Jurassic World: Rebirth

Today on Art of the Cut we speak with Jabez Olssen, the Emmy-winning editor of Jurassic World Rebirth. 

Jabez has been on Art of the Cut before to talk about Star Wars Rogue One - which was also directed by Jurassic World Rebirth’s Gareth Edwards - and for Peter Jackson’s documentary The Beatles: Get Back for which Jabez won an Emmy and an ACE Eddie.

He was also nominated for a BAFTA for The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. His other work includes editing the three Hobbit movies, The Adventures of TinTin, and The Lovely Bones.

Jabez, it’s great to have you on the show again. Thank you so much for for joining us. This is a big project for you. 

Great to be here. Thanks, Steve. 

When you are trying to piece a scene with VFX, tell me a little bit about the evolution of that: You start with maybe storyboards or previs, then you get in plates and various VFX versions. How is the pacing changing through the evolution of a scene with a lot of VFX?

These days, on a big film, you have previs that has been worked on for a long time. It was a little bit different on this one in that [director] Gareth [Edwards] was brought on to the project with not a lot of time. I think he would be the first to say it was a fairly tight pre-production and a tight post-production.

What really helped was that - once we had shot the film - we had a postvis team that was able to add dinosaurs into rough cuts as we produced them, and we could then use those to fine tune the edits and work things out. But at the end of the day, it’s no different than cutting any other scene.

You just have to work with what you have and find the rhythm and the pace and and the energy that tells the story. And, look at us and make changes and iterate. And, that’s what we did. 

Do you find that the previs was close to what you needed to edit, as far as the pace?

It’s always the case that what the previs guys plan on a computer doesn’t match the reality of what the crew can shoot - when you’re on a boat in the middle of an ocean, working from a helicopter - but it’s a guide. It helps. It’s moving storyboards. It’s particularly useful to Gareth, the director, to plan his sequences and to know, “Yes, that’s what I want.”

But he’s also a very instinctive director and will change things on the day and will shoot new things and is very willing to change things in the cut to make it better.

A lot of the scenes and sequences are nothing like the original shot version.  It usually means you’re compacting scenes and trying to make things shorter and get the big action set pieces to flow and to keep the story going when you’re watching dailies.

Does it inform you - when you’re looking at the dailies - and you see that Gareth has made impromptu changes to what was in the previs? There must be a reason why he wanted this and therefore maybe it pops out to you as something to use. 

I think you can often spot when a director’s intending to use a certain shot in a certain way. If it’s there, it’s obviously a key anchor to the scene and the way they see it, so you try to make your first assembly work with that and go in that direction.

But in terms of watching the dailies and comparing it to the previs, it’s not something I particularly do. I always know that previs is just a starting point and something that will always change.

You always look for the best way to tell the story. You don’t religiously stick to the previs. That’s not what Gareth does. I don’t think it’s the way many people operate.

Not unless the previs have been worked on for a long time and everybody agrees that it’s perfect. Even then, if you can find a better way to do it, you take it. 

We talked a little bit about kind of the pacing of a scene itself, but what about the pacing of the whole movie? I, definitely recognized the dynamics of the film with slow scenes and fast scenes and slow scenes. Talk to me a little bit about - once you’ve seen the movie in context - deciding the overall pace of the film.

It’s an instinctive thing. You have the script, then you have what’s shot on set and you put a version of the film together that’s the most complete telling of that story.

Then you watch it and it shows you what needs to change. You hope to be able to watch it many times see what’s working and what’s not working and show it to people that you trust and get and get their opinions and ultimately that’s why we test films: so that a test audience can tell us what’s working and what’s not working. It’s a process.

You watch it again and again and you show it to people and you make changes to see if that helps us and if that makes it better. It is a matter of making it shorter and making it tighter and taking out scenes that are slowing things down.

But then you can go too far and you take something out and suddenly people don’t relate to the characters as well. So it’s a balancing act and you’ve got to find the exact right amount and you keep trying things and experimenting until everybody’s happy - or as happy as you can be.

It’s a balancing act of giving the audience enough information so they’re not confused, but not so much information that they’re bored.

There’s a fine line where you can give them just enough information, so they have to do a little bit of work and stay involved, but you’re not spelling things out too much and being redundant, and you’re not also holding back so much that they’re totally confused and don’t know what’s going on. That, to me, is the art of the editing.

Through much of the film, you’re intercutting between two different storylines. Talk to me about how that intercut worked with the script, and how you found that intercutting evolved over the course of cutting the film. 

