moments.

Anytime  there was a close pass or something, they would label it with which car it was. Sometimes, if I really needed something and I didn’t see a mark, I would high-speed watch the whole camera from beginning of the race to end.

Nine times out of ten I found the piece that I hoped I would find. Since everything was marked up, I was able to kind check the ten times that cars were passing each other on this camera at this specific turn. I can now plug it in. 

Another thing that the crew did was: we had storyboards for all the races in the Avid. I had those frames of the storyboards and we would commonly update reference cuts for the set as they were shooting things so that they knew, “Okay, we got this storyboard.”

And as they were getting things, sometimes the cut would change a little bit. So they were always getting updates of a reference cut. In the Avid for each of those storyboards, I would have a string out where my crew would go through, and try to find examples of exactly that board. So moments that happened at that corner from different cameras.

So I could also go and look at it that way. It was always building this library that - if I found something fast, great. If I needed to dig a little further, then those are the things I would dig further on. It just gave me a chance to move quickly, to get a “base coat” to just tell the story.

Then the next step was going through to say, “Okay, can I beat this shot? Can I beat this shot? Oh, I’m missing this detail.

Oh, I’m starting to feel like the car is just taking Sonny on a ride around the track versus really feeling like Sonny is controlling the car, so I need to make sure that I’m adjusting my cut so that I’m seeing those moments where he’s turning the wheel this way or that way.

Where you can see the expression on his face in terms of making decisions to do certain things.” So there’d be that layer of adding those details.

Back Row: Joseph Kosinski, Stephen Mirrione, Chris Newlin, Michael Tinger, Matt Sweat, Patrick Smith, Joshua Windolph. Front Row: Chelsea Dinsdale, Lisseth Lopez, Latham Robertson, Stephanie Silva, Josephine Breytspraak, Matt Walsh. Not Pictured: Debs Richardson, Isobele Truett, Mark Jones, Guia Ravizza, Kristine Nelson

I had always - in the back of my mind - thought, “At some point I’m going to go through and start adding in shots of crowds reacting, because that’s kind of a trope. That’s something you always kind of expect from a sports movie - to see the crowd reacting.

I realized as we were working through it that that’s actually a thing that you need to do to hide the fact that you don’t have all the material. It gives you this little sneaky bit of emotion with something because it’s too hard to shoot.

If you’re shooting something where you’re not on the track during the Grand Prix weekend, you’re going to be racing around to a bunch of empty stands.

So you’re going to need to keep the cameras really tight and close so that you can hide that. Then you need to cut to fans. We didn’t need to do that because you were constantly seeing fans. There’s hundreds of thousands of people as we’re shooting these sequences.

But you did use layers of reaction shots for emotion.

Yes, but we were able to do it with our characters, our cast, the people who we knew. Because of the strike we had aobut five days of shooting at Silverstone, so we had the first few days of getting in some laps.

What we had really planned to do with them - of really working their performance – didn’t happen because the movie got shut down in terms of principal photography.

But Joe essentially took over second unit directing. And Apple understood the value of continuing to do that. Joe told them that we had to get material at those races.

This is the cut that was sent to set with broadcast cut in and storyboards so they knew what they needed to shoot and what time of day since the race starts at dusk and goes into the night. Here’s an explanation of the tracks and their purposes:

• V15 To be shot - these are subtitles with the storyboard descriptions
• V14 tires - This is a subtitle layer that indicates what position Sonny and Joshua are in as well as what Lap and what tires they should have
• V13 Time of Day/light - this is a running timecode from the start of the race that also indicates the kind of light
• V12 Storyboard number - subtitle with showing metadata of the storyboard number that is referenced in our online Final Cut Pro document
• V11 Storyboard to be shot - layer with a PIP of the storyboard to be shot that would be reduced to PIP if we had something in the cut already
• V10 bugs - labels that would track with the cars showing how cars would be reskinned
• V9 race order - race order overlay from the broadcast showing the positions of the real cars during that particular lap
• V8 version zero - vfx layer
• V7 VFX label - vfx layer, if there is a number it shows the shot has been turned over
• V6 matte - matte layer we eventually included a 2.39 and 1.90 imax matte so we could switch between both formats without the same timeline
• V5 subs - dialogue subtitles as well as any graphics overlays like LAPS and RACE ORDER SCROLLS that play in the movie
• V1-V4 - original photography, broadcast footage, VFX shots, these are the layers I did the actual cutting

F1 is moving around a circuit around the world, and they’re not going to stop. 

