Greedy People

Today on Art of the Cut, we talk with editor Jamie Kirkpatrick, ACE and one of his assistant editors, Amanda K. Romero about editing the film, “Greedy People.” 

Jamie’s been on Art of the Cut previously for his work on the film “Critical Thinking.” His other films include Old Henry, My Friend Dahmer, and We Summon the Darkness.

Amanda has previously edited the feature films False Pretenses and Bedside, and the TV series Londyn and Philly D.A.

Jamie and Amanda, thank you so much for joining me. It’s great to have you on Art of the Cut. 

KIRKPATRICK: Thank you. Steve, it’s it is always a pleasure. I always enjoyed chatting with you. Love your show. As you know, a long time fan. So we’re happy to be here. 

ROMERO: Thank you. Steve, thank you so much. 

Amanda reminded me that we met at the ACE holiday party in New York City last year.

KIRKPATRICK: Oh. That’s right. We were so excited to finally have you join us in New York at the ACE holiday party. That was really fun. I think everybody was really excited to finally meet you in person. How many guests did you have there that you talked to but maybe never met in person?

A ton. It was really fun and it was a nice intimate group compared to the LA Gathering, which is in a  football field size room. 

KIRKPATRICK: That’s how we do. We have a very tight knit community here in New York. everybody knows each other. So many people have either worked together or been assistants for each other or shared assistants. It’s something I really love about working in New York. You go to those parties and you generally know everybody there, which is really cool.

Let’s talk about Greedy People. The first thing to talk about is just cutting comedy.

KIRKPATRICK: It’s a good question. It’s a really tough question because I don’t think there’s any special secret sauce to it. What it ultimately comes down to is that you need to have a sense of humor. You need to appreciate what’s funny. In the case of our film - because it’s not a straight comedy, it’s a very dark comedy - and that’s a little bit more specific. It’s a different nuance.

You’re not playing for laughs. We’re playing for the absurd, because it’s the absurdity or the irony in some of the situations in the movie that create the humor. On the face of it, somebody getting killed is not funny but HOW somebody gets killed or BY WHOM, that has a lot to do with the plot of the movie, that can be very funny.

So even though the end result is actually fairly high drama, the irony of the situation that led up to that person’s death? That’s a big kind of part of of Greedy People. There’s a lot of that. That was the sort of thing we really leaned on. I feel like dark comedy is one of those like sub-genres that is out there, but it’s not done that often.

I feel like you can always remember those films when they came out. With the director, Potsy Ponciroli, most of our reference points - tonal reference points were from the films of Martin McDonagh. He’s made a whole career out of that exact kind of tone: very high stakes, but also dark comedies.

These movies that are really funny. It’s silly to deny the reference point of something like Fargo, right? The Coen brothers have always been great at doing that, from their very first movie. Blood simple is a pitch black film, but there’s a lot of big laughs in that movie to this day.

The characters aren’t seeing the humor - they’re playing it completely straight - for those characters, the stakes are life and death. So if you can find a way to make a situation such that the audience can see the humor in those really dark stakes, that’s the challenge.

And certainly in the editing process, that was something we spent a fair amount of time on - really finding the nuances of scenes - and deciding whether we leaned too far into the comedy of this scene.

Are we lessening the stakes without meaning to? Or have we done the opposite of that? Have we made this scene a little too serious? And are we skewing the movie? We still want the audience to feel like they’re on a ride and have a good time. So it was tricky. I think we did a pretty good job with it.

Editor Jamie Kirkpatrick, ACE

Amanda, I’m going to get to you in a minute, but I want to stay with Jamie about tone - which you kind of alluded to. This is a movie that starts out pretty broad comedy, but then goes pretty dark. How do you either balance that tone or how do you make those transitions where it feels comfortable to the audience?

KIRKPATRICK: You do it the same way you balance out any show or movie, which is the editor and the director have to fight to stay objective audience members as you screen the film. You can’t get too caught up in what you’re doing or what you’re trying to do that really straddles the line tonally.

This was not the kind of movie where we could just watch a scene or two scenes and ask, “How does that work?” We always had to start from the beginning. The director and I probably screened this movie more times than maybe any other film I’ve worked on, because we realized very quickly, we can’t cut this in chunks because the section might feel fine, but then several days later, a week later, when we’ve worked on something at the end, you realize, “Oh, shoot!

