Slow Horses

Today, we’re talking with Zsófia Tálas, who was recently nominated for an Emmy for her episode of the drama, Slow Horses - available on Apple TV Plus.

Zsofi’s other work includes the BBC TV series A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, SkyTV’s The Midwich Cuckoos, and Hulu’s Brassic. She’s also cut feature films including Bad Poems, The Cabin, and Unwelcome.

Zsófia, congratulations on your Emmy nomination. It’s wonderful having you on the podcast. Welcome.

Thank you so much. I really love the podcast, so it’s honestly a great thing for me to be here. I actually can’t believe it. And yes, the Emmy nomination is ridiculous to believe, honestly, still to this day.

Tell us a little bit about yourself. You’re editing out of London, correct?

Yes. I’ve lived in the UK for the past almost 10 years now, but I’m originally from Hungary, so I started my career there. I went to film school there first and then moved here to do my MA here.

The nomination we’re talking about is for Outstanding Picture Editing for a Drama Series. The series is Slow Horses and the episode is Footprints. I watched it yesterday. Great episode. One of the things I notice with a lot of Emmy nominations is it’s usually either the first episode or it’s the last episode. Why do you think that is?

When Sam - the other editor - and I were nominated for the BAFTA - and he actually won for the first episode - it was him choosing the first episode and me choosing the last episode because I think those are the hardest parts in some ways: how to start a whole season or in some cases a whole new series.

In our case, we had an already-established show, but how do you reintroduce these characters? How do you set up a new storyline?

So that’s the hard part for the first episode and also everybody’s super-focused on the first episode and the last one. Do we get a jumpstart into the story? Is it exciting enough? Is the audience going to stick around for the whole season?

So those are the hard parts of the first episode. The last episode is obviously hard because you have to round off all the different storylines, all the emotional entanglements that you have within the whole series. You have to set up the next season, you have to make sure it doesn’t have too many endings, but you still feel satisfied that all the stories are concluded.

And in my case, the last episode was really fun as well because it just included so many action scenes and different, much slower-paced emotional scenes as well. So there was a big range of stuff I thought in that last episode.

But I was actually thinking about another episode for a while, which is my personal favorite: the second episode. There’s something about River trying to get something out of the park without everyone knowing that I just feel it’s so fun and it has a countdown clock and I just really like those episodes just to watch as well, not just to edit.

So that was my personal favorite, but in the end I thought episode six showcases more skill, probably.

It’s interesting that with your other favorite episode, you talked more about what you liked about the story than what you liked about your editing.

Yes. I think it’s also interesting editing-wise, but it’s less obvious maybe, and definitely six was the hardest one to edit, so there’s no doubt about it that that showcases more skill and not just technical skill but all sorts of other skills. So I think that was the right decision.

Let’s talk about one of the things you kind of hinted at, which was the number of storylines that there are. Talk about intercutting those storylines. Are they always as scripted? I feel like they’re probably more as-scripted on a TV show than they might be on a film.

Yes. That was the hardest part for me in this episode, and also the most fun challenge because on most of the other episodes we stuck with the script pretty strictly because they were just so amazingly written. That was a real privilege for us.

But the sixth one was different because - as you said - there are so many storylines going on at the same time. Time passes differently in different locations. For example, in the “kidnap house” - where Catherine is being held and Lamb is trying to rescue her - that was a totally different mood/style/genre to what was happening in the facility underground with River and Louisa trying to get out and save their lives and Shirley and Marcus shooting at everybody.

So those had to be very intricately woven into this tapestry. That was challenging because we try - obviously, as you always do - to put down the structure as it was intended in the script. That sort of worked, but it didn’t have the same impact that we wanted.

Editor Zsófia Tálas

My initial thought was, I really want all these storylines to culminate almost at the same time and that would’ve been so satisfying to have the bus crash as River and Ru are all coming out of the facility. All of these things happening at the same time and just having a really nicely wrapped up sort of feeling of “now we have a solution for all these storylines”, but it just didn’t work.

The kidnap house was so stretched out and because it’s a slower pace, it’s a more tense plot line. We just felt we had to bring it way forward in the whole episode. It also has less going on.

So we thought that had to happen and also a very different mood to the other ones. So we thought because it’s a little bit more comedic, especially with whole crashing into the house with the bus, we thought it worked way better when we brought it forward.

