Greatest Night in Pop

Today on Art of the Cut, we’re talking with the editors of Netflix’s Greatest Night in Pop documentary. They also were part of the editing team of Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa.

Carlos Haynes was an editor on Greatest Night and Pop Mountain Queen. He’s worked on Neymar: The Perfect Chaos, Amend: The Fight for America, and Kevin Hart - Don’t F*ck This Up.

David Brodie was an editor on Mountain Queen, Greatest Night in Pop, The Volunteer, Struggle: The Life and Lost Art of Szukalski, and Selena Gomez: My Mind and Me.

Will Znidaric was an editor on Greatest Night in Pop and projects like Biggie: I’ve Got a Story to Tell, Neymar: The Perfect Chaos, and Quincy.

Thank you for joining me on Art of the Cut.

HAYNES: Before we get started, I wanna shout out Nick Zimmerman who was an editor on the film who should be here with us. He was instrumental in getting the first pass of the film done. He’s great.

BRODIE: A lot of credit for the shape of the film and the style of it goes to him.

I wanted to talk a little bit about the idea of setting up a story when you’re doing any documentary - but especially this one. How do you determine - or when do you determine - how the documentary is gonna start? Is it something that happens later in the process or right up front?

BRODIE: I always find it’s desperation.

I’ve heard that before. People say, “We only figured it out in the last month or something.”

HAYNES: I think that’s what’s special about documentaries: you are finding the story in the footage a lot of the times, which is different from a scripted film, which is largely done in pre-production and production. You make do with what you have.

Documentary is a little more malleable and the process of discovery is actually what’s really unique and special about it. You can often find a new story or additive parts to the story as you’re going through the footage, putting things next to each other and finding characters that were interesting that weren’t or even originally thought of as a main, a main part of the story and things like that.

ZNIDARIC: I often say, in terms of beginnings, that I cut the beginning at the end. You need to know what the story becomes, then you can figure out what’s the best reflection of the theme or what we’re going for. Greatest Night was a great example of that. I think Dave found the key of how we can start this.

BRODIE: I assume you’re talking about the Lionel Richie aspect of the film. With Greatest Knight and Pop, the story is all pretty clear in terms of the chronology of what happened over the course of these months leading up to it.

Then that night what was gonna be the sort of thematic and dramatic and character journey is what we had to figure out to make it engaging and experiential. I remember watching Lionel Richie’s full interview for the first time, and near the end of his interview he had this little anecdote where he talked about driving home after recording “We Are The World” and he’s exhausted and he gets home and his family is waking up and they’re asking him about the American Music Awards, which he was just at. And he won like every award possible and hosted it and kind of cemented himself as a major star of the moment.

He was kind of shocked ‘cause he had forgotten all about the American Music Awards and his own personal achievement and was still riding the wave of “We Are the World” in this really beautiful communal experience. That seemed like such an encapsulation of what the film could be about. We all talked about like, okay, if that’s gonna be, that’s gonna be Lionel’s journey.

The end has to be him forgetting about the individual need and want and his ego. Then how do you get him as far as possible from that moment while still being truthful to his story? How do you make his biggest separation between Lionel the selfless guy and him at the beginning? So then it’s about, “Okay, how do you start his journey?”

He’s not a selfish guy, so you can’t make him very selfish, and as talented as he is, he’s not as egotistical as you might expect, so it’s more about, “Okay, his new manager is trying to make him to be the face on his albums. He’s breaking away from the Commodores. It’s about establishing himself as a solo act. And that really informed how we would start.

So you’ve gotta put that on a Post-it note at the bottom of your editing monitor.

BRODIE: Right. Exactly. 

HAYNES: I think universally in documentaries - especially something that’s about a cultural moment or it’s historical or a bigger story than a personal journey  - is finding the character that the audience can live through. I think that was why it was a key moment to a main character can cue you on how to feel, how the emotional journey should feel.

We lived with Lionel through that story and felt the relief and the wonderment of the whole night at the end. So that’s how we knew we had succeeded in telling the story we wanted to is - as an audience member - you felt the emotions that Lionel felt and by the end you were so relieved and in awe of the achievement

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ZNIDARIC: Doc editing is like writing. I think most doc editors would agree with that. So I find a lot of the most helpful books to recommend to young doc editors are screenwriting books or writing books ‘cause that’s the thinking you have to get into. You’re writing a script, so who’s the main character and what is the narrative?

What drives a narrative or a plot? I find that I look for decision points. A plot is a series of decision points. A character has to make a choice and that’s gonna go down a path, so we really looked for those in “Greatest Night” in particular.