That section that we loved now feels a little out of place with how we’re ending the movie.” So there was a lot of coming back from lunch, saying, “I guess we’re going to watch.” We had to start from the beginning and eliminate distractions. 

Potsy and I were remote from each other for a lot of the process. He’s based in Nashville. He seemed a little less concerned about it, but I kind of demanded that he come to New York for a couple weeks after my editors cut was done.

The film the two of us did previous to this was called Old Henry. But it’s a Western. It’s really character-based and plot-based, and it was a much smaller movie. But this thing had a lot of moving parts. It’s a big ensemble cast, a bunch of different storylines that all kind of coalesce and converge, but nonetheless different storylines you had to put together. I knew this was something we need to be able to have those micro conversations about.

They don’t have to do the big giant ones. The big giant ones you can do on Zoom or you can have a phone call. As an editor, one of the things I look for is when we’re screening something: is the filmmaker checking their phone? I would never do that. It’s just not something I would ever allow myself to do. But sometimes I can tell when a director is not totally dialed in, and sometimes it has nothing to do with the movie. It just might be real life encroaching.

That’s why I really like watching directors watch a cut, because when you do it enough times, you start to be able to pick up these little micro-reactions of seeing that their eyes aren’t kind of staying on the monitor, so you think, “If they’re not into it, then it’s very likely that the audience is going to feel something similar.”

I think we had two weeks together where we just really bombed through the movie a bunch of times. I’m so glad we did that. He also agreed this was a good idea because we really needed to feel each other out. Sometimes one of us would say, “Oh, I think this thing works really great.” But the other one say, “Yeah, but do you think this joke takes away from this important serious line later?”

Then you say, “I hadn’t thought of that.” You’re not going to have that little conversation over Zoom. I’m not going to go out of my way to call him to ask him that question. Maybe I should, but that’s just the reality of the remote work setup: you tend to overlook little nagging questions you might have just because you don’t want to bother the director right now, or I just don’t feel like messing with my flow and getting on a Zoom call or jumping on Slack.

I’m not against remote work, but I am one of those people that’s pretty vocal that the best way to make movies is in person. I think an in-person work environment just leads to a better product ultimately because of those tiny little nuance things that you can’t do over a computer.

Assistant Editor Amanda Romero

Amanda, were you remote from Jamie as well? 

ROMERO: I was. 

How did that work? You were working from your home and how were you connected together? How were you working on the same media? How were you delivering what you needed to deliver to Jamie? 

ROMERO: We were both remoting in through a program called Jump Desktop. That was how we worked together. Of course, it would have been much easier to work in person with Jamie. We were on the phone all the time just going back and forth, between little things or bugs that were occurring in Premiere and how to fix those - or even before we encountered those bugs - just how to work best with each other.

We had never worked with each other before, and we were working in a remote environment. Jamie and I met through Post New York Alliance, and we had been in contact with each other for several months. As someone who was just trying to break into the industry, I was just trying to network as much as possible and develop those relationships.

Jamie was somebody who I felt was really in my corner from the very first conversation, and I think it ultimately led to him really trusting me and believing that I could do this and take this on, even though it was remote. 

We started this in March 2023, he was in constant communication with me, making sure that I was okay and if I needed anything or if I had any questions. I always felt that I could reach out to him if I was stuck or I didn’t know what I was doing or anything of that nature. So it definitely helped having him in my corner and just having someone be so helpful and willing to help me in any capacity. 

KIRKPATRICK: Amanda was not the original assistant on this job. Blake Pruitt was the initial assistant. He did all of the dailies work. This job had a bit of a circuitous post schedule. It went a lot longer than anyone initially thought.

There were a couple of hiatuses. So as you can imagine - especially in independent film like this one - they don’t keep people on, so Blake went off actually to cut a film on his own. Then in the middle of the project, Will Truesdale came in to kind of help us through the director’s cut, producers cuts, things like that. 
He went off to do something else. Part of why I felt safe hiring her, despite - at least on paper - her lack of feature film assisting experience, was that it was supposed to be a two week turnover. Then those two weeks turned into - I don’t know - Amanda? What? 10-12 weeks?

