Saturday Night

Today on Art of the Cut, editors Nathan Orloff and Shane Reid discuss editing Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night - a film recounting the chaos just before going LIVE with the first episode of Saturday Night Live.

Nathan Orloff has been on Art of the Cut before, most recently for his work on Deadpool/Wolverine. He also joined us for his previous collaborations with Reitman on  Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire and Ghostbusters: Afterlife He was also on for editing John Wick 4.

Shane Reid was also on Art of the Cut with Nathan for Deadpool/Wolverine and for Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. Shane also edited the Nick Cave documentary, One More Time with Feeling. 

Gentlemen, thanks for chatting with us today about this movie. One of the overriding feelings - and I knew this was gonna be the case from watching the trailer - is that the night depicted in the movie just seems like total chaos. Can you talk about what director Jason Reitman wanted you to get out of the footage? And how did you support that feeling of chaos in your editing?

ORLOFF: Jason has this wonderful quality about him where he loves the footage to speak for itself. He just smiles and says, “Here you go!” You read the script and you think, “Oh my gosh! This is gonna be crazy!” The same thing goes for music.

He’d send music to Shane and me before the shoot and it’s these drum tracks that are just like propulsive. It gets Shane and me in the head space to think, “This is gonna be really exciting and - yeah - definitely chaotic.” Then the footage lends itself to naturally be cut that way.

The way that Eric Steelberg, the cinematographer, did everything was just so brilliant and it was sort of the only way you could possibly put this together.

That’s a common theme: “the dailies speak to you, the dailies let you know how to cut it.” You just mentioned the music. Were the tracks you were getting during production, were those actual John Batiste tracks or was Jason finding temp some other place?

ORLOFF: There was some temp in early of the vibe. John Batiste actually played Billy Preston in the movie, so he was on set. He and Jason came up with this idea to try recording the score on set.

What that entailed was - after wrapping each day - John would come back with his band in street clothes and I’d have my laptop there and I would show John scene assemblies that Shane and I had done - some with temp track, some without.

And Jason and John would talk about the tone they’d want, what kind of instruments, and John would just sort of feel inspired and he’d go up on the stage - the same stage you see in the movie with the same bandmates - and just improvise.

He’d walk over to one of his bandmates and say, “All right, you do this in E flat. You take this instrument and do this with it.” John of course would play any of those instruments, so sometimes he’d pick up an instrument and play it and then hand it off to a bandmate.

They’d do these tracks that were 10, 12 minutes long and they’d do these builds and drops and breakdowns and climaxes and then they’d wrap that track and Jason and I could look at each other and say, “This is perfect for this part.” Or “Wait, what about this?” “Oh this is great for the ending.”

Then once we got back to LA our music editor, Chris Newlin, could take these scenes and sort of create loops out of them. Some of them two seconds long, four seconds long, 30 seconds long. We’d be able to sort of “Tetris block” our score and cut our scenes.

It’s malleable. The music informed the scenes, the scenes informed the music. We never had a temp score that we handed to a composer. Our score was built around the scenes, yet we were able to completely cut our scenes however we wanted pace-wise.

And did that end up being temp that John then tried to recreate in a studio, or did you actually use that music?

REID: No, we used that music! Jason would make all these choices that seem like they make a lot of sense now, but they were used to create an environment for the actors and for the music that feels like it would - in a sort of scrappy, inventive sense of 1975.

The minute that I heard the concept, I thought, “Of course it’s gonna be that spirit. Of course it’s gonna be about people trying to fumble over themselves to get it together.”

I think the music was done in this way that felt so alive and it was really important that the sound quality that Jason wanted to capture was to bring Studio 8H [the studio SNL is shot in] alive. He built that space [Studio 8H] not only for the visuals but also for the acoustics, so that you could have people working in the background.

You can have chatter all around, you can have musical instruments warming up and you would feel the warmth of that whole space. So to capture music in that space and to be able to carry that over into post and then build it and not have John come in and try and recreate something was so smart.

So often you work with something in post that works so well in its original form because that’s informing the way you’re cutting the picture - the way you’re feeling it. Then when you try and recreate that, it can be very distracting and not land emotionally where you’ve set out to land.

So this allowed us to build the movie with the music and the tone and feel that we wanted and then be able to land it and not have it change from there.