So the big core decision point is Harry Belafonte presenting this idea to Lionel’s, but Lionel’s got his own thing, his own album, his own stuff, which we worked to establish and set up based on the main idea.

After that we tried to find a clear way why or how people agreed to join the project. Those decision points build the idea that these are a group of individuals coming together to become more than themselves.

I love that idea that it’s a character arc that you’re trying to build, just like a script writer would try to build a character arc. I wanted to ask about a moment early in the film where Bruce Springsteen says, “We didn’t know what we were gonna be doing” and you cut to Huey Lewis kind of shrugging his shoulders as if he didn’t know what they were doing. We’ve probably all heard this phrase, “see and say.” What is the value of it and when do you try NOT to do it?

HAYNES: I almost have to remind myself to do “see and say.” My dream is that the audience is so connected and tuned in and has full context so you wouldn’t need to “see and say” to understand what’s going on.

But I find that it can really land an idea. It’s sort of for superficial information, superficial sorts of ideas you’re putting out there to push the story along. It’s helpful but it’s also really helpful not to do it when you’re trying to provide a little more subtext and you can often show the opposite of something or just something different that directs your attention away to something else to be one step ahead in the storytelling.

So for the audience it’s like, “Wait! What’s that?” And they lean in and you take ’em down another path. It’s always a conversation in my head when I’m covering footage as to how on-the-nose to be and how much I’m respecting the audience to need it or not need it. Then how much we wanna be nuanced and trying to reflect subtext or maybe foreshadow what’s about to come.

BRODIE: I would just say, I think also your example is from the cold open. In the cold open you’re painting with a much broader brush than later on. In the cold open you really wanna establish themes very quickly and everyone’s still getting settled and you need to be a little bit more accessible and obvious while you’re getting people hooked into the language of the film.

Then, later on, you don’t have to be quite as “see and say” and you people will be more engaged. So you can have the conflicting ideas - the image and whatever you’re saying - conflict a little bit, but in the beginning it’s helpful to be a bit more obvious.

ZNIDARIC: So in that instance: what are we achieving here? In every decision point you’re asking: why am I cutting right here? Why am I layering this, why am I putting this visual to the sound? The motivation of doing that is it’s a character reveal in a way.

Each of the icons that are part of the story are archetypes. I find thinking about mythological constructs is really helpful and you wanna have different archetypes in there or define characters cleanly, so that everyone’s not overlapping. Everyone’s got their own journey.

Cyndi Lauper’s got one and Bruce Springsteen has one and everyone’s got a little bit of a different journey so that you can track and feel satisfied with them. Huey’s got a journey that I think is probably the most compelling or most relatable, which is: “what am I doing here?

I’m freaked out.” So a moment like that upfront - having Huey be the person as the visual of confusion - is the key that you’re teasing. That’s what the character’s journey is gonna be.

HAYNES: That’s a smart reference that Huey was kind of the heart and soul in a way. Obviously Lionel’s kinda the main character, but we’re kind of living through Huey too. It’s the outsider perspective of: what would it be like to be in that room?

Huey’s the guy that doesn’t feel like he should be there. He’s like, “I’m standing here next to Michael Jackson!” It’s so relatable and so fun and he leaned into that too. He kind of knew what he was doing and he really helped the film and provided that sort of energy.

It helps when you get a good storyteller sitting in the chair, doesn’t it? 

ZNIDARIC: Totally. We’re so lucky he gave us that in his interview. It’s such a treat when you have a lot of coverage of something archival to play with. We had timelines laid out based on the time of time of night so we can reference through time and space.

That’s what made that project unique. Huey’s visuals reflect that. He’s got the nervous glance and he’s got the shrugs and he’s got the weird jokes. The closer you get to the edit, it starts wanting to meet you halfway. It starts almost kind of like showing itself to you a little bit.

Carlos Haynes

I love that idea. You mentioned how well covered the event was, but you guys did not hold yourself to that footage alone. There’s so much archival and music video stuff and footage, footage of L.A. nighttime driving. Talk to me a little bit about archival. Did you have to ask for that or was that something that was provided by some story producer?

HAYNES: I just wanna shout out Bao Nguyen, the director, for the recreations, which are some of the best recreations I’ve seen in terms of fitting with the style of the archival. Some of the audience might not even detect the difference between the recreations and the archival.

I’m assuming putting down the duct tape on the floor…

HAYNES: The duct tape, and when they’re writing the song and they’re crumpling up the paper and throwing it in the trash bin and the empty wine bottle. He was smart. There wasn’t a lot of visual context in the inserts so you could really just cut ’em in seamlessly.

