Twisters

Today, we’re talking with Terilyn A. Shropshire, ACE about editing one of this summer’s big blockbusters, Twisters. The last time I spoke with Terilyn, she had just edited The Woman King, for which she was nominated for an ACE Eddie.

We also spoke when she edited The Old Guard. Terilyn has been nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award, was nominated for an ACE Eddie for her work on When They See Us  and she won an ACE Eddie for Redemption: The Stan Tookie Williams Story.

Terilyn’s other credits include Miss Bala, Eve’s Bayou, and Love and Basketball.

Terilyn, it’s so nice to have the chance to talk with you again. I think the last time we talked was The Woman King and before that The Old Guard. 

You got it right.  

“Art of the Cut Volume 2” just came out. I’m not trying to promote that, but you are quoted numerous times in that book, so I owe you a copy. It will be coming your way, I promise.  

I can’t wait. Did you also do the audible - like do you read your book?  

I want so bad to have everybody read their own quotes, but that would be such an enormous task to have everybody do that. I’m actually talking to my publishing company about the Audible, so we’ll see what happens.

I wanna read a quote from you that’s in the book and I want to ask you whether you have changed or whether you still do things the same way. To give it some context: many editors say they like to watch dailies passively and many editors like to watch dailies actively - in other words, taking notes, pulling selects, that kind of stuff. Your quote in the book, the last time we spoke was “The first time I watch dailies. I really don’t like to take notes if I have the time not to. I prefer just to watch it and be that audience member. It really does help me to get myself in the emotional space to cut the movie. 

I still aspire to that and try to do that as much as possible. What was extraordinary on Twisters was that we actually watched dailies the old school way. We were at Prairie Surf Studios on location in Oklahoma City.

Prairie Surf used to be the old Oklahoma City Convention Center and then it became the studio. It literally looks like it’s kind of a set up as an arena. We took one of the upstairs rooms, we brought in a projection system and either at lunch if they were at Prairie Surf or after wrap and sometimes even before they shot, we would go upstairs and watch dailies with our director Lee Isaac Chung with our DP and and his team, Dan Mindel and whoever wanted to show up and it was great.

Even on location, they had a dailies trailer that followed them around on location and I would have to send my second assistant - Jessie Lee - out wherever they were. There was one location where I actually went out and spent the night, but then when they got further further out, Jessie just became part of the production crew and she would be there just to screen dailies for them while they were on location.

Running off PIX or something?

We had an Avid that was set up both in the room screening room up at Prairie Surf and then the trailer itself, we brought an Avid unit out and we were literally screening it through the Avid onto a large monitor.

Though I do like to usually watch dailies passively, when you have a director sitting next to you, commenting on the things he’s seeing you definitely have a notepad nearby.  

When you were watching dailies - say at lunch - did you watch select dailies? Like only circled takes or last takes or something?  

When I was watching dailies with them, we would watch selects and sometimes they would want to jump ahead because they only had a limited time to look at things. So what that meant for me was that either prior to the screening - if I had time - I would’ve looked at things ahead of time.

There were times when I picked selects ahead, so I kind of knew what they were gonna see and there were a couple times when things were moving very quickly and my assistants were helping me with that. In that case I did need to still go back and look at those hidden things that sometimes you lose if you don’t watch everything.  

Did you watch the first Twister movie - other than just with the rest of the world, 20 years ago, or so?

We got to Oklahoma City a couple of weeks before they were actually starting to shoot, and Daisy Edgar Jones, one of our amazing actors on the film came up with the idea that we should get together and watch the movie.

They made an arrangement with one of the local theaters for us to bring it in. It was a couple days before we actually started shooting. We all got together at the theater and watched Twisters and it was great. It was great to sit and watch it with the crew.

There was so much anticipation and excitement and regard for the first one and it was a fun way for us to kind of get to know each other early in the process.  

Could you keep your mind on the story or were you watching the editing?  

I am still one of those people that can forget what I do and sit in a theater and just enjoy the spectacle of it all - unless you give me reason not to - either because of extraordinary editing sometimes or sometimes there’s something that maybe distracts me, but for the most part I really love to just immerse myself just to take the ride like everybody else.  

Lots of the movie is handheld. Do you concern yourself with the performance of the camera operator and the camera movement when you’re choosing takes or are you completely focused on acting performance?  

For me it’s very much from an audience immersive space. Even as an editor where you have to obviously keep a closer eye on those things. We had an amazing, amazing camera crew. A lot of it was handheld, a lot of it was Steadicam, but what was so beautiful about that was it allowed a lot of movement within a shot and that was extraordinary in a film like this. Just the ability to be spontaneous even as an operator and have that freedom.

