Longlegs

Today on Art of the Cut, we are discussing cutting horror and suspense with Greg Ng and Graham Fortin, who edited this summer’s Longlegs, which is now available on VOD after its theatrical run.

Greg has been nominated and won numerous Canadian Cinema Editor and Leo Awards for TV and documentaries. His credits include the feature films Afflicted and Come and Find Me. He’s also edited for the great ESPN doc series 30 for 30.

Graham’s credits include the documentaries Ari’s Theme, The Wrestlers, and the TV series Trumpocalypse.

Gentlemen, it is so nice to talk to you both. One of the things I want to ask about is the opening moment. There’s this really interesting editing timing thing I wanted to ask about where you see this Longlegs person, and he dips into the frame. There’s just a moment where you get to see him. Did you experiment with how long can we hold it? A few frames more, a frame less? Was that tricky?

NG: I think we see him in his entirety for one frame. That was probably enough to ride it out until we see him the next time. It was an interesting process ‘cause the movie evolved a little bit.

In the early stages of the edit you saw quite a bit of him and then as we started to play around with the structure and realized you could show less of him and eventually you start to see him more and more. When it came down to that moment at the beginning it was just enough. It’s maybe even too much. One frame.

Sound design was fantastic. Any movie that’s like this - a thriller/horror movie - sound is really important. How much did you work on the sound design in your picture cut?

FORTIN: There was a lot of that during post. Hats off to Eugenio Battaglia, the sound designer and sound mixer on the film. His work is incredible. We’ve worked closely with him on other projects so he was kind enough to send over a library of sounds, so we started placing some of those elements very early on in the cut. The stuff he was doing in the mix was also super cool.

NG:: The director, Oz Perkins, his brother was the composer on the movie under the alias Zilgi. He was providing a lot of sound ideas. There’s a sort of a spectrum of: “is this music/is this sound design?” There’s a lot of gray area between where that comes together and some of the stuff that Zilgi was giving to us was a lot of pretty far out stuff, like hanging drums or little freaky piano stuff that we sort of build together to create the temp soundscape that eventually became the real soundscape.

You’re not in the Longlegs cutting room now, are you?

NG: We’re recording this interview in the same room but on a different project. We’re working another movie with Oz called The Monkey and another movie - sort on and off - called Keeper, which will be coming out next year.

I point it out for the audience who can’t see your location,  because you’ve got the classic story cards on the wall behind you. What does that do for you? Do you move them around when you’ve got structural changes?

FORTIN: Yeah. We had the cards on Longlegs as well, and also for The Monkey. It’s nice to be able to step back and see the entire film, and moving it around really does help come up with new ideas for the structure.

NG: In this particular instance - which was similar to Longlegs - we have the wall divided into two pieces by a single strip of green painters tape. One side represents the past, the other side represents the present. By laying them out, you get this visual idea. It’s just nice to see it in the physical world where you can digest it differently.

This (looking over his shoulder at the wall) is another representation of what the story feels like, but in a vertical sense instead of like in a horizontal way, which I find helpful. I’m a big fan of it and I love green tape!

Greg Ng, director Oz Perkins, and Graham Fortin

Longlegs has flashbacks. Was the re-structuring about when to jump to the flashbacks?

FORTIN: It’s all kind of a fog because it was a while ago, but I do know there was a lot of playing around with the original structure and Oz had a lot of great ideas in terms of moving things around and creating some voiceover elements, especially near the end of the film to sort of help clarify the story, like the way Longlegs is introduced and the way Longlegs’ story becomes apparent for the audience, which changed over the course of the edit.

NG: The early edits were definitely more Longlegs-centric when we began as scripted. Then as we were going through we started to realize, “Early on, you see too much about the past so that when you come into the present you know too much about what their struggles are, so the audience is ahead of the characters, which is a strange predicament to be in.”

You want a balance of knowing just enough to understand where someone’s coming from but not knowing too much?

FORTIN: It’s kind of like skipping a stone across a pond where one bit of information leads to another.

