Young Woman and the Sea

Today on Art of the Cut, Úna Ní Dhonghaíle, ACE discusses editing Disney’s Young Woman and the Sea.

Una was first nominated for an editing BAFTA 15 years ago. And again in 2013 and THREE TIMES in 2015. She won a BAFTA for Three Girls and was nominated for another BAFTA and an ACE Eddie for editing Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast which we discussed right here on Art of the Cut. She was also on Art of the Cut previously for her work on The Crown and for Death on the Nile.

Una, thank you so much for being on Art of the Cut. I miss talking to you! It’s been a while.

Me too. Thank you, Steve, for asking me. I’m honored to speak to you anytime.

Thanks. Young Woman in the Sea was a book, correct?

Correct. Yes, written by Glenn Stout.

Did you read it before you edited it?

I didn’t. I read it after. I think the beauty about this film is that it’s a story that we ought to have known and it’s a story that we didn’t know. I believe Jeff Nathanson came across the book and he was very mindful of wanting to write something for his daughters who were young teenagers at the time. He brought it to Jerry Bruckheimer who got the rights to the Glenn Stout book.

Jeff wrote his beautiful script, but I think it was eight years in the making to bring it to fruition with Joachim Ronning becoming the Director, then all of us getting on board. When I read the script, I did not know about Trudy Ederle​​.

The script was so beautiful. It really moved me. I just was really delighted that they asked me to join them on the journey. I believe it was about eight years in development before they got to the point of crewing the film. I have read the book subsequently. I have bought it as gifts for family members. ‘cause it’s a great book. It’s a brilliant book.

Do you think there’s an advantage to not reading the book before you edit the film?

I’m open to this because I do have some documentary background as well. I wouldn’t have a rule that you cannot or should not read the book. I think I’m more open to the fact that if you have read the book, that could be a great asset ‘cause at least you know what the audience knows.

For example, if you’re to do a Harry Potter film to know what the audience, the readers of the Harry Potter knows, it gives you a really good position ‘cause you’re also a fan, but with a film like this, because it was a story that had not been told wildly, I didn’t rush to read the book.

I just thought I wanted to use the bones of what Jeff had written in his script and go organically. But then I did read the book during the making of the film because I do feel that sense of responsibility when you’re telling a true story that you don’t miss something that the audience who know the book might pick up on.

So I think there is a dual thing of having your intuition and the freedom of exploring the film and finding it yourself, but also the responsibility of not letting down anyone who knows the story or adores the books if it is like a Harry Potter or some such thing.

Did you watch any sports movies?

I love sports movies. I loved Nyad. So when Nyad came out the year before - we actually finished in 2022. Actually maybe we were mixing in March, 2023. We had the possibility that we could have released last year and Nyad came out and Nyad was such a brilliant film.

So I hope anyone who loved Nyad, I hope you loved this film. I think they’re great sister companion films as the oldest woman who had achieved her swim to Cuba, and then Trudy, the first woman to swim the English Channel in 1926.

So a hundred years ago - where she faced different challenges of the swimwear was a heavy woolen garment. They weren’t encouraging women to swim. So there was a really good energy, I think with those two films. Then we released this year (July 2024) to commemorate her time in the Olympics in 1924. So it’s the centenary of Trudy swimming in the Olympics, representing America.

How did you get connected with the director? Was that through the production company or was that through the director himself?

I’ve never worked with Joachim Ronning before and I had actually never worked with any of them before. I got a call to have a meeting with Joachim and Jerry Bruckheimer. I think perhaps my work on Belfast had brought me to their attention.

I’m obviously a huge Jerry Bruckheimer fan-  as the rest of the world - grown up with all his brilliant films. I read the script first of all, and I said to my agent, “Anything I can do to have this meeting. I would just really love to be involved in the making of this movie.” We had a great meeting very quickly after that. There’s a lot of great men behind this film. I love working with people who are just great people.

Being someone with a compassionate heart and understanding the story, that’s the thing that drew us all together. I think that’s the thing that made me want to be involved. I could see that it was a labor of love for Jeff and Jerry and Chad [Orman]and John , the other producers and Joachim who had got involved.

Joachim had directed Kontiki. One of the things he said to me in the interview was that he wanted to shoot on the real sea. He didn’t want to use tanks in studios. He actually wanted to be out there, and I love that. I just thought, “Okay, that’s sort of the filmmaking that I like.”

It was a lower budget film than the film films I had been on. But I just loved the bones of it and the fact that they wanted to embrace that authentic, visceral style of filmmaking that translates.