Obviously there were things that were very, very blocked and choreographed and then there was movement that would come through the course of just shooting a particular take, which was also incredible. 

So for me, I wanted to honor that as much as I could and hopefully not be limited by something that would distract the audience’s eye or that was a challenge of focus or anything like that.

So I think that in many ways when I looked at dailies themselves - and you know this - it’s one thing to look at dailies and see something as a whole and the sum of its parts will have a lot of different dynamic changes even visually and viscerally and even with a handheld situation, it’s really when you start cutting and juxtaposing those images together that you can either find that the thing you might’ve been worried about is not something that you ultimately - when you cut it together - it looks great.

Or you find that we’ll have some challenges juxtaposing these two shots. It could be performance, it could be something technical that happens within the shot. For me, there’s not one rule of thumb or another, but obviously performance always for me rules and at the same time I have to be sensitive to technically if someone’s gonna be pulled out of a performance.

Every single crew member comes to a film bringing the closest thing to their A game that they can and it’s our responsibility to honor their work and hopefully keep the best of themselves in the overall piece.  

When you’re transitioning from handheld to something like either Steadicam or a dolly shot or a lock off shot, is there a trick to it?

I have to look at it surgically, but sometimes I also have to step out and say, “Okay, in this moment what’s happening with the characters and what are they doing and where is the audience’s eye going to? Where am I going to direct them to?”

Often if there are two shots that I’m finding challenging to juxtapose, it’s always: where’s that moment where I might be able to get in without the audience necessarily seeing the movement itself because they’re focused on something that’s happening in the frame. So it’s a little bit of that kind of magic of like, “Oh, shiny object over here!” while I’m doing this over here, you know? But with something like this film, there’s just such an energy.

Sometimes all of our other tools in our toolbox, all those other layers that are going to hopefully connect with the audience - the sound, the music - all of it can help you in those moments where there might be a little bit of a challenge of from handheld to a dolly or a static shot or being in a situation where the line is gonna be crossed - and you know that’s gonna happen. 

But if you’ve done your job right, you’ve oriented the audience in a way that they know where you’re going and they can kind of jump with you. So it’s all these things that -  as you become more experienced in what you do - you have a sense of what you can usually get away with and what may be more challenging, too.

But I still think, Steve, that that goes back to stepping out and always reminding yourself and getting yourself to a place where you could be the audience to your own movie. I feel often that we all fall into this place where sometimes we get so caught up in the minutia of a cut that we’re not necessarily acknowledging that if you’re telling that story and and giving the audience a path to follow, I feel like you can get away with a lot more than sometimes you think.

That’s where sometimes - when we are in those situations where you’re just not sure - that’s when I often bring in my crew. I won’t tell them why. I’ll say, “Take a look at this.” I won’t say, “Did you see any problems?” I usually say, “So what’d you think?”

Your audience will tell you if there’s something that throws them or or that didn’t feel quite right And and I really rely a lot on my crew to come in and be my first audience.

Is that one of the ways that you choose a first assistant?  

There are so many ways that I choose a first assistant and at the same time very specific ways. So for me, I’ve been working with Corinne Villa now… I’ve lost count on the number of films we’ve been together. We did start with The Old Guard.

She is such an integral part of my process. I feel that in choosing and selecting that person who’s going to be - I call her my “wing gal” - but it’s so much more because she allows me to be my most creative self by taking hold of all of those things that happen within the editing room.

Everything from the technical side of things, the politics of it all. They really are the ringmaster and I’m the one on the flying trapeze. 

But what I look for more than anything is always about the communication and someone who - even from the moment that you start to interview and you may not even be talking about the project, you may be talking about what’s happening in the world or whatever - but to be able to receive and give information and have that person receive and interpret information is so important because they’re going to have to talk to so many different people from so many different departments and represent our interests and what our needs are in the cutting room and what our expectations are.

So it’s very important that you have someone who is really skilled at communication, who’s really skilled at interpretation and has built a knowledge of a little bit of what everybody does. And that’s very much Corinne, she’s been in the business for a very long time. I don’t know how I would do it without her.

Corinne Villa (first AE) Josh Romer OKC Post PA and Teri at OKC Twisters Wrap Party. 

So that communication’s very important how they represent themselves because they’re representing the editing room. I am someone who just does not like a lot of drama except on the screen. I like to keep a calm cutting room and I like to keep an educational cutting room. Those are the things that are really important to me: that everybody is working very hard.

I call all my crew “editors.” We’re just editors in different stages of our careers and our trajectory. Knowing that and knowing where they’re hoping to get to, I really think it’s important - even within the craziness and mayhem of it all - that we remind ourselves that this is a craft that we are training people to come up and hopefully get to a point that if where they wanna be is in the chair one day, what kind of tools can we provide them to help them get there?