That was a huge part of being able to capture and present the world, which was really helpful. We did have a lot of coverage of that room, which was made our jobs easier, but we didn’t get everything. A lot of the cameras were missing and the audio was bad so we had to repurpose a lot of sound and images to recreate what was going on. The inserts were really helpful in that. 

BRODIE: One of the biggest challenges that I think we all looked at with this film is that you wanted to be accessible to people who don’t remember 1984 - people who are younger than us who might not know, God forbid, who Stevie Wonder is and why he’s such a big deal.

You could spend three hours going through everyone’s history, explaining who everyone is and how interconnected they are and why it’s important to get them on the project. But you’ve gotta do it very quickly and have it motivated by story instead of just expositionally.

To me that was one of the most fun aspects of the project: how do I explain who Stevie Wonder is? So I’m just gonna spend the day watching Stevie Wonder clips and find 10 seconds that consummate that, that I can put together to let someone see who Stevie Wonder is.

And we did that for everybody. Not everybody made it in there, but it was really fun to do that, but a challenge to do it in a way that didn’t interrupt the story and didn’t undermine the sense of urgency.

Editor David BRODIE

Bao’s vision was that the film should feel like a heist - have that sense of excitement and it’s clandestine and if you spend too much time explaining someone’s backstory, it collapses. Will and I spent a lot of time talking about this: how do you thread it not as one big information dump, but through various scenes like we’re gonna get a little bit of Stevie Wonder’s story because that’s when he comes in we might hear a little bit.

ZNIDARIC: Yeah, I would say the key word for that idea is “context.” How do you paint in the context so that any audience member can come in and viscerally experience it. The audience needs to be able to come in cold.

You can’t assume knowledge and you can’t assume somebody knows who Stevie Wonder is. There were some iterations of the edit where there was a scene where the vocal arranger is playing records. In one iteration, we played a little bit of EVERYBODY! It took too long.

The introductions to people had to fit organically, so determining how you paint in the context artfully and organically as part of how you put the puzzle together, that a lot of fun too.

So in the vocal arrangement scene you had to pick who to highlight in that little section?

BRODIE: You have to pick based on who it will pay off for later. You had to go into journey so you can hear “Don’t Stop Believing” and you can hear how amazing those vocals are. Then you see Bruce Springsteen talk about how Steve Perry and he’s reveling in how great of a singer he is and he says, “He’s in that Sam Cooke territory.” It also sets up Huey Lewis being there.

There’re a lot of things like that where you have to just find the things that are gonna connect to something later on. I thought Al Jarrett singing was a really compelling thing to put in the film. I was corrected in that, because it just didn’t really pay off anywhere.

You have to have a very ruthless mindset on what stays and what goes because they’re all incredible musicians. It’s fun to listen to, but that’s not what we’re here for. We’re here to tell a story.

ZNIDARIC: It’s trial and error. Any doc editor will relate. You might have something that’s totally compelling and you try to fit it in, but you have to be ruthless. You do have to lose things that you like or because ultimately you’re trying to create this incredibly streamlined aerodynamic thing. It could be 20 minutes longer but then the whole loses.

Editor Will Znidaric

How long was the editor’s cut?

BRODIE: Honestly, not much longer. There wasn’t a three hour cut. We would work on scenes in isolation and kind of trade them back and forth so there would be longer versions of individual scenes, but I don’t ​​think we ever put it into a full assembly in terms of the vocal arrangement scene or where Lionel’s assembling the team through his management.

We did many iterations of different approaches to how that could work. Different styles, different orders of people. There were some that were much longer, some that were like 12 minutes long before we condensed it. Our process generally was to get into a place that worked and was compelling and that was dynamic and punchy and then work it into the full assembly as opposed to just putting in really baggy edits.

So you had a bunch of stories that could have each been 20 minutes long, but before you put them a full timeline you were cutting them down? 

HAYNES: Yeah. The structure of the film was kind of always there. It was pretty clear from the beginning. The tricky part is providing the full context to make the story more meaningful in act one to make the rest of the story more meaningful and for the story arcs to land - managing the timeframe of that.

It almost fixes itself because what makes the film move and hum is also what’s gonna give us the constraints to not spend too much time in act one on all the backstories of all the musicians.

BRODIE: One of the least complicated tricks to making it move is adding a literal ticking clock. You put that in the backstory and you cut to it as much as you can and you also are cutting to dates to create a countdown.

That automatically just gives you momentum and it’s such an easy trick. But for this, it, really helps contextualize knowing where we are in the process. It just gives you that sense of urgency and it’s so funny how something so simple can change the experience so dramatically.

HAYNES: Yeah. Bao’s heist movie idea - we kind of just kept going back to that. I spent a lot of time in the verite in the studio and on the night of, and whenever you’re making decisions, you fall back on the ticking clock.

