jimmyfilmed

Long time since I wrote this blog, and much has happened....as I have just returned from the Berlin Film Festival here is a letter I wrote to friends:

We got back from Berlin on Thursday after a few days which went really well. We flew over with Mike Leigh and Charlotte Holditch and checked into the Regent Hotel, which was great: it had formerly been a 4 Seasons. The room was spacious and quiet and cost €275 per night. Not the €180 which the office here had quoted - so it was quite lavish and I didn’t really mind spending that money. First night there was a dinner thrown by the production company at the Paris Bar, which is a very old atmospheric place, which attracted us, but the service was deadly slow. My wife, Laurence, waited 2 hours for her fish and the rest of us drank 3 bottles of red wine as we waited - I got quite sauced and did not get to bed until 1.00 and was up again at 5.00 to run a rehearsal of the film in the massive theatre. Mike stuck with me. We ran the whole film as I’d asked for it to be plattered, otherwise we would not have run the whole thing. We limped out of there, had some breakfast and then Mike went off to do endless tv interviews. By now the two actors, Sally Hawkins and Eddie Marsan had arrived. The film was not yet sold to America, though Gail Egan,our executive producer, was trying to do a deal with Miramax (she succeeded, finally, at 3.00 Tuesday morning). We spent the morning walking to the European Film Market with Charlotte and met Cathy Wyler (Willie’s daughter) there for a coffee. She was seeing HAPPY-GO-LUCKY that night at the premiere, and if she liked it, hoped it might be the opening film at her High Falls Festival at Rochester NY. Then we had lunch with Mike, Sally and the publicity people before going over to the Press Conference. The press had seen the film that morning. This would therefore be the first intimation of reactions. There were hundreds of world press there and a 1000 cameramen. Mike and the actors answered many, quite good questions, and it became evident that the film had played much better than we expected. After a drinks party we all went off to the premiere in the huge theatre which had been completely empty at 5.30 a.m.....press were out in hundreds and the theatre was packed. The film played very well - the audience were really with it, laughed in the right places, and enjoyed themselves, at the end they gave us a great ovation. Mike and the actors went on stage and then Mike called me on to represent the crew, making a very flattering speech. Laurence said it moved her to tears! Then we went to another dinner organised by the financiers, and we read the first reviews - all good - from Variety, Hollywood Reporter, The London Evening Standard etc....all very positive. So everyone was happy....the only so-so review was by Bradshaw of the Guardian: but even he gave us 3 stars....the following day we had lunch with old friends at the Talent Campus, which I attended two years ago - very pleasant -but I had some dodgy soup with frankfurters and some hours later was feeling proper poorly. We had arranged to take Mike and Charlotte to a restaurant specialising in meat (forgetting Mike was now a vegetarian) and as soon as I was there I started to feel sick, excused myself, ran from the place and promptly threw up in the gutter - which continued as I neared the hotel - I felt sorry for the road cleaner - so I went to bed and waited for things to calm down, which they did much later. By the morning I was OK - phew - but this experience has forced me to go onto Mike’s diet: no alcohol and no red meat. Laurence has been trying to persuade me to do this for years, and now I’m copying my director she is mad with me for spurning her advice!"
End of that saga.
I'm currently out of work, having completed work on HGL before Christmas.
Going backwards, before HGL I spent most of 2006 waiting for Mike Leigh to start, but prior to that I was editing a version of THE DECAMERON that has ended up unshown having been retitled VIRGIN TERRITORY, though I now hear that it might get a French release under the title of MEDIEVAL PIE! That's a disgraceful title, and though the film is not that good, it's not that bad either.
But you never know with films....someone, somewhere will enjoy it.

Any students out there? if you read this, sign up for next year's Talent Campus which runs with the Berlin Film Festival. There are 500 students from all over the world. The language is English, thank goodness, since I was invited there this year and managed to give a session on film editing which went down a treat. I was lucky since I had the foresight to ask Avid Germany to send a machine and an engineer, and my assistant Gavin came too with his girlfriend Jennie. They didn't pay for Gavin and I was really happy that he'd decided to come anyway. He was a great help....and the first session was a symposium on film editing chaired by Larry Sider of the National Film School. As usual I was the oldest person on stage - and the fact that Larry introduced me as 'legendary' caused he to think about my age....well, I cut my first film in the 60s so you can tell....anyway, there I was on the platform with Angie Lam from Hong Kong (she cut HERO and KUNG FU HUSTLE), a girl from New York who cut documentaries and a German editor called Dirk. We answered questions and generally fooled around for 2 hours - there were some 300 people in the audience. Then, the following day, I gave my session on editing, where I cut a section from THE DECAMERON in front of the students and then invited people up on stage to have a go themselves. Gavin helped them while I did a Q&A with clips from films I had edited. It seemed to go down well. I only had time for two editors to try their hand at cutting the scene, and if I'm ever asked to return, I'll probably change the format. But it was fun and perhaps instructive....would you people out there let me know if you are reading this stuff? Should I create my own website?

I finished my work on DECAMERON: ANGELS & VIRGINS since the film had gone over-schedule by 6 weeks or so and it was running into dates I had made previously to participate in CAMPUS 2006 at the Berlin Festival. So I had to leave before the final mix of the film, which I was reluctant about simply because the director, David Leland, might feel let down. He had remarked that we were "joined at the hip" on this one. It's not always like that. I wonder just how much director's should rely on their editors? In the old days they didn't even come into the cutting room - I often wondered if they knew where we hid - in any case, if they did come, they couldn't see much on the teeny-tiny screens we used. I cut a black & white Cinemascope film, THE INNOCENTS, now something of a classic, on an old Acmiola, the UK version of the American Moviola. So, by the very geographic nature of things, we didn't get close to our directors. In fact it was not until I worked with John Schlesinger that I had that experience - John loved the cutting rooms and we had a lot of fun together as we worked (on many films), though always protecting the movie and ganging up on interfering producers. But that's another area which must wait for a further edition....

There is no doubt that the editing of film has become a major craft and that editors are being churned out of film schools and 'media' studies like sausages - but where will they all go to earn a crust? we are constantly asked to read cv's from young people who are looking for work - but we tend to stick to the teams we already have, or have worked with in the past. The opportunities available to newcomers are small. I feel so sorry for them - years ago, when I was lucky enough to start work in a cutting room it was hard enough to get one's foot in the door, but now it's 1000 times harder. But, as I tell students, if they have the passion and the guts and the patience, they will, eventually, make it.
For the record: I have just finished editing a new feature called DECAMERON: ANGELS & VIRGINS for producers Martha & Dino di Laurentiis. I'll not be talking much about that in this bog, since there is a confidentiality clause built in and I might even want to work with them again! I don't know when the film is released. I am off to the Campus 2006 at the Berlin Film Festival and will report from there.

Well, here we go - this blog is aimed at all film editors and those who are interested in the craft - a more public concern than it was formerly - the film editor has at last been recognised as a really valuable contributor to those films that people enjoy, love and see again. We used to be backroom people, but now are more and more thrust into the limelight. This is both a good and a bad thing, but since the advent of digital film editing things have altered. Now everything we do can be immediate, thus the directors and producers with short patience spans can be happy - since they only have to say "How about if we ..." and it's done. Before digital we would have time to make changes, and those with short attention spans were soon out of the room and back in their offices. Recutting a sequence could take days! So, today, we are quicker but not, perhaps, better than we were. Digital has produced rapidity but less thinking time - so maybe that's why movies are longer these days - that's today's beef! More later....