There’s more to the craft and discipline and art of editing than just making the deadline. It’s gotta be something that you’re also giving back to. That’s how I came up  

Just to give them their props, who would you say was that person for you?  

Wow. Initially, I have to say it started with being able to go to USC and have some amazing professors - not only in the film department but also in the journalism department where I did a lot of writing and editing as well the other students who I was trying to navigate.

Then when I started to actually move into the editing those people who gave me an opportunity to cut: the editors and directors I worked with. I worked with Earl Watson very early on. A woman named Deborah Smith. I was trained by an amazing first assistant named Ralph Alda, who at one point became my assistant editor. Howard Smith was amazing.

Paul Trejo. These are all editors who I assisted for. And in that progress of moving up in the cutting room, they also gave me the opportunity to cut.  

It’s a really important thing to have that and to also work with the director. Sometimes it was just screening dailies with them.

Dwayne Dunham is an amazing director and editor who worked with David Lynch and when I worked on a season of Twin Peaks as an assistant, he was also directing episodes of Twin Peaks and my editor Paul - when Dwayne and Paul were working together - Dwayne always said, “If there’s an empty KEM or Moviola, get on it! Come on! Get on that KEM.

Here take a scene and work on it.” Those are the kind of people that really allow you that early access to not only - if you’re doing your job right and you’re providing what they need for as an assistant editor - they wanna get you to the next level. So all of those people were mentors to me.

Lee Isaac Chung’s POV of Teri editing, courtesy Lee Isaac Chung

To get back to Twisters, how did you deal with VFX editing? How does not having final VFX affect your editing pacing when you’re early in the process?  

That’s a great question and I feel like on this one I certainly had a lot more of those moments of not having everything than I think I’ve had probably on any project. Part of it was just the nature of the schedule and the nature of what happened through the course of the actor’s strike.

What did help a great deal was on some of the bigger scenes we had previs on them and I had come on early enough where we had started to build a rhythm to those so that we had a little bit of a template. We had done a fair amount of storyboarding. With the prevising and storyboarding, we treated those sections very much like the film itself.

We added sound effects, we added voices, we tried to animate them as much as we could. 

And even with that, there’s nothing like when you first see a tornado come across your screen for the first time from ILM - who were amazing! Again, you become an audience member and there’s this sense of awe. But also, “I don’t think I gave that enough time. It’s like, “Whoa!” 

Once we started seeing the early development of what the tornadoes were going to look like and how we were going to move them across a particular scene or when they were gonna touch down and how they were gonna touch down or how they were gonna dissipate, how long was it gonna take them to dissipate, how long was it gonna take them to go through whatever cycle they were gonna go through.

There was a lot of thinking, “Okay, we need to add a little bit more here.” We talked handles a lot with my visual effects editor, Warren Hickman because there were moments where I just knew: “Okay, this is what we’ve got right now, but you need to gimme some more. Make sure that we have enough handles on this one.” And it really was helpful in that respect. 

Then there were times where when we got things early enough where we didn’t have the handles and we knew, “Okay, we’re gonna want more of this. We were able to stretch things out. Mostly, Steve, it was more stretching things a little bit longer, especially if it had to do with the spectacle of the tornado itself. A little bit of a trial and error.

A little bit of knowing what you created within these little previs tornadoes Warren created. Warren called them “terrinadoes.” He created these lovely little animatic tornadoes, that I could drop onto shots so that - until we actually had the real tornado - I could actually expand them and make them larger. I could make them EF1s.

I could make them EF5s. So there was a lot of dropping on my “terrinadoes” in different spaces to help me with the timing of certain sequences and that was very helpful. If they were driving down a road and there was supposed to be a tornado coming in front of them, we would just kind of take my little “terrinado” and drop it down and it was a fine substitute until the real things came through.

Let’s talk about score. First of all, I thought there were lots of times when we were leaning into the sound effects instead of the score, mix-wise. Is that something that you started building when you were in the picture cut?

We were really fortunate to have Skywalker on from the very beginning. They started sending us sound effect things from their library, but also ideas that they were starting to formulate with the tornadoes because we knew that each tornado would be its own character. It has its own purpose.

There’s a reason why the characters are moving through the five - which are really six - tornadoes in the film. The early cutting of it was very sound effects-forward.

At the same time there was a certain sensitivity to building that musical layer as well, that score layer.  Isaac knew that he wanted our composer - Ben Wallfisch - to do this from the beginning, so Ben came to Oklahoma and he hung out for a couple days on set.