This is a heist movie they have till this amount of time to get it up. So how do we build the tension as we go? And that’s by pacing it up and getting it to the essentials. Falling back on that heist ticking clock idea really helped as a rule to follow.

There’s the whole Stevie Wonder trying to get people to sing in Swahili or something, right? If you cut that scene out, the documentary still tells a cohesive story, right? Also, the anticipation of Prince showing up does not pay off in a positive way either. But in a heist movie, there’s always something that goes wrong, right? You can’t have a heist where everything goes right. So I can totally see the Swahili thing or Prince not showing up helps that heist concept.

HAYNES: Going back to act one - in terms of assembling the team - that was also part of it. It was sort of like an “Oceans 11” assemble of your unique crew with all different talents and put ’em all together. That also kind of the helps the flow and pace of the film. That you keep it moving. So that was, that was the vision.

I also realized how much you were cutting away from stories. Like, there’s the whole thing with Lionel saying, “We were trying to write this song, but we were goofing off and getting distracted. Then you went away to the big record producer guy, then came back to him saying, “We still didn’t have a song and we still were goofing off.” So it helped to have those moments of breaking away from a storyline and coming back to it.

BRODIE: With the momentum and the ticking clock, a sense of escalation is really important. Part of that is when Lionel and Michael start writing the song, it’s low stakes. There’s no deadline because they don’t know when they’re gonna record it.

So they’re just kind of goofing off. At that point it’s just the two of them. Then you cut to Ken Craig’s team and they decide to add all these other artists? Then you cut back to Lionel and they get a call and now there are all these people waiting on the song. Now the stakes are higher.

As Lionel sits down with Tom Baylor and imagines what line everyone is gonna sing then he realizing this is real. As he listens to everyone’s records, he imagines the line they’re gonna sing and imagines them all in the studio and it’s the most real it’s ever been.

He has that moment where he says, “What am I doing? What am I doing here? Am I up to the challenge?” So that sense of escalation is always driving it forward.

ZNIDARIC: You know, I think the unspoken question in a heist thing is: are they gonna pull it off? If you have a heist movie where they just go in and easily get the money, that’s not compelling. You’re looking for those complications.

Complications like the heat of the lights in the studio and people getting tired and wanting to leave. Waylon Jennings leaving.

BRODIE: Without the difficulties, people just smell a rat. The audience - if it’s all flowers and happiness and everyone’s getting along - the audience knows that it’s curated. The more you can give these moments that are uncomfortable or that don’t pay off, I think the more you’re casting the spell that this is how it really happened and you’re convincing the audience that we’re not holding back and that we’re telling you the true story.

Especially when there are celebrities and everyone has this image to protect, it’s really hard to show people’s weaknesses or fears or when they didn’t come through. It’s just the nature of that type of documentary.

A lot of people are really open to it, fortunately. We talked about people who are like Bob Dylan. If that had been cut out, number one, you would lose a really compelling story beat, but also the audience wouldn’t believe it and they wouldn’t really feel anything at the end when Lionel says, “I can’t believe we pulled it off!”

Or when Diana Ross cries because she doesn’t want it to be over. If it was all great, that’s boring. And I don’t believe you.

HAYNES: Stevie teaching Bob Dylan his part on the piano is one of the the coolest things that happened in real life that I’ve ever seen.

You’ve got this footage of Bob Dylan looking like he’s kinda lost up on the stage. When do you decide that you’re gonna have this thing about how uncomfortable he feels among all these great singers? I mean he’s a great singer, but in his own kind of odd way.

HAYNES: Well that was something that was luckily able to be seeded early and then paid off at the end. I think it’s a case of what Will was talking about where we’re working backwards in a way. Luckily, things are basically chronological in the story.

Once we get into the studio, that’s kind of the storytelling technique. As it got into the night, the more tired people are gonna be, the more time is running out naturally things are gonna break apart.

People are gonna be tired. But Bob Dylan also was one of the last guys to go and we just had that incredible moment at the piano with Stevie and Lionel coaching him and just his general non-pop-star-ish vibe that made him feel kind of out of place.

But we also found that moment earlier when they’re doing the chorus, the beginning of the film where he’s just not that kind of singer as they realized and seeding that really helped the audience to plant in their mind: “Let’s watch Dylan ‘cause this is gonna get interesting with him. He’s not where he is supposed to be.” It turned out he WAS where he was supposed to be, but we didn’t know at that time.

BRODIE: To further set that up. When they get Dylan - when they’re assembling the team - it’s like, “Holy shit! We got Bob Dylan! He’s the voice of a generation!” He’s not a “singer” like everyone else, but it is setting him up as a major cultural icon who’s kind of in his own world.

