The Instigators

Today on Art of the Cut, we discuss editing the Apple Plus feature film The Instigators with three editors, including Oscar-winning editor William Goldenberg, ACE, Oscar-nominee Tatiana Riegel, ACE, and Oscar-nominee Saar Klein.

Billy’s been on Art of the Cut six times before for his work on Live By Night, Detroit, 22 July, The Outfit, News of the World, and Air. Billy won an Oscar, a BAFTA, and an ACE Eddie for Argo, and was nominated for an Oscar, a BAFTA and an Eddie for The Imitation Game. He was also nominated for an Oscar for Zero Dark Thirty, but lost to … himself. He was also nominated for Oscars for Seabiscuit and The Insider.

Tatiana has been on Art of the Cut to discuss The Girl in the Spider’s Web, Cruella, and I, Tonya.  Tatiana has been winning ACE Eddies since back in 2008! She was nominated for an Oscar and won an ACE Eddie AND an Independent Spirit Award for I, Tonya, was nominated for an Emmy for Pam & Tommy, and was nominated for an ACE Eddie for Cruella.

Saar was nominated for an Oscar and an ACE Eddie for The Thin Red Line, and he was nominated for an Oscar and won an ACE Eddie for Almost Famous. His other work includes, Jumper, The Bourne Identity, and the TV series, Masters of the Air. 

I understand that you three did not collaborate on the movie all at the same time, but it was kind of a serial project. Saar, I understand you were the main editor for dailies and the editor’s cut and the director’s cut. Tell me a little bit about how you approach a scene.

KLEIN: I think every situation is different. Every film is different, every relationship with the director is different. In general, I just try to make the best of what we have with the intention of what I think the director wants. Because I’ve worked with [director] Doug [Liman] on so many films, it’s quite easy to kind of understand.

With Doug, you can really cut anything out, you can remove stuff, you can take out dialogue. The only thing he doesn’t really like is if you cut the scene as intended. He’s somebody who’s not very precious about anything really.

I’ve heard him say, “Why am I seeing this? This is the way it was written!”  I think with other directors, the process is a little bit different. You may have to go through steps. Show ’em the way that it’s intended and then kind of work from there. For me - I dunno if it’s the same thing for Tanya or Billy - every film film requires a different philosophy that you learn as you go along.

I’ll come into it with a certain way of how I’m gonna view dailies - how I’m gonna break ’em down - and then I’ll find that it doesn’t really work.

What about on this film? Or can you describe an example of what you’re talking about where you got dailies in from one of the scenes from The Instigators and how you had to change your approach?

KLEIN: This film was shot in a really interesting way because the coverage was pretty wild. It’s not as covered. Some of the action stuff and all that with like multi-camera and everything is covered.

Doug does go into a scene with an approach and an idea that can be risky at times where he will just - for example on this one - come in with a Steadicam and just turn the angle in the middle of a shot in subsequent takes. So it was a bit of a tricky puzzle on this one with continuity of things like that.

But what we got out of that was an incredible energy and a natural style.

Is that kind of coverage difficult to even organize because it’s not your typical setup coverage of “oh here’s a two shot that always points this direction and here’s a wide shot” - that kind of thing?

KLEIN: Doug has a tendency to discover things as he goes along. A lot of times instead of just watching all the dailies in order I’ll see if he’s changed any of the blocking ‘cause that can happen with him a lot.

So instead of just making notes, breaking everything down then you get an hour into the footage, find out that he actually moved an actor around or changed the blocking. So I like to have an idea of where they ended up so I can go through all the footage and figure out how it’s gonna get put together.

I learned that on the Born Identity where I’d watched dailies for a whole day and then the last setup I’d see that Max suddenly is kneeling instead of standing then I had to go back and redo everything.

Doug is a very loose director. He is a very instinctual director. There’s planning and then the planning goes out the window once he’s in the situation. So you kind of almost have to edit that way. You have to get sort of an idea of the whole landscape of a scene and then go back and figure out how to put it together.

Did the story to through-line remain the same from the script to the final or did did things change?