He came to the editing room and I started showing him early cuts - whatever Isaac was comfortable with Ben seeing - as well as dailies. It got him really, really excited. He immediately started thinking thematically of some of the things that he wanted to do for the film. So we started getting a little bit of an early taste of what Ben’s ideas were.

But we also started to build that temp sound effects and we did a spotting session with our music editor, Lisa Richardson, who was incredible. Lisa works with Ben a lot and so she was there.

Early on she was actually finishing a film with Ben, so the other music editor, Chuck Martin came on early and started getting us ready a little bit even for my cut to show Isaac and then Lisa came on then.

Because she’s worked with Ben so much, she really has a sense of not only his music but other composers that she felt would work well in our early presentations.  

I’m very sensitive to not necessarily putting anything into the film in the early stages from a composer until he’s ready to present his work because it’s not fair, we only have one chance to make a first impression. You don’t wanna put anything out to the studio that a composer isn’t ready for them to hear.

So I’m always very sensitive even putting in too much temp music of that composer if it’s not reflective of the type of thing that he’s gonna wanna do. So I did have conversations with Lisa. We talked a lot about what music would we put in kind of in the early stages and then we tended to ask Ben if we were gonna put something in: “Are you ready for this to be heard?” Because you need to give them the time to have their creative gestation as well.

Ben was able to start hearing some of the sound effects and hear what other things were gonna be part of that layer. The conversations between Skywalker and Ben were incredible, so I feel like by the time you heard what you heard, there was a lot of symbiotic communication between music and sound and I think that they were very respectful in terms of finding that space - that sonic layer where both could work together.

Talk to me about choosing when in a conversation to use a reaction shot and to be off the person speaking. I was thinking about this in the scene in the New York City diner between Javy and Kate. He’s telling her some personal things and she’s thinking about her own life and I thought the reactions were very critical in that scene.  

Often when we’re talking about two people having communication with one another, it’s always about when do you cut to the person giving the information and when do you cut to the person receiving or processing the information?

I find that for me, it starts with the script and it starts with getting a sense of which character in this moment is the person who needs to react or have a certain sense of what the other person’s telling them.

A scene like Javy coming to convince Kate - in reel one - that he really needs her to come with him to help him get a sense of these tornadoes - what was really important is that scene has a lot of layers. Obviously Kate has been in a situation where she has chosen to move to New York. In a sense, she’s hiding. She’s living life in a very safe space.

Then this person from her past comes to shake her up, so there’s gonna be a lot of moments for me where I’m gonna wanna see how Kate is reacting and processing the idea that this person from her past has come back and that there’s a history with this person and there’s a certain part of herself she’s not ready to show.

So a lot of it was allowing the audience to really feel what it feels like for Kate to have Javy back in her life. 

The other side of it is: you have this young man who had a special relationship with Kate and what I wanted to start to also show was - that in a certain very textured, layered way - there was a friendship there, but there was also something more that we later start to discover a little bit more.

But just being able to give a little bit of a fissure, a little bit of a hint that maybe Javy has feelings beyond just friendship with Kate was something that I felt was important for the audience. If you were paying attention, holding on a look of his, looking at her a little longer to try to just kind of get that sense of that these two people meant something to each other. 

And certainly Kate, she has a relationship with this fellow student friend of hers and yet it’s painful to have his return. It’s awakening in her something that she has been keeping dormant. So that scene was a a lot about Javy providing information to Kate but also to the audience about where he’s been, what he’s looking for.

So when I felt that there was information where it was important for the audience to understand what Javi was doing from a technical side, a lot of it was having those moments cutting to him when there were moments where I felt we needed to see Kate start to get a little bit excited or have a certain reaction to what Javi was telling her, but then kind of also pull away.

There were a lot of moments where I stayed with her on that. I wouldn’t say it was complicated, but there were - just for me organically, again, being the audience - moments where I just felt I knew where I should be with these characters.

Talk about jumping a story forward. I often talk about cinema time. There are times when you hold moments longer than they would really be in real life and there are moments where you just skip to the next part of the story. An example is when Kate is home in her apartment, kind of thinking about what Javy has told her and the next thing you know they’re in Oklahoma. There’s no plane ride, there’s no discussion. Is that the way it was written or did you say, “We don’t need all of this stuff.”?

That’s a great question. Kate goes through something obviously incredibly life altering at the beginning of the film and then we jump ahead five years later. Initially as written, we got a little bit more of Kate’s life in New York.

We actually had a transition from seeing the devastation of the five years before to where we kind of moved into her apartment. We saw the sparsity a little bit of her life and then we took her into heading to work. We kept that for a while.

