Dune Prophecy

Today on Art of the Cut we speak with the editing team of Dune Prophecy. Amelia Allwarden, ACE has been on Art of the Cut in the past for Daisy Jones and the Six and Pen15. She also edited Westworld.

Anna Hauger, ACE has been on Art of the Cut before for Three Body Problem. She’s also edited Westworld, Station 11 and Watchmen.

Sarah C. Reeves, ACE has edited Westworld, Star Trek Picard, Gotham and The Walking Dead.

Mark Hartzell, ACE has edited The Last of Us, True Blood and Monarch: Legacy of Monsters.

Anna, Amelia. Sarah, and Mark, thanks for joining me to talk about Dune Prophecy. Tell me about getting the call to work on this big project and how you became involved.

Allwarden: I am a really big Dune fan. I love the books and of course I love the Denis [Villeneuve] films. The first Denis film came out while we were finishing season four of Westworld. That’s where Anna and I both met [showrunner] Alison Schapker.

She joined season four of Westworld, so we were working in post with her and [writer] Jordan Goldberg. She said she wanted to put me up to be one of the editors on Dune Prophecy, which she was going to start working on.

I was really excited ‘cause I loved collaborating with Alison and loved Dune so much. So it was the perfect meld for me. Just to be able to play in the big playground with all the visual effects and scope and so many different characters.

Hauger: Yeah I essentially have the same origin story. Amelia and I both worked on Westworld season four as did Sarah Reeves.

Alison called all of us up and asked us if we were interested in joining her on Dune. How could I not join such a great IP? Unlike Amelia, I had not read the books. I had watched the Denis film.

Reeves: My origin story is similar to Amelia and Anna’s since I worked on Westworld season four and got to meet Alison and Jordan there and develop a rapport with them and get involved in the HBO family.

Hartzell: I guess mine’s a little more complicated. I am a huge Dune fan from watching like the Lynch movies as a kid. When I heard they were doing a Dune TV show years ago, I knew I wanted to work on that.

I remember seeing the first Dune film - the Villeneuve film - at Warner a week before it came out. The first time I saw the little sign language thing that they use in the film I thought, “That’s the TV show!

Make it some super sniper squad of space nuns who are gonna sign to each other and go kill people.

Cut to years later when they’re announcing that they’re going to camera. I reached out to everybody I knew. I reached out to my agents: “Can I just try to get a meeting on this thing?”

Eventually I did get a meeting and they said they’re gonna go with all editors from Westworld. I thought, “OK, at least I got the interview.”

Then the three Westworld editors thought that it was gonna be so much work that if they brought in one person to do one episode no one would be stuck doing two at the same time. So I was gonna be the escape valve.

Did you feel like you needed to go back and read the first book?

Hauger: No. I had not read any of the books and I still have not read any of the books. I felt it was more important to insularly look at Alison’s world-building and work from there.

There’s a good split between people that talk about wanting to have that background of reading the book and those not wanting it that. I worked on a film where it was based on a book and everybody else had read the book and I hadn’t, and there were all kinds of gaps in the script where I was asking, “Why does this happen?” And they’d say, “Oh it’s from the book.” The benefit of me not reading the book was that I was probably like most of the audience, who would be in the dark about certain things.

Hauger: We have some similar stuff in Dune Prophecy, but I think Alison and her writing team were really brilliant seeding little hints of lore from the franchise, without making it impossible for new viewers to connect to it.

So there are references to the Jihad where you don’t really need to know what it is, but you can kind of plant those little Easter eggs for the fans of Dune.

So there are three directors. There are four editors and there are six episodes. So do the math on that for me.

Allwarden: For the editors it was really cool because we had six episodes and four editors. It was like we were each able to edit one episode solo, and then Mark and Sarah co-edited episode five and Anna and I co-edited the finale, episode six.