There’s lots of either handheld or Steadicam footage. Is there a trick to watching or logging or editing footage with that kind of camera movement?

REID: Jason and Eric really choreographed a lot of the movement of the film. It gave us these really strong train tracks to build scenes off of. You could lay those down and know where you wanted to go in a scene where you wanted the characters to land or begin.

As we would put those in, you would just feel whether or not the film wanted to accelerate at a certain point. So some of those camera moves would be broken up. For instance, a big one is when you go up into the 17th floor with when Lorne and Tebet and Michael O’Donoghue arrive, the choreography was to follow O’Donoghue, talk to Lorne.

He talks about “was that a Hitler quote?” follows O’Donoghue over to meet Franken and Davis. Camera goes off of O’Donoghue to meet Chevy Chevy and Herb talk and then you whip off of Chevy into the women.

But when we got into that scene, it needed to feel more eclectic and more alive and more captured. So then you’d start to break those camera moves up, you start to jump around the room a little more. Then Nathan and I would find these really wonderful happenstance moments of catching a whip into another whip so that you could whip through another environment.

The idea was to have this dance and not really have you notice it. You’re in that room and your attention is being drawn to left or right, almost like this weird VR experience in a way. Some of that is just a feeling and some of that is practically built into the movement.

So there’s a blurred line where you feel like there are a lot edits and where some camera moves sustain for a long period of time.

Shane Reid and Nathan Orloff

Did you use sound effects or dialogue - offscreen dialogue or ADR that you added later - to pick up the pace of some of those longer tracking shots where you were looking for more pace?

ORLOFF: Initially we had that instinct that you’re talking about of adding a lot of SFX and ADR, but I think through the intense choreography it actually became a matter of making sure that it was incredibly focused what we did and didn’t add.

Of course we wanted to support anything we saw on screen, but initially we had the instinct of “Oh, we should be hearing in the background people doing this.”

And we had our assistants adding stuff, and all of a sudden the sound effects started to overshadow the dialogue, so it was this delicate balance of adding stuff.

Will Files, our sound supervisor and sound effects mixer, did a great job of trying to make sure that things were alive in the background - that you believed that there were a hundred people off-screen doing something but not being pulled out of what you’re trying to hear, because to me this is a dialogue movie. Dialogue is king in this.

With a lot of those tracking shots, was there also coverage?

REID: I don’t think there was. I think maybe there were a few things that hit the cutting room floor. Leaving the 17th floor there was a little insert that was kind of an Easter egg that we ran past that got cut. Jason doesn’t shoot things very traditionally. He doesn’t shoot coverage in that way where there’s a master that you’re coming in on.

A lot of it was the experience I think of feeling like you are present in these conversations and so you’re sort of following behind closely to someone’s back moving with them down the hall. The claustrophobia of that environment. I think that was an important character. Cutting to insert shots felt a little unnecessary and broke the mystique of the human experience.

ORLOFF: Jason is incredibly confident when he shoots. If you’re doing a long tracking shot, he’s not gonna shoot options. He believes in this idea. Then there are scenes where he shoots all the coverage because he knows this is gonna be a scene with lots of cuts.

That’s also the benefit of assembling as you shoot. He relied on us to flag anything if we needed it. I can’t actually think of a time where we were trying to raise the red flag and say, “We should really just get coverage just in case.”

REID: Because we believed in that tracking shot also. That’s an amazing thing to pull off! To meet all those characters in a shot! To see it in the script, then the iterations of them working that blocking out and to see them finally start nailing it.

I think for the actors it gave that theater-performance vibe that they have to be on their marks and it creates a great palpable energy. And in the edit - to allow something like that to breathe - is a real joy of working in a longer format to not have to cut.

Nathan Orloff and Shane Reid

Because of the way that the music moves and the picture moves in this jazz element and how much it can fill up a shot, you can allow something that hangs seven minutes and people don’t really know at the end if there were a bunch of edits in there.

And then when you get to the more chaotic part, there’s almost a feeling of like, was that just one shot? That was really wild! It’s that fusion of all these different styles of editing along with this really kinetic camera work that bleeds the whole experience into one where it feels like one giant long take, which is what Jason was aiming for.

ORLOFF: I think that vibe of Jason doing it this way and not necessarily giving us a lot of options, it created this culture on set between the crew and the cast of: “This is it!