Then there was a certain point where -  as you do when you start looking at the evolution of your film and moving the story forward - Isaac and I said, “Let’s do a ‘what if?’ What if we literally go from that devastation to just coming straight to her?

Do we need to show you a lot of her living space? So we just did a version where we closed the door, put down the shades and tried things. We did that a lot. This was one of the things that when we did it, we thought, “There are little character things that you missed about her, but at the same time you got a little bit of that same thing on the back end of it, so we decided, “Let’s just transition to her in NY and not immediately reveal that it’s five years later.”

Obviously she looks different, her whole demeanor is completely different. Then at the end of the first time we see her, we reveal that it’s five years later. 

Often when you look at a scene you might immediately wanna show that it’s 10 years later. Whereas I kind of like the idea that you cut into a moment, let the audience imprint on that moment and start to get their brain moving and then at the end you can reveal it’s five years later.

In that way the audience almost gets a chance to have a bit of their own self-discovery about what they’re looking at before you start telling them what they’re looking at. 

I definitely realized that the “five years later” graphic was delayed.

What I love about that moment is that when we did make the cut between the scene that came between is that when you first cut to the train, there’s a little bit of this flash, like when you’re on a subway and there’s a flash, it almost looked like lightning the way that they shot it.

So I made a point of wanting to actually see that flashing of lightning from the subway kind of creep into the wide helicopter that shows you the devastation from the tornado. Then I wanted to creep in a little bit of that lightning, which you later find out is really the subway lights as we transition into New York.  

That gets us into the fact that that’s a dissolve. The dissolve helps you blend the two.  

It was a dissolve but it wasn’t a straight dissolve because when I was playing around with my initial work on the dissolve, the lightning wasn’t coming in quite the way I wanted it to.

So I did give that particular blending over to VFX so that they could push some of that light a little bit more into the outgoing shot so that it appeared early, then we cross over. So that one definitely got some help from the VFX department  

Sound effects are a big part of this movie, even with something like the drone shot of the wind turbines slowly spinning and the sound of the cars rolling down the road.

Skywalker Sound Team with Post team and Producers outside Final Mix stage

A lot of it also had to do with making sure that we were holding on to Kate’s memory of the first tornado that happens in the film and the sounds that she would have heard throughout trying to get to safety and her moments of just fear. Isaac and I had a lot of conversations about fear and how do you hold onto fear as memories, visual memories and sonic memories and even musical memories.

Often in cases where it had to do with Kate and revisiting moments, we really went back to those sounds that would have kind of triggered her. What was fun about doing things like the wind turbines had more to do with being able to show the power of those things. But also if you’ve ever obviously driven by those things and you see how enormous they are. 

So there was a lot of kind of experimentation with that and I think Skywalker, and our editors Al Nelson and Bjorn Schroeder were just amazing and the effects guys, They came out to Oklahoma, recorded all the vehicles so we had a quite a library and our onset production mixer, Devendra Cleary, he was amazing because there were these huge fans like airplane engine fans going and it was really extraordinary the way he was able to record things and he would have all his sound drops as the cars went by.

He had different places where he had mic’d areas and it was a huge, huge help to the post-production sound, the work that he did while on set was a huge, huge job to create all of the sounds that you’re hearing - not only from the typical things like the wind turbines and houses being lifted and movie theater - then also creating the these specific sound characters for each tornado.

For me it was fun because I had a director once say, “I direct to get to the editing room” and I say, “I edit to get to the mix stage.” Because by the time we got to the final mix, what was amazing was that we had already had a sense of what these different scenes and sequences were gonna do to some degree because Skywalker was there for the director’s cut.

They were there for the first preview. They were there for the second preview. And each time we just kept honing in on the different sound layers and and characters that they were creating.  

We also talked about Oklahoma, and Oklahoma when Kate was young and what that sounds like when she says, “I love Oklahoma” and that beauty of the wind in the grass from the moment that the movie starts and then it gets darker and darker and more menacing as that particular day goes along. Then we bring her into New York and the cacophony of that.

Then if you remember the subway and the trains, the sound of trains by her apartment is a very, very strong sonic layer and a character that we use because she lives literally outside a subway, so she’s hearing the sound of the subway or the trains going by her apartment.

Also, specifically where she lives, it’s near a station because you hear that screech of the subway, which is the same thing that she’s hearing from when she was back in Oklahoma as a young woman. You ultimately hear that again when she’s out in different parts, facing the tornadoes again. That sound is something that is triggering for her. 

Twisters editing room, photo courtesy of Temi Olutunmbi (Post P.A.

You mentioned gigantic fans and that made me think of a conversation I had with the editor of Master and Commander. Lee Smith said that during a lot of that footage the dialogue is useless when you’re shooting with six or seven fans to simulate a storm or the wind in the sails.