And as an editor, I always say we’re very fortunate that we stand on the heads and shoulders of our brilliant writers, directors, cinematographers, cast and crew. So once that material comes back to me, it’s very good as an editor to just see the truthfulness in that material.

So that was exciting. Daisy Ridley trained to swim in that open water! I think gives the truthfulness of the film, even at the early stage of pre-production.

You have had some incredible directors, Kenneth Branagh among them. When you have a new director that you’re dealing with, how do you create that collaborative experience with him? Does he collaborate differently than somebody like Kenneth and does that change the way you collaborate?

Yeah, I think so. After the shoot some directors like to be in the cutting room, even if they’re not actually, micromanaging or anything like that. They might be developing another script.

Maybe we’ll come up with a different word than “micro-managing.”

Do you think micromanaging is too rude?

For Directors? Absolutely not. They need to hear this stuff! (laughter)

Lemme find an answer to that again.

No, I think we should leave all this in!

Well, you know what I mean, there’s some directors who like to sit behind you, but I have been blessed that I’ve been with directors who are sitting behind me and they’re actually doing other things - then collaborating with you in an artistic way rather than micromanagement. With Ken for example, he is different.

He can watch it, go away, and then come back. So, on this film they shot in Bulgaria, the cutting rooms were in London, and I was actually working from my studio at home in Dublin during the shoot. So my two people who I was talking to - even more than Joachim - were Jerry Bruckheimer and John Scotti, the producer.

They were great. So I was editing one day behind the shoot - editing quite quickly as all of us editors do - making sure that we’ve got really strong assemblies.

I was just intuitively, instinctively just cutting that stuff. I had my great assistant - Nick Davis and Tímea Kalderák, who’s our second - they were helping building sound. So by the end of day I would have something really substantial.

At that time we had Matt, Glen and Charlie working as the VFX, so they were painting in the backgrounds. It meant that I could send those cuts off. If there were scenes that they had to strike the set or they had to move or do something, I was able to feed in ideas very rapidly.

Then John Scotti was in location in Bulgaria. He could immediately speak to Joachim. Joachim and I built our relationship working remotely - by the nature of just the editor not going on location. I do like to go on location, but in this instance it was just more cost effective to do this way.

Halfway through the shoot, I always tried to pull together everything that we have at that point. That was a great moment for both of us where he then saw what I was doing and really liked it, thankfully. I had cut the Australian swim, which was the scene where Eppy tells Trudy not to get in the way of the Australians.

The Australians are touted to win. Meg was their greatest hope - Trudy’s sister. So Eppy was trying to encourage Trudy not to swim too fast or get in their way. So that was a really hard one because we had so many cameras.

He shot so many cameras on that day and there were so many ways you could have played that. There could have been eight lengths of the pool or only four. I worked really hard on that scene to make it work emotionally so that when she’s struggling, you can see her struggle and the audience can follow it.

And the men are yawning because the men aren’t interested in women’s swimmers and her mother is looking a little bit aghast and doesn’t really want to be there, and the stadium was pretty empty. So we had a lot of brilliant B camera stuff as well as the A camera.

We had underwater material. So that moment when she finally finds her stride and she begins to overtake, there was a beautiful moment where she went under water. So in the soundtrack, even at this early stage, as soon as she went under the temp score crescendoed and suddenly as an audience, they realized Trudy is going to do it.

She’s actually going to win! So that was really good because I think even at an early stage that scene began to show you the promise of what we could do with a swim film - which is a front crawl, a challenge rhythmically that you don’t get into this rut. That was exciting.

So I think working with Joachiim from that point onwards, we had a little bit more communication.

But I do understand when directors are on location, they have to just keep focusing on what they’re shooting the next day and not be distracted by maybe looking at assemblies that show them what they’ve already done and they’ve moved on from.

So then once we wrapped, then I went over to London, Joachim joined me in London, then we had the first screening of the first editor cut or whatever language that we use. I know we like to say editor cut ‘cause it is a fully singing thing.

Then Joachim worked with me. We were both very like-minded - I had loved his film Kon-tiki - and we shared a lot of sensibilities of cinema and the cinematography. Oscar Faura did a beautiful job on cinematography. So I think just quite naturally we found our feet and just found we had a similar sense of humor. He’s very funny.

Not to say I’m funny, but my brothers are funny and my sister’s funny.  I’m not as funny as my family, but Joachim is actually very funny. So I enjoyed him and I enjoyed just the act of rolling our sleeves up and working out how to shorten this film ‘cause of course it was way too long.