Then we had more time to deal with the other storylines, which we still had to intercut between Taverner and Tierney waiting for the outcome, Duffy upstairs, Duffy downstairs, all these things. That was really fun because at some point we just said, “Let’s take all of these storylines and strip them back to the start and put them all together as almost like short films.

So that’s what we did to really get our heads into that space of what actually happens in each storyline and start almost from scratch - obviously still using the script to some extent, but really not being slaves to where exactly we cut out from one plot to the other.

That was really, really fun and really challenging to find those moments of when we leave one storyline behind because there’s enough tension and suspense in what’s gonna happen, but you’re not going to feel cheated. Also what was tricky was when you cut away to a different plot, we found that you sort of need to feel like - in the one that you just left behind - that time has passed a little bit.

So you can’t come back to the story at exactly at the same place you left it, or at least that’s what we found in this instance. I’ve done similar things in the past where it didn’t feel the same as it did here when you had to feel like all these storylines were moving even when we’re not with that storyline. So it was tricky to find the end points or the out points to each one.

You mentioned that the story kind of has to jump ahead each time you come back to it, and I remember interviewing somebody about a story where one of the stories was about going on a journey and he said that intercutting storylines helped make the journey seem like it was longer because you were going away to another story and when you would come back they’d be further along the journey.

Avid timeline screenshot of the Emmy nominated Episode 6 of “Slow Horses”

Yeah, that makes sense.

When you cut between the stories, sometimes I thought the shot that you chose when you cut away from one into the other, it seemed like the incoming shot was sometimes chosen to be ambiguous about whether you’d left the other story. You’d be on somebody’s back or it would be on a gun or something like that. Did you find that shot selection for that first shot was a really critical thing in making the transition between storylines?

Yes, of course. That’s always super-critical: what exactly the first shot of each scene is. I also really like to play around with sound and music and signal a change of location that way.

Also - as you said - sometimes it’s quite fun to disorientate for maybe a second, hopefully not much longer because you do need to feel like the storytelling is also clear. But I do like to play with that a little bit sometimes.

When you cut the scenes separately - reconstructing them as short films - and then when you finally join them together into the storylines, do you find that those transition points need to change? For example, you’ve chosen a certain shot but when that shot becomes a transition point, now it doesn’t work compared to what it’s now got to be juxtaposed against.

Oh yeah, of course. It wasn’t quite as simple as cutting up those short films into four pieces or eight pieces then just splicing them all together. Obviously that was just for us to really get a sense of how long each storyline was and where they were going.

So we only watched that once and then we threw that out the window again. So we sort of re-crafted the scenes again when we put them together.

There was a nice edit as the bad guys are entering and clearing “the kidnap house.” Two bad guys are coming in and we know that the secretary is hidden in the closet. Then, as they’re clearing the house, you cut to her in the closet kind of worrying about them and then the next shot is a guy opening a door. Was that scripted or did you think “this will be great if when he pulls the door open, you think it’s her in the closet?”

That was not scripted. I think that was even a reshoot. That was actually an idea of mine. I thought that we needed to see her in the closet because we actually didn’t have her in the closet at all. There was only a shot where the door was closing in on her, then we only see her when she comes out when Lamb rescues her. I thought, “I really want to see her worry.

And I want to actually have the audience remember that she’s there. The stakes need to be a little bit higher, and it will be higher if you see her a couple times. They very graciously picked that up for me. Then I realized that I could do that little trick - which we debated whether it was a little too “tricksy” but I quite liked it.

I loved it. 

Talk about building tension - especially in the kidnap house which was almost like a horror film. There was this tension. Can you talk about building that or what you did editorially to enhance that?

The action stuff underground was a little bit more straightforward as to what we did with that. That’s sort of like just have the action as best as possible - and in my eyes - as clear as possible as well because I don’t personally like watching action scenes when it’s too fast for my liking.

Obviously I do use fastness as a tool in certain areas, but I think when it’s used for the sake of fastness to create an extra feeling that isn’t in the rushes themselves, then I don’t think it’s always totally effective in my eyes because I just lose in interest, honestly.

I just zone out and I think it’s just images in front of me that don’t actually move me emotionally. I like to cut action very intentionally so that I always know who’s doing what and really getting the emotional meaning of each action scene.

But the rhythm of the kidnap house - the mood of it - is very different from the action scenes. That was really fun to juxtapose the two. Hopefully they kind of enhance each other. So you have this really slow building tension.

We had so much footage of them snooping around the house and when you watch the rushes it’s obviously quite boring because it’s just two guys walking around a quite dark house and nothing happens because they don’t find anybody for ages.