Yeah, well that was back in the day. I sat with Bjorn a lot when we were up at Skywalker and it was just remarkable how much they were able to clean up. It was incredible. The technology, the tools that they have now are just so next-level.  

I always notice pre-lap edits. I saw one going into a guy playing a guitar. What is the value of a pre-lap edit and why not do them all the time? 

I think often in that space where you don’t always wanna end a particular scene or sequence - as we would say “with a period, but maybe with a comma” - I think that being able to pre-lap or suggest - either through something very subtle as a sound that’s gonna be coming in or in some cases some people may have a piece of dialogue coming in where someone is asked a question in the scene that’s going out that’s about to be answered either visually in the scene that’s coming in with something like the moment where we have the music start to creep in a little bit.

I felt that Kate had gone through something pretty intense and she was having a bit of a private moment to herself to kind of recompose herself and hide a little bit. She’s sharing with the audience what she just went through, but the person she’s with is away where they can’t see what she’s going through.

So it was almost giving her a little bit of that moment of an exhale, but also kind of letting the audience know that we’re moving into a different moment here. It just felt right musically where the song hits when we go to the cut to allow it a little bit of a pre-lap, before I start the actual song itself.

We talked about reaction shots. Another one that I thought of that I really liked was an edit that you did when Tyler’s crew asks Kate what her last name is. They’re at a hotel and they’re still early in their relationship. He doesn’t even know her last name. Someone asks Kate, “So what’s your last name?” And instead of cutting to Kate saying what her last name is, you cut to Tyler WONDERING what her last name is. I love that.

It carries along the lines of the first time that they meet and Tyler’s trying to figure out who this person is. He’s trying to get information out of her and she’s not looking to be forthcoming.

So I just wanted to keep that energy going a little bit - that through line of Kate being a little bit hidden and not wanting to share too much about herself - but yet Tyler is somebody who’s looking to know a little bit more about who this person is.  

There’s some fun intercutting between Kate’s explanation of how a tornado works. Tyler’s explaining it to the British journalist and you’re cutting back and forth between all these technical explanations. How was that shot and how did you assemble that?

I knew when I read the script and that scene came up that I was gonna want to do something there where I would be able to create a shared love and regard for the weather: that you really start to see that these two people are connected in their love of the weather and their love of this mysterious thing we call a tornado, AND that they were on an equal level with each other in terms of their knowledge, which is something that I don’t think you initially really get at first from Tyler. You first see him as just this very bravado, cocky, cowboy tornado-wrangler guy.

The whole purpose of his trajectory and his arc is to kind of peel back the layers of who he is and also seeing why Kate is Kate and how she has this sense about weather. We called it “Kate-vision” - that Kate could look at the weather and she looks at the sky differently than other people. Even in knowing that that’s what the scene was gonna be.

I did talk to Isaac about the idea of being able to kind of let one person finish the sentence and let the other person pick up. In many ways what we tried to do, and I think he did a beautiful job of it, was basically having both of them say what they had to say but also know that we were gonna overlap them.

So when he shot them, he actually had them make sure that they were doing the dialogue so that I had a little bit of a sense of being able to have a little leeway as to when I cut over to the other person. 

The transition that I really wanted them to get was the transition where we start in Tyler’s car and then he looks down to the monitor and then when we pull back, it’s Kate’s car.

That was a transition that - going into shooting that sequence - Isaac and I talked about how we were gonna make that transition from one car to the next, which was great when you have that ability to proactively plan something like that based on just reading the script and then coming up with how are we gonna move from one car to the other in a seamless way.

To be able to have those conversations before they start shooting is an editor’s dream. Isaac was excited about those kind of conversations. We had a fair amount of them, which was great.  

I’m just trying to figure out how you knew that they were gonna talk over each other and interchange from the script.

It’s so funny that you asked me that because so often through the editing process you get so used to making these cuts that by the time you finish, you forget whether it was something that was there or if it’s something that you created.

To be perfectly honest, I would have to go back now and look at the initial script to see how it was actually structured to answer that question. 

Editor Terilyn A. Shropshire, ACE and director Lee Isaac Chung at an Academy screening

Let’s talk about the movie overall - what I call macro pacing. Did you have big story points like getting to the turn about the food donations or getting Kate to Oklahoma or whatever. What were big points where you thought, “Ugh, right now we need to get to this part earlier.”? 