And working out how we could collapse scenes and find a way of just following through Trudy’s story, that’s something that I love. I love just trying to tell the story from a subjective point of view and allow the audience in by empathizing and identifying with her. So then you really feel her pain and you feel her joy whenever she begins to succeed.

Did you watch Kon-tiki before you worked with him?

I actually had seen Kon-tiki before I even had met him just by being the cinephile. I love movies and I had seen it, so when I heard his name, I knew who he was. I had also seen Pirates of the Caribbean, which I adore.

So I was already aware of his work. He’s a really great guy and he’s a great guy like Jeff and Jerry. They just understood Trudy.

Very often I talk about Alien and Aliens. Sigourney Weaver is just brilliant in those films because they just treat her as a human being. That’s what I liked about what they did with Trudy. It is a story about a young woman who - at the time wasn’t supported to swim and it was actually frowned upon.

Many people thought it was very un-ladylike to swim and it might affect their fertility or give them a very muscular physique.But she had the vocation in her bones. She had to swim. I love the fact that they treated her like a human being and they didn’t pander to things that they might think were female or feminine.

They just kept going with what was the story of this woman, this woman Trudy and what she faced and how she convinced her mother. First of all, the film is made up of different relationships. So there’s the mother daughter relationship, there’s the sister sister relationship and there’s the father daughter relationship.

That really intrigued me. I love that. I just thought it was really nice how the father begins - the patriarch set out this stock of what the world was like at that time. But gradually he even began to realize that his daughter had this gift and who was he - or anyone else - in the world to stop someone doing what they dreamed of doing just because of their gender? That really intrigued me and I was on board.

Were your assistants and everybody else in London and you were in Ireland? Is that what I got? 

Yes. 

Excuse me, for nerding out: What technology were you using to be able to collaborate with assistants in London?

So we were using the Salon Sync Box. 

All of us are Avid Media Composer fans, and we all have the same system with the Salon Sync Box, which is that remote box that everything uploads to the box. So I could work anywhere in the world, even when I was over in LA and I took - for  traveling purposes - my big laptop with me, I was able to log in and work through that Salon Sync Box.

That has been a great gift for all of us because years ago, back when I was doing the Missing series, I used to have a DHL delivery drive. They were shooting in Belgium and I was working in Dublin and I used to have a drive every day that I’d have to swap drives and I had assistants in London, but I was doing my own assistanting to maintain the drive so I could work from home.

That’s back in 2011. So in 13 years we’ve come a long way that overnight it downloads and you wake up the next morning, everything’s there. You can just jump on and start editing.

I know when we talked on Belfast, you were saying that you could relate to the characters who had to go off and leave Ireland to be able to work - because you did that for many years.

Yeah, I’ve been doing that for many years. I think that economic migrant story is shared by many people. My family wants to move to America. London is so close. If I go to America, then I think they’ll all immediately delightfully pack up and leave.

But you’ll have to move to LA!

I know, I know. And everyone in LA - they’re all coming to London. So the world is becoming small. The globe is shrinking.

Tell me a little bit about the evolution of how long you stayed in Trudy’s childhood. Obviously the story really accelerates once she goes to the Olympics and has these dreams to swim across the channel. Did you cut it like the script? Then what happened to that whole section of the childhood?

The childhood was a little bit longer and we did collapse it. We felt that the childhood was important to set up because the real Trudy did have measles and her doctor had given her parents the terrible news that she wouldn’t survive the night.

So as a character insight, it was very important to show that this little resilient child who had survived the measles against the odds, who had lost partial hearing in an ear and was told never to swim again, kept nagging her parents to swim. All of that is true.

She wasn’t allowed to swim in the swimming pool. So after singing that song of “Every morning, every evening, ain’t we got fun.’ She bothered her family enough that her father finally put the rope on her (to teach her how to swim). So we thought it was actually important not to lose too much of that.

We did shrink it, but it just gave us a nice insight into who she was. It also opens with outside the window that ship that sank and those women and children who drowned. And as the Jeanette Hain character says, “They could have walked to shore.

They could have survived if they only knew how to swim.” That was a true event that Jeff Nathanson had pulled. So I think that’s sort of an important beginning that we didn’t want to shortchange the audience on. We did begin with the prologue of her in this unknown place for the audience - covered in fat and lanolin and everything - so hopefully that’s an intriguing image for anyone watching.

Disney Plus viewers please  proceed further! It also set up the sister relationship because the sister was more of a champion swimmer at the beginning.