Editor Graham Fortin

There’s a montage of going through the evidence with the pink cards on the floor. Can you talk about building montages like that and what kind of story elements you’re trying or what kind of pacing you’re trying? Are you discussing, “We need to get this story beat done in 30 seconds” or something? Or are you just following the script and you’re done? … I say that facetiously. (laughter)

FORTIN: Greg and I both worked in the documentary world and a lot of those skills came into use during that sequence. There are the scripted elements with the voiceover and the audio tapes of the cases. One cool thing that came out of building that sequence was there’s a lot of crime scene photos and police reports.

All of those elements were created by the art department. There was a week or two where we had the post-production team dig up those files from the lockup after shooting had wrapped and we had gone through and scanned those elements.

It was almost like pretending you were Lee Harker (the heroine) in the edit room where you’re pulling out these boxes and we’re all lying all these elements on the floor and like Oz is saying, “Ooh, I like that photo! I like that police report! Let’s put that in the movie!”

NG: On the one hand it was very challenging, but on the other hand it was super fun to play with. ‘cause in that montage we have all these elements to work with. They also shot a lot of trippy kind of satanic imagery, like a sink full of blood and milk and some bones and snakes and we just got to throw this all into the blender and see what we get. So that was kind of the visual layer of it.

Underneath that were all these 9-1-1 calls which tell the story of the recorded murders. I remember when we were putting that together, I went onto onto YouTube and grabbed a series of 9-1-1 calls, which were quite scary when you listen to all those things.

They have this texture of people panicking and the idea was that as these images are kind of escalating, that the phone calls would sort of form this “audio tornado” of panic that would emerge from the first call where you get all this specific details of what happens to the killer and then eventually it starts to layer and layer and hopefully you get this feeling that Lee Harker is getting overwhelmed by all the evidence, leading to her mental block.

Editor Greg Ng

Let’s talk about spotting music cues. I’m really interested in that exact moment: when do you actually need the music? You don’t need music through the whole scene. You’re choosing an exact time to put that music in.

FORTIN: I will say that there was a lot more music in the first cut and it was a process of removal and seeing how much we could get away with not using music.

NG: Generally speaking, when the movie is coming together and you’re editing and working within individual scenes, you’re thinking, “I need some momentum to get the scene going and the vibe.

But as it all comes together, and your scenes become a series of scenes, and then the scenes become reels and the reels become the whole movie, I think there was definitely way more music to kind of glue things together, but as you start to get a sense of what the movie is instead of just on a scene-to-scene basis, it started to become apparent that maybe things were too embellished or too decorated or too dressed up when they didn’t need to be. Props to Oz for always pushing us to ask, “Do we need that?”

There’s a scene where Lee Harker goes outside and there used to be a lot of music and some heartbeats and crickets. Oz’s saying, “We need more crickets!” But as we went along, we realized that we don’t really need music in that point because the audience is invested in what’s happening, hopefully.

So you don’t need to overdo what’s going on. You don’t need to jam it down people’s throats if they’re already feeling tense. So it was definitely a process of reduction - knowing where things need to be.

On the flip side of things, when it came to montages - like the 9-1-1 montage or a couple of the “story time” sequences near the ending. We used to call them “story time sequences” where there’s an explanation in VO about what’s going on in the backstory.

Those scenes are somewhat dependent on music to give you some kind of cohesion to the story and to propel you forwards. Not necessarily rhythmically but tonally. They’re within this sonic bubble of a backstory montage.

Timeline screenshot, “Longlegs”

How do you create that tension in editorial?

NG: There’s so many elements going on. First of all, obviously the scenes are really well written. They shoot them and it looks beautiful. The performances of the amazing Maika Monroe and of course Nicholas Case - the greatest actor of our time - are really selling the tension.

There was a promo with Maika when she first sees Nick Cage in his Longlegs makeup for the first time and through Maika’s lav mic, you can hear her heartbeat just pounding, and that was a real thing! 

FORTIN: When the dailies came in I thought, “Whoa! What is that?”

NG: Her heart was beating so heavy that it was sort of tainting the audio. There’s not necessarily one way to sort of come about it. You don’t have to do too much to keep the audience on board. If she’s already there, the audience is hopefully along for the ride, feeling what she’s feeling, feeling the panic and then suddenly at that moment in particular the mom is also really kind of messed up.