The intercutting was largely set in the script. When I first read it I thought, “Oh, we’re going to play with this. We’ll be intercutting a lot.” The script had several scenes of each group back to back. And I said, “We’re going to try intercutting a little bit more.” But while we did try that, we returned to the way [screenwriter] David [Koepp] had originally planned it.

That seemed to be, largely - with a couple of exceptions - the best pacing and rhythm for the intercutting, because a lot of the scenes tended to need to flow.

So the next scene of that group, we found that if we tried to mess with the intercutting that was planned that things would unravel. It would be like pulling a string, and it would lead to a problem that was then too much of a problem to go with, so we’d have to try something else.

We ended up with an intercutting rhythm that was pretty close to what was originally planned. 

Talk to me about creating tension. There’s a great scene in the movie that’s prominent in the in the trailer of a T-Rex chasing people in a yellow raft. That’s one of the places where I felt great tension. How do you create that in post-production?

That’s that’s the whole game. That was a scene that was obviously a major part of the script, and we could see that it was going to be a major set piece. It was actually a scene that was in the original Michael Crichton book of “Jurassic Park" and had been planned for the 1993 film, but they had to drop it as it was too expensive and complicated to achieve back then.

But it was one of the things that [executive producer] Steven [Spielberg] and [screenwriter] David Koepp wanted to get back. It’s a great cinematic scene because it’s a lot of action and tension and all the things you want on a film like this.

We take the footage that’s shot and we put it together and we feel out the rhythm and pace, and then we have some temporary dinosaurs drawn in through the postvis process, and we see how that works.

We put temporary music on the scene and sound effects, and we build it up and watch it and we just keep making adjustments. It’s an instinctive process of trying to make it exciting and work as well as it can

 

You mentioned sound effects and music. I’m guessing you’re not cutting with music originally, but let me know.

We usually cut with temporary music from other films and things. Even when I’m doing the early stages as assembly, I’ll put music on. We’ll watch it both ways, but I like to cut an action scene with some form of music just because it’s a rhythmic musical exercise at the end of the day, and it’s good to try it and to see what’s working.

Of course, if it works without music, the music only ever makes it better. So it is always good to see it like that too. 

Do cutting in sound effects during the picture cut change the rhythm?

Music and sound effects help. If you’re on a close-up of someone’s face, it’s important to to understand what’s happening off screen. Sound effects can really come in and make the scene better. In terms of actually changing the rhythm of the cutting, I don’t know. It’s a not a conscious thing.

You’ll always make changes and improvements as you’re working on a scene. And once you’ve got a decent level of sound effects, that just helps to show you if the scene’s working or not - and where it’s not working, you’ll make changes.

Is sound effects something that you typically hand off to an assistant? 

It’s a little bit of both. I’ll start by putting some on myself. But I had a great team of assistants led by Elise Anderson. I would often throw scenes at them to lay up some sound effects.

At a certain point, we brought in the post sound team at Skywalker Sound. They worked on scenes for us.That took it to a whole new level.

Let’s talk a little bit about leaving room to breathe and kind of feeling the wonder that the characters feel. One of the things I loved about the first Jurassic Park movie was the moments where you’re just able to just marvel at the world. Like when Sam Neill and Laura Dern come up out of the top of the Jeep - looking at the dinosaurs for the first time. There’s just a lovely breath to let the audience have that sense of wonder. There were similar moments in this. Can you talk about regulating them? 

Well, those are important things. And again, that’s lead by the script because I think good writers like David Koepp understand that rhythm and they will build that into the script. So we would have a big action set piece, then we’d have a quiet moment for the characters to reflect and things.

So we had moments like seeing the giant titanosaurs come out of the grass. It’s planned from the beginning, and you put it in and you try and make it work, then when you watch the film, if parts are feeling too slow or there’s too much action back to back, that’s when you make changes and try to move some things around or tighten things up or slow things down.

It is instinctive. You’re not working with a rulebook or anything. You’re just watching the film and making notes to yourself about where it could improve. 

The scene with titanosaurs is exactly the one that I was thinking of. It has such a great sense of wonder. Early in the process, you’re not seeing the amazing cinematography and VFX that you get at the end, so you might look at some early postvis or plates and say, “This doesn’t look that interesting. I’ll keep this short.” Then you see the final shot and think, “I wish I had another five seconds!”

Well, yes. That’s where we were lucky with our visual effects team, led by David Vickery and the ILM people. We did extend a few of those shots late, late into the piece.