Meg was the strongest swimmer. Meg was the one who was able to join the swim club. Trudy only managed to join the swim club by her sheer perseverance in carting that coal and allowing herself to be sort of denigrated. Another girl might have just said, “I’m not being treated well” and stop, but she really wanted to swim.

So I think that was a very important thing. We did try in a very subtle way, to allude to a little bit of her hearing. She didn’t lose her hearing completely until after the film in the 1940s. It’s a texture to reveal the strength of character that despite the dangers that she faced, she was willing to risk everything because it’s the only thing she could do.

Many of us in the film industry, we probably are the same. When people ask us, why are we in the industry? Because we can’t do anything else! We’re good as filmmakers and we’re hopeless in any other job.

So I did definitely identify with her just thinking. She was a brave little girl and her mother was a wonderful woman. ‘cause her mother actually first supported her when the father felt ashamed that the girls would want to swim because it wasn’t something that was accepted at that time. What was beautiful in the film is how it turned out that it was the father who actually went to Cape Green and joined her with her sister Meg on that real swim.

The spirit that she had was just something that I think is inspirational to all of us. Life is very short. So make sure you do what you what makes you happy  respectful of other people. Jeff Nathanson’s script was just beautiful because he captured a lot of that.

Then when Joachim came on board, Joachim and Jeff both have daughters and both of them spoke about the wanting you to feel the need to do justice to Trudy’s story and make a film that would make their daughters proud.

Joachim said he made this film for all the daughters in the world and also all the sons, all the people, because I think it’s a great film for anyone. It’s not female-specific. Anyone who has a dream that has to be true to themselves: That’s what this film’s about.

You mentioned the Australian Olympic race. I really felt the tension - that cresting suspense. Can you talk about trying to build that?

That was important. We really wanted the audience to be behind her. If you watch this film with a critical eye, you’ll see that we do have several montages. Some were scripted, some were by nature of collapsing scenes and trying to tell the story in a more efficient way.

So we did have a scene where she actually was speaking to some boys who were challenging her to swim. We unfortunately had to lose that scene just because of time. It was beautifully acted. But we did find that the Australian swim - by focusing on Trudy and by trying that juggle of the mom watching who isn’t totally on board but is so supporting.

The Australian woman - who actually was quite assured of her swim ability - and Eppy, who had ruled out Trudy and was focusing on Meg, I think we shot that over four days and we had at least six cameras. So there was a lot of footage to tell that story.

So I started watching everything, pulling out all the best bits and trying to locate where Daisy was to keep an eye on her and also show that she’s a little bit behind the girls. We used some split screens to maybe move her back a little bit in case she was too fast just to try and show that jeopardy.

And then once she began to swim and those legs were kicking, Joachim did a great shoot in al tank where he got a lot of that underwater feet kicking and it actually came together quite easily  because the footage was beautiful. It was really strong.

Once you’re following the race, the first lap, Australians winning second lap. The Sullivan character was a great foil ‘cause he was able to narrate for us if anyone got lost with the heads in the water - the other challenge of swimming movies.

So he was able to keep that energy going and his character was brilliant. That actor is incredible. So that helped us. So there were a lot of tools that I had at my disposal that we could actually use together to make that scene work. My first cut of that scene was actually very long. All the actors were superb. Even the supporting actors just delivered everything.

So the Australian girl, when she touched the water, she was smashing the water. She was so angry that she had lost. So those little things you could grab as an editor and keep them in and just allow the audience feel like you were there.

You mentioned the music. Is that something that you would edit with or something that you add once you feel like you’ve got a good cut?

In this film I actually was using a lot of temp music from the beginning, mainly because we were showing so quickly to either Joachim or Jerry. It just meant it was better to have a more fully finished feel even after the first day of shooting. On the film I’m doing at the moment, we’re not using any music at all as an exercise. 

I love sound as well as music. So sound as a character or music as a character, as a filmmaker, I feel is a very important thing to keep as part of our dialogue. I suppose with the film it’s a discourse and how we use sound or how music can really aid the subjective point of view of the character.

I try not to use music if I feel the scene isn’t working. I don’t try and put music on to get something passed. I do try and and investigate and work out how music could work for that character, for that storytelling. So I definitely used music for Young Woman and the Sea very early on. Then Amelia Warner came with her beautiful score afterward. 

All of us together were on the same page of wanting the best for this movie and making sure that the story reached a larger audience so that her story could be told. It’s like Three Girls. That’s another story about y an untold forgotten unheard group of girls.