The scene I was thinking about was a scene where she’s at home in her cabin in the woods and I was struck by the tension of that scene as she talks to her mom on the phone.  Talk about designing the tension of that scene.

NG: Well the shots are held so long that there’s an expectation of something to happen. For example, she sees someone outside, she goes outside, no one’s there and then someone’s inside. She comes back inside and then we sort of cut to a chapter title so when we come back to that scene, everyone’s sense is heightened because there was no resolution to it. Is there someone outside? Is there someone inside?

And I remember thinking like, “Everyone’s paying attention now pretty good. We can really milk what’s going on.” So she’s just sitting there, the creak happens, and she slowly looks around and there’s nothing but because it’s just a fun moment of “no one knows what’s gonna happen” we can really ride this out. It’s one of my favorite sort of cheap scares that happens.

She’s looking towards the thing, there’s a creak and then it’s a smash cut to her sort of s stomping the birthday card onto the table with a big thump. That wasn’t necessarily something that was designed. It just happened when she opened up the card. I know it’s a contentious thing to do the cheap scare, but I think in that moment I was quite proud of it. It was very satisfying to me.

The other other thing I was thinking about with that scene was that the art card - the chapter card - did come in an unexpected place because you’re putting a chapter card in the middle of a scene.

NG: With some loud strings and big noises as well. Another somewhat cheap scare.

FORTIN: Another element of that scene is the way the frames are composed. You’re playing with the expectation of what is going on in that cabin because she’s sitting at her desk.

She’s to the left of the frame and that doorway is behind her and you’re looking at that doorway and you’re looking at her and she’s answering the phone call with her mother and talking to her mother, but you are waiting for something to pop into that space. So that’s another huge element to kind of get you emotionally connected to the scene.

The composition was something that I noticed because the compositions are almost always centered with her perfectly in the middle.

NG: Yeah. Props to the DP, Andres Arochi. Every frame was like a painting. Not only is the composition centered horizontally but there’s a lot of shots that are centered vertically as well. So there’s a lot of head room, which is just strange to see. The counterpoint to that being the intro where you just see Longlegs’ chin. You’re thinking, “Where’s the rest of his head?”

FORTIN: Or at the end of the film, when Carter stands up from the couch, at one point and it’s a very awkward unsettling frame ‘cause this isn’t normally what’s in a film.

NG: Usually you cut once the actor leaves the frame and then you go to the next shot. But in that situation we’re sort of just holding on it and it had this strange effect of being more tense.

I love that idea that what you would do in one film you wouldn’t do in another because the film is speaking to you in a different way.

NG: One of the most interesting things is discovering the tone as  we’re cutting the scenes, then the scenes become the reels and the reels become the movie, with each milestone in the edit, it starts to become more apparent what the movie is and then you start to adjust all the finer details that gives it that greater tone. It’s a movie where there’s a very clear distinct tone and ambience.

It’s not like anything that I’ve ever sort of worked on before. I didn’t have any personal reference points about, “What are we making?” It’s not like this movie I made last year. It’s sort of like movies we’ve seen but it’s not necessarily Silence at the Lambs, but it has aspects of that.

The more we’ve been working with Oz, it becomes interesting that once you get past the director’s cut, your ability to see the whole movie as a movie is really where the edit starts to get interesting.

You mentioned some of the structural differences. What are some of those other things that you realized where the structure needed to change?

NG: I think the big one was a lot to do with the flashbacks and the opening.

FORTIN: The thing that popped into my head is the thing which Cage has said in interviews: “You don’t wanna see the shark early on in the film.” I feel like earlier on in the film you saw a lot more Longlegs and that definitely changed the anticipation of this guy throughout and helps pull you through the entire film - the mystery of this figure helps with the tension, helps with the suspense of every scene.

NG: We sort of took the intro with all the flashbacks and sort of doled them out throughout the film. At what point can we motivate a flashback that maybe wasn’t initially thought of and how can we connect it to what’s happening now, as Lee gets closer to putting things together.