You have these plates - empty shots that were shot on location with the actors, and it might tilt up the neck of a dinosaur - and you hold it for what you think is plenty of time.

Then, once the dinosaur’s actually animated in there, you always find you want a few seconds more. It’s never quite enough. So at a late stage in that scene we went through and we added a few seconds to the completely CGI shots and that helped enormously. Luckily they were able to accommodate us until the time ran out. 

Did somebody come to you and say, “Jabez, you just added $400,000 to my movie?”

No, not in terms of money. It’s more how much time was left and how many shots are left. And yeah, there was a lot of pressure on us with visual effects. A lot of pressure on the visual effects team, too, because it was a very tight post-production schedule. When Gareth asked me to do the film it was a little honeymoon period when you’re being asked to do something like this.

Then he told me when the release date was and suddenly the honeymoon was over and the reality of it was upon us. I think we got there and I’m proud of of what we were able to do in the time frame that was required. 

What was the general schedule for this film?

When did we start shooting? I believe it was July or maybe June of 2024. The shoot was four months long. It was about six weeks in Thailand, then four weeks in Malta, then the remaining time in the UK. For those four months of the shoot. I had actually planned to assemble the film from my home in Wellington, New Zealand.

That’s how we started for the first couple of months. But, at a certain point, I got a phone call asking me to go on set. So a couple of days later, I found myself on Malta and continued assembling the film from there until the production moved back to the UK and I traveled with them. 

After a month or so of shooting in the UK, we moved into post-production and did our editing in Soho, London, right in the center of London at Goldcrest. The editorial team was on one floor of an office building at Goldcrest.

What was really great was that the key members of the visual effects team, Carlos the producer, and David, the VFX supervisor and their team were able to move into the same buildings so our daily visual effects meetings, which would grow longer and longer as the production went on, only required us walking up a flight or two of stairs, so we were able to not waste a lot of time having to travel to another facility, which can often be the case.

So that helped a lot, and we were able to work very closely with them. We were able to finish just in the nick of time, as is always the case for some reason.

When did you go into color correction and sound mix?

I don’t have the dates in front of me. It was a little bit of a blur, but probably two months before we had to deliver the final picture. The sound team came over from San Francisco from Skywalker Sound, to do the final mix in London.

Talking of efficiencies of location, the mix happened in the basement of the same building we were editing at Goldcrest - the London mixing stages there in Soho, so we were able to visit the visual effects team upstairs and then race downstairs to the mix as it was happening. Even the color grading was only a block or two away. Having everything together was a huge advantage.

Do you remember when you had to deliver?

There are a lot of processes that have to happen with the film after you deliver it these days. There’s so many versions. You have your 3D version, you have an IMAX version, you have Dolby Vision version, you have you have versions for home entertainment and Blu-ray release.

They’re all slightly different in terms of the color and brightness levels that are required and the sound mix that’s needed for them. So there’s a lot of checking things and a lot of different deliverables to get out the door. A lot of that is done by the post-production supervisors and people from Universal and my assistant editor team.

There are a lot of people involved. I would check a lot of the deliverables but even Gareth would check many more flavors of the film than is often the case with the director. He was quite involved.

Did you feel like you needed to review the whole series of Jurassic films? Did you rewatch them? And if you did, what did you take from that? 

I had watched them all fairly recently, but I didn’t review them specifically for this job, except the one we did watch was Steven’s original film, Jurassic Park from 1993. I think we were all very keen to return to the flavor of that film and to create for the audience the emotional experience that we ourselves had experienced watching this in the cinema for the first time.

It was such an important part of cinema history. It was such an important film for Gareth and for myself that that we felt honored to be able to attempt to play in the same sandbox. 

I first worked with Gareth on Rogue One, about ten years ago, so this was sort of a reunion for us because that film, too, was done in the UK and in Soho, London.

So it very much felt like a bit of a ten year later reunion for us. I hadn’t worked with Gareth since Rogue One, but it’s something that I particularly wanted to do. Gareth’s one of the best there is, and he’s a great guy, and I really enjoyed getting to work with him again.

I interviewed the the editors on The Creator, and they said he’s definitely got an almost improvisational style. Can you talk to to me about how that affects you in the edit room? 

The Creator was shot on almost prosumer level digital cameras and gave him a freedom to improvise and to shoot a lot of material. I was slightly luckier, I think, because he decided to shoot on film, and he was therefore limited in how much he could shoot before having to cut and reload.