Exactly. And nobody knew, “Is the strike going to last two weeks? Is it going to last a month?” It was crazy to see all the meetings that Joe was having every week to come up with five different schedules depending on if the strike ended here, here, here or here.

Because of that, a lot of the early cuts of the racing sequences were just broadcast footage, then cutting to either storyboards of the drivers’ faces or I would just steal moments that kind of looked similar from those first few days of them getting warmed up at Silverstone, just to have a sense of what it would feel like.

Knowing that any race we didn’t get to do in 2023, we would go back and shoot them in 2024, which is what ultimately we did for all the races. Essentially, they went back and we did the whole season.

We wanted to show the spectacle of Formula One and understand that they tear down that track and build it back up in a new place, so when we finished shooting everything - except for our third act - because that was shot this last December, 2024.

Six months before we were to be in theaters! At that point, I brought Patrick Smith in, who has been my long time first assistant, who’s gone on to start editing.

Also, Chelsea Dinsdale, one of my assistants for a long time, she helped out to start crafting these little documentary bits of world-building. That became another layer.

One of the first things we did - because they were playing “We Will Rock You” on the gridwalk that day - when I first cut that scene together, it was in the background anyway, so I just used it then turned it into letting the music blossom as he is getting ready and getting hyped as the race begins.

Then we just went into the race, because we didn’t have this whole  layer that was going to come later, so what Patrick and Chris Newlin, the music editor, did is that they took elements of “We Will Rock You” and just slowed the guitar riff way down and created this kind of really magical tone with that beat. So Patrick was able to then use that and create this kind of moment of build up.

Then once we had that and we really liked it, then we were able to give that to [composer Hans Zimmer] as a reference. That then became that theme that we play at the end of the movie when Sonny has this big moment.

Everything gets built by these little blocks - one on top of the other, on top of the other, with everybody working really hard towards that goal. 

The layers that you’re talking about is really about trusting the process.

Yes. Things are going to change. Things are going to slowly get added in. Joe understood that. All I had to do was say to Joe, “That’s going to come when this part of the process happens.”

When we were working together during Covid, we were both working from each other’s houses and we would be on the phone all day. At one point, Joe told me that his wife - who I guess was working in the room next door – said, “Gosh, you guys just spend all day arguing and yelling at each other. What’s that about?”

I laugh because literally the day before I went upstairs and my wife said to me, “What do you guys do? You just laugh all day long! You guys are just laughing all day!”

We do have a really good rapport. But that being said, I totally trust him. I can try crazy stuff and know that if it’s too crazy or if it doesn’t work, he’ll push back. I can be really forceful with things and know that I’m not going to bully him into doing something that’s not right for the movie and vice versa.

I know that he’ll be able to get me to do something to take it above and beyond. So that trust really helped this whole process move quickly when we finally had to race to get to the end.

There’s some cool time-jumping. When the Javier Bardem character first shows up at the laundromat there’s a jump in time to them playing pinball and some cool edits with the pinball, then another jump in time to the shower and another jump in time to the diner. All the same conversation, right? 

Yes, exactly. In the script, that conversation all happened - I think - in Sonny’s hotel room over a cup of coffee. Usually when I’m reading an early draft of a script, I’m imagining what are the dialogue scenes that go on so long, so many pages, that’s just all exposition, that I’m going to get so bored of cutting from this face to this face. That’s in my mind when I’m reading it.

And that was one of those scenes. Of course, when I’m reading it, I’m not really taking into account how charming Javier is going to be. After we shot that sequence, the first thing I said to Joe after watching the dailies is: “Forget F1.

I just want to see these guys take a road trip across the country to go to the Baja 1000. There’s so great together!”

So I said to Joe, “Wouldn’t it be more interesting to take advantage of the fact that Sonny lives in a van and have this conversation be somewhere where he’s having to do the things that people do when they live in a van?

You know when you’re going up and down “the five” there’s all these truck stops where you’ve got laundry rooms and showers? And there are these diners with sections for drivers only. Why not break that whole scene up?