Or she’s standing next to the basement door at one point in time and these sort of flashbacks start to come to her. so we thought, “Oh, this is a great point in time to give another little seed - a little hint - to carry us through to the next thing.” So at that point in time I think Lee has a sort of memory of Longlegs coming to the house, but you don’t see that. It’s sort of implied.

At one point in time we gave that memory to Lee Harker’s mom, Ruth, but then that seemed like a weird perspective shift to be motivating a flashback based on another character. So that was an interesting move.

I kind of liked that because it’s almost like Goodfellas where it’s mostly Ray Liotta’s perspective and VO, but then at one point the VO shifts to his wife’s vo and that really kind of perks you up. But for this particular section if we give the memory to Lee Harker’s mom, then maybe people start to suspect her of something and we’re trying to hold that back as much as possible.

FORTIN: The mystery is not as compelling.

Lee Harker - the investigator and main heroine of the movie - goes to her childhood bedroom and looks at a box and there’s this burst of imagery where every edit is about a frame long. Did you experiment with that? How much can we give away and how much are we just scaring people and showing what’s in her brain as she sees things?

FORTIN: I remember playing around with that particular moment a lot with Oz and what images go in there and how do the images appear?

NG: Filmograph (filmograph.tv) is the name of the company that did the main titles and the end titles and all the graphics. They designed that section. They embellished it. They did a really good job of taking the idea of the Polaroid flash and kind of psychedelic-izing it so that it’s a bit of a scare.

I think at one point in time - that moment when she looks at the photos led to a flashback of her taking the photo, which was interesting but didn’t have the pop of the burst of a flash and a scare. We just realized that this moment is ripe for a little scare because everyone’s waiting. It’s so creepy.

There’s this big moment when you realize that she was there with Longlegs in her childhood. So to give it that huge pop I felt like that was the right way to do it. It was very short. I think it’s maybe a second long. There’s quite a number of images that flash through the frames. It has some Easter eggs for some stuff that happens later in the movie. There’s a bloody nun if you jog through it frame-by-frame. But that was quite a fun one. 

Another interesting thing that happened was that it used to be that Longlegs - when he was more in the beginning - he used to sing the song about “let me in now and it would be all right.” But when that was at the beginning it was kind of bizarre but didn’t quite sit.

But when we moved that to after the Polaroid Flash, she understands that Lee’s connected to Longlegs through her childhood and then Longlegs sings this crazy song. It was suddenly this glorious moment. It is obviously still crazy ‘cause Nick Cage is dialed up to 11 but it set the tone of the whole thing with this magnificent, glorious, evil thing.

The movie’s a slow burn. With tension, one of the keys is to draw it out as long as possible. How did you know that you couldn’t draw something out further? How did you say, “I can’t have her walk down this corridor ONE more frame!” To me that’s the thing with great art and editing is navigating this gray area that’s in the middle where you know, “I know it can’t be this short and I know it can’t be this long, but someplace in HERE I gotta find the right place.” How did you find that right place?

FORTIN: We were fortunate enough to have the opportunity to test the film a number of times so that being in a room with an audience, you know, certainly helps with figuring that out. A lot of it is, you know, as other editors have said, it’s you know, cutting with your gut and just feeling it out like what where it sits is the right place it needs to end up.

NG: There’s certainly lots of beautiful hallway shots. I think during the 9-1-1 montage at one point there was a really long shot of her walking into a beautiful dark hallway. I think at one point in time we were on it for it the whole time.

It was so beautiful and then we figured, “Okay, this is getting a little too self-indulgent here. We need to get some information or move on.” The movie is slow and yet fast. Within certain scenes, a scene plays slow with lower energy but within the greater movie the story moves along quickly. Like when she’s talking to her mom, because it is so restrained and there’s a weird tension of wondering what’s happening?

Who is the mom? Why is the mom so weird? That moment can play slow because it’s so strange. But then the things that are happening around it are moving a little bit quickly. That’s the balance that we had to find.

The cinematography is fantastic. Were you working with dailies that looked like what I saw when I saw the film in the theater?

FORTIN: They were pretty close. The flashback material was shot on film, so we did have the film tap come in so we used that on the first couple days, then that was replaced. When those images came in, they were very close to what is in the final film. Obviously the color just absolutely popped.