Director Potsy Potsy Ponciroli, and editor Jamie Kirkpatrick, ACE

ROMERO: It started in March and it ended in June. So I think it was like 14 weeks. 

KIRKPATRICK: She really got thrown into the deep end. We did run into some pretty daunting technical hurdles, but she was a trooper and a real hero and got us out of the weeds. I was off the show at that point, so she had to just figure it out, and she did. 

So that’s always a sign of a great assistant. They don’t get too overwhelmed when there’s not an obvious answer in front of them. They chase down the solution. By the end, I was getting a lot of thank you emails from the producers that we had found, Amanda, and how she had really saved the day.

One of the things I think about with assistants is that the knowledge base isn’t as important as the personality, and knowing they’re going to keep trying, that they have a work ethic.  What do you think Amanda? Do you do you feel like when you’re when you’re trying to sell yourself to someone that your best foot forward is to talk about your own personality almost instead of knowledge base?

ROMERO: Of course. Yeah, definitely. Jamie, understood how passionate I was about being a part of this industry. I feel like I had enough knowledge that I could comfortably take on the job just because I had been editing for about 12 years at that point in unscripted and a wide variety of content. Through that time, I was my own assistant for the most part. 

But when I realized I needed to switch to narrative because it was just more fulfilling to me, I’m not one to, fake it until you make it, because I am just a terrible liar. I might not know 100% of what I’m doing, but at least I can say I know maybe 80%; and whatever I don’t know, I am going to learn. 

So I did try to push the experience that I did have as much as possible. They knew that I had over a decade of experience in post-production. But I was constantly trying to take in as much knowledge as I possibly could before I even started working with Jamie, so I think that helped him feel a little bit more confident taking me on, just knowing that I had really been preparing for this. 

Also our personalities did match, so that also helped.

Adobe Productions window for Greedy People

Was your decade in post production mostly Premiere or mostly Avid? 

ROMERO: I started in FCP7, then I moved to FCP-X, then I moved to Premiere, and then Avid, and then DaVinci. So it was kind of like all over the place. 

But I was happy too, because I feel like the more you learn and the more you can take on a program even if you don’t even know it that well. If you have the editing experience, you can say, “Okay, if I know how to do all these things and these programs, I just need to figure out the buttons or how to do them in a new program.” 

So it wasn’t so much as like learning Avid from scratch. I had a base knowledge on how to edit. Definitely, Avid was a different world, but the only way to learn is to cut on Avid. So I took it upon myself to cut a few projects in Avid, knowing that I could have just cut in Premiere, and I probably would have got done a lot faster, and it would have been a lot easier and less stressful. 

But I knew that I needed to take that jump, and it really ultimately helped me. But when Jamie hired me, he told me the project was in Premiere. 

KIRKPATRICK: In the months before we worked together, Amanda talked a lot about how she did projects on a platform she didn’t know, and she could have used a different platform. Those are the things I was picking up on. That’s what I’m looking for in someone that I want to work with is really kind of that drive. The thing I say all the time is: passion sells.

There have been jobs, even as an editor, that I’ve gotten that I know I’ve gotten - I’ve been told this after the fact - that I probably didn’t have the job on paper, but after the meeting, the filmmaker knew that nobody was going to be more into this project than I was. 

Especially with an assistant, the hard skills - how to organize the bins, how to do the string outs, all that stuff - we can teach them that. That’s very easy to teach. Every editor of course is a little different, has their preferences, but the hard skills are teachable. 

The soft skills are not. The soft skills have to be learned, not taught. It’s all well and good for someone to give you a heads up of: “Read the room. Know when to interrupt and when not to.” That’s good advice.

But until you’ve been in a couple of rooms - not one, but a few, maybe with one really nice director and maybe with one not so nice director, or with one editor who really welcomes your feedback, and another editor who doesn’t want to hear you talk. It’s only after having multiple experiences like that that you as a person start to piece together what is going to be your way of presenting yourself in the workplace. 

In our industry, something I really worry about in these last few years - because so many things have gone remote - I keep meeting more and more assistants who’ve never met their editor in person, or most of the relationship is Slack-based or Zoom-based, or, if they’re lucky, on a bigger show, with Evercast, but a lot of smaller shows don’t have that. 

