Blitz

Today on Art of the Cut we speak with Oscar-nominee Peter Sciberras, ACE about editing director Steve McQueen’s film, “Blitz.” 

Peter was last on Art of the Cut for his work on Jane Campion’s “Power of the Dog” for which he was nominated for an Oscar and an ACE Eddie. His other films include The Rover, The King and Foe, among many others.

Tell me a little about your involvement with this project with director Steve McQueen. 

I was finishing up on a film called Foe. I got an email from my agent saying, “Hey, there’s this thing. Do you want to have a read and jump on a call with Steve McQueen?” And I said, “Yes, I would! I would like to do that!” There’s a “Power of the Dog” connection.

Tanya Seghatchian - a really well-known U.K. producer, and amazing creative producer - knows Steve very well. I think she was involved in “Hunger.” She’s worked at Film Four on the funding of that, I think. She vouched for me.

I mean, I work with See-Saw Films, quite a bit in Australia, and Steve’s worked with them before. They did “Shame” together. So, we had quite a few connections. 

Let’s talk about this movie starting with the very first scene and whether it was scripted that way - because the opening scene is also part of almost the end of the film, too - it’s book-ended.

It was scripted that way. It’s also the only time we really see the carnage close up in that way, so it had a really vital part to play, because we needed that to be really visceral and really strong so that you carried it with you as an audience all the way through.

Also, that opening sequence kind of helps set up some devices and some language that we come back to a few times, like the bombs falling from the sky. You could read that as part of that sequence, but it’s also kind of an abstract thing that floats throughout the film.

It’s kind of this impending danger. You could technically say it’s the actual bomb that hits the Cafe de Paris later in the film. So, there’s quite a lot to do in that opening.

London, during the war, people went on about their business. They went to work, and they went to the pub, and they had a cup of tea, and they listened to the radio… and there are moments in this film where you would never know you’re at war.

But there’s always this underlying anxiety or tension in the air. That opening sequence - if that didn’t work and you didn’t hold on to that, you lose that sense of tension throughout, so it had an incredibly important role to play.

Originally, that scene had far more classical coverage - like trucks pulling up and wider shots of the street. But the more we played with it and the more we refined it, it just felt like you wanted the most visceral kind of rough and loose feeling to it, even though the rest of the film felt more in a classical lens. It was a long process actually getting it to that point. And the sound on that was very fun to craft.

The sound was amazing. You mentioned that you had coverage of the fire trucks arriving and all this stuff, but you drop the viewer in the middle of the scene. They’re struggling with a fire hose or something at the very beginning.

There was a very early assemble which was more like: a bell ringing, then trucks pulling up and ladders going up in the skies. We could have really gone very classic, like to start wide or really build up that everyone’s arriving, everyone’s getting the hose ready, but the more we played with it, the more you just wanted to come in with a punch and just put you back in your seat essentially, just to hang on for dear life. The whole sequence was really fun.

There’s the little set piece within the scene of the fire hose out of control. A big part of setting that up was creating enough chaos before it, so that when it happened, it didn’t feel like you were just presenting this moment.

Then all of a sudden, the firefighter gets hit in the head. He did that eight times and it was quite amazing to watch, especially because he really threw himself down. It was pretty intense to watch. There’s a bit of cheeky frame-cutting in there to get a little extra smack.

We spent so long on the sound. I think we developed the sound on that scene for as long as we developed the cut on that scene. We just kept going back to it and chipping away, chipping away, chipping away. Paul Cotterell and James Harrison - the sound guys - did an incredible job on that.

The sound was definitely an assault right at the beginning of the movie. There was also an interesting visual motif of daisies or a field of daisies and also some streaky light that developed over time…

The Man Ray footage - the daisies that came in really early. Steve had the idea quite early on to use something kind of a little abstract. You can talk about war, but just to get something that felt like a metaphor for the film.

There’s this absolutely violent tearing of light that - when the camera stops - it’s a field of daisies. So, it’s this violence in this beauty. The film is constantly doing that: it’s absolute chaos and terror and humanity, and how beautiful that can be and how dangerous that can be. This constant two sides of things.

Oscar-nominated editor, Peter Sciberras, ACE

You mentioned the sound effects for that opening fire scene, but another place that I noticed the sound effects in a much more subtle way is straight out of that: there’s a grandfather playing a piano, and there’s sound effects throughout that coming out of the piano playing. 

Hans Zimmer’s music starts to build…

I wasn’t sure if it was sound design or score…

Yeah, it’s music. Hans had some very unmusical music for us to build with. I think he built this incredible library of people playing instruments.