Wouldn’t it be great if some of the conversation happened over a pinball machine? Because in my mind, I’m imagining if the scene starts to get too boring, I could just cut to the shots of the pinball machine and make it shorter, make it faster.

Whatever I need to do to kind of get us racing through that, because I just knew that was the part of the movie - we’re not even at Silverstone yet! We need to be racing through this exposition. We just need to race through it. So Joe and the writer completely rewrote it in a way that kept the conversation going in those different locations.

Sir Lewis Hamilton's dog Roscoe graced the cutting room! You can follow Roscoe on Instagram!

I wanted to talk about the specific moment that you spot a music cue. An  example I’d like you to talk about is when the waitress at that truck stop says, “If it’s not about the money, then what is it about?” And there’s a great cue right there. The music isn’t running all the way through that scene. It starts at a specific moment. Why? 

That one is fairly straight forward, except there were a few options. The most straightforward is we know we’re going to cut straight from that scene to Silverstone jumping to basically starting the actual movie.

Everything up to that point is this prologue, then boom, we’re finally at F1 at Silverstone, ready to start the actual movie, so it just becomes about knowing that we’re going to hit big for the theme of the movie. That’s where we are going to hear Hans for the first time.

For me, the music there signals to the audience about point of view. That’s the moment that somebody plants the seed for “what’s the decision you’re going to make” by having the music start to seep in.

The audience is aware - whether consciously or subconsciously - that, “I’m now in his head. I’m now thinking what he’s thinking.

He’s got to make a decision. Why is he doing it? It’s not about the money.” It’s that unanswered question. Then you cut to the answer to the question. That’s up to the audience to project their own answer.

For me, cutting to the thrill of racing around that track at 200mph or whatever - that’s the reason for making the decision.

I believe we had tried starting music when Javier’s character, Ruben, is telling him, “This is your chance for one day be the best in the world.” We tried starting music there, but it was “leading the witness” too much. It was  indicating too much to the audience that he’s already made that decision.

Maybe the audience knows it anyway, but at least the filmmaking narrator isn’t telling you that.

“Silverstone” preview.

It’s an interesting point about the waitress. There was a lot of back and forth with that. Some people wanted us to - right after he says, “You ever seen a miracle?” then Ruben leaves the diner – to not have the conversation with the waitress at all.

We did screenings that way, but ultimately it came down to the fact that we felt it was important to understand that to his character, for other things that happen, to just say it out loud -  this is not about the money for him.

He’s not being tempted to do this because he can become rich. It’s the exact opposite for this character. He doesn’t care about money in the same way that kind of you traditionally think about. 

I’ve got a question that I want to ask, but before I can ask it, I want to talk about how sound design changes or alters or affects the pace of the visual edit. So if you’re cutting a race scene, how are the audio edits interacting with the visual edits?

I almost had to completely cut silently because our actors were racing with modified F2 cars, so that means it’s a different set of gears.

So instead of eight gears that you’d have on a Formula One car, I think it’s like 6 or 7 on a Formula Two, which means any time they’re upshifting or downshifting, all that audio’s got to be thrown away. It’s utterly and totally unusable. Not even as a reference. 

The sound of the engine in the production audio was throwing Joe off, so I just started stripping out all the sound. I would occasionally play dialogue but my crew would just put subtitles to the whole scene. So as we’re watching a scene, if somebody is talking, I have the sound, but I would have it muted and just have a subtitle playing, so we could kind of understand the storytelling.

I was operating without any sound at all. Pretty early on we brought out Al Nelson and his team at Skywalker. We started giving them race sequences.

These were race sequences that we cut and turned over for visual effects and turned over to sound, turned over to Hans, but they still didn’t have all of the pieces with the actors, so they were intercut with storyboards and maybe placeholders of stillframes of the actor’s faces, things like that. Then they started actually to build that.

Another thing that we did to facilitate that was one of the stunt drivers, Luciano, would come in and sit with us, basically to map out what the F1 gear changes would be all around the race. So if they’re going into the Wellington Straight, he could say, “Okay, this is where they start to downshift here, here and here.

And when you’re coming out you’re going to be all out. And this is a corner where you’re not downshifting to do that corner.” The timeline that I had was just absurd.

