Behind the Best Edited Movie of the Year
John Magary on editing improv, drug scenes, and that damn door in Nathan Silver's 'Between the Temples.'
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by Nevin Kelly-Fair
While working out of the Washington Square Films office last year, I had the pleasure of being a fly on the wall to the editing process of Between the Temples. My desk was a few feet away from the suite where director Nathan Silver and editor John Magary edited the film, and I heard many a muffled conversation between them as the film took shape over the course of the year in the lead up to their submission to festivals.
When I caught the finished film this past June at Tribeca Film Festival, I was struck by what an accomplishment it was on John’s part. The film’s blend of 16mm photography, overlapping dialogue, and improvisation makes it a unique treat in today’s cinematic landscape — but also, I imagined, an enormously difficult puzzle to piece together. So I was eager to ask John about his experience editing the film. Here, we go in depth on John’s working relationship with Nathan, finessing the sound design, and how he cracked the big dinner table scene.
Nevin Kelly-Fair: How did you meet Nathan and what was your working relationship leading up to Between the Temples?
John Magary: I think the first time I met Nathan we both had films at MOMA in a series they used to do every year called “Not Playing At A Theater Near You.” It was five undistributed movies that they liked. I made this movie called The Mend and he made a movie called Uncertain Terms.
I think there was a few years of a gap, and then he made his movie, Thirst Street, and was looking for an editor to come on when they were editing in the U.S. They did the first pass in France, so he wanted me to come on as a second editor. That’s how we really became friends and now we’re really quite close… too close! [Laughs.]
What was the timeline for the edit of Between the Temples?
All told, the whole process was around eight months. Some off and on there where we had weeks off, when we were waiting for notes or there was a holiday or something. It was a lengthy process. We started just a couple weeks after the movie was done shooting in April 2023, and then we just went right through the summer, through the fall, and were editing up until sometime in December 2023.
And what was your working relationship like with Nathan? Is he telling you what to do from the offset or does he let you take a first pass alone?
We have a really good understanding of each other, I think. We respect each other’s peculiarities, but also how we work the best — how I work best as an editor and how he works best as a director.
I really do like to have a little bit of freedom to engage with the material on my own, even to the point that I don’t really consult with the script much. On a first pass, I don’t really look at notes too much either. I want to take every scene as fresh as I can and approach it creatively to see what I can add.
I would edit with Nathan in the room, but I was editing for the majority of the time alone. I’d start a new scene every day — though that wasn’t always the case; some scenes took days and one scene took weeks — and then I’d work through it until I was in a place I was happy, which usually took me a while.
What’s your approach to your first assembly cuts of scenes?
When I do my assemblies I don’t see a huge value in throwing things together to see what the whole scene is. I know that’s an approach some people take, but to me it seems like busy work.
Usually when you watch through the takes of something, especially if they go through the entire scene, you get a sense for what the scene is. I’m much more linear and I like building, building, building. What’s the best take here? What’s the best take here? How do those two takes interact? Where should the camera go from here? Where should the shot go? Where should the tempo go?
It takes a while, and then when I feel it’s worth watching for someone else, then I’ll reach out to Nathan and say, “Come on into the office and take a look!” And then he’ll take a look and we’ll discuss what we think is working, what’s not working. Almost always it's too long or sagging, or maybe I tried something that he just doesn’t care for. And then he’ll leave the room and I’ll work alone again.
One of the scenes that really intrigued me with its unique approach was the drug trip scene. Did Nathan give you any instructions for that or did he just say “Go your own way on it, here’s some visuals from the script”?
A lot of the stuff in that scene is sound. At one point, I was trying more visual effects — my terribile visual effects. [Laughs.] Trying out different things, like some person’s face drooping or some kind of weird arm showing up, but Nathan didn’t want to go that route.
With a drug scene, it’s really interesting… The movie’s psychologically motivated, but the editing isn’t necessarily motivated by psychology. But when you’re doing a drug scene it has to be in some ways [motivated by psychology]. So there’s different modes within the scene of things happening to the characters that are ahead of the audience and the audience is trying to figure it out.