I knew that the first tornado would have to be a bit of a slow build. Starting a movie and ending a movie - as we know - are two of the most challenging things. I think for editors - or I say, for storytellers who edit - I think that it was really important with tornado one in reel one that you go in feeling as if these young people are gonna face a tornado at some point, but part of the challenge for me was giving enough space that you imprinted on them and cared enough about them that when things went south that you really were invested early and hopefully had a a certain feeling about what happens.

The challenge always is to balance the storytelling, the character connection around the spectacle because obviously there’s a lot of spectacle to this film and there’s a lot of tornadoes to move through, but if you don’t care about the characters you’re not gonna have the same experience. 

I knew that at a certain point we were gonna go through five tornadoes by the time we get to the part in the movie where Kate decides to go home, I knew that we were gonna wanna take some time when she got home and give the audience a little bit of a time to process and get to know Kate a little bit more intimately and also allow Kate to kind of reconnect with family, and allow Kate and Tyler to really start connecting to one another.

I knew it was gonna be a sensitive time because we were asking the audience after intense tornadoes to give us the grace to take a moment and we’re going to go back home. I knew that there would be some people that would get impatient with that.

I knew that there were also people that were gonna appreciate those moments of getting to know Kate and the character and being back at home. I was hoping that I was providing enough intensity in the overall modulation of the film, but also character-building and imprinting moments that we take a moment to allow the characters to engage more emotionally with each other that the audience would go with us, because once we were back on the road again heading into tornado tension, it was gonna be nonstop.

Once she leaves home, we slingshot them back into a very, very kind of intense period until the end of the film. It was really creating enough of that intensity and those dynamics and enough of the spectacle that when we did pull a little bit of the spectacle back, you still cared enough to take the journey through the character and the storytelling. 

Avid screenshot of Work in Progress timeline from screening

I also think of just letting the audience take a breath because if it’s just tornado after tornado after tornado, after two or three you’re exhausted and you tune ’em out and you’re numb. So I loved that scene and there’s another really nice scene that’s much shorter of course, where she’s up on top of a hill taking a picture of a big storm cloud and the British photographer’s taking a picture of her and it’s just a breath for you to say, “Okay, something big happened. Something is about to happen and we’re just gonna sit and and learn about these people.”

That moment on the bluff is hands down one of my favorite moments in the film. I love the fact that the first time we meet Young Kate, she’s bounding up the hill looking for a storm, taking a photograph, excited, and then we see Kate after everything she’s been through and there’s a woman up on a bluff again looking at a storm, taking a photograph and looking at the sky, but differently.

To me it’s kind of a symbol of life and maturity and what happens to all of us in life. There’s still that wonder there, but there’s also that kind of seriousness that becoming an adult gives you. When I saw those dailies and specifically that daily with the photographer Ben taking a photo of Kate, I thought, “Oh my God!

This is your John Ford moment!” It just reminded me of those films and there’d be this beautiful expanse, and it’s just one of my favorite moments in the film.  

Yeah, I loved it too. Talk about the use of the video flashback when Kate enters the barn, she’s gone home and she enters the barn and she’s entering it in present-day, right? Then it cuts to the flashback? How did that work? 

Teri visits ILM

When Kate gets home and decides to take a break from all of it, she starts heading towards the barn, which we later find out is going to be so much a part of her past. It was her “tornado cave.” If Batman has a bat cave, Kate has her tornado barn. What I wanted to do was to try to take the audience as seamlessly back into her youth as possible.

So as she starts to walk towards the barn, she goes to reach for the handle and I cut to a hand pulling the barn door open as if you think it might be Kate. And as we pull into the barn we very subtly go from our anamorphic lens to where we move into a video framing.

4:3.  

Yeah. We’re seeing the barn from their point of view through the camera. We really wanted to make that as seamless as possible. In fact, when you go back and look at it, even moving the frame to the 4:3 was done in kind of this dark space where - by the time you recognize it - you don’t necessarily see where the change happens, hopefully.  

I didn’t realize that there was a change in aspect ratio!Yeah, beautifully done then.  

Thank you. Then you start to hear a voice from Kate’s past and from our past as an audience. It’s Jeb, who we met at the beginning of the movie, and we really just wanted to - for a moment - you understand what the past was for Kate, what this space was that you got to see this space from her youth when she was using it as her laboratory.

We wanted to have a sense of that nostalgia and what she was going to feel when she moved into the barn because it’s one thing to take someone and take them into a barn and have them looking around and cutting to the different things that were part of their past.

But we just wanted to do it a little differently where you could have more of a visceral feel of who Kate was in that space, which I think helps inform a lot about who she is in the present. 