What do you temp with for that? 

We just left that knowing that it was kind of going to come at a certain point when Hans got involved. We just temped with the piano on its own and timed it out. When Hans got involved, we adjusted slightly. I think that shots didn’t change dramatically.

Other things changed a little more. But we knew something would come in there, but we didn’t really temp. We were happy to just wait because it really worked nicely with just the piano. You didn’t really get that sense of anxiety without those sounds.

It also helped us to not rely on music. You get up the stairs and Rita staring at George kind of told you everything you needed to know, so we knew it was working without temp to strengthen it. We worked for quite a long time without music on that scene.

We temped in a few places like on top of the train and in the bomb-making sequences, but we didn’t temp a lot. We left it quite open. It helped us really focus on the sound design as well. Paul and James are in the same building as us here in London.

They’re in the basement. We were up on the second floor, so we constantly head down with the sequence and really sit with them the same way Steve sits with me. It was kind of an amazing way to work on a film like this where there is so much sound. Just the crowd stuff alone is huge.

I just got the sense that this thing’s not going to come to life till these crowds have a voice. There’s so many extras in those tube scenes and rushing down the street. Without the sound, it feels like a set, or it feels like a bunch of extras, but you get that sound going and all of a sudden it’s got some power.

Any time you’ve got travel in a film - somebody’s walking, somebody driving - in the hands of an editor like you, there’s a purpose for it. When George is first taken to the train station you could have left the house and cut to them arriving at the train station. Instead, there’s this lovely number of scenes of him getting to the train station with his mom. Can you tell us what the purpose of that is? 

It’s their last moment together. We don’t spend that much time with Rita and George. We need to know their relationship a little more, and we need to feel the sadness of leaving. Also, Rita’s doing it against her will. She knows it’s the right thing to do, but she doesn’t want to do it.

They’re on the bus and George’s performance - or Elliot’s performance - just kind of gave you so much pathos and really helped you understand how difficult that decision is to make. It’s quite an abstract idea to think that thousands of parents had to do that - put their kids on the train and not know whether they’d ever see each other again. 

There’s just such uncertainty, so it’s important to illustrate that and to build that up. 

You also get a sense of London. It’s the first act, so we need a sense of place. We don’t really spend that much time on the streets of London. So there are many reasons, I guess, but I think the emotional is the most important reason - definitely the relationship.

You said one of the few places that you used temp music was in the bomb-making montage. Can you talk about making that montage?

That was a fun one. Steve is really interested in showing what was going on in London. And what with the men gone on the battlefield, it was the women who were working and supplying the munitions for the frontline. I’ve never seen that on screen before.

Steve really wanted to give them a proper moment to be represented. He collected such great featured extras for that. The faces were so incredible and real. It felt so real, even just watching the dailies without any music or any sound.

It was really about finding those moments and finding the movements that would work together and what machines spun in the right way to really get a sense of visual cohesion. Hopefully finding a poetry in the way these women are making weapons of destruction.

There’s a kind of irony that they’re looking up in the sky every night, kind of wondering when the next one’s going to fall, and they’re making the same bombs to send off to be dropped in another place. It’s this cycle of war.

Instead of temping it with music, we spent far more time on sound. We didn’t really go too far with the music. We just had something that was tonally right but added that tempo to it with the clangs and the industrial sounds. We spent a long time building that up.

Then [composer] Hans [Zimmer] worked with that essentially and built to the sequence. That shifted ever so slightly when the music came in. It was pretty developed when Hans came on. We tried to make the music out of the machines essentially.

We kind of needed that rhythm to work, not relying on music too much, not knowing where exactly it was going to end up. When we played it for Hans, we played it with zero temp - no music except the stuff that Steve had worked with Nick Britell on earlier. 

You mentioned that the motion was very important in that montage in the factory and other places. I was thinking about motion being important in that opening scene - the firefighting scene. Do you approach it differently when it’s handheld? 

I find handheld gives you so much freedom as an editor. It’s kind of that doc style, so you can be much rough with it. I started out in a very indie scene in Melbourne - cutting handheld stuff - really beautiful handheld stuff - 16mm handheld kind of stuff. I spent so long doing that, I feel like I can just not even think with that stuff.

I find it gives you so much freedom. Freedom to just be loose and be free with it and find the feeling of it. One thing with handheld is you can overcut it; you can try to refine it too much and it loses actual energy. I think handheld is best kept a little rough, but I try not to over cut it or over refine it. There’s some energy and you can easily ruin it.