This is how we’re doing this! You better bring your A game for these angles, these performances, this shot because we’re not gonna sit here and and cover ourselves, try different things and we’ll figure out in post we’re gonna do it these three different ways.” It was: this is the way!

And in that way it’s very much more in the spirit of doing Saturday Night Live. Everyone’s doing their best. There were times when call time would be eight or nine and they’d wrap at four and it would give Jason and the producers time to set up for the next day, think about the camera for the next day and and whatnot. But the cast would wrap it early.

REID: A testament to Jason’s strength as the director is that none of those fell apart in the edit. There was nothing where you said, “God, this didn’t quite land the way we wanted it to land.”

The vision was so strong, the execution so well done that these things slotted into place and all we did in the very beginning was move a couple of little scenes to keep that train rolling, so that you didn’t fall off of it, because with that kind of energy, if you diverted it, it’s very hard to get back on board.

We would do little things like that, but it was really confidently executed.

Are you gonna reveal to us how many edits are in that oner?

ORLOFF: None.

None?! Really?!

REID: Yeah.

Nathan Orloff, director Jason Reitman, and Shane Reid

Wow!

ORLOFF: There is some audio from different performances that we might steal - a line from how one actor said a certain thing and we would swap some audio out - but normally we do that all the time.

REID: Coming out of the elevator with Lorne going into the control room is all a single shot.

That’s crazy. That’s a wild scene. I wanted to talk to you about the editing of the scene where all the NBC station affiliate GMs were in the green room. Can you walk me through building that scene and the pacing of it and achieving the effect you were going for?

REID: I was juggling the editing of “Saturday Night” and “Deadpool/Wolverine” for a little while when we were in the early stages of post. The acceleration of our post schedule was real and we were moving very fast. Nathan and I showed an editor’s cut to Jason a week after coming back from production. The film came together very fast.

It became more about what ideas can we infuse into the film? What can we do to keep this unexpected? So I started recognizing some opportunities and doing things really late at night, then present to Nathan and Jason the next day - some very ‘splice-editing’ things - at the control room door with Tebet and Lorne as Tebet is reciting the list of Lorne’s mistakes that he’s seen.

We started to realize that this - the editing with flashbacks - is a really cool way to get inside of Lorne’s head a little bit more. It allowed the audience to get peeks into Lorne because he’s almost an impenetrable force in the film and he wasn’t gonna let you in there.

So the edit became this really cool language to allow the audience in. We had done this kind of editing a little more towards the back of the film and Jason thought if we’re gonna make this work, we need to find another area earlier on where we can establish this kind of language.

We ended up finding that sequence in the affiliates room was a great space for it because it was the first time we felt Lorne pressed with his back up against the wall. You could feel that kind of anxiety as he’s being stared down by all these guys.

For someone who is in that position that can turn into a sort of a threatening situation and those faces that can almost seem friendly, can seem a little scary, a little scarier and a little trippy. I would grab any pieces of camera whipping around or anything to get the sense of him sort of trying to find his words while also dealing with the pressure that was happening in that room and trying to escape it and get back out.

Nathan Orloff

You mentioned that you were trying to get that feeling earlier in the film. Was the scene with the NBC affiliates actually placed later in the film or was it just that you changed the edit to match the later scene?

ORLOFF:  It was just edited differently. It did take a while to sort of find the soul of it. Part of that was when we finally dialed in everything before that. What I do love about that scene is you’re going, going, going and then you stop down for the scene in the edit bay with Rosie and then you’re going again.

Then in this scene with the GMs, Lorne is intentionally stopped and forced to do this. We found these really fun shots that are like searching through the crowd and then you land on Lorne.

We intentionally stayed a while as he’s shaking a lot of people’s hands and it’s like, “okay, where is this going? What are we doing?” You’re also supposed to be with Lorne in that regard.

What Shane’s talking about is discovering the style of how we wanted to get inside Lorne’s head. We found that that was the perfect scene to do that: climb and build before that, then almost stop like a record scratch when he’s forced to meet all these random people.

Then by the end of it, you’re inside his head and there are these whip pans as he’s remembering being laughed at. It’s this moment where it’s not just chaos, but emotional turmoil. To do that arc in that scene was sort of what unlocked it. And it’s so important to his character in the film.