I really limited myself to only using four video tracks. Then there were six or 7 or 8 reference tracks above the matte line that we could turn on with various things, like what position are the drivers in? what tires are their cars supposed to have?

Sometimes it was the right tire on the car. Sometimes it had to be turned from red to something else. A lot of visual effects were put into changing tire colors on cars. 

Note: The colors on tires on authentic F1 cars: Red for soft, Yellow for Medium, White for Hard, Green for Intermediate, Blue for Full Wet.

There was a whole layer that showed where every other car was on the track. That was my team figuring it out, then mapping it out. Then as I start editing, I’m ripping that stuff apart, then they have to go back in and repair it so that when we turn it over to sound, they get it.

One of those timeline layers was what corner? What turn? What part of the track are they on? What gear and when does the gear shifting happen? From my early sketches of the races the sound team would do a car pass, and I would get a track back from them.

The reality of the car sounds was so important. It really was half of what sells the reality. But imagine you’ve got to “ADR” every single car in the movie! That’s what they did. 

The other really tricky thing for them was, how do you get that sound in the first place? Because if you’re there on race day, there’s music playing.

If you need a single car going around a single corner and you need that to be clean, what are the chances of actually being able to record that?

So they figured out ways to go when they were doing tire testing, for example. F1 was really amazing in terms of giving us access to record laps when the track was empty.

Stephen editing with Sir Lewis Hamilton

Lewis Hamilton would come into the editing room and watch the race with us and listen to our sound, and he’d call us out, “Oh, no, no, no, no!

You’re using sound from exiting the pit stop for turn 11! I can hear the reverberation off the pit wall! That makes no sense!” That kind of feedback really allowed us to take it to another level.

For F1 novices, please explain who Lewis Hamilton is, and why he was the expert.

SIR Lewis Hamilton - who is like a seven time world champion for Formula One. I believe he was going to be cast potentially in Top Gun Maverick until he realized his day job would take up too much time.

He’s the person that the director reached out to when he had the idea to do this movie because he knew he was going to need someone as an entree into the inner workings of the sport, so he came in as a producer and he gave feedback and contributions to the screenplay and production design - just to all aspects. It was really amazing having him in the cutting room. He’s really an artist.

When he’s talking about his racing, he’s talking about it with such artistry and in such a beautiful way that it really inspired me after those sessions to really go back to every cut, every shot we were using and make sure that we were doing justice to the things that he was expressing.

I heard an interview with him where he talked about watching a cut and saying, “He’s going into turn three, you should be in fourth gear, and it sounds like he’s in sixth.”

To be fair to Al and the sound team, he had the “layers issues” as well, where he had to say, “This is all we had at the time.” There has to be a lot of placeholder material that would be replaced as we get feedback. 

Talk to me about the use of jumpcuts. There are some going into the first F1 lap for Sonny. What’s the value or purpose of a jumpcut? Why use them? What do they do for you? 

It’s kind of a thing that I start to do early on instinctually. Then when I recognize what I’m doing, it just becomes part of the vocabulary.

For this particular movie - one of the byproducts of the way we were putting it together and the material that I had - is you’ll notice that there are almost no jumpcuts during actual racing.

Of course we’re always up-cutting around the track as we’re going. But if a conversation is happening in real time, I’m not up-cutting. I was really militant with myself about making sure, “If they’re heading into the National straight and they’re having this whole conversation, I’m not skipping anything. I’m going to make sure the continuity of that is match frames and everything is perfect.”

That was just a rule I gave myself to just make it subliminally sink in to the audience that this is happening for real. He’s there. He’s really driving this. I have material to cut from one driver to the other because of all the cameras that are going at the same time, I don’t need to do those kinds of tricks.

However, I also knew that this was a movie where the pacing was going to be really important in terms of just keeping things moving and keeping things alive. I’m talking about the dialog scenes early on. I’m just kind of feeling my way through a first cut and  the rhythm of something.

I might put a jump cut in. A lot of times I’ll do that with the intention of of later going and maybe cleaning it up or cutting away to something to hide the jump cut. Maybe it just felt right.

The other part of the vocabulary of this movie is this is kind of like documentary style filmmaking, so let’s be honest with the audience.

The audience is sophisticated enough to understand what a jumpcut means. It means you’re not trying to fake me out. You’re not trying to manipulate me.

