Blair McClendon's Voice as an Editor

McClendon on what makes Joe Walker great, how Ozu influenced 'Aftersun,' and why he doesn't think movies are really about stories.

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A few weeks ago, I published an interview with Vera Drew drawn from a long Filmmaker Magazine article I wrote about how — if at all — an editor’s voice shows up across their filmography. This week, I’m running another conversation that contributed to that article. This one is with Blair McClendon, who has edited The Assistant, Aftersun, and most recently Union and The Last Showgirl.

While McClendon obviously works in service of a given director’s vision, he was also quite aware of his own sensibilities and how they may show up in his work. “I think I am most interested in how much space and breath you can put into a movie,” he says, adding that on any project, “the thing that's most paramount is the rhythm.”

In this conversation, we begin by talking broadly about the role of an editor, before zooming in on how McClendon and director Charlotte Wells found the ending of Aftersun.

On narrative films, across your work with different directors, I'm curious how your sensibility comes through in the edit. 

When I'm talking to assistant editors or rising editors I'll tell them I kind of know how the programs work. If what you want is someone extremely good at the program and who can execute directions fast, you should hire a twenty-one year-old at NYU who's certified in Premiere, because they're going to be faster than all of us. The real reason to hire me is that you have some idea either that our sensibilities overlap or that where they don't overlap that tension is productive. 

I guess I can think about what my taste is and what it runs towards. In fiction, I'm always like, editing isn't actually making a cut, and so what I'd like to do is keep whatever images on screen for as long as it's compelling. Which maybe is longer for me than for some other people. I think I am most interested in how much space and breath you can put into a movie. Music video cutting doesn’t come to me instinctively. I don't think to cut fast enough. Whereas, I think what comes to me is if a shot's good, hold it. 

To me, the thing that's most paramount is the rhythm of a thing. And basically you can get away with anything if the rhythm's right. My giveaway from Aftersun was when Charlie and I needed to figure out how to repeat the pillow shots from Ozu — the sequence of nice little still lives in between two sequences — we just watched a bunch of movies that had them and timed them, and we found that they all run like five to seven seconds. So that was cheating. They all run the exact same amount of time. 

You mentioned being good at finding the rhythm of a thing. And I'm wondering if you have any kind of a musical background. 

Not in a long time. Once upon a time, I thought I would be a good musician, but no longer. 

But I guess the reason I'm always on the fence a bit about editing and writing and writing and editing and their overlap is that my answer is often, "Yes, if you take writing at its most expansive meaning." In the sense that people also write music. And to me, I think that's what is actually happening. Or it's like you're taking some sort of fluxus directions for a poem: "Here's the sandbox that you can play in, and now you have to construct some feeling out of that." To me, the writing is in the revision of the story, but — and this is probably going to make people feel weird about hiring me — I just don't think movies are about stories. I don't even think they're not about stories because I like quiet, austere films. I think Star Wars is not about a story. I think movies are often about these gestures and these emotions that land. And I think you produce those in a sort of musical sense through a particular rhythm, through a resolution or lack of resolution of that rhythm. 

And I think of that on a very small level — with those interstitial shots, you can feel if a series of shots are running the same amount of time and then suddenly one doesn't. In the same way, you can feel something when those shots go from very small to very big. And what I often find is a very common problem early in editing a film is all the scenes run about the same length, which you can totally feel because it’s totally stultifying. So my feeling is it often comes very close to that. 

And then I think there are some editors where you can clock who did it. I think Joe Walker, who does Denis Villeneuve's movies and Steve McQueen's movies, is one of those people. I think that even though Denis Villeneuve and Steve McQueen are very different filmmakers, I often am like, "Oh, no, that is Joe Walker cinema." They are cut very similarly.

How so?