So the astonishment of seeing him so uncomfortable and not knowing what to do was so much more jarring. That’s another aspect where you just wanna set him up as a bigger thing so that when he’s out of his element, you’re as shocked as everyone in the room.

ZNIDARIC: We see he’s past his prime. We paint that context in a little bit, but what makes the payoff so satisfying? It’s a redemption arc being at the piano with Stevie, and it’s the way he interacts with Quincy. That to me is like my favorite stuff in the film because Quincy’s also from a completely different landscape

And you don’t think about Bob Dylan and Quincy and those kind of interactions throughout with these different people. The way Quincy gives him notes gently - I’ve got a printout of Quincy talking to Bob above my workstation and it reminds me of how to give creative notes and how to talk with other creative people. It was very inspiring.

HAYNES: The audience wants that peek behind the curtain. It felt like the studio was that peek behind the curtain and we kind of had that idea that everyone was equal when they walked in that room because there were so many egos that no one could have an ego.

I really like the distinction between the fame and pop culture that we kind of blast to you in the first act. Then what it’s like when you’re in a safe space as a famous person being creative.

You might have seen Quincy working before but have you seen him manage 20 egos or give notes to the most famous musicians on earth? That’s the really special stuff.

The audience wants the dirt. This was a really special way to peek behind the curtain without it being this toxic situation with drama that they were shielding from the world and we’re getting our kicks through seeing people suffer behind the scenes.

A lot of the networks want: What’s the never-before-seen stuff? This was a really beautiful healthy peek behind that curtain where Bob Dylan’s struggling creatively. And we see the genius of Quincy coaching him on how to do the part correctly.

Imagine that every musician in that room has had that moment behind the scenes where they weren’t able to pull something off and they needed help and they were vulnerable. The vulnerability was really special there.

ZNIDARIC: It’s a gift to have that stuff playing out on camera versus needing to recreate it.

HAYNES: Having the verite was pretty special. You’re typically dealing with an interview retelling and then you’re finding creative ways to visualize it.

But this played out on camera and you can just live there and it’s super special and the archive chest - it’s like Summer of Soul or something like that where you just uncover this archival that blows your mind.

We knew that there were cameras in that room, but I think - correct me if I’m wrong - but one of the producers found a bunch of these tapes in their trunk.

BRODIE: Someone from one of the foundations had it in the trunk. Julie Nottingham was one of the producers on it in the UK. She put a lot of effort into baking the footage and recovering it ‘cause it was not in the best shape. I’m guessing if someone had the idea of making it in 10 years, the footage wouldn’t be there.

ZNIDARIC: Most of the audio was from the journalists who just had a cassette recorder. So we had that sunk up to the cameras, which we ended up utilizing a lot where there were no cameras shooting at that time or whatever.

HAYNES: Some things we heard on that tape - that we didn’t include in the film - but that were pretty interesting.

BRODIE: It was really funny to hear Willie Nelson talking about golf with Huey Lewis. It was just fun because you don’t think of musical heroes like that talking about golf in that way. Just regular stuff.

People talking about what kind of mixed drinks they like… a lot of it is really funny and compelling and if the documentary was an hour longer, you’d wanna put those verite moments and that’s when it becomes a little bit more like the Beatles documentary - the Peter Jackson film - as opposed to something that’s a little bit more of a concise story, but so much of that stuff made it in, but it all had to be propelling us forward as opposed to a little cul-de-sac that you’d want to hang out in for a while.

The magic trick of documentaries where you find those moments that are these little gems that you could never write in a million years, but they’re so weird and specific. But then assembling enough of those that tell a story and that work together in a way that retains sort of the specificity and spontaneity, but also works together to move the story forward.

It’s the hardest thing to do, but you don’t wanna waste those discoveries, but you can’t destroy the momentum. That’’s always the trickiest part, especially with verite is having both the spontaneity and the momentum.

Talk to me about leaving breaths. I started out editing TV spots and then got into documentary. When I did, I had a hard time leaving space for breath. I was just like slam everything together as tight as I possibly could. There are lovely moments spots of breath or space opening in this doc.

HAYNES: David and I actually have similar editing background as you, Steve. I started my career cutting commercials. David still cuts commercials. When we learned how to tell a story, it was in 15, 30 seconds and you’re slamming everything in there and it’s just the bare essentials. It’s a good way to learn how to tell a story in terms of being efficient and telling a story quickly. But your instincts are to cram.

My process is interesting, it’s sort of an accordion because when I started working in long form I was kind of overjoyed with how much time you could take with things. But I’ve noticed recently in the last few years, with streamers and retention and all this stuff that they do want to up-cut things. They want the audience leaning in and the pace of things have really picked up.