KLEIN: Some of the order of some of the scenes, some of the secondary characters moved around, but the general order was a pretty chronological story with the third act being at City hall. But I think some of the scenes moved around and a bunch were dropped. It wasn’t a film that had to be completely rethought to salvage.

It was really about energy, and which direction that would go. It was always anchored by this incredible performance and chemistry between Casey and Matt, with the plot really being secondary. I thought, “This is the gold - these two characters” and everything else was malleable to some extent. But I think we were locked into some structural things that had to happen.

Editor William Goldenberg, ACE

The heist was kind of complicated. They were going through multiple rooms, getting off of a boat, going through doors, going through kitchens, all that stuff. How do you keep the audience understanding where they are and having some kind of understanding of geography.

GOLDENBERG: Well, I think what Saar was saying is true. So much of it had to do with the relationship with Matt and Casey and the energy of that relationship and the comedy and there was a lot of heart in that relationship as well. Some of it is flexible. Once you set the stage basically of where they are, then you can sort of do what you want.

They were both wearing black and everybody else was wearing other clothes, so it was easy to tell who that was. In general Doug did a really good job of covering the heist with enough sort of wide coverage, enough detailed coverage to make it fun and still know where everything is.

Knowing Casey and Matt, I’m sure they did a lot of ad-libbing and I’m sure the three of them together came up with a lot of stuff that - as takes go on - stuff evolves and some of the great moments evolved along with it.

Casey is hilarious in the movie and it was really fun to work on because of that. I’ve known him for almost 20 years at this point. The last movie I cut with him was Gone, Baby Gone, which is slightly more serious.

Can you talk about deciding in the film when you were gonna be done with the heist? When you were going to start on the escape essentially? Did that have to come at a certain time?

RIEGEL: When I came onto the film, there was an additional heist earlier on that I ended up taking out pretty early in my stint on the film. It was fun and it was interesting and it was funny and all of that, but I found it confusing.

I remember the first time I watched it. It’s one of the advantages of coming onto a film later in the process. I hadn’t read the script. I hadn’t been so close to it and sometimes it just gives you a little bit of distance to ask some questions and to be a little less emotional about cutting things out. Like Saar said, Doug is great about that.

I had never worked with him before. I was given a little bit of time just to play and explore and you start going through dailies and there’s just so many options.

Editor Tatiana S. Riegel, ACE at her home studio with her dog, George.

First of all, so much of it was working really, really well by the time I got there. When I first watched the film I kind of wondered “Why am I coming on?” Then you start to explore a little bit more and you see some stuff.

They had done a few reshoots and a few things like that, but one of the things that I really tripped up on early on was this other heist early in the film I found it just confusing. So with that out we got to the other heist much faster and into the rest of the film, which I think is not only really, really funny, but it allows you to really attach to the characters emotionally and get involved in the heist in the beginning.

The incredible car chase scene, which Saar did, was just amazing. It just gives it this energy and fun and is nonstop. There were a few other scenes that moved around. The film right now opens up with Matt in therapy. That lived in many different places in the film.

Even while I was working on it, that kind of bounced around a little bit where he is watching his son going into the hockey rink. That was a little reshoot that also moved around a fair amount while I was on. It’s a pretty chronological story but there were things that just you could move around and play.

I got into the dailies and tried slightly different humor things and taking a little bit more time for a joke or peeling stuff away and moving away or spending a little bit more time on one character or the other just to attach to them emotionally. That was really the fun part of it.

KLEIN: The first scene in a film is the clunkiest one. That probably was the clunkiest one. A scene that was moved around and cut a thousand times was the introduction of Jack Harlow. I think it was brilliant by these guys to say, “We actually don’t need it.” Because when you are living with a director and with the footage, it is hard sometimes.

You get a little close to it and things seem precious. From the beginning, I think the scene that came in where I knew we had a great film was the one Tanya was talking about: Matt at the therapist. It’s ]the scene that kind of grounds the whole thing, aside from the comedy and gives a little bit of heart.

I think the thing about this film: the balance has always been between the bumbling criminals versus the human connection that was really mostly sitting over Matt’s shoulder with his relationship to his son.