At the beginning we were alternating like a traditional editor schedule, but episodes five and six were bigger episodes, so it was nice to be able to co-edit them and it was a really unique episode assignment, but I think it worked out really well for our series.

There’s a school for Truthsayers in the first episode, intercutting various training things - martial arts, truth-telling, with the yoga-like poses in the rain. Was that scripted as intercut? And what’s the value of intercutting?

Reeves: Per the script that was supposed to be a big montage of the girls training. Originally it was them preparing to go to the next level, whether or not they would become acolytes from novices, but we had to change a lot of different storylines throughout the process of cutting the show, and it became a lot more about showcasing what these girls do and what they’re taught as well as the beginning beats of what truth-saying is and why they truth-say.

There are a lot of different scenes and things that happened that got moved around and it’s all very malleable, so we were able to put the montage of the girls training before we meet Desmond Hart, when he arrives at the palace, where then you see Kasha use the truth-saying.

So it was getting you ready for what you’re about to see. We  intercut a lot more with what I affectionately call the Death March which is Desmond sitting Corrino discovering who Desmond is as people start burning.

That was different scenes that played out. The score that Volker Bertelmann put in there was so great. It really helped weave it together. So many of these montages work great because of his score.

Hartzell: Once you juxtapose one image with another, you’re creating layers of subtext. You are creating relationships that may or may not have existed, but open up the emotional experience of the viewer to more possibilities.

And it’s incredibly powerful. Sarah and I ended up doing a co-edit on episode five. At the end of that episode there’s a scene where Natalia goes to see Desmond and that was intercut with Francesca and Corrino, which was something that was suggested during the director’s cut with director Anna Foerster.

It’s also where we see the DNA results come in for Tula to realize that Desmond is her son. So all of that was a really powerful intercut.

As scripted, it was not all happening concurrently. You don’t wanna cut in the middle of a great scene, but sometimes especially if the scenes are related, you can do amazing things.

Reeves: It is honestly one of the greatest powers of editing.

Hauger: We had quite a few intercuts in episode six. Some of it was scripted, some of it was not scripted. It was something we found in the editorial process with Jordan and Alison. I find Intercuts to be a really effective way to tell a story.

Sometimes if a scene isn’t landing exactly how it needs to emotionally, it can be really helpful to use pieces of other scenes to hit certain plot points and certain beats. Amelia, you can maybe speak to in episode six the kind of created intercut that we made with Valya entering the palace and using dialogue.

It was a pitch from Allison because the palace entrance montage and this scene with Valya and Theo and Francesca weren’t working as strongly individually as they should, so Alison pitched that.

Allwarden: Yeah, that was a fun one. The scene with Francesca, Theo, and Valya, used to come earlier. We would hear about the whole plan and then later we would see it. So it was Alison’s smart pitch to just hear it and see it at the same time.

We did many versions of that montage. All of the different beats unraveled with the audio that was actually originally used for the scene where Valya is speaking to Theo and Francesca about the plan. It was a really fun way to convey the story in a more streamlined, fun feel.

When you’re reading a scene, what is informing you as you start to approach that scene?

Hauger: I think it’s multi-layered. You read the script and you get your impressions of what’s happening in the scene and what’s important, then when you dive into the dailies and you see what the actors are bringing to the table and how the director intends for the scene to unfold, it changes the perspective on things a bit, so I always start from the character and from the emotion and really mine the emotion of what the actors are giving.

Then in later passes we’ll finesse and figure out which emotional beats are the most important and emphasize those and take away the less important beats just to keep the pacing going.

Allwarden: I had a mentor for many years, Doc Crotzer, who’s an amazing editor. When I was his assistant editor 10 years ago, he taught me about cutting a scene. that what’s between the lines of dialogue was more important than the actual lines of dialogue.

I’ve always carried that with me when I’m doing my first assembly of the scene and looking at all the lines of action and all of the intentions and the actor direction for their emotion behind the lines and paying more attention to those than words and dialogue being said.