It led to having a slightly more formal style and less footage to have to deal with. Don’t get me wrong, Gareth would often pick up the camera and shoot himself. He would film himself and that allowed him to not plan the shots quite so formally - allow him to improvise and find moments as they were happening - which is part of his style.

What makes him great is the visual sense and the shots that hadn’t been planned, that he just found in the moment and we were lucky enough to still get a lot of those, but overall, we probably had a lot less footage to deal with than the guys on, The Creator. 

You mentioned, Stephen Spielberg and the original film. He’s an executive producer on this film. What kind of feedback were you getting from him? 

Well, we showed Steven the film several times. Luckily for us, he was very encouraging and very positive. After he saw it the first time he phoned Gareth and was effusive.

Very happy. He had notes and a lot of suggestions. They’re from Steven Spielberg, so they’re usually worth listening to, but he was very supportive. Gareth couldn’t have been more happy with the relationship he had with Steven. It was great.

Not that you might remember specific notes that Steven gave, but what kind of notes did he give?

Steven’s notes were about where things needed to work better and be quicker off. He encouraged us to compact the third act and have it move quicker and faster.

There were certain moments we were trying to, create between dinosaurs and characters and we were trying to milk certain moments, and he generally encouraged us to keep moving a bit quicker through the third act and make it more energetic. It was probably a good note. 

That’s interesting because a lot of times - of course, you know as an editor who has cut a lot of films - it’s the first act that people are telling you that you need to speed up.

That’s funny too, because Gareth and I actually wanted to compact the first act as much as possible to get things happening quicker and to get to the action quicker. And we were actually given notes to restore a few of the expositional moments, which we had taken out the first round.

The feedback we got was to put some of the stuff back in. “We need to understand the set up a bit more and the characters.” We were expecting to be told to get on with it and get to the action as quick as possible because that’s usually the note. So it was quite a surprise to be told the do the opposite.

But these are the things you play with, and you try, then you show people again. Everyone can have an opinion but eventually you have to come to an understanding in the final version and find what you think works the best.

Avid timeline screenshot of Reel 6 of Jurassic World: Rebirth

The last several years you’ve spent cutting documentaries for Peter Jackson - They Shall Not Grow Old and The Beatles: Get Back documentary. Did you learn anything from cutting those docs that you brought into this film? 

Well, I’m sure I did, but it’s always hard to exactly put your finger on what one project teaches you that you’ve then brought to the next project. Every project teaches you something, and it all just adds to the mountains of compost that you try and grow the next decision out of.

The more experience you get, the more confidence you get about certain things, then you’re quickly taught: don’t be confident, because everything you thought you knew doesn’t apply in this situation, and you’ve got to learn something new that you hadn’t thought of. 

Any thoughts on the differences between cutting docs and narrative films? Is the interaction with the director any different? 

It is a hugely different process. Not having a script with a documentary means that you’re making up the story yourselves in the cutting room, and you’re as much writing as you are cutting moments.

Also, with the documentaries that we were doing - that were found footage as much as anything else - they weren’t shot by us, which meant that we were having to search and find shots that go together in ways that were never planned, because there was no planning - at least by us.

It was a very different process. It was much more “make it up as you go” and create the story and create the scenes and find bits that could be used in certain ways to accomplish what you’re trying to do.

Whereas with a narrative film I sort of breathe a sigh of relief again, because at least someone’s got a script and then someone tries to shoot footage to tell that moment. Unless something goes wrong you’ve got something to fall back on and it’s a lot easier to get something working.

Jabez Olssen’s cutting room at Goldcrest, Soho

Do you think you’ll go back to do any more documentary work? 

I don’t plan for what’s in the future. I’ll consider any interesting projects that come along and see what happens, but never say never. At this point I don’t know what’s next for me. 

When you are looking at a fresh set of dailies for a scene, how do you tackle them? How do you look at dailies? How do you start to organize your thoughts and then how do you build the scene? Has that process changed since Rogue One?

I doubt my process has changed consciously. I look at the footage. I think, “This seems to be the way the directors planning to do it.” Although sometimes there are a lot of options and they shoot multiple ways of tackling the scene. So you look for the bits you like most. You look for the angles you like most, the moments you like most, the performances you like most.

You make a little collection of these, and at a certain point I usually find a bit that I really like and I think, “Well, I want to put that in.” So I’ll start with that. It is a little bit of a jigsaw puzzle from that moment, like, “Well, if I’m on that shot there, that means the shot before it probably has to be this angle.