That kind of gets discovered throughout the whole film and a little bit with Casey, but with Casey it’s much later on when they’re hiding out at that beach house and he tells the story of his brother.

With the car chase scenes, it’s not really scripted how long they should go on. I remember the one of the first action scenes I cut was 12 minutes at first, but in the final film it’s only two. Talk about not only putting that together but also getting a feel for the car chase and saying, “This is long enough. Or maybe the audience is loving it and it needs to be longer. How do you decide on just the length of something like that?

GOLDENBERG: The car chase had the benefit of being well shot and it was a good car chase with good footage. But it also had story in it - the relationship story and “story story” that makes it even better. The relationship between Hong Chow and Casey and Matt - that’s what makes it special.

KLEIN: I had conversations about that car chase before they shot it. Both Billy and Tanya, I think, have these relationships with these directors where they don’t just hand you the footage and say, “Here’s the car chase.

Put it together.” There are a bunch of conversations about it beforehand. When I was talking to Doug about it, he said that it’s not gonna be like Mission: Impossible. It’s not gonna be James Bond. The film’s got a little bit of wildness. It’s not shot in a crispy way. It’s pretty handheld and rough.

And we talked about, a lot of times we talked about like the sort “Anti Oceans 11.” You can’t compete with that so let’s just kind of go in a different direction.

We decided, let’s just find a moment - it happens on the bridge - where we can just stay inside the car and what creates the comedy is that shit’s flying, blowing up outside but they’re completely unaware of it because they’re so self-involved in their own little argument.

So it was a choice to try to keep it inside as long as we could. It’s a great thing when you get to discuss these things with the director before the shoot. There was an intention already when we got into it that it’s a car chase but it’s really about these three characters and about Casey finding out what’s going on and interrupting their therapy session.

Withhold as much as you can of the big stunts because it serves the story better. Matt is the anchor. Matt just delivers. He knows his character. Casey just improvises nonstop. So it was definitely broken in basically three acts or four acts. It was just a matter of which Casey line do you pick?

Which improv thing do you like more? Which one serves the story better? I don’t think Doug would ever do a car chase just for the sake of the car chase. That Chase is about therapy.

RIEGEL: The only stuff that I remember working on regarding that was Doug’s concern of the sort of the chaos of all of the different police departments from all over the northeast and trying to find tiny, tiny little moments where we could be sure to see that the cars were different or to hear a quick line of dialogue from either Matt or Casey or the cops over the radio to really get that extra element of chaos.

GOLDENBERG: If you’ve got a scene that’s five minutes and you cut it down to three minutes, you think, “How can I get any shorter?” Then somebody else takes another look and they see it from a slightly different angle and they make it shorter, make it better.

The benefit of having us all on separately was that I it allowed the film to evolve in a more interesting way. Tanya added the idea of starting the movie with Matt. It grounded the film and grounded what the story was about. I was striving so much for comedy and pace, then Tanya gave it more heart.

It made that balance better. I think also people attach to the movie more because of that and it stays with you longer because there’s heart in the story.

RIEGEL: It was just simply a bookend. That therapy scene had moved around so many times in the film in different cuts. When it was later, I had a lot of time wondering what Matt’s background was. Why were we watching this character?

Why is he here? How did he get involved in this? I think just starting off with Matt and book ending - the very first scene of the film being him in therapy concerned about his son then the very last scene, being him finally going to see his son really just grounded his character.

It allowed you to not wonder about that and just have such a fun ride through the rest of it.

KLEIN: I think Billy came in and really like messed with the energy of the whole thing and energized it. There were places where Doug and I didn’t think that the film could work without certain scenes. But Billy just compressed them and really moved the thing along and it felt energetically much better. Partially it’s just like a Stockholm syndrome when you’re with a director for six months.

Billy, you just directed a film and I directed a film and an interesting thing that I learned is that you hit some sort of place with a director where he tells you something and you don’t completely agree but you have to move forward, so you have to say, “Okay, I’ll incorporate this and I’ll move on.”