So I feel like when I’m reading the scene or assembling the scene for the first time, I’m really trying to understand the subtexts more than the text, and make that come across first. Then if I need to calibrate based on needing a specific line on camera, then that comes second for me. That’s just my personal process.

But for example, in episode six with them talking about their plans there’s so much more subtext going on. I think you need to focus a lot on the subtext of why people are doing things, then subconsciously it’ll absorb better.

Hartzell: I read a scene then watch the dailies from that scene. I’ve read the whole script. I understand at that point where we’re coming from, where we’re going to.

My first Dune scene was Tula, present day, presiding over Lila’s comatose dying body, and being coerced by Sister Avila into pulling the plug on her and Tula saying, “No. I’ll do what I want to do when I want to do it. I’m in charge here.”

That’s how I got to know the character, and that’s how I got to know the actor, and that’s how I got to know their relationships.

When you’re approaching a scene, you’re always trying to see whose scene it is. It’s this age-old question of when do you want to be on a character who’s speaking? ‘cause the real power and interest is being on someone who is listening or someone who is watching.

Reeves: Agreed. My favorite acting is reacting.

Hartzell: Yeah. It’s all about what isn’t being said.

Reeves: I like to call myself more of a subtext editor, which is why sometimes cutting certain scenes on certain shows is hard for me when it’s just basically what the scene is about.

Exposition is always hard for me, and it’s hard for actors too, but when you have such rich characters that have these intense backstories and that sort of playing out, even if you don’t know the full backstory yet, but you understand the tension in the scene, there’s something else going on.

Specifically in the first episode. You get a glimpse of Val and Tula as their younger selves but you don’t really know until episode three.

But in episode one there’s a scene that Alison and Jordan called the Teacher’s Lounge scene of Val and Tula discussing the girls and how they did in their training montage.

You can just feel the subtext of the two: the way these two women see the world and how they’re talking about the acolytes and what they think their powers are.

It’s like they’re really talking about themselves and what they see as the truth. It’s really interesting the subtext of a lot of the scenes on this show.

That subtext is really interesting. Somebody would say something and you would know that’s not what they really mean, so therefor you’re on a reaction, for example.

Allwarden: Exactly.

Or you hold that a little longer. Do you feel like you need to read ahead or read back from the scene that you’re doing?

Hauger: When I receive a scene, I like to read at least the scene before the actual scene and the scene after, just to know where I’m coming from and where I’m going. It helps the emotional trajectory of it.

Also, if I’m picking up a character or a certain story point, I’ll probably read the last scene that character was in too, to see what emotional state we’ve left them in, so I’m picking them up in the right place.

Allwarden: I wanna do that now!

That’s a very good idea.

Allwarden: Anna and I work really well together because we both we have similar tastes, but we sometimes work differently and I feel like we just pick up on each other and took little things from each other and iterated on each other’s styles and made each other better, so whenever Anna says little tidbits about her workflow, I think, “I’m gonna bank that.”

Hauger: Same. I always I love collaborating with other editors. It doesn’t always work. You have to have similar styles and ways that you work, but It’s seeing how other people work and seeing how other people approach scenes and being able to utilize their tricks of the trade.

I’d heard of a similar idea to your idea of going back and looking for the previous scene of the character where editors will edit the entire character arc continuously in order. You take the movie out of the order that it’s written in and you just string together one character’s arc, so that you can see back-to-back whether they grow properly.

Hauger: We actually used that approach on the show. There was a character or two that their storyline wasn’t quite working when we looked at the episode as a whole, so we took that individual character and just strung her scenes back-to-back and Alison and Jordan and I would watch it and figure out where it needed a little bit more work - like where did she need a little bit more to flesh out an arc of the episode. It’s a really useful tool in my opinion.

Were you collaborating at all with each other’s episodes, watching them commenting, notes, that kind of thing?