So a lot of times against my instincts, I’m making things go quicker. With some films, you pack in a lot of information. It’s really exciting. Then you relieve the tension and give the audience a breath to retain what they’ve watched, have an emotional break and then you can ramp back up. 

Again in terms of killing darlings and discoveries, something like Ray Charles playing Georgia on my Mind. Something like that is so special. You also just sort of find a way to build it into something. It would be crime not to have it.

I was thinking of when Lionel’s talking about how he and Michael can’t write the song, you break from that with a moment of a driving shot in LA with just some sound underneath of it. You could have jumped right into the next thing. But there’s a breath.

ZNIDARIC: I came up cutting ads as well. I actually think it’s a great proving ground for docs and other editing. You feel it. A lot of times you might put together something that’s too tight and you can just feel that it’s tight when you step back a little bit and look at it. You want to actually have a natural sense of how people breathe.

Sometimes dialogue gets cut so tight. Where are they actually breathing here? BRODIE, you could speak more to that particular edit to the car, but in a few different places we had thought about rhythm and you’re kind of wanna reset a little bit and you feel that out.

There’s a lot of just vibe and instinct and trial and error of things and putting it together. I call it confident editing versus insecure editing. You can see stuff where it’s too fast and it feels insecure. ‘cause it’s like, “Pay attention to me! Look!

I’m doing all this stuff! Keep paying attention to me, please!” But confident is like, “I’m just gonna let you vibe this. I’m gonna let you feel this and I’m gonna be confident enough that it’s got the power it needs to pull you in.” That - in and of itself - is compelling and pulls you in.

HAYNES: I’m really intuitive with rhythm and pacing. I’m constantly watching it back, which I know is a great way to not make a lot of progress, but I can’t really move on until I watch something and nothing bumps me about the pacing of it. That’s comes from watching it in context.

You’ll work on something for a long time in a bubble and think it’s amazing and then you watch it down in context and you think, “Whoa! You can’t put this fast-paced thing next to this fast thing.” You gotta vibe out the rhythm.

BRODIE: I agree with that. You work in individual scenes. It’s the only way that I know how to do it is to go scene-by-scene then string them together. That’s when you really get the sense of “Okay, we need a breath here. These two sections are feeling too much the same.” Or maybe, “Let’s turn off the music.” If it’s wall-to-wall music, that becomes really grating.

Early on in my career, I was working on something for Stand Up to Cancer and we were doing a three-minute version and a seven-minute version and the network was asking to get it tighter, tighter, tighter. It was people talking about their experiences surviving cancer.

The director said, “At a certain point, when it’s shorter it feels longer because it’s so much work for the audience to keep up.” When the audience is really working hard and they’re off their balance, it’s gonna wear them out. So the reality is that it can feel a lot longer to have to struggle to keep up with something for five minutes as opposed to just enjoying something for seven and a half minutes.

So that’s something I’ve always been conscious of. I do tend to cut fast and slow things down or find those breaths.

With that transition to the driving, I think our director gets a lot of credit for that because he always had this vision that LA was another character of the film and he really wanted to find footage that didn’t feel like cutaways and b-roll and archival that really told you something about what was going on in LA at the time and gave you a sense of the different locations and what it sounded like and felt like.

I think the best solutions are always answering two problems, like the shot you mentioned of the driving: you get a break from the intensity and the sort of cloistered songwriting bubble that Michael and Lionel were in.

You get a little bit of scope and you get a break before you go into the next montage of musicians. But it also addresses that idea that Bao had of what is the city and how do we establish the context of the time? So when it solves both problems, that’s when you know it’s the right answer.

It reminds me of a couple of places where you guys left room for a punchline. The two best punchlines: I love the Paul Simon quote that “If a bomb drops on this building, John Denver’s back on top.” And you cut to - I think - an aerial or LA landscape. Something allows you to laugh for a moment. The other one is the Lionel Richie comment when Michael Jackson’s snake comes out in the studio and he says, “I saw that horror movie and it didn’t end well for the brother.” Then there’s another break where I can laugh. Talk to me about interviews on camera. You guys had so much footage you could have covered every single interview and not seen anybody on camera. When do you go to someone on camera and when do you not? When do you cover?

ZNIDARIC: There was something really interesting about seeing that contrast between what people looked like 40 years ago and today. It gave you a little something. So seeing Bruce Springsteen walk into the room and sit down.

He comes into the story and he’s a major figure for when they’re putting the team together. So that’s another way we get some space. He enters in a special way and the way they were shot is really interesting. The cinematography is really interesting.