And at a certain point they’ll get OFF of that idea and you’ve already incorporated it yourself and you start fighting for something you didn’t believe in originally just because you’ve been doing it for so long. So it’s kind of interesting to have somebody who’s just free of that situation.

RIEGEL: I work a lot with [director] Craig Gillespie and that’s something that we kind of have this joke about. We get to a point in the film and then we try to break it by taking out everything we can possibly take out even though it’s painful and you love it and you think, “How can this movie possibly live without it?” It’s always shocking - and a little disappointing to oneself - how much of it can go away.

Then you really see what is missing and you put it back and then those moments that really were important that you were pushing to have just shine so much more because they’re there. 

When they’re in the beach house, I went through and took a lot of time out of it and then just put a few more cuts of Matt pondering and thinking. I feel like that was another one of those scenes that ended up being grounded much more and you could listen to it and hear it.

It didn’t feel like so much of a stop in the film because the rest of the film is just pedal to the metal and that’s one of the only moments that where you kind of stop, but there’s a lot of really important information there. So it’s that balance of how much can come out? What has to go back in - within scenes and within the entire film?

I loved the conversations in the beach house, but one of that struck be was the bus conversation where they’re talking about going to Montreal. Conversations are so much the heart of a lot of films. How do you make them visually interesting? Do you feel like you need to use all the coverage? What do you do for a conversation to have that pop just as much as a car chase?

GOLDENBERG: Matt and Casey have known each other for their whole lives really, and there’s an energy they have as performers together. So we’re lucky to have that. That’s irreplaceable. I always try and cut for the subtext of it.

Not the text, but I look for pieces that speak to what’s going on in inside them. What’s happening to them in a more three dimensional way as opposed to just the words? If there’s seven different sizes and the closeups are better, I just use the closeups.

To me it’s performance. Of course, you want to set the location and all that stuff, but to me it’s performance and I don’t feel compelled to use all the coverage. I just try to use what I think is good and what tells the story that I think the director wants.

Not only the A story, but what’s happening to each character inside them. What their goals are, what they’re thinking, so you try and look for those moments to tell that story as well.

RIEGEL: I agree with that. I think that’s the case when you’re watching dailies for the first time. I always try to be that audience member to watch with very little baggage attached. I wasn’t on the set. I don’t know how long it took to set up.

I don’t know who was in a good mood or a bad mood or whatever. I just know if I’m emotionally attached to anything in any particular take and I try to watch everything. There are times - like Saar spoke about earlier - where a director changes everything very late, but there’s still always stuff in these other takes that you canmine and use for different things.

You’re the audience member and you just talk to yourself while you’re watching the film and you pay attention to how many times that inner monologue with yourself is a question because you’re confused or don’t buy it or just really enjoying it. If you’re asking a question of yourself like, “Wait! what was that? I’m lost.” then you have to go into those areas and reexamine.

KLEIN: It’s so comedy driven, that you just try to find funny stuff. And it’s matching. It’s hard because he’s got his hand to his mouth or it was a scene that was rewritten in the middle of the shoot, which those guys love to do a lot of.

I think they probably wrote it the night before and Matt and Casey had to just kind of memorize those lines. Drama for me, a lot of times, you’ll watch dailies and they’ll be good, but there’s a moment that it doesn’t really make sense, but there’s a certain honesty to it and it’s a combination of performance and camera and light and all these sort of unknowns, that come together.

A lot of times I’ll just grab a moment in a conversation. I think it’s what Billy talked about: it’s subtext, but because we’re in a visual medium, it’s not necessarily just dialogue. It’s what the camera is doing, what the light is doing.

Anyway, there’s a moment that to me resonates as kind of honest and unique and I’ll work back from that. Whatever it is I wanna include this little piece. Sometimes it’s a complete waste of time because you’re building things around and nothing else is kind of working, but when that actually works well, it gives you incredible satisfaction to find a moment in a scene that you feel you can kind of anchor the whole thing about, even if it’s not the important line.