Hartzell: I was working on episode three - which is primarily flashbacks to our younger characters. Alison actually brought the entire post team in pretty early to watch a rough cut of the pilot, so we all knew what we were working on.

What was working, what needed to be thought about and wanted everyone’s input on that.

Reeves: Yeah, that was awesome. We’d been working remotely the majority of the time during dailies and during the first few passes of episode one, so to actually go into the office and have everyone sit and feel that energy in a screening room and be able to talk about it was great.

Hartzell: I came on later. I was more of a hybrid situation, but I did have an office and worked both in person and remote throughout the season, and I appreciate that. It’s always interesting now to see on what show you work on, what it’s going to be.

Will it be in person, will it be hybrid, will it be fully remote? I think there’s a cost benefit analysis that works on all of it. I do think some degree of remote does help for quality of life.

But you do have to take more steps to make sure that everyone is getting enough interactivity time. I try to make sure that I’m hanging out on Evercast watching things with my assistant.

Having my assistant be able to give me feedback is important, and if they’re not in the room, I have to make sure that we are screening things to together, working on them together and giving each other input so we’re rowing in the same direction.

Allwarden: We all got along really great. It was nice because we could talk about, how all of our characters are developing, how certain actors are working in certain scenes, how we’re iterating on the episodes with Alison and Jordan and sometimes having to share scenes depending on if we are reordering anything, amongst different episodes. So there was definitely a big collaboration.

I think that coming from the Westworld world, all of us are open to “anything can be anywhere” and not beholden to how it was supposed to be.

That’s what’s really great about Alison. She’s not precious about what the intention of something was.

Obviously we’re always gonna go for the intention first, but if there’s a better way, we’re always going to experiment with it at the very least, so it required constant conversation between me and Anna and Sarah and Mark so that we could make sure we’re all on the same page, make a cohesive story.

Hauger: On Westworld - as on this show - we had the great fortune that everybody’s in the same outfit all the time. So it was really easy to move scenes from episode to episode.

Allwarden: That’s a good point. I’ll give an example of that, which is a fun one. Episode four culminates with the Landsraad sequence when Desmond Hart makes a big show of his powers at the high council.

The Landsraad is really the climax of the episode. We have a lot of conversations and references to what the Landsraad is, but we haven’t seen it before in Dune.

They reference it in the Dune films. They reference it in the books, but if we haven’t seen it, so toward the beginning of the episode we created a sequence that was made in editorial, which is an introduction to the Landsraad, with all the ships coming down.

We hear roll call of all the different houses coming in from different planets, and we hear an explanation of what the Landsraad is from the speaker of the hall. We see everyone filing in. And we see the throne room space where this takes place.

That was all crafted from footage that actually is from the later Landsraad sequence combined with CG shots and ADR.

What I think that was doing really well - and this was a pitch by Jordan Goldberg - was to show visually what the Landsraad is so that when we’re talking about all the plans throughout the episode and we come back to the throne room in the last third, we know exactly where we are. We know exactly what’s happening.

Before we had done that, when we get to the Landsraad sequence, we’re trying to get our bearings for the first time, so we’re not exactly sure where we are.

So that was an example where everybody’s in the same outfits and people wear the same uniforms all the time, so it never bumped that everybody’s in the same clothes in that sequence. Then days later, they’re also in the same clothes.

I’ve heard from several editors the value of having characters in the same clothes for either the entire movie or the entire episode. I think Bonanza even famously had this! The guys are always in the same clothes. When you shoot a bunch of footage on horses, you can just use that anywhere you want.

Hauger: It’s incredibly helpful. We did that all the time on Westworld. For traveling between places you can use the horse b-roll anywhere you want it.

On the show that I’m on right now, there was a scene that I really wanted to move somewhere else and I couldn’t because they were all wearing different outfits and that was a hard pill to swallow. I’ve been on so many shows where everybody’s wearing a uniform.