NG: It looked beautiful the whole way through. So we were very lucky to be working with such beautiful images. Spoiled in a way.

I’ve heard of directors having temp love with the color of images that come in. If you don’t have things graded fairly closely to what they have been seeing, it can be hard for the colorist to move them from that.

I wanted to talk to you about what I call “cinema time” which is that some things happen fast than real life - you show someone sitting in their car, then - without getting out of the car or walking to the house - the next thing you see, they’re knocking on the door or walking through the door. Then other things are drawn out or that you show characters driving someplace. How do you decide when to shorten, and when to show the traveling and giving space? What are those conversations like?

FORTIN: A basic concept of cutting a film is: what do you want to see next? That intuition of that gut feeling of what comes next has to be with you while you’re putting together the film. Another joy of watching a movie is when you have those moments like you just mentioned where she’s in a car and it goes on for a long period of time.

There’s some moments in a film where you need to have that moment where the film kind of allows you to meet in the middle between the screen and the audience member where you can bring your own thoughts to the film and the film can allow you to kind of connect because not even on Longlegs specifically, but there’s other films that you can have a moment of, “Gee, how do I connect with this character?”

There are elements of Lee Harker that are inside of me too. I connect with that.” Then you think about your own life and connect with the character and the plot and everything going on around it.

NG: There’s that one scene where - after meeting Carter’s family - Lee is talking to the little girl and she gets invited to the birthday party and she’s driving home in the car. It’s really the only moment in the movie where she kind of smiles and she’s kind of relaxing and she’s smoking a cigarette. The radio’s playing.

Emotionally it’s a necessary beat to take a breather where you realize that this is kind of her happy place before the shit really hits the fan. So in that moment let’s vibe with Lee for a bit and get to see her chill before she gets thrown into all this panic. 

Another example is when Lee wakes up in the basement. She comes upstairs then she gets into the car and goes to the next point in time. In a moment like that, you have the liberty - ‘cause the tensions are high - that you can see people move from point A to point B ‘cause people are invested.

The audience is invested in what’s gonna happen next. She gets in the car. She’s driving but it’s a completely different flavor of driving. She screams at the top of her lungs for a very long time and it’s one of my favorite cuts.

She’s screaming so loud and then we cut outside and it’s the sound of the engine revving and can’t hear her screaming, but you see her. It’s quite delightful for me. But in that moment, the energy is different but it’s such a great time to be in ‘cause the emotions are so high that you kind of want to see what’s happening.

So sometimes the audience needs to be thinking. A moment needs to give the audience a chance to process the new information they just heard - anticipate a little bit about what could happen. Maybe guess. Either the character that’s in the scene needs time to think, or sometimes it’s the audience who needs time to think. The audience needs to have that chance to participate in the movie.

NG: Yup. Give everybody a chance to digest what they just saw. Especially when there’s a lot of elements, like he’s this satanic serial killer, there’s dolls, there’s the balls, there’s the calendar and at a certain point in time if there’s too much information and not enough time to let it sit, then the audience is confused and isn’t on board.

Even for me on some of the earlier cuts when Lee is talking to Carter about all the details of the case I thought, “Man, there’s so much information. What is this scene about?” For me, that scene was just about: I just need to know that we’re going to the Camera farm and the rest of the details are important, but we need to also be moving along as well as talking about the details.

Sometimes I think it’s okay to have the audience try to connect the dots. It gets them more involved. I felt a little bit like that at the beginning with Lee’s character becoming an FBI agent. I figured out what was happening: the fact that she had some kind of psychic ability by the slideshow.

NG: We call it the perception test, which was voiced by our fantastic assistant editor Stephen Grobe.

LONGLEGS post team - L to R - Graham Fortin, Eugenio Battaglia, Oz Perkins, Greg Ng, Andy Levine

Really? And that’s in the final? Did he make it to the final?

NG: He just sounds like an interrogator, I guess. Very calm, very calm demeanor, very matter-of-fact, all business. That was one of the things that just was there in the very beginning and he just stayed all the way through to the end. We’re trying to put him in more of the movies that we’ve been working on! 