There’s little flashbacks in there, right?

Shane Reid

REID: Those are establishing a language to the audience that everything’s on the table. What you are ingesting, these characters are also ingesting. For the flashbacks with Tebet at the control room door, we would use alternate camera angles that we had of a b camera that might have covered the same thing.

Some shots are the same angles, but the idea turns into: This is Lorne’s recognition of the things that he has gotten caught for, that he hoped no one was paying attention to. And in some ways it’s us showing you that Tebet’s aware of everything that’s happening. He is a hawk in that room and nothing gets by him.

I think that teaches the audience a language that: eyes are on everyone and you are part of those eyes on everyone and everything that you’re collecting can be used against a character or for a character. That was what also just kept the film surprising around every corner.

Each scene has its own identity or little comedy or little drama. So it just keeps these like mini stories within a, a larger story, less formulaic. Not that they were written formulaic, but I think in a film like this, they could be formulaic and this allowed everything to have its own little identity and charm.

The flashbacks in that scene was how we started to unlock the language was how to use editing in a sort of visceral manner to crack open Lorne and what’s going on inside of his head. Also to have fun. It’s funny! It makes us laugh and it elicits a real response.

Jason’s got this wonderful music that he brings in and then John does his score and, and this tension’s mounting and - Nathan maybe should speak to this - but the timestamps [on-screen graphics to show the time of day] were invented in in the edit.

We didn’t have those in the script. So they would be these pillar blocks to sort of reach to and to crescendo to. So each time you could come out of it and sort of revamp the energy and end with a climax.

And that just felt like a climax to where we were going in that scene. I don’t think it’s exactly where a timestamp comes in, but it feels like everything is sort of mounting to this place. And in a film that has a lot of propulsion and energy, how do you do something that takes that idea to the next level??

How do you differentiate a moment like that from another moment of Lorne being questioned or in an elevator or by Ebersol? How do you take that moment and in instill a little bit more fear and panic and also - because it’s a comedy - how do you make people laugh more?

When we started to mess with those kinds of edits, it just did something really unique and different for the film. The film started to find this language in the edit where all these things are possible and we had this goodie bag of beautiful moments, funny moments, violent moments, messy moments. And they were really great tools to use.

On the Mix Stage

ORLOFF: And Jason said that if you’re gonna do something stylistic in the editing, you should try to do it in the first 20 minutes of a movie. So, when Shane came in one morning and showed us that control room door scene and it’s so provocative and adds to what I thought it had already been, it was working great between him and William Defoe, but it elevated it to a whole new level.

Then we realized that it was just these two tent pole scenes at the door and then later with the bricks with Lorne looking at the bricks where we do this flash cutting. That’s when we then worked backwards to how we’re gonna do this earlier.

And that’s how it ended up in the affiliates room. So these three things were linked together and Shane and I flagged that.

Then the last thing shot was Lorne looking at those bricks being put down and that’s what sort of unlocked this idea of flashing through everything that’s on his mind and how close he is to failure and how insurmountable the next 45 minutes seem to be.

So when Shane showed that cut of Tebet at the door and flashing to him and Lorne’s really caught with his hand in the cookie jar, that really helped us get inside Lorne’s head because Lorne spends the entire film, unlike all the other characters, not speaking to their insecurities.

He is trying to keep everything together and Rosie’s the only one that can see inside that or see through that. But we also needed the audience to see through that.

The movie is very chronological. Were there places where you considered getting out of that or that you did?

ORLOFF: Very small things. Yeah, it’s very chronological. It was kind of impossible to do anything structurally. The script just lended itself to being that way.

REID: The way that the time works, that’s the story, right? Time is the enemy and the pressure of this 90 minutes is mounting. So I think if you’re jumping around in time, it doesn’t quite work for a film like this.

One of the things that you mentioned is kind of shocking to me. I wanna talk about how you decided to place those “ticking time clock moments.” Since that was not in the script, how did you decide - and when did you decide - to place some of those? Can you think of a reason why you said, “Oh, this would be a good place for the clock to go in.”?

ORLOFF: This is one of my favorite things that we unlocked in post. We watched the assembly and I think one thing that the three of us really felt watching the assembly was sort of when chaos is on top of chaos on top of chaos, you get a little numb to it.