So, find those moments then get a fit around them. That’s a good approach for me. Don’t overthink handheld stuff too much. Sometimes the rougher the better.

Director Steve McQueen

When I’m looking at dailies and trying to log handheld, every take is not the same, right? The movement and framing are different on every take, so now you’re trying to to do not only note the performance of the actor, but the performance of the cameraman. 

Definitely. And in this case, also what the fire is doing in the background. We had a lot of footage for that. We had a ton of footage. I think that was one of the only real multi-camera days. There was a little bit of multi-cam in the flood and places like that later in the film, but it was mostly single camera.

The camera guys would be coming into each other’s shots, and it was just like it was chaos, essentially. But handheld is really interesting because you’re always trying to find that poetic moment amongst seven minutes of readjusting and things going wrong.

Just when you think you’ve got a great shot, someone walks into shot. You’re always just searching for these golden moments within. I always find that when I’m watching dailies with that kind of footage, I need to take some breaks. It’s so hard to maintain focus.

You need to select well on handheld stuff that can go in any direction. So, I like to watch a take, then maybe move on to something else and come back so I can try to be as focused as possible while selecting. Otherwise, there are just too many options.

On a macro level, let’s talk a little bit about intercutting, because essentially this is what you’d call a two-hander. There are two main characters and you’re trying to decide how long am I going to be with the mom and how long am I going to be with the son and what exact moment do I choose to cut between them?

Some of that scripted, clearly, but not all of it. We did restructure a lot of those moments. It was definitely scripted when you’d go from one to the other sometimes, but exactly how long can you stay with Rita? George’s story is really the story that’s moving forward.

Essentially, it’s his adventure that’s really driving the film and really Rita’s showing us a part of London that we’ve never seen before and serving slightly different purposes. But the one thing to hold on to with every cut back and forth is finding a way for those two stories to feel connected.

Finding moments in their stories that they are thinking about each other, or there’s a relationship between what’s happening to Rita and finding an emotional connection between the two stories. That was absolutely the most important thing to keep in mind all the time.

We used some dissolves and things like that. George and Ife are walking down the street holding hands then we dissolve into Rita coming into Mickey’s shelter for the first time. Just finding ways to keep them as connected as possible was number one.

One of my favorite cuts between them is George after the jewelry store. He’s been taken in by the gang and was almost caught by the wardens and he’s crying on his own. Then we cut to Rita and Gerald in the kitchen, just after having found out that that George jumped off the train.

Finding these moments where they just speak to each other. It’s either stillness to stillness or movements to movement - just finding ways to make it feel like it’s one story. Not two separate stories happening at the same time.

When you cut between scenes you can allow music to continue into the next scene before you drop it out. But sometimes it’s a hard cut. There were certain times when you used a hard cut where the music from a previous scene ends at the visual cut. Can you talk about the power of that and why to do that? 

There’s lots of conversations with Steve early on. This is a classical tale. It’s Dickensian. It’s almost a fairy tale, but we really want it to have these really sharp edges and just constantly remind the audience that this film is not cute. It’s not so pretty all the time.

It’s rough and we’re at war. A lot of that is about creating these jarring moments. Some audience members don’t particularly love that kind of stuff, but I do. I think it’s important that this isn’t a neat little fairy tale. It’s more serious and it’s harrowing and it’s brutal.

So, I think using that style really kind of enhances that feeling. And it wakes the audience up. I think it refocuses you in a way. It doesn’t ease you into things, and it doesn’t hold your hand. It’s far bolder.

One of the motifs I sensed directorially and editorially, is the use of close-ups and insert shots - very, tight shots. Can you talk about finding those in the dailies and deciding to utilize them, or the discussion around using them?

We always wanted to be close to George and see the world through George’s eyes. So those big closeups on George - just kind of taking in what’s going on - was a guiding light. When we started to work with Hans, that was probably the thing that we worked on the most. His music was so psychological and really let you get into George’s space.

So, we kind of extended quite a lot of shots of George just watching - what was he witnessing around him and just taking it in, especially in the later subway sequence before the dream, like when he was taking in the Punch and Hitler show - just coming down the escalator.

We just want to spend more time with George as much as we could. A lot of it was about creating this sense of energy. Like there’s a tight close-up on a bell when work finishes, and Tommy has just been killed. It’s just these kinds of pops - they’re almost violent.

It all adds to maintaining a sense of tension throughout and reminding the audience that, at any time, things can go bad. The world isn’t as it normally was.