And I felt the responsibility when I was editing that series as I felt with this film that it just was very important to give Trudy her day and recognize what she went through and be as close to her as was possible.

The Australian swim was great and then that little montage that was sort of reworked a little bit so that that montage just showed you her winning the 200 meters, the 300 meters, the 400 meters and then culminating in Gertrude putting the blue ribbon into the meat at the butcher shop saying “World Title.” I love that.

So  that scene had been a little bit earlier and we moved it there because it was a lovely little button on that scene before Sullivan comes in to invite her to go to the Olympics. 

We did a little bit of reworking of structure. Jeff was brilliant because I think his script was so strong that he was very unafraid and very fearless when we were in the editing stages of finding ways that maybe we could move things to improve.

So he was very open to collaboration and discussion and one of the big things was actually the Burgess scene that we met Burgess early on in the script, but we moved that later to after the Olympics because we found that it wasn’t helping the audience, that she just had all these successes and then she met Burgess and then she went to the Olympics and then she failed in the Olympics and then Meg got married and we just realized if we move Burgess down later, so we had the montage of her learning to swim to Australia, then the success of Australia to this montage of becoming a world winner.

And within that montage we showed fragments of Meg’s story. So as Trudy star begins to rise, you glimpsed Meg beginning to become second and then third and then not even rating, they’re just glimpses but if you look at it again, you’ll see she’s on the podium as second, then she’s third and then she’s not even on the podium and she’s making eyes at Chip and Chip’s making eyes at her.

So it ends with the ice cream. It was a very effortless way to tell the story of the rise of Trudy and the fall I suppose, of Meg and Meg realizing that she was never going to make it and then rather than going to Burgess, once we moved Burgess down, it meant that Sullivan came into the butcher shop faster.

So it would be a bit of a shock for the audience to realize that Meg wasn’t included and then of course Meg wants to marry Chip and then we have that divergent story that when she goes to the Olympics she comes home and Meg is now going to marry somebody else.

So I think that was an important thing and again it was just us following the story of Trudy. If you do a “Trudy pass” as an editor, very quickly you realize “Okay, it works brilliantly on the page but maybe if it went a little bit later it just opens up the possibility of a more sort of natural organic telling of the story.”

Then it also meant that after the failure of the Olympics we had to create that little montage of her working in the butcher shop and not being happy. And that brought us to Burgess. So then Burgess became another character who you meet him in his nakedness and her seeing him at his lowest point but her recognizing him ‘cause she had seen him in the movies.

So that was quite good as a tool for getting into the next level of why she decides to swim the channel.

Úna Ní Dhonghaíle, ACE

How much did your first scene assemblies - back when you were cutting during the rushes - change once you saw those same scenes in context with the scenes next to them and in the overall story?

My first assembly of the hospital scene - bar one shot - stood, which is why I would say to anyone who is editing, sometimes that rush of just having limited time and you have to just be instinctive and not overthink it and just watch the performances and find the best way of putting it together.

Sometimes that really does pay off. Working with the Disney team, we had Sam Dickerman and Sean Bailey, Vanessa Morrison and then with Jerry, Jeff, Chad, Joachim - working with these great people who are brilliant storytellers.

So all of us were involved in just  forensically examining the film, the telling of the film and making sure that we weren’t in a situation where success came too easily to Trudy or that when she had a failure that she didn’t recover from the failure too quickly.

So that’s why the “Cinderella scene” after the Olympics, we had to flesh that out a little bit by repurposing of the material just to allow Trudy to have that moment of really thinking that she wasn’t going to swim again.

Then the little girls who come and tell her how much she meant to them - which is in the book as well - that was an important turning point to realize she was a role model for little girls in that area. As I think all of us know, when you see yourself on film for people of all different cultures and economic groups and social groups, it’s very important for people to know that you can do something and you can break out of whatever pigeonhole society might put you in.

We worked very well together to just keep an eye on that and be fearless and check in: what if we move that around? How would that work and what happens if you take that out? So there were scenes that we removed scenes that were really beautiful and in another world you could have had a longer film. Like when Trudy met with Johnny Wisemueller.

We had a whole big scene with Johnny Wisemueller, which was great, but unfortunately it was the story of Meg. So in the scheme of things with that opening with the child and then her getting to the Olympics, it just had to go unfortunately because of time, because you had to get to the Olympics sooner to set up the rest of the movie and get to the channel swim.

Things change but I think some of those changes are great and sometimes when you have cut a scene and you know the essence of the scene and you know the material that you have, it’s very easy to actually just then do a more fleeting version of that scene and actually the scene still holds or the intention of Jeff’s writing or Joachim’s direction is still there.