You get a little exhausted and go glossy-eyed. We also have moments where Neil pops in and says 45 minutes or you have Joe Dicso yell out another time, but it’s surprising how unanchored you felt that you didn’t know how much time had passed. You didn’t know how close we were to show time.

You didn’t have have a lot of anchors, and in that way, 8H also got to feel a little claustrophobic ‘cause you aren’t leaving. You’re staying right there. You’re not leaving until reel five where Lorne goes out to New York. So we were thinking: do we pick up some inserts of clocks and do it like “Run Lola Run”?

Then we came up with this “cut to black moment” where it created the juxtaposition of all this noise. The first one we did was the one in New York. We loved this moment of honking, and Lorne saying “Come on, Andy.” And Andy says, “Bye mommy, I love you.” And she says, “I love you.”

And there are people telling him to get out of the road. It was so funny to us but we were trying to figure out why isn’t it working? Why isn’t it creating a laugh? But we weren’t giving a space to laugh because either we were gonna cut wide again in New York and to show New York again, which was like, “Okay, we’ve seen this,” or we just cut to the next scene so you didn’t have a moment.

When we figured out this cut to black and just show the time, it created a joke out of all of it. Shane and I immediately knew: “This is it, this is the answer!” Then for it to cut from 10:00 to 10:01. Then later it cuts to 10:12 and you’re think, “Oh my God! It’s only been 12 minutes!” By the way, that length of time is real. We timed it out. That 10:12 graphic comes 11 minutes after the 10:01 graphic.

Audience members see that and think, “This is how dense this is gonna be? Oh gosh! Let me like strap in!” There was also this piece of music. John recorded this stuff. He was experimenting on the 8H stage and he had these woodblocks and he hit ’em for the first time and everyone watching that evening hushed.

Then he walked around 8H looking for the right reverb. I looked at Jasonand we thought, “This is the clock! Time is the villain! This is our Jaws theme!” We already had that theme within the film at a few different points.

So then it was just obvious when we did this cut to black that it would take all of the music, all the sound, the dialogue, the cacophony of New York and then go to zero. Then this juxtaposition is what created - to me - some of the funniest jokes in the movie, actually.

Were there any scenes that were completely dropped from the film?

ORLOFF: Tiny short ones of transitions - less than 20 seconds.

As they approached the 11:00 PM hour. There’s a brick laying sequence on the main stage.

ORLOFF: That was the “Nothing from Nothing” montage. This was a sequence where we really just wanted to give everyone the candy at the end of the movie. You’ve been waiting this whole time. You’ve been anxious this whole time.

Now you’re seeing everybody come together. It was a really fun sequence they recorded, that was all live on set. We didn’t go back and rerecord that. That’s Jon Batiste’s vocals. It’s all the instruments. It was a really, really, really cool sequence to cut and a hard thing to balance because it was all these different plot points coming together and comedy beats between.

Like,, what is a golden shower and Jim Henson being handed these script pages and he reads them and says, “oh no.” But it was sort of this delicate thing and a really complicated musical edit also because we have all these different plot points and I would work with Chris Newlin, our music editor to get the right length.

It was incredibly intricate because which lyrics are you gonna hear on camera? When are we gonna drop down to do instrumental to have dialogue? It was quite intricate and a lot of fun, especially things like we discovered these little fun whip pans that we could do from George Carlin having lock jaw to the audience beginning to start clapping and there’s this sort of frenetic positive, first-time energy in the film that we were trying to really nail in that scene. I just love that sequence.

There’s a big confrontation in the stairwell between Lorne and Ebersol. It’s very emotional and - from my recollection - no music. It’s the sound of the fluorescent lights humming in the background. Can you talk to me about deciding not to put music there? And also I love the moment at the end: here’s this powerful confrontation and then you sit with Lorne’s face for so long with him realizing how screwed he is.

ORLOFF: That’s one of my favorite scenes that I cut in the entire film. I don’t think any of us thought to put music in it ever. The whole point of the scene was we’ve climaxed with how chaotic everything is when stuff falls apart with Chevy Chase and his girlfriend and then O’Donoghue and George Carlin.

Lorne looks at the bricks and he loses it and the cards fall and all his stuff, and Billy Crystal’s betrayed by Valri Bromfield and everything’s gone wrong and there’s the cacophony of both music and 8H - but now - behind these closed doors, it’s quiet and you were forced to sit with these two pivotal characters that have this big reveal of what the truth is behind the show.