So if I need to jumpcut, I’m just going to do it, and if it doesn’t distract me, if it doesn’t pull me out, in fact, it actually, I think, gives the audience a sense of even more honesty or authenticity of how we’re presenting the story.

I think it also signals to the audience that they can trust us, that we’re not going to waste their time. If it’s for the story - if it moves you along - let’s keep going. Let’s just keep moving.

You can create a good rhythm that way. But then when we get into the races and I never jumpcut - other than maybe to cut ahead for a lap, for example, which is really clearly just a time cut, not really a jumpcut - then subliminally the rules have changed.

They’re maybe not aware of it, but I think that that makes the racing feel even more authentic because they know I can do it, but I’m now NOT doing it anymore.

I wanted to talk about the use of licensed music. How do you cut those? Are you cutting silent like you were mentioning before, and then adding music and then revising the edits because of what the music is doing?

It’s a combination, but for the most part, I’m usually approaching scenes without music. I will cut it together. I want the rhythm of the cut to be dictated by the shots themselves or the rhythm of performance. Actually, I want the rhythm of the cuts to be less important than the rhythm of what happens between the cuts, if that makes sense.

So it’s about what what’s happening within the frame and then the cut happens. The cut is not the defining rhythm of the piece. It’s more about what’s happening within. So then once I’ve got a scene cut, then I start to play with putting a piece of music on.

Nine times out of ten, if I’ve cut the scene in a way that makes sense, it almost always just lines up and then I don’t have to cut picture to match the music.

That was always kind of a funny thing, because you cut scenes with music and then you have to start trying other options, because maybe you can’t get that piece of music, or you have a new artist who’s going to write a song specifically for the movie, so they’re going to be putting things and it kind of works, but they ask, “Could you recut?”

I say, “No, no, no, no, no! Trust me! You’ll figure it out. I’ve done this a long time. It’ll be fine. I don’t have to change the picture cut at all.”

Patrick Smith cut the intro to Monza. I think Chris picked the music out for it and Patrick cut it. Those little sections had a lot of jumpcuts. It was just about energy and a vibe. I loved the way that they were cutting that with the music.

For that we adjusted the cut to what the music was doing in a kind of fun way, but more often than not I was cutting things silent. 

Under the opening race at Daytona we had “Voodoo Child.” That was the first song I put on that race, and it worked great.

The reason I liked it was because the virtuosity of the performance in “Voodoo Child” was similar to Sonny’s virtuosity in racing. So that always blended really well for me. One day Joe sends me a text: “Put Led Zeppelin ‘Whole Lot of Love’ instead.”

I’m sure what he did is he had it at home and he played the scene on PIX, and he played the song on iTunes and it just all lined up. So I edited that in and with the exception of maybe tweaking a few things at the end, it just lined up perfectly.

As we were gradually making that scene a little bit shorter we had to make sure we didn’t lose the connection of the way things were hitting at exactly the right spot.

Then it became a matter of waiting to find out whether we could actually get the clearance to have it in the movie, which came down to the last minute.

Chris Newlin was invaluable because once we had the first cut, Atlantic Records and the people that run the department at Apple would come in and there was a constant stream every week bringing new artists into our editing rooms, to our screening room, showing scenes or showing the movie and saying, “We want you to do something for the movie.”

All these songs just kept coming in, so Chris would work with them and  they would present things to Joe, and Joe would say yes or no, then we would move forward. But that was a really amazing part of the process: getting to see those things as they came in.

One of the crazy things about F1 racing, for those who haven’t watched it, is the speed of the pit stops. Your editing matched the speed of the pit stops. I guess it had to because otherwise it doesn’t make any sense. They’re like 3 seconds long! Talk to me about trying to cut those and tell a story of a of a 2 second pit stop.

That was pretty humbling. I finished my first cut of the first pit stop I had o cut and looked at the timer and it was a seven second pit stop that’s supposed to happen in under three second. I thought, “How am I going to do this?

Because I have to know what everybody’s doing.” I’m cutting this not just for every F1 fan who knows exactly what happens in a pit stop, but I’m hoping that people who don’t know anything about F1 are going to appreciate this pit stop.