My concern is that I think we, as an industry, are producing a whole generation of underprepared editors. As assistants, they might be fine. They might be totally technically savvy and can do the job, but they’re technically savvy. But they’re not picking up all of these soft skills that you really only get from doing it every day, in and out, job after job with different people. 

Just to get back to Amanda, her previous experience also really lent itself to that. It’s not like she’s never been in a room with a producer or a director. It might be a slightly different role for her, but she has that experience. 

Even though I didn’t necessarily think she would ever have the opportunity to be in the room with the director I felt totally fine that she knew how to handle herself with whoever she was interacting with on behalf of the project from a decade of experience.

Premiere Pro timeline for Greedy People

Absolutely. What about structural changes in this movie? Did you find that when you were going through the movie that things needed to change? What were those conversations like? 

KIRKPATRICK: There was quite a bit of that in this film. I agree with Joe Walker that I don’t like to get too into the details of exactly what we changed because then people are potentially watching the film looking for those things. 

This film has kind of that Rashomon structure, meaning we see the events of the film play out through one perspective, and then we go back and see those very similar or the same events play through someone else’s perspective, and we start to understand the intricacies of the plot that way. 

So we bounce around in time a bit. That was something I’m super excited about. I’ve always wanted to do a time travel movie because I just love the idea from the editing room of this puzzle. And you’ve got to really make sure the puzzle makes sense by the time you get to the end of the movie. 

While this wasn’t quite that intricate, it did have a lot of those same challenges of making sure that we’re not giving away the gag of something before the payoff that happens later in the film.

The film was always broken into chapters. Anytime you have a film that has delineated chapters, it’s good and bad. The good is because I kind of know that I’ve got an ending coming to this chapter.

There are ways to fudge some things because it’s not a straight line all the way to the end of the movie, but the screenwriter has already spent a lot of time figuring out how those chapters all fit together and make sense, and when you start changing things in editorial, it can create quite a ripple effect where you say, “Oh, shoot! This part works great now, but now we’ve broken this one bit of logic.” 

We took that thing out and now we don’t see that thing happen, so is the audience going to know it happened? Will they assume it happened? Those become the conversations. There was a lot of that of: “Did this lift or elision break us?

Or is the audience smart enough to just put two and two together and assume that this happened?” There was a fair amount of that all the way up and down our chain, between myself and Potsy, on up to the producers. So it was tricky. 

We did change quite a bit of that. Some famous filmmaker said, “If you have to cut something out, lift a storyline, don’t lessen by degrees what you have in the scenes.” If you need to cut something for time, just try to lift out a whole storyline. I remember the first time I heard that I thought, “I wonder if that’s really true?”

But now I realize that this was a good example where we realized, that that actually did help us a lot because otherwise it can potentially become a death by a thousand cuts to all the other storyline lines. If everything else is working and we’re always getting tripped up on this part, maybe just this whole part needs to come out. 

It’s funny, when I did Old Henry with Potsy, I literally did not have one scene on the cutting room floor. They shot the movie that was written, and we edited the movie they shot, with the exception of just some trims and maybe getting out of a scene a little earlier, every scene was intact. All credit to Patsy as the writer.

That screenplay was just air tight, but it was also a much simpler story, a much more linear story. This movie - because it’s got all these kind of callbacks and flashbacks and so many characters - we knew that was never going to be the case, so it really was just a matter of being really careful what we took out.

Then, screening the movie and asking, “Does it still make sense? Did we break anything?” We spent a lot of time doing that sort of thing. But it was also fun to kind of figure out that giant puzzle.

You had some jump cuts in one of the scenes, which I had to figure was designed that way. There’s a long push in on a car, as one of the characters is waiting for another character in the house. Talk to me about doing jump cuts, making them funny, or making them work. 

KIRKPATRICK: That particular sequence you’re talking about was absolutely designed that way. I remember Potsy telling me, “The dailies you’re going to be getting are not a mistake. We timed it out. They should all line up. We spent a ton of time. Don’t cut it some other way.” Sure enough, when I saw it, I thought, “I don’t understand what I’m looking at here.”