One of the notes I have is about the rhythm of the final episode. I loved it. Can you talk a little bit about the pacing of that?

Allwarden: That was probably the biggest sequence that Anna and I both had our hands in. We call it the Mind Killer sequence. I think that was just a really fun editorial sequence because it could be done in so many different ways, and we did it in so many different ways. I think that it kinda lends itself to be an editorial playground.

We filmed a lot of the stuff on blue screen that’s inside of her Mind Killer space, so that kind of makes it so that we could put her in any place we wanted to. We experimented a lot with some elements of young Valya, we have some elements of Adult Valya.

One fun thing we were working on was transitioning between young Valya and adult Valya. Originally I had done this thing where I flash-framed between them and matching their eyes so that we kind of transition between them.

Then VFX iterated on that by adding this black snow that sweeps across her face and transitions her.

Hauger: Pacing-wise, we have this wonderful moment of Valya coming down the stairs and she’s using her voice to kill Desmond’s goons, then they face off and we slow everything down.

Then getting into the Mind Killer space had this feeling when I was watching the footage that initially we just had straight cuts with Valya.

She’s looking at Desmond, looking at Valya, and they have this tremendous eye contact and he’s doing his little Mind Killer thing of putting his fingers to his temples and he does a little sound and it wasn’t as impactful as I wanted it to be. It was playing a little slow at that point.

We had already had our moment of stillness, now we needed to get going to the Mind Killer space, so I decided to try to use flash frames. So I flashed to the thumper for Desmond ‘cause that’s his fear of being swallowed by the sand worm.

We’ve established throughout the series and all the nightmares, the sound of the thumper and the visual of the thumper, so I put flash frames of the thumper in for Desmond, then I put flash frames of the internal workings of Valya’s mind and the virus taking over on Valya’s side.

We’ve established that too in episode two. When Lila’s going through the agony, we see some visual representation of the cellular transmutation. And we establish earlier on, I think, pretty brilliantly on the part of Alison and Jordan.

We have these cubes, and within those cubes we see a visual representation of this kind of black virus overtaking the white cells.

So that’s a motif we come back to in the Mind Killer. Then these flash frames give us a spark of energy, then we go into this surreal space and slow it down again there.

How are you collaborating with something like that since this was an episode that you cut together? Watching things side-by-side, talking things through, splitting off to experiment?

Hauger: We passed the scene back and forth many times. I think Amelia took the first pass on it and before we even got to the director’s cut stage, I sat down with her and watched what she had done and I got really excited about certain things and it sparked a lot of ideas.

So I would pitch some and sometimes I would take the scene and do it myself ‘cause I had the idea in my head, then I’d show that to Amelia and that would spark an idea in her head.

So it was just this really great collaboration and I think because the two of us worked on it together, it really unlocked editorial gems that wouldn’t have come about if we had been doing it individually.

Allwarden: I think that it was really nice to be able to show each other: “What if we did this?” then we’d play something. “What if we did that? What if the worm came here? What if it came from this direction?”

Laying things out in this super-rudimentary way and showing each other “What if we created this shot? What if we did this?” Just getting each other really excited. It gets super nerdy.

Hauger: We literally got very excited about little things like when young Valya is using The Voice for the very first time to get Griffin to swim. We have this great shot from below looking up at young Valya, and she uses the voice.

I said, “What if we got VFX to come in and the voice travels through the water so we could see the voice go down into the ice and into the water?” We pulled our brilliant visual effects team to get them excited about it too, ‘cause they had to be on board.

We’d go to them and say, “Hey, is this possible?” And get their blessing, or not. Then we’d go to Alison and Jordan and show them what we’ve come up with and they would have new ideas. I think this sequence took us the longest to do, and it was worth it.

Allwarden: That shot through the water came out amazing. When I saw the visual effect come together on that, I was totally mind-blown. It’s a lot of really great collaboration with that kind of thing, with a sequence that just elevates it when people are getting excited about the ideas.