The, the perception test always lived very close to the beginning. And the greater consequence of that scene was always something that was a discussion ‘cause that scene always existed because she needed to have some sort of psychic ability for them to bring her onto the case. But then once the audience knows that she has some psychic tendencies, how can we leverage that to propel the story?

We’ve set up that in the beginning that she’s got some kind of psychic abilities. That gave us a lot of leeway for us to play with that kind of psychological association.

There was a scene that didn’t make it into the final film where Lee is sitting in the car and there was this thing that we called “the disturbance in the force” where she’s feeling something and we cut to the mom and the mom feels something and I thought, “This is really cool” but it became too much so it didn’t quite make it.

But because we established that there’s this psychic power, it allowed for a lot of creative freedom because we can be somewhat nebulous about the details because no one knows what a satanic psychic really does. So we kind of have this ability to play with all those details without being too concrete.

It is a tough balance because you don’t want to alienate someone who’s not on board for the ride. We need to give enough information, but not too much. And that’s always been one of the biggest struggles.

Does the psychic test with the slides happen AFTER the scene where she goes to the house and says, “This is where the bad guy lives” and she’s right, so then they test her because of that instance?

NG: Yes.

The test was also in the weird aspect ratio, right?

FORTIN: No, but the projection slides have the same ratio as the flashback.

NG: I do like the use of the aspect ratio. It is kind of an interesting thing to use. I worked on a doc and it was 2.35 for all the interviews, then we had archival footage, which we thought we had to bow up to fill the frame, but now I think audiences are getting pretty used to any kind of aspect ration changes and it’s not so jarring.

I was quite pleased with using flashbacks within 4:3. There’s even a scene where she comes out of the flashback and the aspect ratio changes over 30 or 45 seconds, which was kind of a delightful thing to see. I don’t know if people actually compute that.

I did not.

NG: Yeah, when she wakes up in the basement, it comes out of a 4:3 memory and into Lee Harker in the present day and then slowly, very slowly becomes 2.35 again.

Any editorial challenges you wanna talk about?

FORTIN: I think the biggest thing was figuring out the opening of the film and the structure of the film and how to make Longlegs as scary a character as possible. That’s something that happened over time.

NG: The opening scene was always somewhat challenging because first character is not Longlegs, so we’re opening with someone else. So the concern is that the audience wonders: is this related? How do we tie this in?

Is this gonna be confusing? She goes upstairs and she points the gun at some guy and we wonder: is that Longlegs? Is that not him? Who’s this guy? That’s always been something we wondered about: do we drop the scene? Does the movie just open without that?

Does the movie open with the perception test? That would be a crazy movie. Just open up like in The Parallax View? That would be crazy. The opening scene I think does work, but the opening and the ending, those are always the most difficult. And at the ending the question was: how do we wrap this up?

There’s this a sort of a standoff between everyone. In earlier iterations it was more sequential, like this happens and then that happens and then she shoots the guy and then the mom and we need to have all these elements climax at the same time so that they have the biggest peak. We can’t come back down after somebody dies and go back up again. How can we make it so everything rides the same wave.

Also the movie ended slightly differently than it does currently. It’s a strange ending. There’s no happy endings, I’m sorry to say, but it’s a strange ending to end with Lee pointing the gun. Did she rescue the girl? Is there any resolution? This is a really bad time to end the movie!

At one point the idea was: How can we get Nicholas Cage as Longlegs back in the movie at the ending? Can we have him singing Happy Birthday and give Nick Cage the final laugh?

Cage singing Happy Birthday at the end was not scripted?

NG: No, no, no. It just felt right though. That was a producer note that came in the very end. The movie ended differently and someone said, “We need Cage back.” So we said, “What if he does the Happy Birthday song? He also smooches at the camera, and we thought, “Well where can we use this?” I guess we put it at the very end. So, end the movie with a kiss from Nick Cage. That’s what happened. Good way to go out.

Good way to go out for your movie and a good way to go out on this interview. Gentlemen, thank you so much for a really interesting discussion of a really cool movie. Thanks for participating.

NG: Thanks Steve. 

FORTIN: Thank you.