I think this happened in a lot of other places in the movie where you have so much material to work with that you almost start cutting it like you’re cutting a commercial. It becomes an exercise in how much storytelling can I jam into 30s or 15 seconds in some cases. It became a kind of Zen exercises that I would go into.

What’s the absolute shortest amount of time that I need to see a shot to understand the shot? I kept massaging and massaging it. Then Lewis Hamilton would watch and say, that’s too long of a pit stop. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s taking too long.”

Then at some point I’d get one that clicks, but then Joe would say, “It’d be really nice to see the driver’s face in the middle of all that.” I’d look at Joe and say, “Do you have any idea how hard it was to even get it down to this many shots? Now you want to add another shot?”

The amount of times we show the pit stops - it’s a little bit repetitive - but what I ended up being able to do was show you everything the first time - when there was a mistake - show you everything so you get a little more time.

Then gradually, as the movie goes, I don’t have to show as many details. I can see faces. I could see other things because now the audience already kind of knows what’s coming.

There’s a great race in the rain. It has fantastic tension in it. How do you build tension in a scene like that? 

A lot of that comes down to making sure the audience knew what they were trying to do - what danger there might be. If you can establish what that is, then there are going to be moments that you can then stretch out because the audience is just waiting for this thing to happen. Once you know that Sonny is going to pull a particular move, then you can start to stretch the moment out a little bit.

In other words, instead of having everything just constantly moving fast, fast, fast, fast, you need to stop and slow some things out and stretching things out … or choosing shots.

There are some great moments where – because of the way they shot it -  you can just stay with those cars for a really long time waiting to see what’s happened. And when you see the spray and the rain and you know it’s dangerous, the longer you hold on the shot, the more tense it becomes. That was one way. 

Then the other way was cutting to people’s reactions. If you cut to somebody looking really nervous and worried, you’re immediately locked in to understanding how dangerous this could potentially be.

Some of the dialogue scenes are edited with the same speed that the race is edited. Keeping that race pace up off the track. Can you talk a little bit about some of the early dialogue scenes? One that I’d like to discuss in particular is the “audition scene” where Sonny meets the team for the first time.

For that scene in particular, I needed to get details of all these characters reactions, and I wanted to do it in a way, that the  audience doesn’t feel like they’re watching so much as they were being pulled along as the scene is happening.

It puts you in the point of view of the team seeing this new guy who we’ve just spent ten minutes of the movie getting to know, and they don’t know him at all. I want to know what each individual character is feeling about everything he says.

If you play that in a master, I don’t know for sure that the audience is going to clock that Dodge is rolling his eyes while Carrie is shrugging her shoulders. I just wanted it to have this really frantic rhythm. There’s a lot of just slight prelapping.

There’s a lot of quick reactions -pop pop pop pop pop - making sure I’m cutting to to see Ruben laughing uncomfortably. I see that he’s trying to cover for the fact this embarrassing thing happened.

When, our producer, Jerry Bruckheimer came in and watched it, he loved the fact that I was focusing on the detail work that the actors were doing.

He just appreciated the fact that I wasn’t worried about making it more traditional or more perfect or easy to watch. I’s not easy to watch necessarily, but it’s fun to watch. I just think it you feel engaged with it immediately.

After the first pass, it was just a matter of dialing it a little bit this way, a little bit that way - making sure we didn’t lose any of the essential rhythm of it.

A lot of it came from their performance rhythm. Then just little nips and tucks here and there or taking a line out here or there.

The rhythm of that scene is part of the language of the movie as a whole. If you haven’t seen how everything else was put together and where you are in the context of the movie, it might not actually make sense why it’s cut that way.

It needs to be contextual. Could you contrast that scene with another scene much later on where Brad Pitt’s character, Sonny, is out on the balcony in Las Vegas talking to Kate. That scene is edited much more slowly. 

What underlies all of that is that I’m always responding to the material that I’m working with. So it’s really about the performance that I’m working with.

You might have to push or massage something a little bit this way, a little bit that way. but you’re really trying to be true to the thing that they were trying to capture on the set with the emotion of that moment.

The tricky thing about that scene was you’ve got a character who has a lot of difficulty being emotional, being vulnerable, exposing himself. He’s had a lot of trauma in his life. It’s not a comfortable place for him to be. 

It was great to just watch the process of seeing him get more and more exposed, more and more vulnerable as the takes went on, to the point where I was completely feel the purity of the performance.