It’s the whole scene in one camera zoom, then they moved a little closer, and they did the scene again, but not from the beginning. But it wasn’t in the script that way. So that was totally just the director’s prerogative. I thought it was a really cool way of doing it, because it happens to be a character just being bored in a car, so it’s a neat visual tool to show somebody being bored without making us - the audience - also bored.

So that was just fun. It’s one of the things I love about working with Potsy. He really is always trying to think: “How can I make this bit of business more interesting?” 

I won’t specify where, but if there is one other time in the film, there is another small set of jump cuts. Like a lot of editors, I just die a little bit whenever I get to that part in the movie because it’s just one of those where I think it works okay.

I knew why I could justify it as a way to fix one of the issues we had with that particular scene, but it was not ideal. Sometimes we just have to jump cut because we have no other choice. Not to throw anybody else on the team under the bus in any way.

It usually happens when there’s a perfect storm of problems. It wasn’t one person’s mistake. The result of that is that we have no other way to cut it. It was the end of the day. So there were only two takes.

What about temp score? Talk to me about what you used. You mentioned The Coen brothers would certainly be a choice. Did you say, “Hey, I need to get the score from Blood Simple?” 

KIRKPATRICK: Yeah, totally. I feel like I know those movies super well: Blood Simple, Fargo, even No Country. Potsy really does like temp score. But especially with Blood Simple and Fargo, as soon as I heard them, I thought, “Oh no! These are much too kind of big or operatic for our movie.” Our movie is much quieter.

So we really leaned into the Martin McDonagh films, things like Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Seven Psychopaths, In Bruges.

Those were our tonal references. Maybe “references” might not be the right word. It was more like our proof that we could get away with something. There were a couple of times where somebody in the process would say, “I don’t think this works. I think the tone is wrong here. I think you guys might want to think about making a change.”

We would show them, “Well, look! Here’s how they did it in this movie. It’s the same kind of beat and it does work.” 

One of my favorite bits of temp score - because it’s so versatile - is the Fargo TV show. There are a number of seasons of that show, and the scores to those shows are really fantastic. It’s a lot of tracks. I personally - just as a creative person - I don’t like adding temp.

My personal philosophy of this is that the poor composer always ends up having to “chase the temp,” and I don’t think that’s fair to a composer. To me, it’s the equivalent of a director saying, “Oh, we already had somebody assemble this and can you just make it better?”

I turn every one of those jobs down because if you don’t understand why I need to do the assembly, then you don’t actually understand what goes into editing a movie. That’s just my opinion. So I kind of feel the same way about temp.

If it were up to me - and whenever I’m asked or consulted - I always try to push the filmmaker not to temp. But I knew from the first time I met Potsy, he has a different view of it. He wants to be able to just see how the scenes play with the right tone.

Director Potsy Potsy Ponciroli, and editor Jamie Kirkpatrick, ACE

I don’t love doing it, but I’ve gotten very good at it. I have a background in music, so I think I’m a decent music editor. I would also argue that it’s really not my job. It should be somebody else’s. But again, sometimes on these much smaller films, sadly, it’s just not something they budget for. That’s a whole ’nother conversation. In this case - because it wasn’t a wall-to-wall score kind of movie - it wasn’t that difficult.

There’s one scene in the movie where one of the characters is in a car and the radio is on, and we know the radio is on because when her car gets stopped, she turns the radio off and she did that in every take.

So from day one, I was nicely reminding everybody, “Hey, don’t forget! We’re going to need a song for this or something, tt could be the weather if you want, but something’s got to be on that radio.” 

“Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. We know, we know, we know.”

Cut to 14 months later. Multiple emails, multiple reminders, multiple text and we’re turning the film over with this song we’d had in forever, and I sent an email saying, “Guys, is this cleared? It was on your cue list for the longest time. This is cleared, right? We’re all good?”

Suddenly a barrage of emails of “Wait! We thought that was just temp!” They were saying, “Well, you don’t need to put anything there.” But I pointed out that she turns the radio off in the shot. I have nothing to cut away to. This is going to feel like a mistake.

It’s going to be really obvious that we just didn’t put something here. So at the 11th hour, a good friend of mine had a daughter who is an emerging artist. She had just sent one of her songs out. So I made a quick couple of phone calls. Long story short, we were now able to feature one of her first songs in this movie, and it’s playing very front and center for at least the beginning of the scene.

