Louise Ford's Voice as an Editor
The 'Nosferatu' editor on working with Robert Eggers, what makes a good director-editor pairing, and finding a career in film in her 30s.
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From a young age, cinema made a big impression on Louise Ford. She can remember queuing around the block to see the original Star Wars; being seven years old and suffering a week’s worth of nightmares after witnessing the evil queen transform in Disney’s 1937 version of Snow White; and staying up late to watch Hammer horror films with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. But growing up in a small town in the northwest of England in the 1980s, working in the film industry never seemed like a real possibility. Instead, Ford found success in journalism, working as an editor in London for outlets like The Sunday Times and Cosmopolitan.
By 2001, Ford wasn’t feeling creatively fulfilled from journalism. So when her husband — who is a TV and documentary editor — got a job in New York, she left her own job and moved with him. There, Ford encountered a thriving independent film community. “For the first time, I was able to see a path,” she says. She took a six-week Art of Editing course at the now-shuttered The Edit Center. “And as soon as I sat down to edit my first scene, I realized I had all these amazing elements at my disposal — beautiful images, acting, music, sound — that I could use to craft into whatever story I wanted to tell, in whatever way I wanted to tell it,” Ford says. “It was the proverbial thunderbolt. I was like, ‘This is what I should've been doing all along.’”
Since then, Ford has gone on to be the go-to editor for filmmakers like Robert Eggers, Cory Finley, and Paul Dano. I spoke to Ford this past summer for a long Filmmaker Magazine article I wrote about how — if at all — an editor’s voice shows up across their filmography. It was an illuminating chat, in which Ford described what makes a good director-editor pairing and how she collaborates with different directors. As her latest film, Nosferatu (which I loved!), is about to hit theaters, I thought this would be a good time to share our discussion.
Do you feel like your journalistic editing is similar to what you're doing now, editing films?
I was in my mid-30s before I even got behind the keyboard for film editing, and I think the experience of copy editing had made me familiar with the process of manipulating other people’s work, so I don’t feel so precious about the material; I’m not scared to make a cut, rearrange scenes, try stuff. Experience gives you the confidence in your decisions, which is a great thing about getting older! Plus with digital editing, nothing is irreversible, anyway.
What was your first professional film editing experience?
I was an edit room intern on a film called The Savages, directed by Tamara Jenkins. Both she and the editor Brian Kates were incredibly generous and let me sit in on the edit, and even during phone conferences with producers and the studio. I couldn't believe that I was able to watch take after take of Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney, these brilliant actors, doing their thing. Three months before, I'd been back in England working as the Deputy Editor of Cosmopolitan, having interns fetch me the coffee; now I was the intern fetching the coffee, and I could not have been happier.
That's awesome.
Editing is endlessly fascinating to me because you're constantly analyzing the realm of human psychology while you're editing these performances. What's more interesting than that? And I have been so incredibly lucky so far to have worked with some true artists in every discipline — writers, directors, actors, DPs, production and costume designers, composers, and sound designers. I mean, I’ve had some wonderful puzzle pieces to play with and put together. Not only am I in awe of everyone else's skill and talent, which constantly pushes me to do better, but I love feeling part of a team where everybody is giving their all to this collaborative creative endeavor.
Did you feel like there was something you brought as an editor beyond having a facility with the programs?
Having a facility with Avid is 1/10th of being a good narrative editor; 90% of film editing happens in your head. To me, what any editor brings to a film is their own experience in life and their own understanding of human emotion and psychology. Everyone brings their own sensibility, and everyone's sensibility is unique. It's molded by their specific experiences.
All I'm aiming for is to tell the story the director wants to tell in the best way possible. The challenge is how do I help the director bring his or her vision into being. Sometimes that does drive you to try stuff. My personal style is the more invisible style of editing. It's more about helping the audience get lost in a story and then not getting in the way of the story, not interrupting that flow. To me, the highest compliment is you don't notice the cuts, you get completely lost in the story.
Having said that, some of the editing I admire the most is visible. Take a film like La Chimera, which is a somewhat tragic — but thrilling — story: the editor Nelly Quettier has some sequences where she sped up the film, so it looks comical, like those silent Charlie Chaplin films… and it’s so counter-intuitive, and yet it works perfectly to add another element, a feeling of oddness… I can’t quite put my finger on what it does exactly, but it makes me feel something unique, maybe it just knocks you off-balance because it’s so unexpected, which actually makes you feel like anything unexpected could happen at any time in the story, which is kind of what transpires. So the editing there is adding to the impact of the story in a subconscious way. She’s an absolute genius, phenomenal.