Director Doug Liman talks to his stars

With some of the restructuring that happened, can you talk about dynamics and trying to create these fast moments and slower moments where you can kind of absorb what happened and transitioning between those faster and slower moments? I think of the craziness of the chase, then going into the bar where the three of them kind of hang out, hiding in the dark. That’s a big change from what had come before it to what’s after. Were there any things that you tried to actually juxtapose differently from the script so that you’re getting that dynamic ride?

GOLDENBERG: I think in that particular scene, I’m pretty sure that was one whole scene and I felt like it was too long to spend there and we slowed down too much, so I split it, which I felt gave it a little bit of a passage of time.

RIEGEL: There was some stuff that we ended up putting in of the owner of the bar, his friend arriving, meeting him outside and I remember I restructured that a little bit too in terms of where they were in the bar to make sure the audience didn’t feel like they were being seen when he is looking through the windows.

GOLDENBERG: We tried to do that, Doug and I tried to make that out of nothing when Ving Rheims runs into the bar owner. We tried to construct that out of the original material and we were cheating all over the place.

RIEGEL: We went and cheated MORE! We created a shot that didn’t exist at all about him coming around the corner and having a conversation outside. That’s one of the great things about Doug. He’s open to anything, especially if you can kind of come up with a good reason for it. If he doesn’t like it, he absolutely lets you know pretty quickly. But if he likes it, he’s really very open to it and willing to continue to explore things.

GOLDENBERG: That’s kind of the benefit of some of this. Like what Saar was talking about “unconventional footage” and a director that’s willing to do that and also willing to let you play. I find it easier to fix problems with unconventional footage than conventional footage.

There was a lot of panning cameras on this and it gives you the opportunity to make something outta nothing a lot of times where if you just get a master, two “overs” and two closeups, well that’s kind of what you have. Working with Paul Greengrass or Katherine Bigelow, when they shoot tons of really unconventional footage, you can manufacture moments that didn’t really ever exist. It is a lot easier because this  film has this unconventional feel to it. So you can do different things

But there’s something about the wildness of it that makes things unique but definitely more difficult to cut together but much more satisfying. I think specifically the one where the guys find the mayor sitting in City Hall. That coverage was just insane.

It was just a single camera roaming around panning and maybe not even a reverse really! So super difficult but a lot of fun to make it work.

GOLDENBERG: Crazy footage like that. You look at it and you see all these fabulous pieces and you say, “Okay, this is gonna be a great scene. This is gonna go together really well!” And you take all the best pieces, put it together and you watch it and you say, “Well that’s terrible.”

It’s much harder to initially put it together, but then once you’re there, I think they’re more special. I love that kind of footage.

KLEIN: I agree. It’s so nice when it’s loose.

Was there an opportunity to play with intercutting? There are the scenes with Alfred Molina and the other guy that plot the heist, they’re separate almost always, so it felt like you could cut to them almost anytime you wanted to. So when did you choose to intercut the A story with the B story?

KLEIN: That’s the place where Billy came in and really radically kind of improved that stuff because Michael Stuhlbarg is just such a great actor and there’s so much range and I was just kind of going for the funny, but then they weren’t really formidable villains and I think Billy was just kind of honed in on it and said they don’t really matter that much.

They put the thing into action but they don’t really pay off. The cut that I did with Doug was leaning on them too much and Billy came in and said, “We just need very little of this. They need to function more as a threat, which they weren’t before.

Structurally I think the trickiest part of the film was a question of where to put ’em in and also to use them less. It’s just more effective to not stop the action. They moved around so much. I don’t even remember where they started to be honest with you. They’re floaters, those guys, you know?

Billy, can you remember reasons why you decided to cut to them when you did?

GOLDENBERG: They do set the thing in motion and then they feel like they’re under threat but we don’t know what that threat really is and they’re running from an unknown villain that we don’t really see. That was sort of more instinctual.

Where do we need to get away and where do we need to slow down? Or, because they didn’t really function in the story in a way that was like really integral, it was more like “where do I need them” or “where do we need to slow the film down” or “where do we need to just get away from the A story?” I’m watching the film and it just literally feels like it should go here.