So what we’re seeing is very internal. We’re hearing things the way that Jason [Schwartzman]’s character is hearing things, and that goes on for a while. And then midway through the scene we jump out and we lose those sound effects and shift more towards Carol [Kane]’s POV because she’s just trying to figure out what the hell is going on and why Jason’s acting so weird, even though confusingly she’s also on drugs [laughs], but she doesn’t seem to fully get it.
It was one of the scenes that took the longest because there’s so many possibilities. The hardest thing is you can go in so many different directions. You’re limited by the footage but you’re not limited by sound and the space of the sound and how exactly it’s influencing him.
And I was also always trying to be mindful of what’s funny. If someone’s on drugs, I want it to be funny. And eventually we really worked with our sound designer extensively to expand those sound effects and change what direction they’re coming at you in the theater and how certain reverb is working. They’re all done through the computer but I tried to keep the sound effects to a studio analog kind of thing: like reverb and repeats, nothing too technical.
That analog approach matches the tactile feeling of the film so well. The drug trip feels so fresh because it works within those constraints. And it was great to see how you play around with that with Jason’s character, who is himself a little more analog in how he leads his life.
And then you have something like the moment where he chases the child version of himself around the house. The first half of that was actually in camera. They slowed down the camera roll, they shot at 12 frames per second, so he’s running around like a Benny Hill cartoon. [Laughs.] I love that stuff because I have to use it. If something’s shot at twelve frames per second, you’re not going to make that stuff look normal. That stuff’s fun. I usually embrace any dumb, goofy idea they try. [Laughs.]
The other scene I’d love to hear how you tackled was the final dinner scene. It seems like it would be a beast to approach, with the multiple overlapping conversations, characters, and mood shifts.
Far and away the hardest thing I’ve had to edit by a factor of ten. They shot over two full nights, and they shot with two cameras, which was great. I think it was the only scene in the whole movie that had two camera coverage. They would shoot an entire roll on each of the two film cameras for each take, uncut, and just play out the scene. So usually the takes would be eight to nine minutes.
As a sidebar, part of why it took eight months to edit the film was there was so much improvisation — so many different options, so many different ways a scene could go, and ways to layer the dialogue on top of each other and overlap things.
And this scene was pure improv. The actors knew where in the movie they were, they knew the contours of the scene, they knew there would be a reveal of something. But what happened during each take was often entirely different. So a character might leave in the middle of a scene, a character might stay at the end, there might be a withholding of reveals, or they might play a game.
And this was the scene that Nathan warned me about in the whole process. “When you get to the dinner, we should probably have a conference.” [Laughs.] I think it was a tough shoot, because the actors were really out there and vulnerable, and that’s hard. And ultimately they were really up to it.
If you look at one of those takes — say that you combine the footage together so you have the two cameras and watch them splitscreen — you’re sort of like, “Ok I guess the scene could go this way.” And then you watch the next take and you’re like, “Ooh but I really like this stuff… that’s good.” So basically what ended up happening was it’s just a pure synthesis of ten to fifteen takes, full rolls each time, of going: “I want this to build to this to build to this…” There was a great amount of freedom in it but it was daunting as hell because I had to invent a shape for the scene that wasn’t there initially.
What was your approach to finding that shape for the scene?
I wanted the scene to become a series of trials and errors. There were long days I was kind of losing my mind trying to find that out before it clicked. I think the first cut of the scene was probably 25 minutes long, something like that. Really, really long for a scene.
There was a luxury to it, because I had all these reaction shots I could use to fake a lot of things. When you shoot improv with just one camera, you have to basically manufacture reaction shots for everything. If it's all improvised and you’re on character A in a take, you never have footage of how character B actually responds.
With this, we had actual responses, because we shot with two cameras for every take. The camera was floating around — Sean [Price Williams] and the other camera operator were counterbalancing each other around the table trying to get shots in here, here, here. And Sean was also zooming and panning, and moving. So there was a ton of movement which I think helped the editing, and a ton of options in terms of reactions. But also that made the whole process that much more daunting.