Temi Olutunmbi (LA Post P.A) Teri, Josh. Romer (OKC Post P.A.) Corinne Villa (1st AE) Jessie Lee (2nd AE) at Twisters LA Premiere

Kate’s got a very emotional scene in that barn with Tyler later on and I was struck by the fact that as emotional as it was, there is no music. It’s crickets and wind noise or whatever. Then right at the very end some score develops. Can you talk about determining 1) that you’re not gonna use score for the entire scene? And 2) the exact moment of when to cue that score? 

When Tyler was trying to convince Kate that the theories that she had as a young woman were still viable and potentially something that they could explore together. He was in a way shaking a tree that wasn’t ready to be shook.

And at a certain point Kate has held so much of what’s happened in her past, so deep inside and really not dealt with it. And I think the idea of her being home, - her back in this space - it’s just so triggering for her that she finally kind of lets go in a beautiful way in which we’ve never seen Kate express herself. She talks about all the guilt that she’s been holding about what happened in the past.

So much of that energy that Daisy is putting forth - when I saw the dailies, I remember crying. I was so moved by that moment in its rawest sense. And as an editor you really want to allow those moments of such truth and honesty to be able to play as beautifully and organic and naturally as they’re being expressed.

So for me it’s a lot of emotion coming at an audience at once. I think that’s when you have to be your most vigilant and most careful of not trying to push anything more. The work is being done. 

As far as choosing when music comes in, how music comes in, what type of music comes in, it should feel as effortless as what’s coming before it in some ways as if you don’t necessarily - even you’re not even completely aware that it’s presenting itself.

I feel that the timing of when something like that happens, you really have to allow a performance, a moment with a character and not try to push something on the audience, not try to manipulate  something that that’s working.  

It’s an art form in many ways because I do feel like sometimes when I’m watching a scene and something emotional is happening and I am connecting with this emotion, then you start to bring music in either too early ‘cause often with these scenes there’s a tendency to wanna kind of bring it in too early and almost not allow the audience to process or discover. It’s like, “I’m gonna tell you how to feel.”

And I think that’s in some ways the worst thing you can do with music. It really is something where the silence of her raw emotion in this space in the barn with its natural sound effects was just beautiful on its own. Then at a certain point the choice to bring it in when I did really came out of Tyler processing what he just saw.

Then looking over and seeing all those people that she loved so much and bringing him and that intimacy between the two of them and his perspective to her about this, it felt right to allow the music then to kind of come in and be a part of the scene.  

Was there a particularly challenging or rewarding scene to cut in this movie? 

Editor Terilyn A. Shropshire, ACE, Photo credit Warren Hickman (vfx editor). 

When I go back and I watch the film, sometimes I look at it as a whole and think, “How did you do that?” And I think - as most editors - one frame at a time. You just start. You begin and then you move until there’s some impedance, whatever that is.

And then you find a way through it. So in terms of the challenge of it, I feel like on a macro level, the challenge of it was at a certain point not having the entire film and yet being in a situation where you were beholden to deliver shots for visual effects because we had a release date that was not going to move.

It was immovable. Whatever was going on in the world as far as strikes or whatever that was, we had a release date.

So for me, macro challenges were when we finally did have everything and they had shot everything, the time that it, I had to show Isaac the film for the first time. He didn’t really get to see his entire film until our late December, early January post-holiday period. 

We went back to Oklahoma in late November and shot everything that we didn’t get the first time because of what was happening in the industry (WGA and SAG strikes).

That was incredibly challenging. When I talk about the micro of a particular scene being challenging, I would say that the entire third act! It was just this literal and figurative tornado of just trying to build from the moment that they get back on the road and both Storm Par and the Tornado Wranglers are heading towards that last tornado seemingly for different reasons, right?

Then everything just kind of gets upended from the refinery. Then we’ve gotta get to town and everything that happens in town. Then we gotta get everybody to the theater.  

It was challenging in the best ways. It’s not challenging in problematic ways. It’s a lot to keep building that momentum. It’s all about the dynamics. Editing is modulation and dynamics and sticking that landing in a way that the audience stays with you.

You give them just enough time to think about things, but not too much time to overthink things. So I think that that was a challenge. Then ultimately the juxtaposition of Kate in the field with what was happening in the theater and finding the right moments and when to cut back to her and when to cut back to the theater and when you got back to the theater, what was happening in the theater.

Because obviously as we know, all that stuff is shot in a very linear fashion and you’re constantly trying to tighten and concentrate the level of tension and keep it ramping up and creating that intercutting was rather challenging.  

I bet it was, Terilyn. I appreciate the amount of time you’ve spent with me and you have just been a wealth of information and I really appreciate you sharing that.

Thank you Steve. And, and once again, I so appreciate you asking incredible questions and, and thoughtful questions and allow me to kind of even think about my film a little more. So thank you.