So it gave us that ability to feel their reflections. We were talking a lot about Huey and Bruce. They’ve got present day reflections that are not necessarily in the visceral part of how the story unfolds. So Bruce saying, “It was a simple song, but it had to carry that many voices” and he’s making a reflection on something so you’re kind of popping out a little bit and you wanna be with him and read his expression and feel his vibe and then you kind of get back into it.

BRODIE: My first question is, “Why should this be a film and not a book?” I think a book is a better medium for information and a film is a better medium for experience and emotion. If an interview is just conveying information, then this should be in a book.

This does not need to be on film, but if it’s conveying someone’s experience and their emotion, then let’s put it in there. I was editing with a director and he said, “Think of interviews as a performance.” I’ve always remembered that.

So if you’re cutting to someone, you’re cutting to them when they are making an interesting expression or you can see the emotion in their eyes or something’s happening that adds the story. I think it’s a performance in that sometimes it’s very intentional on the part of who’s being interviewed.

They have to tell you more than just the words that are coming outta their mouth - the way their voice sounds or cracks or their expression. So that is always the biggest indicator of when you should cut to somebody.

HAYNES: It’s really like how good of an interview they are because in the interest of pacing, you’re often truncating sound bites to just be clean and quick and you’re getting information out and if you have good B roll, you can cover it and it just pushes the story along.

But if someone is engaging, compelling, and you can just hang on them during their interview. I think that’s really special. Especially coming from commercials. You’re “frankenbiting” everything. You’re taking frames out to get the words out faster.

As an editor it’s a relief to have an interviewee that can charismatically tell a story without you having to like cut them up and cut out all the ums and ahs and you can just live with them and they have hand gestures and facial expressions, so that’s a big part of it.

I worked on a project called Supergirls that was a doc series about these high school dancers. One of our creative ideas was to never show an interview when someone’s speaking. We’d just show the B-roll of that person.

Ultimately we were a little lost ‘cause we don’t know the people well enough so we at least have to cut to them for the last line just to kind of land on who that person was. I found that like when you see it’s coming often see things coming outta someone’s mouth, you can connect with what they’re saying more.

So I think it actually was more artistic and kind of cool than not showing any interviews and just have the audio over artistic B roll. But I think ultimately the story was more profound when we got to see these people talking about their truth and their lives.

So much of communication is nonverbal, so seeing the face of someone saying something, oftentimes you can tell when they’re not telling the truth or when they’re lying to themselves or there’s subtext there or meaning. But you have to kind of see them say it to catch that.

So often it’s revealing after they’ve said something. That moment after they speak. That’s the revelation.

HAYNES: Yeah. I’m the king of hanging on faces after they’ve lied.

BRODIE: You slow it down to 80%. Sometimes even key the eyes so their eyes don’t close.

HAYNES: Yeah, exactly.

ZNIDARIC: Well, Sheila E was an interview that we did a lot of that with, because her story has a lot of pathos in it. So the way she delivers some of that, you really wanna be on her and just hang on her for a little bit longer.

How much were you able to ask for things? There were moments where I thought it was impressive that the editors had that footage or soundbite. Did you find those things or did you ask for them?

ZNIDARIC: We’ve got a great archival team who we work with on a lot of these projects and they’re able to dig up stuff like the Los Angeles driving around on the streets at night and these different L.A. texture pieces. We’ll give them specific asks as well.

They’ll dig up a lot of stuff. We put general asks for and they dig up material and a lot of times we’ll be pleasantly surprised and it’ll shift some of what we’re doing in the edit. When we’re cutting the scene where Tom Baylor is playing different records.

That was something where we did do another shoot in the style of the archive, which was one of the visual languages Bao had set up initially. So we did have a shot list of things we wanted closer to picture lock. We really wanna shoot these records being placed and that kind of thing. So to that level of specificity we were lucky enough to be able to actually shoot more material which is unique to this project.

HAYNES: In docs in general, editing is part of the filmmaking process and it’s really important for documentarians to budget pickup shoots because so many discoveries are happening in the edit and the story can go this way or that way, or you realize this story kind of becomes the plot, then you need more coverage of that.

On any of the projects that I’ve worked on where we’ve been able to do pickup shoots after a couple rounds of the edit have been excellent because you know exactly what you need and what you want. To your point Steve, it makes the film feel like it was a vision from the start.

Bao’s like that. He’s a very cinematic documentarian and had a vision for the way the film was gonna look and feel and his original concepts for the B roll and the art and the reenactment archival that we kind of worked into the actual archival that we researched also kind of sparked the ideas for what we could pick up to enhance the film ‘cause we were sort of just mimicking the style of the cutaways that he had already established.