And and the best part was, when I sent it to everybody, they loved it. She was willing to grant it to us very reasonably. She got to say that her song was in a movie, and as frustrating of a story as that was for the obvious reasons, that’s one of the fun things about doing what we do.

I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for that scene just because it’s my friend’s daughter, and it all just came out of the vagaries of post-production and a cue getting missed.

I always tell people that artists should send us editors their music. Taylor Swift should be calling me on the phone saying, “Hey Steve, want to hear the new album?” And it could end up in a movie, making them a ton of cash.

KIRKPATRICK: Careful what you wish for! Years ago, I did a film that featured some hip hop music. and same thing. We couldn’t afford a lot of the more expensive stuff. We found some local Brooklyn artists who were willing to just kind of give us their catalog, and it was great, but for years - like a decade! - I had every one of those guys calling me because they thought I was their meal ticket. I had to be say, “Guys! I love the music. And you can send it to me, but I haven’t worked on anything else that needed hip hop music. 

I cannot put this in Old Henry! 

Amanda, did you were you able to look through the the bins and the project? That must have been cool to be able to see how a narrative film was constructed inside the NLE. Talk to me a little bit about any of that exploration you’re able to do and learn from. 

ROMERO: It was just super fun to be able to watch all the dailies down, which sounds like the most boring thing ever, but to me, it excites me so much to be able to just watch the dailies and see what transpired on set. Maybe I’d make a little marker for Jamie and say, “II noticed this when I was watching the dailies. I don’t know if it’s something you want to use.”

Just seeing how Jamie or the prior assistants, Blake and Will, just organize the sound design. I had come on for the additional photography, so the temp SFX was already there. But it was definitely very exciting just to immerse myself in it and learn with the project in front of me.

Like, this is  is not just from a tutorial. This is a real live movie that I can see how an editor likes his bins organized and how he likes his timeline organized and color coding and just setting different temp music and score and sound effects on different tracks. It was a very well organized timeline because Jamie is a professional. It gave me a lot to think about and just take in, so that I had that knowledge for my next project.

Did you get a sense of how - in a narrative - that you would want to work? Did Jamie work with selects reels? Were you able to kind of backwards engineer any of that where you could see how he was working?

ROMERO: When I was brought on for the reshoot footage, Jamie walked me through his preferences, like making markers for for when the director calls action and when he calls cut. If it was a long take, just marking every instance  where the actor delivers his lines. When I came on, I didn’t have a chance to look through the entire film. I was really focused on the additional photography and just doing the best job that I could with that.

Do you work differently, Jamie, when you’re in Premiere as you do on Avid? Do you have a different workflow or have you changed just because of human nature? 

KIRKPATRICK: That’s a good question. I go back to Avid in the early days. My first job out of college was as Avid tech support before I started assisting, so I’ve known that software since the mid-nineties. But then I also, weirdly, cut my first three feature films as the sole editor on Final Cut. That’s what the production company had and wanted me to use.

And Old Henry was the first time I use Premiere. Potsy, the director, his production company is Premiere-based and we were remoting into their system, so I was happy to do it and Adobe had been really helpful to me and to us when we did Old Henry, because we were one of the first independent features to work on their Productions workflow, which essentially mirrors the Avid shared project structure.

So on this one, I was able to reach out to them in advance to ask certain questions and ask about better ways to do things. When it really comes down to my day-to-day work, it’s not that different. I would say probably the biggest difference that I find is in Avid I’m constantly loading sequences into the source monitor and cutting from them.

I don’t tend to actually do a lot of selects reels. Sometimes I do, especially if there’s a bit of action, because if I know I’ve got somebody pulling out a gun and firing it - just just as an example - they might shoot it ten times and only five times the squib goes off, so only five of those are usable.

So in those cases I always build a select reel just so I’m not wasting my time with the bad technical takes, but in the avid - as any Avid editor knows - I’m constantly throwing those in and kind of using them as clips and just grabbing what I need for the actual cut. Premiere doesn’t quite work that way.

They have a way to do it but it’s clumsy - if I can be honest about it. In Premiere, I find myself using cut and paste a little bit more, which has kind of an old school Avid user is not something that comes natural to me. It wasn’t something Avid ever had.