A lot of it’s just feel and my instincts telling me where these things need to be and having the freedom to sort of do what I wanted and not sitting there with the director. ‘cause I had a free reign at first. A lot of times when you’re with the director, you get into the rhythm of what that director wants and his or her vision and you start seeing it sort of the same way.

It’s sometimes so much easier when you’re unrestricted ‘cause because you come in later and you see the big picture. You see it all together and it becomes about a lack of objectivity sometimes, which I was fortunate enough not to be constricted by. So choosing where I used them and how much I used them were sort of instinctually what fit, and what fit tonally as well.

The tone of this film is very interesting ‘cause it is kind of silly at times and arch and big, but at the same time I think it has a lot of heart. I think that you really care about all three of those people and that’s a really hard thing to pull off. Credit to Doug.

I think Doug made it look effortless and it takes a great deal of skill to make that kind of thing work.

Spoken as somebody who just directed a feature! Tanya, we need to get you to direct a film! You need to join the club! 

RIEGEL: I feel a little left out of the club right now. I definitely do.

Tanya, you came in after some reshoots, correct? Can you talk about what those reshoots were and what they were for?

RIEGEL: Some ended up in the film and some didn’t. Probably about half of them ended up in the film. The biggest thing that really changed with reshoots was the ending. I think there were probably four distinct different endings and we kept trying them all over and over again during the time I was on. We screened them different ways and ultimately landed on this one.

It just took a little while to hone in on what was best without also feeling like we were having multiple endings, which is often a problem with wrapping up all these different characters. So we spent a lot of time on that and that was challenging, but ultimately enjoyable.

There was a little post credit scene. Was that ever in the movie itself? 

RIEGEL: Yes. Yes it was.

KLEIN: They also shot a really funny scene where Casey goes in for therapy but he’s just really there to try to pick up the therapist. And it was just kind of another little button.

RIEGEL: There was also the wood sanding scene where Matt gets fired very early. None of that stuff really ultimately helped. It took a lot of work getting through that and figuring it out and giving everything a really good shot at working to discover that ultimately it doesn’t work. But about half the stuff they shot did end up in the film and helped the film.

KLEIN: It’s a pretty good ratio.

GOLDENBERG: I told Doug that floor sanding scene wasn’t gonna be in the movie.

RIEGEL: No, it was never gonna work.

GOLDENBERG: I read it and I said, “I don’t know if it’s funny enough and I don’t think it’s gonna end up in the movie.” And he said, “When Ben [Affleck] pitched it, it was really funny.” I said, “Well, is Ben playing the boss? Because Ben’s really funny and really charming and a great storyteller. When you hear a pitch from Ben, that’s one thing.

When you read it cold like I did, I said, “I just don’t think it’s gonna do what you need it to.” Not that I was happy I was right ‘cause I wasn’t. But it just felt that it wasn’t special enough to be in the film.

RIEGEL: We spent a lot of time on it and tried it many different ways and gave it a real good college try but I had the same suspicion when I read it and then when I first saw it and every iteration of it, frankly, I’m glad it didn’t end up in the film. I understand why they shot it. People wanted to know more about Matt.

GOLDENBERG: I think what you did that by moving the opening therapy scene up. That took care of that.

RIEGEL: Exactly. That wood sanding scene really forced me to find a solution to not have that scene in the movie.

GOLDENBERG: It’s so funny that when it’s the right solution, it feels like “Why didn’t I think of that earlier?” But it’s a pleasure when that happens.

Steve Semel once told me that Dennis Virkler, one of his editing mentors, once explained to him that if he showed the director the final approved cut as his editor’s cut they’d fire him.

RIEGEL: That’s very, very true. It’s a process and everybody has to learn why things work and why they don’t work. If you ever showed a director his film with all this stuff out, they would freak out - especially if the writer was involved. They would absolutely flip. But when you get that sculpture there, when you take things out and put back everything that needs to be out or in, then it really sings.

That is a great place to leave this conversation. Tanya and William and Saar, thank you so much for being on Art of the Cut.

RIEGEL: It was great to see you guys.

KLEIN: Great seeing you. 

GOLDENBERG: Thanks Stephen. Great to see you guys, too.