There was this one take where you could just feel his vulnerability, then it just became about finding those few moments to cut to the other person who’s listening to him, so that you’re feeling the depth of what he’s revealing, and for him to admit this regret - a character who doesn’t want to live like he’s got regrets. Personally, I just found it really moving. And I hope that it hits in the same way for audiences.

So, the emotion of that and the content of that scene is the reason why the pace was different.

Yes. It has to do with the content within the cuts, the content of the performance itself, the content of the scene itself.

As I’m watching the dailies, it’s very intimate, so you need to really slow down and feel like time is standing still for him.

Obviously, in terms of just the narrative, it becomes a really important moment, because if you don’t have that emotional connection to the story he’s telling here, then you’re probably are not going to feel as emotional when that plays out later in the movie.

How long for the denouement? So you’ve got the celebration at the end. You have  a celebration where the audience wants to feel the release. They want to feel the happiness. They want to see that the characters are happy. But how long is too long? How do you know how to regulate the time between the climax and the credits? 

You have to try it. You have to play it for an audience and you feel it. This was a really fascinating process. This is one of the first movies where Joe and I cut the movie down and started really getting more brutal about how we were cutting it down.

Then producers or studio executives, or even Brad would say, “No, no, no. You’ve got to put that back.” They were begging us to make it longer.

We’re listening to the feedback. And even though there would be comments about maybe it’s too long, we kind of trusted the Venn diagram of everybody being happy with the individual things, so let’s just go with that.

The celebration, by the way, was a really tricky thing for them to shoot because they are shooting that at the actual Grand Prix.

So basically the real Grand Prix celebration ends, there’s a podium ceremony, a real podium ceremony, then drivers get off, we take two of the real drivers, we pull them back on, we put our crew all in there and we do another podium ceremony. We had a very short amount of time.

They got what they could get and then we knew we had another day to do pickups after that in that area, but not with the entire crowd.

Looking at those dailies I immediately see that there were certain moments of different team members that we were missing. I said, “I really wish I could see this person and this person high-fiving or hugging” or whatever it was. So they were able to pick that up. We made sure we had everything you could possibly want.

I kept being reminded of the first time I watched the end of the first pass of Top Gun Maverick when they get back and everybody’s hugging and celebrating.

I thought, “Man! This is going on forever, but you realize - if you watch it in context – that when you’ve gone through the whole movie with them the audience enjoys it. That’s the reason they’re there: to clap and cheer and cry and do all those things.

I felt that Kerry Condon’s character - because she’s not on the podium - she’s kind of getting a little bit shortchanged in this moment. So they were able to construct another thing to help give a nice ending of congratulations to her character specifically

When you’re trimming or eliminating beats, the important thing to remember is that sometimes when you’re trimming things that feel good early in the movie that make it feel comfortable and fast and it’s moving and you don’t need it.

That information that you’ve trimmed out can hurt something much later in the movie.

You mentioned the fact that the waitress might have gotten cut out of the beginning of the movie when she says, “Well, why are you racing?” That comes back at the very end of the movie when he goes to Baja.

It comes back at the end of the movie in Baja, and it also comes back at another point in the movie - if you remember - where Sonny has a choice to make. So that line is important to at least two other later scenes.

I saw on your IMDb page that you’d edited a documentary. Would you care to discuss that experience or how scripted and docs are different for the editor? What skills you take from one to the other? 

When I was in college and taking film courses, I had a really important exposure to docs through a seminar on Werner Herzog and in studying all his work and reading a lot of his books.

He’s very clear that in his mind - whether it’s documentary or feature film or whatever it is, somebody is telling you a story and it’s the story from their point of view. So are there fake things in a documentary?

Oh yeah. But are they fake or just things that I’m using to tell you the story I’m trying to tell you? It’s the wrong conversation to have to say this is real or not real. When somebody is trying to tell you that kind of story, there’s an emotional truth that’s trying to be conveyed.

And when I’m working on a narrative feature, a lot of times I treat that footage as if it’s a documentary, as the editor, in service to the script and the director.

Or I might need to take material and do something different with it than what it was originally intended for, the same way that you do with a documentary.