They do now to some extent. So there’s certain aspects of when I’m assembling things I maybe just a little bit slower in Premiere - as a 20+ year user of Avid - I just got so fast with trim mode and things like that, and Premiere just doesn’t work quite the same way.

But I will say, once I’ve laid a timeline down, I actually find I can move even quicker in Premiere, just because Premiere is so much easier moving things around very easily with one click. Not having to go into different modes and things like that.

And certainly when you get into audio work or color, there’s no question Premiere has just made those processes so much faster and smoother just to pop back and forth between those modes to do little fixes and things. So I guess that’s maybe the big difference.

I end up making my Premiere bins kind of mirror my Avid bins in terms of column headings. Again, Premiere is a little different in how you create those, but I’ve just gotten it down to where I just save them all and I’ve just got them so I can just pull them up. But I surprised myself that I don’t find more of a difference when I’m working between them.

At the Editors Guild, I’ve taught a course: “How to stop worrying and and love editing in Premiere.” I know so many editors who just feel like it’s not an option, and I want to try to show them, “Listen, you can you can absolutely cut a feature in this program.” With any program, there’s certain things you need to know.

I think it’s part of why I could hire Amanda on this job because I knew she did have Premiere experience - probably more than I did. So I thought, “Okay, that’s another selling point: if I get myself into a pickle or kind of paint myself in a corner in the software, she’ll know how to help get me out.”

If you’ve never cut a larger project in, let’s say, Premiere, I think it’s a real good idea to hire an assistant who does have that experience. I think that’s hugely helpful. I would recommend that, but otherwise, first time I did it, I was surprised how quickly I just got over that little learning hump.

You mentioned that you had to screen the entire movie. Basically that it was helpful to watch the whole thing. You also had some audience screenings, I’m sure. Talk to me a little bit about audience screenings - how they affect the outcome, and how you should kind of read an audience screening. 

KIRKPATRICK: That is a great question. I’ll be as honest as I can and let folks who are listening kind of read between the lines here. I’m a huge fan and believer in rough cut screenings, but I also feel very strongly that those should be used - or they’re best used - to just take the temperature of the movie.

Or the temperature of the audience, however you want to say it. are people laughing where you think they should laugh?

Are they jumping where you think they should be scared. Then afterwards, I think it’s absolutely valid to talk to that audience. And I don’t even necessarily have a problem with questionnaires. It’s just that Hollywood has gotten to a place where we have these companies where that’s all they do.

There’s companies that are devoted to setting up and running these screenings, and it’s all this market research. My problem is those things are data driven and the response to a movie or a TV show is not data driven. It’s emotion driven.

Asking somebody if they like the movie is not the same thing as asking them to rate the movie on a piece of paper. Those are two totally different things. And what I’ve seen happen enough times that it’s made me really not a big fan of these sorts of screenings is that they’re different.

You can be in an audience in one of these audience screenings, and the film can play like gangbusters. I have seen it happen. Everybody’s laughing. Everybody loves it. You get a big round of very natural applause at the end of the film. You can see people’s faces. They really had a good time. But then once you start getting into the questionnaires or especially the focus groups, there’s often a tendency for some of either the questionnaires or the focus group questions to be very leading.

When you ask somebody, “What was your least favorite scene in the film?” It makes people feel like they have to answer that. But that doesn’t mean that they didn’t like that scene. They’re just trying to respond to your question and feeling like they’re on the spot because they got invited to this thing.

So they have to come up with a least favorite scene. And then if 4 or 5 people list that same scene, now, you potentially have folks in your orbit saying, “That scene doesn’t work. We have a problem. We never like that scene either. That scene’s got to go.”

And I’m saying, “That’s not what they said! It wasn’t reflected in the screening that we just did. Nobody got up and left. No one was checking their phone. Everybody was totally into that. The scene right after it got a huge laugh.” It doesn’t mean the scene didn’t work.