I think Mike Enriquez especially was just excited to elevate the sequence with us. Like the transition with the black snow to simulate the virus or call back to those cubes. All of us throwing out really cool ideas, elevated the sequence to the best version of it.

It definitely took us the longest, but it was the most fun and most rewarding, especially when I saw it on the mix stage for the first time with all the sound design.

Speaking about the sound design what about The Voice? Do you attempt anything in your picture cut to replicate what you’re eventually gonna hear on the sound mix stage?

Hauger: Funny enough, my assistant editor, Adam Neely decided that he was going to be the extra layer in voice, and so he did this actually really cool element. I couldn’t believe how effective it was ‘cause I cut together a particular voice sequence and gave it to him.

I said, “Adam, I’m not exactly sure what to do here, but it needs to be super impactful. Do something.” And he recorded himself doing this crazy thing with his voice. It was in episode two when Valya is confronting Desmond, and she says, “Stop, take out your blade.”

And we layered Adams element in and it was really cool. I think it gave the sound team an idea of what to do. Eventually they layered lots of different elements together. They had older Valya’s voice, younger Valya’s voice, and I think they pitched them to various degrees.

Allwarden: When we were iterating on our cuts, the sound team would send us little bounces for each of those elements as we were improving on each episode so that we could start to bring in those elements in there and not just have temp sound. I wish I could do an impression of what Adam did for the voice, but it’s like a crazy thing he does with his vocal chords.

Hauger: He told me that it was something he did as a kid. It was like his ET impression that he did when he was a kid. So he just brought it back to life.

Allwarden: We obviously have what the voice sounds like established in Denis films. We wanna be in the same world. An expansion of the universe. But we’re a TV series, we’re a separate story, and we’re 10,000 years prior.

So there was never a time where we felt like it needed to sound like in Denis’ films. We don’t wanna just imitate something else. So I think we sought out to make it our own and understand, “This is the first use of the voice within this world.”

It’s the sisterhood’s first known use of it. So what would it sound like? A rudimentary version. So that’s why it’s different. That’s why we came up with our own sound in collaboration with the sound team.

I totally bought that fact that this is the first time it’s ever been done. Obviously they expand upon it, evolve it over time.

You both used the words “talk about” and “showed them” interchangeably. That appealed to me because I just talked to documentary director Raoul Peck that gave me a German expression - “Probieren geht über Studieren”  - that basically means “stop discussing and just do it” or “Stop intellectualizing and just try it.”

How much do you find that you need to just stop talking and do it? And how much does the talking help you?

Allwarden: Probably a good combination for me. I feel like it’s 50/50 sometimes. It’s really helpful for me to talk out. Anna will be the first to test. I’ll walk around the room. I have to put up storyboards. I have to be like, “What if we did this” and pointing at things and moving things around visually.

But then once an idea starts to spark, I can’t really talk about it anymore. I just have to do it. Sometimes I’ll be working with Alison and we’ll be talking through “this really needs to feel like this. This really needs to feel like that.”

And we’ll start to talk about ways to do it then I’ll say, “You know what? Just stop. I have an idea.” Then I’ll mute her for two minutes because I don’t think it’s worth it sometimes for me to explain the idea. At that point let me just show you what I’m thinking and get it out. Then we can decide if that works.

Hauger: Sometimes it’s impossible to explain what you’re seeing, so you just have to do it and show the visuals of it.

Hartzell: Oftentimes if I’m faced with an editorial dilemma or a challenge or a note or something that someone says, “How can we do this?” or “Is this possible?” Or they say “This isn’t possible.”

Usually the best ideas for me come when I’m not sitting in front of the Avid and I’m thinking about it, then I work it out in my head and I can go get in front of the system and realize it. Sometimes just playing with the film can be really informative.

Stop talking and do it sometimes is stop talking or doing and just walk away. See if your creativity can take over.