Can you remember when you first met Robert Eggers? And do you remember what you bonded over?
I first met Robert around 2008, when I was an assistant editor working on a lot of NY-based indie features. Maura Anderson was a runner on one of those films, and she was producing Robert's short film, The Telltale Heart. She asked me if I would be interested in cutting it, and I'm like, "Yes, I want to cut anything that I can!" She gave me the script, and I'm blown away. It's all there — Rob’s originality of vision and the way he writes dialogue, as well as all the things that traditionally you’re not supposed to mention in a script — details about costume and set design, how camera will move and so on. It’s so well-written I can see and feel this thing already. I instantly realize this guy’s a one-off, potentially one of the great, original directors who creates an entirely idiosyncratic world that is unlike anything else we’ve ever seen and is instantly recognizable and uniquely his own — like David Lynch, or Nic Roeg. I kid you not. I just had a gut feeling. This was exactly the type of director I had hoped to work with in my wildest dreams, and I couldn’t believe I’d stumbled on him right out of the gate, so to speak.
So I met with him and and I was so bloody nervous, I babbled on incoherently about the films I liked for a bit. And he’s sitting there all self-possessed and cool, and I’m thinking, Fuck, I’ve blown it. And then we started talking about our mutual love of folk tales and horror stories and myth, and I was able to talk about Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folk Tale, which I think made an impression, and then I was impressed that he not only knew about, but was very into a whole lot of British cultural icons like the Edwardian artist Arthur Rackham, whose fairytale and fantasy illustrations I’d been fascinated by as a kid, and his love of those old Hammer horror films. And since then, our relationship has grown into a kind of brother-sister thing. We just get each other.
And that's what I was saying about life experience. You can’t worry about how to meet the kind of collaborators you want to work with — if you follow your own interests, you will come across those people naturally. And it's a chemistry thing. You meet some people, and you just hit it off. The main conduit to meeting the right director to work with is always the script. Always. If you read the script and you connect with it, chances are you're going to connect with the person who wrote it.
I think most directors will say that they like collaborators who elevate their ideas. Are you able to locate times in your career where you've done that? And within that invisible editing, where does some of your sensibility and skillset come into play?
Sure. Inspired by the samurai sword which features in the opening sequence of Thoroughbreds, I used some Taiko drum music in the initial edit that then became a signature in the score; same with the Tanya Tagaq throat singing. On The Witch I wrote a scene with Robert that we shot as a pick up. At the beginning of the movie, the baby gets stolen, mom's distraught, dad and son Caleb go off into the woods to hunt the hare. And there's this very long sequence — or it would have been very long — of William and Caleb in the forest. When we put the whole thing together, we were away from the farm for too long. We needed a scene back with Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) at the farm. We were also worried that the starvation aspect of the story wasn't coming through enough. So I suggested we have a scene of Thomasin going to the hen coop to collect eggs, to find there’s only one there. And Rob's like, "Great. How about she drops it, and it breaks open to reveal the dying, bloody fetus of a chick." Which is a great example of how good collaboration works — you end up with a better scene, if you have a good partner to bounce ideas off of.
Besides that, you write lines of dialogue for ADR and stuff like that. The thing about editing is the general perception is you're given a jigsaw puzzle and you put it together. But when you're in that post phase, there's so much writing work you can still do. We had to do a couple of extra pickup scenes for The Northman, and Rob will run scripts past me. He was co-writing with Sjon on that. And the editor gets involved. I'm not saying that's unique, that's what a lot of feature editors will do. There's collaboration on the actual words in the script. A lot of times, Robert will run dialogue by me. He usually ends up having the best idea. But I might help him get there.
With narrative editing, people often talk about it as though there are all these limitations and the editor isn’t writing in the way they are with documentaries. But everything you're describing makes it seem like there are fewer limitations than some people make it seem like.
Yeah. And sometimes one little ADR line completely transforms a scene. Because it can be a particular story point that wasn't coming across. You can sometimes do it in one line, and then it all makes sense.
I wonder if there's a throughline in your work that has to do with human psychology.