So really drawing attention to the fact that maybe you heard a certain sound or a certain bell and you would be terrified. There were sirens going off and things would be happening, and things could go wrong very quickly.

There was an early cut where we weren’t doing that so much, and you kind of feel that you forgot that you’re at war because you’re in a workplace and it becomes like a workplace drama for a moment, and you’re just sucked into that. It’s really easy to lose track of the fact that we’re actually at war and there is danger around every corner. So it was really crucial to have those moments.

Another place where the kinetics of the camera is really evident is the flashback sequence to the dancing. Rita is remembering an early date with her husband. Tell me a little bit about cutting that, because that was pretty dynamic.

This film was a joy to cut. Even though it’s a very heavy subject matter. There were these moments of true loss, and that was definitely one of them - and we just had Tommy’s death. So, it was really important to us that that scene just felt like pure lifeforce - joyous in a sense. One of those nights where you’re hearing a great band or just having an amazing time - even though it kind of goes wrong later. 

That was another one where there was a lot of footage. There’s a lot of takes on that. And that was the other multi-cam scene. We spent probably more time on that than the fire - chipping away and chipping away. Steve is really an intuitive director. It was actually the first thing we sat down and really cut together during the shoot, just to know that we had it.

We actually discovered we were missing a few elements, and we picked a whole bunch of stuff up - the real micro stuff. We had this great take where this woman was dancing to the camera, and she was just screaming and losing her mind. We knew that was the way we were going to end, but everything in between was up for grabs. Essentially, it was just about creating the absolute most joy and frenetic energy.

Also, we did something really interesting where we just turned up the bass in the Avid and that unlocked the scene for us. We needed that kind of sound. We needed that feeling. By adding bass, that got us in the mood to get it right. 

I even sensed that in the theater! 

Yeah, we carried that all the way through the mix. 

You’re listening to 40s music, but it sounds like a 90s club. 

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. It feels quite contemporary, even though it’s 40s jazz.

Structurally, you mentioned that the scene came right after a death. That’s one of those things that a director might feel - that the energy or tone dips a bit, and you need a scene like the dance scene to get the energy level up, whether that scene is scripted in that spot or not. Was there any structural stuff like that? 

We had talked about moving it. I think we tried it, and it just felt like the audience needed it after Tommy’s death. Sometimes you have those conversations, but you realize the chain reaction is not helpful. Now you’re going to restructure the rest of the movie in a really not so good way.

There was always the intention to have George’s first joyful moment on the road with the trains while they’re on top of the train, and the audience is expecting something bad to happen, but it doesn’t. It’s beautiful, but then something happens a minute later, but it really felt like we needed some energy right after that to bring people back in. 

When I was watching that with an audience - Tommy’s death - nobody seems to see that coming. You can see everyone’s head move to the side as it happens. That was really tricky to cut - something which looks very easy, very subtle. It’s pretty straightforward, but to find the exact amount of time for Tommy to get hit where the audience can see it but not see it coming, we worked on that so much.

And the solution ended up being rotoscoping Tommy out and just moving him a little left in frame so that we could get the shot so we didn’t have to cut around anymore. But just moving him ever so slightly to the left gave you just a frame or two more to catch what was happening. 

Because if you go too fast, everyone misses the fact that he got hit at all. And if you go too far then you see it’s coming, so finding that balance was really tricky.

It’s also the distraction of the other train, and you’re more worried about George. You’re thinking, “What’s going to happen to George?” 

There’s so many other things going on, then this thing just comes out of nowhere and the train’s going backwards. I didn’t even think about trains going backwards.

What are some things that you want to talk about that you feel were either challenges or moments that you were glad you were able to solve?

I feel like the tonal development of the film. It starts out in this kind of fairytale place and slowly that disappears and disappears until - by the time you get to flooding - the fairy tale is very much over. It was just finding a way to bring all those elements together, and keeping track of the tone of the movie was really crucial. 

Hans’ music was so helpful in terms of managing that and the sound design. On this film I was very involved in every department: with the sound guys, with Hans. Just trying to keep a film like this - which has so much variation, big dance numbers, there’s bombings, there’s essentially a children’s film within it as well - so it’s just keeping all of those things together and in the same world.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what those things are, but the choices you make help the cohesion of all those elements. It’s a pretty bold film in lots of ways. It doesn’t do many things the easy way. It’s always going for it. But really incredibly rewarding. 