I think people nowadays - because there’s such exposure - people really understand what reality shows are. You’re just getting lots and lots of material of people doing real things, but then you’re putting them together to create your own narrative, which might be a completely different narrative than the people that were actually participating had. 

By working on a documentary, it’s understanding the freedom of that. I think a lot of my approach to dialogue scenes is influenced by that. 

If I’m cutting a scene that’s got an A camera and a B camera - so you could literally cut from character to character with perfect match action - a lot of times I will intentionally break that a little bit.

Not make it a jumpcut, but just break it a little bit because I think audiences are trained to single camera and it just feels it feels more purposeful to me. It feels more sculpted, so that you can feel the hand is kind of helping you to feel where your eye is supposed to go.

When you’re working in documentary you don’t have the luxury of having things all be planned out and designed, so that language naturally becomes part of the style. 

Half of this movie is documentary and this was not a documentary crew. This is a feature crew that had to learn all these new techniques and methods and ways of organizing that allowed me access.

Matt Sweat, who was the first assistant editor, was on location every day at all the races. His job really was different than a normal for assistant job. He was really my liaison on the set, so he and Joe had a lot of back and forth. 

Debs Richardson, who’s a long time first assistant that I’ve worked with whenever I’m working in the UK, she was there with those assistant editors, so she was the kind of more traditional first assistant in an editing room dealing with dailies.

That was a huge task because you had all those cameras that you had to keep in sync and keep group clips up. Isobel Truett, and Guia Ravizza, those were my three UK assistant editors, so they were dealing with all the, stunt racing material and grouping those all together.

Mark Jones was the one that was initially organizing all of the broadcast cameras that were coming from the F1 races. We would get a giant dump of those cameras, and he would go through and make sequences with every single camera from around the racetrack so that I could go through and start marking those up.

Then back in the US, we had our, editorial assistant, Lisseth Lopez, who just did a great job. She did things like watch the broadcast and write down time codes for certain things that happened so that we would have a list of certain things to look for. She was actually probably on the movie as long as Matt and myself.

Chelsea Dinsdale, who I’ve worked with for ten years. She came in once we got back to the US. In addition to being a second assistant editor, she did a lot of additional editing for me as well. She did a lot of things like those exercise montages.

She did a really beautiful job with those.Stephanie Silva and Joshua Windolph were the other two assistants. They hunted through the broadcasts and gave us these long string-outs. Then, of course, all the turnovers back and forth to Skywalker sound and music.

I think I already mentioned, Chris Newlin, our music editor. He was just such a strong asset. Patrick Smith came in because we shot our third act in December and we had to be locked and previewed immediately, so he was able to to really help push certain sequences forward while I was doing the heavy lifting in other areas. 

Couldn’t have done this movie without our VFX editor, Latham Robertson. She was constantly making sure every shot had the right tires, making sure that we were replacing Jumbotrons with material from the actual race or putting our material into the Jumbotrons. She also had Christine Nelson helping her.

So anytime we were getting deliveries of VFX, they were always perfect. We got to to really trust those deliveries, which made it so much easier.

And our post-production supervisor, I have to thank Michael Tinger, for keeping everything moving so smoothly with all of our time-constraints in terms of the finishing process.

Managing two different studios: because Warner Bros. was doing the distribution and Apple. We had the co-ordinators, Josephine Breytspraak and Matt Walsh on that team as well.

I can’t say enough about Skywalker Sound and everybody there: Al Nelson and Gwen Whittle, and Garry Rizzo and Juan Peralta, our sound mixers. For sure, Atlas Digital.

We didn’t even talk about the fact that we had a UK cutting room with Nexis. We had an LA cutting room with a Nexis that had to be kept in sync with each other. We had Matt Sweat traveling in an editorial trailer from race to race all over Europe and Abu Dhabi.

That had to be kept in sync. I was mostly working from home. The times that I did travel, I had to be in sync. Or when we were at Skywalker being in sync with LA.

They helped us keep that all working all the time. We really didn’t have a lot of problems, which was was amazing because in addition to the 2500 hours of broadcast footage, we had 2500 hours of our own material because when you put ten cameras at one time shooting it, it starts to add up very fast.

That is a huge shooting ratio! Stephen, thank you so much for all the time you’ve given us. This is such an interesting discussion and congratulations on a great movie. 

Thank you so much. It was great talking to you.