So you really have to set up the geography of that kidnap house beforehand, which we spent a lot of time doing, so you understand as much as you can where things are in relation to each other. So when the bad guys go through the house, there is actually some tension between the knowing and the not knowing, because you actually don’t know where Lamb is.

That’s part of the fun of the whole thing for a while. That was fun and obviously playing around with music and sound is crucial for those tense parts and stripping away the music and just letting the creaky floor do its thing when one of the guys is going up the stairs and steps on that fateful Pringles on the stairs.

Yeah, the Pringles thing was pretty funny. Originally it looked like Lamb had all this serious stuff to prepare for the attack and he just casually chooses to eat some Pringles. Then you realize he’s got a deeper purpose behind it.

That’s actually funny because what was scripted was he grabs the Pringles and obviously for a second maybe you think he’s going to eat it, but then sprinkles it on the stairs. But our director thought about it and decided that, because it’s Lamb, he has to eat some of them, which is quite funny.

There’s always this other element of the show, which I absolutely love, which is the humor, which is so unusual. But that’s what makes the show for me: the sense of humor always being there and Lamb’s character obviously being one of the main catalysts of all that. It’s really interesting to see how much comedy actually works within this spy thriller setting and not making it an actual comedy in the meantime. It’s very crucial.

Is that a hard thing to juggle? Those tonal shifts? And how do you do that?

I thought it might be, but actually it’s not too hard. Because the script is so good and the characters are so good, the actors are so amazing that they know this show inside and out and they know these characters so well and it never feels like a force of them not knowing why they’re saying a funny line when they’re saying it. It’s always very intentional and it always comes from the reality of the character’s experience.

So really we rarely struggled with that part of the show. So that was quite good I think from the start. But there were small bits and pieces when we thought “this might be too funny” unfortunately, which is really hard to let go, but sometimes very occasionally a little bit of a performance or maybe one or two jokes we had to cut because we felt like it was almost too funny, which is a really hard thing to do, especially coming from comedy. But it’s all for the greater good in the end.

Editor Zsofi Talas with the Slow Horses promotion on a bus.

You mentioned comedy. Tell me a little bit about the other shows you’ve worked on and how you got on this one.

It’s a bit of a stretch thing to say I’m coming from comedy, but my first two feature films were comedy-dramas and they were way more comedy than drama.

Comedy’s always a place where I just really love going back to. Saul Metzstein, the director, and I worked on an English show called Brassic that was a really funny comedy series and that’s where we actually got to know each other.

When a director brings an editor along from one project to another I’m always intrigued by the idea of whether it’s more about the quality of what ends up on the screen that the editor brings, or whether it’s more about the collaborative relationship and how the editor works or how they are to be with in the cutting room.

I actually don’t know the answer. It would be interesting to ask him. We have a very similar taste in what we like and what we don’t like on that show. I felt like we just found what we were looking for incredibly quickly and we’re on the same wavelength.

Also we just became friends in the process, which really actually helps because you spend so much time with each other in a room. He has a dry sense of humor and jokingly he said one time, “You are just someone that I can tolerate for six months in a room.” So that’s probably part of it.

To get back to the Slow Horses episode. There’s a flashback when someone gets killed in the episode. Can you talk about doing that? Was it scripted? And if it wasn’t, why you decided to add it?

I don’t want to give any spoilers, so if you haven’t watched it, maybe you should skip this part. I don’t think it was scripted. Saul [the director] had a really early idea about this and he intentionally shot those Sean and Allison’s in bed in a certain way so that when they shot Sean’s face when he’s dying, it was in the exact same position when he was on the bed.

So the two could almost look like they’re looking at each other. So he did that very intentionally. When he told me about it, I freely admit that I thought it might be cheesy. I was a little bit against the idea at first when I heard it, but I like trying things even if they don’t sound like they’re my kind of thing. So I just tried it and when I did, and watched it back, I thought, “Dammit, it’s really moving!”

I just did an interview with somebody else, and that’s exactly what they said, “This is never gonna work,” but you don’t say that. 

No.

You might as well just give it a shot.

It’s actually fantastic that can still happen. I think it’s amazing that you think you know quite a lot and you can imagine those two shots together. It’s not that hard.

You can imagine even the music underneath. In my mind it was cheesy and then the actual images just create some magic that you didn’t expect and I just have to throw up my hands and say, “Well, I was wrong.”