I think part of what makes Denis Villeneuve work compared to a generic blockbuster of the last decade is there's a little more patience in those shots. He certainly loves to design a shot. But I think there's a real patience in those that I think has disappeared from a lot of Hollywood cinema, though if you go back not too long ago it was pretty common. It's hard to put language to this, but I often think of both the Steve McQueen movies he cut and the Denis Villeneuve movies he cut as having very hard edges. I think some of it is in the shot design. I think some of it is in his patience and his willingness for there to be silence in just the shot. And I also think it's this real interest — which is not unique to Joe, but his movies seem to do it a lot — in what two images up against each other really produce. I think in an ideal world everyone wants to do that. But I also think there's a form of editing that tries to be more fluid. 

I've been trying to tease out this idea of how two movies would be different if two different editors switched movies. Do you ever watch something and think about how you would've edited the movie differently?

I think it's easier for me to see if it's someone I've worked with before and then they work with someone else. Then it's like, "You know what, I wouldn't have done that." But let's say Joe Walker and I switch Dune and Aftersun, I think probably — well, you know, in some ways it's hard to say what would change, because I bet in the back of my mind there is a part of me that's wondering what he would do when I'm cutting something. I think probably, and this may be a virtue of the filmmakers we're working with, Dune would be slower in my hands on the scene level. I mean, if he cut Aftersun, he probably would've done it faster than I did it. I just think he would've hit upon ideas I had much faster. Maybe the tagline is if you're thinking of hiring me, Joe Walker could probably have done it faster. 

I think another reason it's hard to pull apart is you find filmmakers you want to work with and you keep working with them. And then it becomes a little hard to see how somebody would do it differently. I think there are types of films that I would be less likely to do, and so my answer for what would happen is they'd be very different because we don't do the same thing. I think if you flipped me and a Marvel movie, I'd just not know how to do it. I think in [Marvel] kind of filmmaking you're really running the emotion through faces. And I think a closeup is such an unnatural image in the world. You just do not experience someone's face like that unless you're in a fight with them or kissing them. A closeup or even a medium closeup is this insanely powerful thing, so don't waste it. And I think there's a lot of filmmaking styles right now that are like, to register the emotion it needs to be with the actor. I think it works for a certain kind of filmmaking. But I think you're better off registering the emotion somewhere else. Which I guess gets back to the rhythm thing. I think if you want to produce a feeling you don't produce it in the scene you're in. You make it so it lands somewhere after that.

It seems like you and Charlotte Wells have pretty similar tastes and sensibilities. But what are the areas of tension between you two as you work? And how do you rub off on her?   

With her and I, it's sort of a particular thing because we've known each other for eleven years. I worked on her shorts before she made her feature, so we had some familiarity of how the other person worked. And I actually think when we first started working together our taste was probably further apart than it is now. Me, her, and the DP, Greg [Oke], all went to film school together, and there's a circle of us who often work together. I guess where our taste winds up converging is we all believe Edward Yang made perfect films and nobody else has ever matched them. 

I think in terms of where these productive tensions are, I’d go back to a useful thing we did on Aftersun. There's a point where you've revised something so much that none of it works for you anymore and it doesn't produce anything in you anymore. At that point, we laid out: What are the two or three moments in this movie that still make you feel something? This was after two or three months of working on it. And they didn't necessarily overlap. And we were like, OK, if it [still produces a feeling], then let's keep that in and we will make the movie work to keep those things in. I think one of mine was when she wakes up and he's recording her on the camcorder. He drops the camera because the phone rings, and there's just this pinkish color field because the camera's not looking at anything in particular. I think I always have an interest in the back of my mind in how long you can get away with not saying anything. But also, there's a very particular feeling and a quality in her voice there that's producing something. 

There were a lot of ways to end that movie. It could keep going. There's some other shots that exist in the world. There's something else the camera could do there. And I just remember in our discussions on where it should end, there's some back and forth amongst a lot of us about if it should end on him — because it's not really about him, it's about her. And I was just like, "The whole movie's been about her, so it's impossible to think at this moment that it's not still her thing." But also I just had a very simple feeling that it's a strong image. I think when I say I care about endings what I often mean is literally the very last image, because it's the only image you can't make up for. If you have to have a weak image somewhere else that sucks, but then you keep the movie moving and hopefully everyone forgives you. 

Aftersun feels like a movie where there was a lot of playing with the ending. Could you talk about the process of constructing that?