It was a weird experience. I never was worried that I wouldn’t have enough, it was a question of what the form of the scene would be and if it would include this crazy little thing or this crazy little thing. Like, there was one thing that was in the movie up until the very end and then it got cut out at the last minute because someone said it was too much.
How long did it take you to get to the final cut of the scene?
Overall the editing of the final scene, which ended up being twelve or thirteen minutes, took three weeks, which was a long time for one scene. And it was a scene that got refined and refined. It was the most picked over scene by the end, cause it was so long at first and then shortened and shortened.
I think some of the initial views of the movie people would say, “Good god that scene is so long.” And Nathan and I for so long were like, “Isn’t it long? Isn’t it great how long it is?” [Laughs.] Because the trick was to cut it down and not make it so sprawling and gangly that people leave the theater, but also make it feel too long, even at a shorter length.
Was there anything in terms of a lightbulb moment that helped you crack the final shape?
The big revelation I had was to not choose one path but to try and incorporate all paths. Have Jason constantly try and profess this thing to Carol. And the stages are first “That was weird but we’re going to keep eating,” and then “That’s fun,” and then he tries it again and people are looking at each other, “Oh ok.. That’s really strange but let’s keep going…” and then by the end he’s trying again and again and people are like, “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
And there’s multiple turning points. There’s a turning point where Carol is receiving this information, there’s the turning point where everyone at the table turns against Jason, and there’s the turning point where Maddie [Weinstein]’s character loses it and cries. Because what he’s doing — considering what happened earlier in the movie — can be perceived as somewhat cruel to Maddie’s character. And that was another challenge: How does she respond to that?
And that’s not mentioning the beginning, which is kind of the anthropological section where we see the Shabbat rituals. And then the choices on how to end it: How does he leave the table? How do we go and transition into this next movement? There was a lot in that scene. Good grief.
You were juggling a lot!
Yes and being protective of the unruliness of it, not paring it down too much. One of the things I'm so proud of with the scene is that it just feels like this chore. I do sometimes read Letterboxd reviews and a lot of people mention the dinner party scene and obviously call it “cringe.” And I’m like, “Yeah, well hopefully it's that, that’s the minimum you should feel.” [Laughs.]
To close things up, I have to ask you about that incredible/terrible door creaking sound. It was the biggest laugh in my screening. It’s so fucking fantastic. How did that come about?
I will unabashedly say I am very proud of myself because I remember I was up in the office working on that sound effect, building it for a long time. In the mix stage we definitely refined it, but I tried so many different sounds. Like a dog barking, and then a cat… and then I think I ended up on a dog barking backwards? But layered under a scream. It sounds like a yelp which is why I find it so funny.
For a while, we had smoothed it out in the mix and made it a little more realistic sounding and I was like, “Wait a minute. It’s just not as funny!” It has to feel like someone screaming. It’s another kind of ridiculous sound effect that’s psychologically motivated. Jason’s character’s id. [Laughs.]
I had a feeling the more awful the sound, the funnier it would be. It just keeps going and going and going. There were discussions in post of “Boy, that sound is so fucking annoying.” And I was like, “Yeah I know, isn’t it perfect?”
Nevin Kelly-Fair is a producer’s assistant at MountainA. Most recently Nevin worked on the Oscar-nominated Todd Haynes film May December and the Alma Har’el-directed limited series, Lady in the Lake. Prior to MountainA, Nevin worked at the SFFILM festival where he assisted with programming and filmmaker liasoning for the fest, and The Gotham, where he helped lead public programming. He also founded & programmed Gotham’s under 25 initiative, Gotham Z. Nevin was born and raised in San Francisco's Excelsior District and now resides in New York.
Listings
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Josh Palmer is also casting two roles for that fall-shooting feature, with descriptions here.
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The 48 Hour Film Project, in Montreal, is looking for teams to enter and make a film this September 20 -22. Winner goes to Filmapalooza in March 2025 and is eligible for a spot in a screening at the Canes Film Festival Short Film Corner. $99 CAD to register. Email jasen48hr@gmail.com or erin48hr@gmail.com with questions.
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