Earlier, you were talking about the dynamics of slow moments and fast moments. One of them that I thought of was after the escape from the hatch, you take a moment to breathe. The characters get a moment, the audience gets a moment. Talk about editing dynamics and the need for those.

That’s absolutely crucial. Especially in that moment. It’s the most high intensity episode probably in the whole Slow Horses world, not just in our season. This season was way more action-heavy than the other two. At some point we were a little bit concerned about that because we thought: “We don’t want this show to become something that it isn’t.”

Jason Bourne.

Yes, exactly. Which is amazing, but because we’ve already seen two seasons of this show and it’s a well-beloved show by those who watch it. So it’s sort of like we kind of want to get the same thing - but better, of course - every time you go back to a show.

We don’t want to lose people by saying now we’re Jason Bourne or now we’re James Bond when we’re actually not and we were never supposed to be. It was well balanced in the end. I think definitely in that moment that you mentioned, when they managed to get out of the hatch, we felt like “this is our moment to go back to normality” to really calm down and that the audience needs a breather.

It was so obvious that we peaked and it’s very obvious when you watch the whole episode.

The other one that I was thinking about that’s similar: there’s a great moment where Lamb is at a petrol station - a gas station - and he reveals some stuff to the character of the secretary and it’s very powerful and emotional. This series doesn’t have a lot of “shoe-leather” - going from one place to another - but after that powerful moment you do allow the car to drive away and you allow us to see the secretary walking away. Those shots don’t mean much really, but the TIME does, right?

Yeah. It’s a big moment in the show between those two characters. Their relationship is massively fractured and there’s this big secret that Lamb has been holding onto. For Catherine to hear that in that moment is massive and feels very personal.

She’s been talking about this amazing boss that she had and how noble and good he is, compared to Lamb, who isn’t. So Lamb just had to reveal that the person she thought she knew was not who she thought he was. As horrible of a person as Lamb can seem, he’s still - at his core - a good person, but it still really, really hurts Catherine, obviously.

As you say, in another scene, we would totally cut those shots (the shoe-leather) out, or not used them in the first place. But in that moment you’re in Catherine’s headspace and you want to think about what you just heard as she does and to think what actually is going to happen after this?

Where does this leave these two people? So those shots do exactly that and just show her vulnerability of having to walk all the way back to London all alone in the night next to this motorway and it’s so sad and so lonely and both the shots do all of that without talking.

There’s a scene in David Cartwright’s den where this folder of information is revealed. One of the things that I noticed in that scene was the use of a bunch of very interesting angles. When you look at a series of dailies, do you think, “I really want to try to use as many of these set-ups as possible?” You could just cut back and forth from one over-the-shoulder to the next and you’d be done. Talk about exploiting the dailies that you have and using interesting angles.

Working with Saul, there’s a particular kind of rushes that I get. I think they’re very intentional. The advantage that I have working with him is that - because we worked together before - is that the rushes sort of speak to me as if he was leaving actual notes of “don’t use this,” “definitely use that.” “This is where the scene starts.”

Almost every scene I can tell where he wants to start a scene, for example. He is very intentional with camera moves, with shot sizes, with all of this stuff - and obviously our DP as well - but I just know him from a different show as well where he did very similar things. In another job I would probably try to use as many setups as possible to show the director what they have.

I think I know by now that Saul [the director] doesn’t need that. He remembers what he shot and he just wants to see the best version of the scene straight away. So he actually trusts us as editors, which is amazing. It’s a good feeling that he doesn’t need to see what we have, he just wants to see what we think is the best version of the scene when he watches the first cut.

Funny you mentioned that scene actually because I really like that scene and the fire and the document going in the fire. Obviously we had some of some shots where the fire is in the background because we were …

… Foreshadowing.

Foreshadowing, exactly. It’s about finding the right balance of establishing that the fireplace is there and maybe having a little suspicion, but not too much.

Swag’s always nice.

Talk to me about your collaboration with the other editor. Did you show each other episodes? Was there not time? Isn’t it nice to have another editor around?

Yeah, definitely. It was special in this case as well. It was different than any other show I’ve done before because it’s one director for the whole series but there’s still two blocks. So Sam Williams - who cut the other three episodes, edited episodes one, three and five.

I did two, four and six. That was because of scheduling, so we would be able to cut one and two together simultaneously and you would go on to the next one and executive producers were able to watch them in order as they were being done. Because we were editing alternating episodes we had to collaborate more - or we wanted to, anyway.