But, you’re trying to balance a lot of things. You’re trying to not make it too cutty. You’re trying to not cut to entirely different angles every single time. You’re trying to use the best performances, but in combination with the best looking footage and the best angles and the best shot sizes.

You get into questions like, “I really like this performance, but it’s not on the shot size that I think tells the story of the best.” So what trade-off will we make here?

And as an editor, you’re working on your own to begin with while the director’s shooting and you get to have a chance to put the scene together the way you feel it should go. Then the director comes in.

The director will want to see what they had in their head. They will want to see the scene the way they imagined it, so you do that with them and you get that out of the way. Then you look at what there is and you start combining things and coming up with brand new ways to tackle a scene.

And eventually you show other people and you look at the whole film and then you rule out a lot of what you thought you knew and had planned, and you try new ways to combine scenes in ways that were never planned.

Sometimes you’re combining footage to tell a version of the scene that was never thought of before. It can get pretty intense for several months. You don’t see much of the outside world. Eventually, hopefully, you’ll emerge from it and you have a film that hopefully people enjoy.

Do you have any examples of a scene - like you just described - that was not edited the way it was intended? 

Sometimes you don’t always want to reveal the the secrets of the cutting room! Sometimes things happen for innocent enough reasons.

The original Mosasaurus boat sequence was a lot longer. The Mosasaurus rammed the Essex boat 2 or 3 more times than what we ended up with.

We ended up combining a few of those moments and I think originally the the misfire that Zora did was because the trigger was loose on the gun, and we decided that that didn’t feel as good to us as having that actually happen from a ramming of the boat, so we were always trying to combine things in a way that felt best to us and made the most sense. 

You you mentioned when you were looking at footage in dailies and trying to construct a scene, that you were pulling out selects. Do you do that with a selects reel?

Yeah, I like to have all the footage, the rushes for a scene, in a single reel, rather than a lot of people work with a bin with individual clips.

They look at them visually, which I used to do back around Lord of the Rings. I was working for the first time with so much footage for a scene that it was hard to visually look at it all in one go, so I stopped doing that.

A few years later, when I worked with Michael Kahn on the Tintin films, and I saw how he would work with rushes strung together into a single reel - which I believe they called KEM reels - because it was similar to how they would work on a film bench. And that’s how I’ve been working since.

I have the footage arranged in a very specific way that I like in an a reel. Then I’ll just play through that reel and swap the bits I like into another sequence and make a smaller collection and, then maybe do that again, but always be able to go back  to the full collection at some point.

You mentioned how you like to have your camera rolls laid out. How is that? 

I go through the original rushes and split up the takes in what I feel is the natural place for them to split. A simple example would be a close-up shot of an actor talking.

I might break it at each of their lines, then split the shot on the “off” line of the person off-screen as they’re talking, then I will have the assistants copy the example that I did on all the other takes of that set up so that I end up with all the other six takes exactly the same with that one line in close-up, then maybe the coverage had that line again in a wide shot.

We’ll get those little lined up, with a little bit of filler in between. 

But then sometimes the wide shot might not just be broken up on a single line, because you might see two actors in it and it might be more natural to have them talk back and forth. So I find where I think the shot should split. It’s a complicated process.

Then after all these line-ups are done on the footage as it was shot, then they’ll get them all rearranged with the lines all together and I have a version of the roll where the footage is sort of in scene order, with all the different coverage of any line.

At the end of the day, the idea is that I can watch through these and sort of progress through the scene, see all the coverage for any line.

I can see the non-verbal coverage for the scene, and it all progresses through in a relatively logical order. So from that, I can just choose the types and the best bits that I like and end up with a selects roll that’s all sort of in scene order. 

I would think having that roll would help you with reviewing things with the director.

Yes. If we need to go back and look at a new take or something - all the coverage for a line - I can go back to these rolls and find it relatively quickly.

I love the idea that you mentioned that you’re not just saying, “Give me the close-up on the actor six times in a row,” you’re saying, “I want part of the conversation six times in a row.”

Yes. It’s very valuable.

I do something similar with the geography of the scene. If characters are in one part of the room and they move to another part of the room, then you break those things up. 

Yeah, absolutely. It can be difficult for the assistants because sometimes the logic of what order shots should go in isn’t always clear, but it really helps, especially when you got a good team to help you organize it all. 

Jabez, thank you so much for talking to us about this film. It was a real pleasure, chatting about this. 

Thank you for having me. I look forward to listening to you talk to other editors, as I often do.

Temporary edit set-up in a hotel conference room in Malta