It’s some of my favorite performances in the entire film as well. Neither of them are wrong but also very wrong in a sense. So it really was a fun thing. Some of those edits stayed through from the assembly - especially the ending - like when Ebersol tells him like, “Are you that really that arrogant?!” That cut from all that stuff on is, is how it was from the beginning. We never needed music. The performances are that strong.

REID: You have to sit with that fight, it feels private. Like it feels like you’re a part of a moment that you shouldn’t be a part of. That’s the case for many scenes in the film. You are obviously watching a scene in the film, but because of the language of this movie and the choice to not have music there is because that’s what that room’s gonna feel like.

I especially love what you’re talking about with Nathan staying on Lorne’s face. It’s also just the silence of that hallway after everything else is going on in the background. And every time Lorne is behind a door, he has to work up the courage to walk out the door and face all those things again that are still waiting there.

That’s why using things like the flashes in the bricks and using the shots of the cards, it’s this double meaning. At some point the cards [the wall of cards showing what sketches, music and acts will be part of the show] represent this optimism of what the night could be and all these possibilities. They still have to choose a lot.

But then sometimes it becomes a terrifying image - like a horror image - to learn about how many choices need to still be made in the very little time that Lorne has. That scene never would’ve worked with music on it because the score in this film does not work in that kind of way.

There’s also a scene where the brick layer is trying to lay the bricks on the stage by himself at 11pm.

ORLOFF: This ties into sort of what Shane and I have been talking about: those three pivotal moments of getting inside Lorne’s head that started with the affiliates and then it was with Tebet at the door and then this sort of climactic version when he’s watching the Bricks and, and yeah, it’s the guy doing it alone, but Tebet’s watching and Lorne’s remembering the cards.

REID: Carson sort of cutting through the imagery and seeing him and the nightmare that is Carson’s face and he is smiling and doing his thing. But to Lorne, that’s a real fear - and the thing that is ultimately gonna sort of ruin his life.

It Carson goes on that night, his career’s probably done. The bricks also are just such a metaphor for the craftsmanship that went into the the do-it-yourself young guys that are like building a stage, building a foundation of television on their own.

Leo laying the Bricks is all real! That all came out of the interviews with that real character.

It’s a metaphor, but also there’s a great rhythmic pattern to those bricks and there’s a really a disturbing sound that I loved, which is of those bricks scraping against each other and the way he would scrape the mortar. It just sounded like blades.

Then you would use those blades and those pounds to elicit sort of some emotional response. It was like music that wasn’t friendly and was a little bit painful. Then to pair that with the enemy - with clocks, with time, with ticking, with all the things that could happen to Lorne - it was what we needed.

When we talk about needing these crescendos to feel different emotionally than other places in the film, you needed to get to the point where Lorne was gonna boil over and where you’re sort of backing out from him ripping all the cards off the wall and as you watch the first assembly and those things don’t exist, it’s like he is ripping all the cards off the wall, but am I with him and do I feel why he’s doing that? That’s where we would explore really interesting ways to cut the film.

There’s another great moment when Lorne’s executive assistant is told to go find John Belushi and the assistant takes some drugs. Talk about either the sound design of that or the edit of that whole scene because it was just very funny.

REID: That was another idea I had late at night. I was watching it and I thought, “It’s a funny scene. Andrew’s fantastic.” You’re backing into these things that Jason had built, like you’re backing into him standing in front of Billy and Gilda screaming and holding his face and he is saying, “I can feel my blood!” He’s such an innocent character.

I wanted to figure out, how do we feel that as an audience a little bit more? Because we established up front that he’s totally a fish outta water and he’s just trying to keep up and he’s a little lapdog. We just thought “We can have so much fun with this.”

Like when he turns the lights off let’s add this really exaggerated light sound! I built up the sound design when he’s handed the whiskey. Everything else is muffled around him, but the ice and the liquid is like a pool with huge ice cubes in it! Nathan and I would start playing around with layering all the words, like: “I’m John, I’m John, I’m John!” “I’m bringing back Belushi Belushi Belushi!”

We built these scenes into their own little mini stories with their own different personalities. Jason’s so wonderful to work with because he’s so trusting and open to these ideas and loves to be surprised by them. And if something doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.