So I think that was really good to see that any film that goes in with such a sturdy script and with a strong director like Joachim, you can shake it and rattle it and collapse it and new things will reveal themselves.

Well, THAT was the quote of the day!

I had so much fun working with these guys on this film and the sound team, I have to say for them as well, Tormod Ringnes and Baard Ingebretsen and Luke Gentry and Ben Meechan, they were our sound supervisors.

Even when I was editing I was able to email them and sort of say, I need some creaky, woody sound ‘cause you’re on that little boat and they were able to just send us stuff over.

Now when they went to do the real sound, they did go and they were actually recording on boats. They were going into the ocean. But whilst I was editing, even at assembly stage - week one - my second assistant during the shoot was Lottie Gilbourne, and she was dunking her head in a bowl of water and doing the breaths for Trudy, recording it on her phone, until Daisy Ridley came and did the ADR session.

So those little things are sort of important. When I’m editing and you want your audience to really identify with Trudy, you have to hear those breaths. So when she is swimming and then she’s tiring, then you have to hear those struggled breaths.

So that was something really important. Otherwise she was just swimming too well all the time. So once you heard it, then the audience actually has that chilling moment of thinking she’s not gonna make it. And that’s what I was always keeping an eye on, even in those early stages of getting the assistant to dunk her head in water.

You do anything to make it feel real. And I think for all of us - for the the entire team - Jerry and Disney and everyone, I hope this film reaches people and that they see it because I’m really proud of the work of all of us on this film.

The beautiful thing about working with someone like Joachim is he gives so much that actually it makes you want to give everything as well. So between him, Jeff and Jerry, the bar was raised. I don’t wanna exclude anyone because it really was the Young Woman and the Sea family. They raised the bar. We raised the bar.

So together everyone was trying their best to make sure that we could make a film that did justice to Trudy’s memory. When you see what year she died, it seems such a shame that she wasn’t celebrated in her lifetime at the end of her life.

She was celebrated at the moment of her historic win, but to know that she had spent dedicated her life to teaching children in the deaf community to swim, she’s an extraordinary woman and so much of her later life is not known. But I just felt a real loyalty to her memory and to her family’s memory, wanting to make sure we did the best.

I had the same feeling when I did Stan and Ollie. When I was editing that I just felt the relationship between those two men was such a beautiful thing to celebrate - the friendship of men is as important as this film - which is celebrating the success of a young woman who has been removed from the history books and let’s put her back in her rightful place.

Avid timeline screenshot, Young Woman and the Sea

You briefly mentioned the hospital scene before she decides to try again. There are great reaction shots that build to her decision. Can you talk about using reaction shots as part of the story and the importance of the storytelling?

Definitely. Reaction shots for me are a massive tool for subtext. It allows the audience a private gaze. I very often quote at Brian Friel, if anyone hasn’t read, Brian Friel’s play “Philadelphia, Here I Come” and Gar has a public self and a private self.

I read that when I was in school and that always stuck with me that as the filmmakers, we have the ability to show the audience the objective thing. Then those cutaways, they actually showed the private space, the unspoken words between all of them.

The family does not want her to swim again. Kim Bodnia and Tilda Cobham-Hervey were just magnificent. Stephen Graham was magnificent and Daisy. I can’t speak highly enough of Daisy. The fact that that they were all working together and just living that scene as directed by Joachim. 

We did have a conversation about how do we get the audience to believe that  the father would allow her to swim again because he wants to take her home. How do you create that space for the audience to believe that the father would even get on board with this idea? That’s what those reaction shots allowed us.

They allowed us the time for them to process. Did her coach poison her? Is that actually what happened to her? That is an allegation made in the history books. That is what they assume happened.

So we needed to create that gap to give the family time to digest that, to think “is that true?” to give the audience time to work out: “Well we think it is true ‘cause we did see him give her the tea” and then it just helped build that tension before she says “I’m going to swim.”

If we had tried to trim that or make that more brief, it would’ve felt too easy that the father had just changed his mind like that and his daughter had nearly died. Why would he do that? So I think that’s what I found in that scene: that those shots enabled you as an audience to believe in the decision-making of the father.

And in a film like this, you need the audience to believe in the truthfulness of it. If they feel that something isn’t right, you’re gonna lose your audience. Veracity is everything. Emotional truthfulness is everything.