When you got a documentary and you’re maybe not quite sure the way it’s gonna lay out - you’re just building scenes - talk to me about looking at some footage and saying, “Okay, I can make this into a scene of 30 seconds or two minutes. What’s the process of approaching daileys and building a scene?

HAYNES: Documentary films are so tight now unless it’s a doc series where you have a little more space to play. The choices you make tend to serve the narrative that you’re building with the interviews. The interviews are kind of the foundation of the structure of the film.

Then it’s being enhanced by the verite. Verite is a really fun process of having an idea of what you want and then finding moments that you didn’t realize were there that sometimes end up being more powerful or more unique than you visually intended.

But verite for sure is a whittling process where you find a thousand amazing things, you put it together, then you kind of compare it to this sort of structure of how the story’s going and see what fits in. Then if there’s a special moment that maybe is a little off the course of the plot line, you try to sneak it in there in the early rounds.

Then as people start saying, “Eh, I gotta cut it down then you kill your babies.” But the Mountain Queen documentary was special because of the verite. I work on a lot of interview-heavy docs, especially now that the stock footage industry is such a big thing.

You can really find what you need out there. I worked on a film last year that just shot interviews and said, “You find the visuals and we’ll go from there.”

That happened to me. I spent 10 years working for Oprah. They hired a lot of magazine writers to be producers. They were fantastic writers, great interviewers. One of these magazine writers went out and shot this entire interview and they came back to my editing room and the interview was great. I said, “This is really great. So let’s look at the B-roll.” And they said, “What’s that?” (Laughter)

HAYNES: There’s more archival out there now. The footage is out there. My son is 10 and he is starting to explore video production and editing. He doesn’t really understand what a director does.

He thinks editing is the whole thing because footage is easier to shoot now with his iPhone then he downloads video and there’s archival in the editing software that you can use. He just just thinks you just grab the footage and you do the edit and the edit’s the thing.

As opposed to the visionary director. It’s just interesting the way things have kind of changed a bit.

ZNIDARIC: In terms of approach in general this is something I developed back when I was working on spots and doc-style spots and I found it was able to scale up. Organization is key and a lot of docs are interview-based. I organize it in the way I pull selects as I have little text cards.

So even with an interview, I’ll tend to clump ideas or themes. So if it’s something that’s been spoken about in four different parts of the interview, those come together and I label it in a timeline and the act of writing the text card actually helps me to kind of boil down the essence of what that idea is.

And if there’s a particularly juicy line in the verite, a really juicy moment or something, I’ll raise that up to V2 ‘cause I’m visually oriented.

Later in the process when you’re under the gun and there’s time pressure, you’ve gotta find something else or rewrite a scene or a section, and then you can go back to that original select timeline and immediately find whatever it is around a particular idea or immediately just scan the juiciest lines and it helps quicken the workflow at that point.

But in that process of selection and organization that’s really where the edit’s happening. I say it’s almost like 70% of the edit ‘cause you’re putting those ideas together and you’re creating connections between different ideas and you’re finding the themes and the foundation is happening in the background and you have a confidence of what you have to work with.

So when you get down to putting the puzzle pieces together, you have a pretty good handle on what the animal ultimately is gonna become. Then it just becomes more fun. You’re finding temp music and that’s almost the bells and whistles and the expression of the vibe that you’ve already gotten a handle on in that process.

I love that idea and I read about that in my last Art of the Cut book - that it’s so easy to be bored with organizing footage and the project if you think that all you’re doing is organizing, but if you actually consider that the organizational process IS the editing process that makes it so much more interesting and so much more important in your life that you’re not thinking, “Oh, I can’t wait to get through the organizing process so I can edit.” Then you ARE editing right then and right there.

Any other thoughts on organization while we’re on the topic?

HAYNES: I’m not naturally a super-organized guy.

Me neither. Thank goodness there’s somebody else.

HAYNES: I shouldn’t really be an editor, honestly, if I’m not good at organization ‘cause - like Will said - it’s the process of organizing. You’re going through all the footage and you’re already cutting the movie in your head. So by the time you’re done, you’re off to the races.

I’m just a little A.D.D. It’s like I see a squirrel and I run over there, then I see a squirrel and I run over there. I do a lot of things on intuition and vibe. But to Will’s point, it’s the legwork in the beginning that serves you at the end because when you’re down the stretch and the clock is ticking and you have to make changes for a client or the network and you can go to the well immediately and know exactly where things are. It’s so helpful.

So I would say with disorganization, you’re shooting yourself in the foot right away because it’s not even just the process of organization, but setting yourself up for success for the entire project.

From Mountain Queen documentary

Gentlemen, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much.

HAYNES: Thank you Steve.

ZNIDARIC: Great speaking with you.