It means that you made them come up with their least favorite scene out of all of the scenes in the film, and just because nothing really happens in that scene - it’s a little bit of a dialogue drop - That’s what 5 or 6 people said out of 40, now the narrative is planted that there’s a problem with that scene. I’m just being really honest about it. I can’t tell you how many times… 

Monday morning when we’re all sitting there in the cutting room with all the sheets in front of us I’m making those arguments to the director and the producer saying, “Guys, that’s not what they said. You are misreading this data. And even if they did say that we were all there, we all saw the same thing and everybody loved that.”

Another version of that is, inevitably there’s one person who comes in to an audience with like their own baggage, whatever that thing is. One example: I worked on a movie that was essentially about a married woman having an affair with a younger man.

The film was a very serious look at infidelity. But guess what? We had one person in a test screening who - while they certainly didn’t admit this - very clearly had been cheated on by a spouse. Everyone in the audience knew where this person was coming from.

But by the time this person was done monopolizing the conversation, we could feel that they had pulled the audience in a direction to feel like our main character was a bad person. That created a week or two of conversations with producers and investors trying to remind them: “This wouldn’t have happened had it not been for this one person, and it’s okay that they felt that way, but that doesn’t mean the movie doesn’t work.”

I’ll tell directors right off the bat, if we do a test screening. I say, “Okay, but please go into it with an open mind and remember that one audience’s reaction does not equal every audience’s reaction.” And on top of all that, my God, how many of the most famous films of all time have famously tested in the toilet?

I worked on a film where the one scene that everybody can now quote the scene in the movie, that was the one scene that the studio executives wanted to cut out. And luckily the director said, “No! We’re not going to cut it out,” because that is now the scene that people remember from the movie.

I want to ask Amanda one more question about assistant editing, especially since it was remote. What advice could you give - because so many assistants now are working remotely? What advice can you give to others about shining in that situation?

ROMERO: It has a lot to do with communication, I would say. And in communication there’s so many aspects to that. There’s communicating how you’re the best person for the job.

So there’s the selling yourself, but there’s also the communication and making sure nothing goes wrong with the film. It’s very easy to not communicate and mess something up.

Then you are not shining anymore. You are looked at as someone who can’t communicate properly.

Or maybe can’t do the job, or maybe can’t handle the stress. Communication is probably number one. Communicating any problems or communicating any questions that you have. If you’re in a pickle or you feel stuck, or you feel like you can’t get out of something, so you do something and maybe that’s not the right way, and then you just caused so many other problems.

The communication goes both ways, right? It’s not only what you’re sending in communication, it’s what you’re receiving in communication. 

ROMERO: Exactly. I’ve seen whether a relationship is strained and the communication doesn’t flow as easily. That can just be a recipe for disaster. Luckily, Jamie and I didn’t have that. We were always talking all the time.

I don’t think there was anything that could have possibly slipped through the cracks because we were always talking. We were always trying to anticipate what any problems would be. We ran into a huge technical issue with Premiere, and we were just bouncing ideas back and forth. What can we do? Who can we speak to? Jamie referred me to somebody who has a ton of experience in Premiere. I think he works for Premiere now. 

KIRKPATRICK: Yeah, he used to work with with David Fincher. Ben Insler. One of the one of the greats. 

ROMERO: Jamie had a ton of resources. I spoke to Will, who was super helpful. I spoke to Ben, who was super helpful, and I feel like a combination of all the conversations that we’ve had ultimately led to us solving the problem.

I think the way to shine is just really doing what you need to do to make sure the job is done, and it’s done well and it’s done on time. It also helps having a good team, having people who are willing to help you, and the passion. You can’t just obtain passion overnight. It’s something that’s within you.

I really feel like that’s helped me shine not only in my work with Jamie, but throughout my career so far. I put so much energy into all of the projects that I work on, because it’s a representation of me and what I bring to the table. So I really just try to go all out, in anything that I do and just make my editor’s job easier.

Then when I become an editor I’ll have all of that knowledge and I still need to shine when I’m an editor. I still need to shine to my director. I still need to shine to my producers. So just really doing everything in my power to make sure that I am the best candidate for the project, and I’m the best person that they could have chosen, whether that’s as an assistant or an editor.

Amanda and Jamie, thank you so much for talking to Art of the Cut about, Greedy People. 

ROMERO: Thank you so much. 

KIRKPATRICK: Steve, it’s always a pleasure, and I hope we get to see you again at the ACE party in New York in December.