I was thinking about trying to make something that is very boring - no offense to this movie - very boring to watch, which is long-distance swimming, most of it’s under the water. It takes forever to happen. How do you intercut that or what do you do to make that exciting?

That’s the thing that was important about those early scenes. So the early scenes, one could assume that you could have shortened those family scenes at the beginning and got faster to the Olympics. But what they did do is establish the family. So then once she’s in the water and we’re on the boat with Burgess and the father and Meg, you know them, you feel as an audience that you know them and that was a really strong tool.

So it is important sometimes that you have to do that stuff at the beginning. It’s not for expositional reasons, it’s more for character building and allowing the audience in. So there was a danger of “swimming fatigue” when the film was a little bit longer. And how to avoid the episodic thing: she swims, then the journalists come, then the jellyfish come, then the fog comes.

How to avoid feeling compartmentalized. That was something that we worked very hard on. 

We used dissolves. Joachim and myself were saying if there was ever a recognition for how many dissolves are in a movie, this one would be it. We’ve brought back the beauty of the dissolve.

We were trying to use everything that would feel truthful to a film of that era and also the characters on board. I think that’s the thing that really helped us out because you cared. As long as you care, as long as the audience cares then you’re more than halfway there with the movie because then each stumbling block doesn’t feel like an artificial obstacle that the lead character has to mount.

It actually feels like this is actually true. The only thing that we couldn’t do was the waves. She did face these massive waves but it’s just too hard to recreate. But we got everything else. We got the coldness of the water, we got the jellyfish, the fog, the danger of the shallows. We tried to be a little bit effortless in trying to give that expositional tracking for the audience of “this is the route she’s going to go, she’s going to go further than the 21 miles and these are the shallows to be aware of.”

So we were trying to put things in that the audience could just absorb without it being too signposted. But then it meant that when you got there you realized the danger she was in and that if she got lost in the darkness that she would lose her way.

I wanted to jump cut that all the time so that she was absolutely confused. It’s a psychological style of editing. I read that Donald Spoto book about Hitchcock and I love the way that they speak about the iconography of cinematography but also the visceral power of editing that jump-cutting and disorientating can totally throw you off.

And that lets the audience actually feel her confusion so I could have her looking left and then right and then underwater she’s turning and you just feel that there’s these murky depths that she’s really in danger and in peril. I think it helped us as well that the ocean and the sea is another character.

That’s something to recognize as an editor when you’re working, that this is another element that could take her life from her. Even if the audience knew that she did successfully swim the channel, you needed them to be in the cinema shouting, “Look around! The fires are behind you!”

 I was doing it!

Good. That’s what we wanted. We did have the version where that was a little bit longer that Joachim and I totally enjoyed, but then as we were shrinking things, we did think, “Okay, a little goes a long way” and seeing the fires and her going under and then popping up again and then turning was actually good.

You mentioned the jellyfish. I wanted to talk about creating dynamics, like the anxiety and the speed of cutting when she was going through those red jellyfish and then that pause or release after the jellyfish.

Yeah, she’s floating and she’s injured. You have to see all her scars. So I worked really well with our VFX producer, Carrie Rishel and Richard Briscoe our VFX supervisor and we were actually on the same floor, in the same corridor.

So where my cutting room was, my assistant was behind me, the second assistant was over in the corner in another room, then the VFX editor and VFX assistant were right beside me again in another room and the VFX team producer and supervisor were at the end of the corridor.

So that was great, especially for the jellyfish scene because it meant that very quickly we could communicate with each other and if I had done a cut that I could show to Carrie and Richard, they could work out what they had to do.

Or if as time was crunching as could happen to any of us, that it’s suddenly a little bit like this shot has proven very tricky and very expensive that I could maybe find another solution to say, “well what if we cut here?” then show to Joachim. Is Joachim happy and if Joachim’s happy, it actually makes VFX life easier that they can actually work with the jellyfish. 

It was  funny: Joachim went to an aquarium in New York. I went to the aquarium in London independently, not for research, just for family day out and we both ended up filming jellyfish and sending it to the poor VFX team who already knew every jellyfish under the sun.

We really were mindful of creating that and that’s where Daisy Ridley was amazing because she did so much. If you watch the film again, there was a stunt double, but actually Daisy did all the swimming. I think there was only one or two shots, otherwise it’s all Daisy. She did everything. She was in that water until her lips went blue and she was just magnificent at the end.

She’s scarred. We really wanted to show you that. So that’s why when she’s doing “the starfish,” we actually extended that moment a little bit to show you the scars on her back to show you the scars on her arms.