Each time we were done with a cut we would not only show the director a cut, but we would invite each other into each other’s edit rooms - which were on the same floor next to each other in Soho - and we would watch it together and give each other notes. Sometimes that was really useful because there were a couple of times when we thought, “You know what?

Actually the ending of your episode would work much better as the beginning of my episode.” or the other way round. That was actually really helpful. What I liked about collaborating is that it’s nice to expand the experience to a few more people.

Can you give us an example of switching the end of one episode for the beginning of another?

Yeah. It was Sam’s idea that what is now the beginning of episode two - River running because he just received a text from Catherine’s kidnappers that he had one hour to meet or they’d kill her. Episode 1 used to go up until River meets Spider on the bridge and they have that big scene between the two of them and River runs off to actually try to rescue Catherine.

I think episode 1 was maybe a little bit too long, but either way it felt like it could easily finish at the point of River receiving that text because it’s a big cliffhanger. They just kidnapped her and set this new storyline into motion by involving River.

And so the start of my episode, it felt was a good start of just River running as he does and having that big scene with with Spider was really fun as well. So I didn’t mind at all receiving that.

As someone who has cut both features and TV, can you talk a little bit about the differences of those things, either in your approach or how the schedule changes what you do?

I think the biggest difference for me is less about the approach. It’s been a while since I’ve cut a feature film, but it feels like you have more time with the feature film potentially, especially with indie low budget stuff, maybe less so in a bigger budget, but with indie films it’s very personal.

A lot of the time everybody puts their time and effort into it just to make the best film possible. The schedule is way more strict and obviously there are other differences. Having executive producers and showrunners and all these people that come into the edit and give their feedback, which might not happen on a small feature film.

It usually much more intimate with a director in the room for months and months, just trying to craft this film. With a series, that’s very different, obviously. The other thing that we just discussed is how you end an episode, how you start an episode, which you don’t have in a feature film. So that’s a very different thing as well.

Obviously you have to keep in mind the fact that these characters - this story - has a life before and after you finish. So all these things go into consideration when you’re cutting something and setting up something.

Can you tell me how you approach a blank timeline? Are you a selects reel person? Do you just go to the bins? How do you watch dailies?

I start by watching everything and making notes on a little notepad with an actual pen. My handwriting is terrible and I usually can’t read my own handwriting, but I feel like when I write stuff down I just remember it more.

So it’s basically for that reason I try to really etch it in my mind, every single take. I always look at the thumbnail version of a bin. I can’t look at the writing (list view).

That means nothing to me. So I need to see what I actually have. From that point - as I’m watching the rushes - I start forming a very loose idea of what I want with the scene and whose scene it is and how important different setups are, always trying to establish where I want to start the scene as I’m watching the rushes.

Once I have the starting point, that is my way into this scene. Even if I don’t really know how I’m going to cut the whole thing, I just start by putting the best take of that starting shot down onto the timeline and then basically start from that, building it up.

I don’t make selects unless it’s a complex action scene or something like that. That’s quite different, because that’s more technical and more what actually works.

So did you do selects for the stuff that was underground in that last episode?

The only one that I made selects for - I could be wrong about this, I can’t remember - but I think definitely for when Duffy and Marcus fight.

They have a fist fight and that was a really technical scene because we had two stuntmen fighting and we had the two actors fighting, and they both did the same thing and I had to put them together in a way that when we can’t see their faces, I would use the stuntmen because they were obviously better at the fighting part or actually punching each other or close to. 

But also weave in the actors’ faces and some of the stuntmen’s actual fighting just to make it more real. So that was very tricky to find those tiny moments of when does it actually work when you believe that these two people are actually there fighting?

I think with an action sequence, I don’t just write down “This is the best take for that actor.” Now that I’m talking about it, I remember that I made some markers in the bin when I’m watching them in the source monitor. I make some little markers on each take and just highlight what works best.

I rarely edited any action before this and so I was actually really worried about that coming into this - if I’m even able to do it because I’ve never really done it.

But as soon as I started doing it, I realized it’s not that it’s easy, but it’s kind of given what works and what doesn’t work in some way. If you let any of these shots go two more frames than they are in the cut, then they just don’t work. You can see that those are not the actors or you can see that they’re not punching each other or the tension dissipates.

The movement isn’t as dynamic as you wanted. So it’s not easy, but it’s easier than I thought. The story is the hard part.

Zsofi, it was so nice to talk to you. Congratulations again on the nomination and good luck with seeing how that ends up.

Thank you so much. It was great talking to you.