There were plenty of things that Nathan and I tried that you’d take out and it just wasn’t worth it. But it was all of our jobs to try and pull every little piece of joy out of this film that we can and where they could be elevated comedically as well.

Anything else that you wanna talk about that was difficult about the editing of this or that you were particularly proud of?

ORLOFF: I spoke to the “Nothing from Nothing” Montage. That was a difficult, intricate thing I’m very proud of but also the scene in the stairwell with Ebersol and Lorne and that was more of a matter of the performance.

The movie almost feels like one giant long scene, so it was such a holistic approach from a bird’s eye view of when did things slow down, when did things work, not as well as they could? And it was such a momentum ride of when we got off that train.

REID: Nathan not only built “Nothing from Nothing” but it’s all that tension that is so good - and that the film hinges on - because everyone knows what the outcome of the story is, right? Are they cutting to this tape of Carson?

Did that happen that night? So that’s Nathan building that tension and when to let it go and when to let Tebet say, “Go live!”

ORLOFF: How do we make it so people question whether we’re actually gonna make it? I looked at Apollo 13 in terms of just suspending the disbelief or at least maybe suspending the belief that you know that they succeed.

That scene in the control room was probably my favorite scene in the film that I did. John Batiste recorded that score and Jason and I looked at each other and I just knew that this was gonna be for that moment. So when they shot that sequence, I cut it to John’s music and that sequence did not change throughout the rest of the editing.

As far as the “Feed my fingertips to the Wolverines” sketch, we didn’t want to present them as recreations - as sketches - the movie’s not saying, “Here. Find this sketch funny.” It’s about the audience in the 1970s finding it funny and what does this sketch mean to the characters that we’ve been following?

It evolved later on with us cutting in more reaction shots and then putting in the piano that exists under when “Wolverines” is starting to succeed and win over the audience. That’s when we’re like, “Oh, we gotta give all of our characters a win. We did it guys!

We really fucking did it.” That was a fun thing to unlock later on. Weekend Update was also a really fun one with Chevy Chase. Then we get to Gilda wanting that photograph. You feel exactly like she does.

One of my favorite jokes in that moment is when we pivot to, “I have a camera!” and everything has come full circle and even Ebersol has a redeeming moment. The last time you saw him was in the stairwell confronting Lorne.

That’s one of the things I love about the script is that these characters can have these conflicts, but their resolution doesn’t need to be a dialogue scene between the two. So Ebersol and Lorne can have this deep conflict, but his redemption is in that moment. That was a really fun thing that sort of ties everything in a bow but in a way that maybe you expect or is typical.

REID: That’s what I loved about the film in general too, is that it describes this moment in time. This is something that happened 50 years ago. What does that night feel like? And I love films that actually exist within that space.

I like films that exist over a big span of time, but I also really appreciate when something tries to capture what a moment felt like. There’s some truth to how people might cinch a moment up or how they might resolve a conflict. It doesn’t need full resolution. Sometimes it’s just in the way that they keep going on with the night, that’s their job.

With the Wolverine sketch, I was thinking about the suspension of disbelief - which I think think was necessary. I’m not complaining about it - but when they say “Cue Belushi” and he doesn’t come on, he doesn’t come on for a LONG time! But you need that. Lorne’s gotta get down to the stage, he’s gotta worry, the audience has gotta worry what’s gonna happen, but how long could you draw that out realistically?

REID: This is the line between what’s real and what is emotionally real for these people. I directed a play in college. It was a two man show and the mother character was starting the show and she does her line that cues in the other actor that comes in from a door on top of a stairwell.

And the other actor didn’t come on and I lost my shit. It was probably 40 seconds, but to me it felt like a lifetime and it felt like everything was falling apart. So I think maybe it’s not really that long, but for Lorne, not knowing that Belushi’s gonna walk through that door confidently is enough to give the feeling that time becomes so elastic.

I think that that’s what the film balances is, “what is real and what emotionally did it feel like to be in that room on that night?” That’s the dance of the script. It’s the dance of the concept and it’s the dance of the final film.

Gentlemen, I really enjoyed this movie and thanks for all your work on it.

ORLOFF: Our pleasure. I’m so glad you enjoyed it. 

REID:  Thank you, Steve.