And then Meg is fixing her goggles. She’s sealing it with candle wax and then throws it back in. So all of that just helps you, allowing her to recuperate before she swims again. It comes down to the fact that the audience needed that, ‘cause you couldn’t go through that jellyfish and then just starts swimming.

So by allowing that peaceful moment and keeping the goggles there, it just allowed that space. Then Jeff had done great work on a lot of the news reports.

So he wanted to build up this idea that at the beginning it was a small amount of journalists and then gradually it became a global news event. So then we created that sequence of all the dissolves where you heard the news from all over the world and you saw her progress before she gets completely tired and then Meg has to jump in.

Talk about that tension. Everybody talks about tension is like a rubber band that you have to pull and pull and pull as tight as you can get it, but you don’t want it to snap. Talk about that in the shallows, that time where the people on the beach are worried: is she gonna make it? And Trudy’s in the water wondering: “Am I gonna make it?” How much did that contract and expand back out and how did you figure out the right length?

The length it is now in the darkness was a little bit longer than in the first assembly. Entering the shallows  had been shorter. Then we actually opened that up a little bit because Joachim shot another pickup with Trudy in the tank.

He was always going to do that, but it just allowed more for her point-of-views that you were more with her in the water.

That’s one of the areas where my second assistant was dunking her head in the water in the early days because the breath in that darkness was just really vital to understand the jeopardy. I think the key to what Jeff wrote - which was a really beautiful piece which always makes me cry - is that earlier in the film he had planted the story of the mother saying that she was scared to swim and that her twin sister had drowned..

So whilst Trudy was in the water, some of that elastic band that you’re talking about was added to by the fact that we keep going back to the radio studio and he’s getting these telegrams saying that she’s lost in the shallows and the mother stands up. Jeanette Hain- I love her.

I hope everyone who sees the film just loves every actor in this movie ‘cause they’re so great. But the way she stood up and the way she held that pendant and the audience would remember that pendant even though we only saw it for probably only four seconds on screen.

That really was strong because then I think you do feel like she feels her daughter is gone, even thought the audience knows that she didn’t die. They begin to think that she might be gone.

So I think that was really important and using sound in a much softer way. So after the aggression of her breath and realizing she’s lost and doing all that sort of jump cut, visceral cutting, then going to the studio where he’s saying in a very soothing radio voice, “Trudy Ederle is lost to the Shallows.”

And the mother clasping that locket, I think immediately it had an energy and that is as per script that it just allowed an emotion to come in so that when you went back to her, I could actually use the most poetic shots of the tank footage that we had of Daisy Ridley as Trudy.

One of them I actually called the Joan of Arc shot because she was just so magnificent. When she went underwater - I dunno how she did it - she had her eyes open as the water went up over.

But the way she looked up she just looked like Joan of Arc - she’s gonna sacrifice herself. She takes her goggles off, she drops them, she’s letting the water take her. I think that was important. With the sound we went a little bit more gentle. We let the music just flow there.

I think that tension is just the combination of the whole team: what Jeff wrote, what Jerry produced, what Joachim directed, Then the fact that there was the freedom to just jump cut and for the sound and music team  to create this hypnotic space where you just feel this horror of “she’s going to die.”

Then those lights lighting. I think that’s where you get to the audience shouting at the screen: “Turn around!” We wanted her to be freezing so we did her breath sounds. Daisy came in and did a lot of ADR where she did her freezing breath where you realized she mightn’t make it.

Then when she sees the fire again, sound was a very important tool. She did a of that freezing breath, trying tomove those frozen limbs and gradually finding her stride. I think the crescendo or the climax we always wanted that when she came to shore, when her feet touched the sand or when her hands touch the sand to cut the music and Joachim always called it “the moon landing,” but you just hold your breath as she stands.

Then the audience - we cut to a rear view shot of her standing, so we denied the audience her face. Then you just see the people on the beach in rapturous applause. Then the music comes back in and that always felt good. Joachim and I were always thinking, “No music for the touching of the hands to the sand.

But the hands to the sand was something that I think Sam Dickerman had mentioned as well as something important so that in these crescendoing climaxes, because she gets through the jellyfish and then she gets through different areas and then when she sees the lights and she comes to shore, the music is so magnificent and triumphant, but how to make sure that we don’t just stay triumphant all the way.

That’s where silence then works: to just break that and the breath works and the shots of the hands and the feet.

The climax of the film seems like a great place to end this conversation. Una, thank you so much for talking to us about this movie. I really enjoyed it.

Thank you so much for asking me again, Steve.