Steve’s such an amazing guy to collaborate with, but he’s completely aware of what he’s making and what’s good for the film and what’s not good for the film, so you feel like you can really be as creative as you like, and you’re never going to step over the line or go too far.

He wants to get the best out of everyone around him. He’s so certain of what he’s making that it makes it really easy for you to just be really creative. Working with Andrew Whitehurst and the VFX partners was quite amazing on this because he’s so amazing at whipping up shots like the bombs falling in those close ups. That’s another use of close-up that we were talking about before.

That really grabs your attention. We toyed with, do we have some of that at the start to kind of build up to the blitz? Planes in the air. Some of the shots he created we then had material to use and there was this one moment in the Cafe de Paris when you heard that bomb whistle.

You’ve heard it three times, so you know what it is. So we said, “You don’t need to see the bomb go off. We cut to black. It worked really well. Cut to black. Silence.

Then the kind of slow funeral version of “Oh, Johnny” the music would start coming up underneath it and it was lovely. Then Andrew made this shot of this bomber really high in the air, and we’re above it, and you just see some flashes on the ground. Instead of a cut to black, I said, ‘What if it was a cut to black, but through the black you start to see something?”

So I graded that shot down to almost black, but then you had these flashes that were silhouetted and revealed this plane high in the sky. It just sucks the air out of everything when you kind of see it from such a distance. It’s just war, right?

You’re just dropping bombs in the sky. It’s kind of like that drone footage you can see sometimes, and you think, “Wow, there’s no humanity in that.” Also, the kind of randomness of it - all these bombs are going to fall somewhere. 

All that was just discovery. It wasn’t written that way. And we just had this great shot, and it wasn’t like I was looking for somewhere to put it. It’s just we had enough time and enough space to play that we could find those things. I showed it to Steve, and he loved it and it stayed that way.

There’s quite a few of those discoveries throughout of how we could add layers to the film. And the more you learn about Steve’s vision the more you really understand what he’s looking for and those ideas come quicker and easier.

I’ve talked with other people about the fact that the more notes you get from a director, the more you’re on top of what the note is GOING to be.

Absolutely. By the end, if you spend enough time together, you’re addressing the notes before they’ve come up. There are barely any notes left, and it becomes more of a “yes and” kind of situation rather than notes.

You were talking a little bit about regulating the tone of the movie, but there’s also regulating the macro-pace of the movie - deciding how long you’re going to be in any one story. After watching the whole film - either with an audience or just with Steve - Talk to me about making those macro decisions about how long each part of the story should be.

It’s often a feeling of working away on scenes or sections and you feel like you’ve got it dialed in properly. Then you watch the whole and you think, “Now this is too long.” 

The overall mission was - Steve wanted this film to really move. He didn’t want it to be slow in any way. He wanted to have energy. When you’ve got two storylines going at the same time, if you spend too long in one place, the other place suffers.

You need to really balance that so that they’re always present in your mind and both the stories are always there. So a lot of it had to do with that. If you spent too long with George and Ife - like if we brought two scenes of George together - then you haven’t seen Rita for 25 minutes or something like that. You lose that thread, then you’ve got to build it back up.

That’s a tricky thing. It also goes to the way the stories talk to each other. So, finding a way for their stories to support each other rather than be separate is such a huge part of keeping the pace of the film moving so that you’re not having to stop and start so much. You run the danger of being quite episodic if that’s the case, which is always a danger with a structure like this.

The other thing that suffers most importantly is emotion, because if you lose track of the character, you’ve lost your connection to them. And that’s the end. If you lose that, you’ve lost everything, so it was incredibly important to keep track of that.

That’s one of those things that just develops over time. And it’s definitely watching with audiences. You get a really good sense. We did two test screenings, and we definitely learned a lot from those.

Then we’d watch it together - not too regularly - because you don’t want to overwatch either, because you can lose a lot of perspective. But just watching it enough.

Things kept moving, like where Rita finds out about George disappearing used to come a bit later and we found a way to bring that forward. You just find these small structural changes. It’s only a couple of minutes earlier, but finding George on the street after Rita’s found out he’s jumped off the train?

You could just feel the emotional difference coming to him there versus the other way around. Essentially, it’s such a huge difference in energy, so that just changes the pace completely because instead of a lull, you’ve now got a kind of propulsion.

So it’s really about finding those moments and finding the structure in the order that really every time you cut, it kind of felt like you were pushing things forward rather than kind of sitting still or catching up or building up again. That is the biggest part of the process for sure.

Peter, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate, having a chance to talk with you about another great film. 

Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Hopefully we get to chat again one day.