Last year, when I was editing Nosferatu, I met up with Joi McMillon for dinner in London, where she happened to be cutting Mufasa with Barry Jenkins. And we were talking about what our approach to editing was. And it turns out it was very similar. And then I asked, "Did you read a lot when you were a kid?" And she was like, "Yeah! I was always reading!" A couple of drinks had been had at this point, but we came up with this whole theory that part of what might make someone a good narrative feature editor is if you were a kid who'd spent a lot of time reading fiction. That perhaps we were absorbing the tenets of what makes a good narrative story — the pacing, the character development, the emotional beats — subconsciously, almost like osmosis.
Are you able to locate different editors' fingerprints on different movies?
I'll tell you someone who jumped out at me a few years ago. That was Walter Fasano, who edits for Luca Guadagnino. The first one I noticed the editing on was A Bigger Splash. I love that movie. Some of the editing is phenomenal. The choice of music — there's some really bold music in there. The fast cuts when they're driving from the beach. The boldness of it. The audacity. It's rock and roll. It adds a whole flavor to the movie and it fits the movie.
On the completely opposite end of the spectrum, there's Dylan Tichenor's editing of Phantom Thread. It did that thing where he'd rest on a closeup of Daniel Day Lewis or Vicky Krieps and there wouldn't be any dialogue. He's so good at choosing takes. Because the acting is so good, you can read Daniel Day Lewis's mind. That blistering “don’t pick a fight with me” scene where Lesley Manville is berating him for treating Vicky’s character badly, and Dylan just stayed on Lesley the whole time, not cutting back to Daniel once, even when he interrupts, because that shows the power Cyril (Manville’s character) has over her brother, how strong she is. But that kind of editing takes a lot of confidence and courage. That's the gift of having amazing performances.
You mentioned you have an influence on the music in a film, what does that look like?
On The Northman and Nosferatu, we had the score in pretty early because Robert Carolan, who's the composer on those two movies, is a longtime friend of Robert Eggers's. So they're in conversation in pre-production about how Robert wants the score to work. But what it looks like is, first of all, I cut everything dry. I'll cut every scene without any music, always. And then when I've got the music on, I can manipulate where the volume is, where the crescendo is, or whatever. And that's going to impact the emotion of the scene and the pacing of the scene.
On the early movies, The Witch and The Lighthouse, Robert and I would cut together the music cues, consisting of different classical pieces, before we had the score. We might use a cymbal crash from one piece and a violin line from another piece or a sound effect, or a drone, something that's not music, per se. I'm not calling myself a composer, but it's kind of like composing. And then we'd hand it over to the actual composer as a starting point to give an idea of what we wanted.
On The Lighthouse, I spent way more time editing sound and music than picture. Way more. I think there were probably sixteen different pieces of music and sound effects all being mashed together and manipulated during the crescendo at the end when he goes into the light and is laughing hysterically before he falls down the stairs. Robert Eggers, I will say, is so knowledgeable in terms of classical music. He started off as a musician. So he knows all the pieces he loves, all the composers he loves. So he brings a lot of that. But I will find pieces, or suggest making this a bit louder, this a bit quieter. We can rewrite it in a sense using pieces of other music. Robert's said to me that he likes how I do that. I've been in the room at least six months with Rob before we get to the mix stage. So that's six months of figuring this stuff out. So chances are we've got it in pretty good shape before we even get to the mix.
Was there something that felt particularly exciting about film editing as a form of writing to you?
Yes, of course. The first time I sat down I realized I had the power in the keys. Everything's there at my fingertips. I've got the power with the keyboard to manipulate the pacing, how a character appears, how a character is perceived. Because every take is different. Even with the most consistent actors. Really great actors will give you options. But even with actors who don't do that, there's differences between every single take — nuances, gestures, eye twitches, looks, subliminal behavioral clues as to what's going on inside someone's brain. I am very cognizant of that and I very much enjoy the challenge of making every scene sing, and orchestrating the pacing of film as a whole.
It's endlessly fascinating to me how choosing a different take can impact not only the scene but the whole film. If you have a particular performance from an actor, what you choose can really make a huge difference. That's the thing I think people don't really get. The choice of what take you use is such an unseen, unknown skill in a film editor. Because how would anybody know?
Sometimes I will choose takes while I'm in the assembly process that the director didn't want. I'm looking at my script notes from the script supervisor. I've got ten takes and for the sake of argument, three, nine, and ten are the selects. But I might use seven for another reason. There's no right or wrong here, it's all subjective. But in choosing seven, sometimes the director will go, "Oh, right, I hadn't thought of that. That's cool." That's why the director-editor relationship is so important. It's so important that you are on the same wavelength in terms of creative sensibility.
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