Reeves: I’m a big fan of the “shits and giggles” method, which is basically that even if you don’t think the note is great, you can still try it. Even if you know it’s not gonna work, it doesn’t matter. People need to see why it doesn’t work.

You can be 10 steps ahead, but it still helps if people actually see it and why it doesn’t work. What’s great about that is that sometimes seeing it even in a not great way creates a new idea in your mind and other ideas can flow from that.

So just being open about trying stuff and feeling stuff out and allows other creativity to flow through in different ways.

Hartzell: For sure.

You mentioned working with your assistant and how they need to learn to give notes.

Hartzell: Dune Prophecy had four strong editors with four strong assistants. My assistant was Timothy Cooper. I’ve worked with him through The Last of Us, and then on Monarch: Legacy of Monsters over at Apple, then Dune Prophecy.

He has a strong story sense. He understands the process and what editing is really about. And he’s also extraordinary with visual stuff and sound and music. He has been a great collaborator and I know that the stronger he gets, the less time I’m going to get to spend with him when he moves up.

But for now we had to learn how each other works, and I explained to him, ”Do me a favor: Always give me the shit sandwich and consider giving other people the shit sandwich when you’re giving your feedback.”

Reeves: Shit sandwich means that you say something nice before you give ’em the shit and then say a couple nice things afterwards. It’s the true American way.

Hartzell: Something constructive on the way in, then the real criticism, constructive on the way out: the shit sandwich.

Reeves: I find this useful in real life too. You got something you need to tell your partner? See what happens if you just come out with the criticalness and nothing else.

Hartzell: You can be direct if you need to, but try to gimme the shit sandwich. Especially if it’s something I’m already concerned about. But I do want the feedback. I want it to be honest and I value that. I’ve had a couple of tremendous assistant editor relationships.

My longest one was with an assistant editor named Emily Streets, who has been an editor now for a number of years that I helped promote to editor when we were on Lost in Space.

We are now working together on the second season of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, where she’s been an editor the whole time.

Mentorship is a big deal. Anna Hauger and I share Michael Ruscio as this huge mentor in our lives. Michael Ruscio was instrumental when he was directing on True Blood. I got to edit an episode that he was directing. When that opportunity came around again, I leapt at it.

Eventually that’s what helped get me the chair on True Blood where I moved up to editor full-time. Having a strong mentor is incredibly important and I’ve tried to pay that forward and continue to try and pay that forward.

Reeves: It’s interesting discussing both having an assistant and then also your mentors because I do feel like those two things can be intrinsically tied for people who’ve had really good mentors help them bump up because then you try to pay it forward the same way with your assistant.

I’ve worked with Michael Ruscio on Homeland. Great guy. My mentor editor is Jordan Goldman who won an Emmy and ACE award for cutting the Homeland pilot. And he was very generous with me and provided great feedback.

He was one of the first editors where I was cutting scenes for him and he could really talk exactly about what changes he wanted and why in such a unique way.

That was also very helpful when he was explaining to directors and producers why certain notes were done a certain way. He’s just really good with filmic language and subtext.

What I look for in an assistant is really having somebody to have your back and be there to have creative ideas who’s really involved with the show. Every single assistant editor on our show, I believe got an additional editing credit on every episode.

Even on the ones that we co-edited, I think they got additional editing on. It’s a big show and our assistants undertook a lot of that.

So many of my interviews over the last couple of years have talked about working remotely. It sounds like you were in the same physical space. Talk about the value of that.

Hauger: Yeah, we were in a lucky position where we were very hybrid. We had the office space available to us if we wanted to use it, but we also had the ability to work from home. I personally enjoyed that combination.

Just being in my own space, insularly, working through things and in my head and getting it done, but then there comes a time where I wanna show other people and I want to talk about things more.

So it’s great to be able to come into an office and collaborate with your fellow editors or even just talking at lunch and getting an idea there, and just the community of it all is fantastic.

Allwarden: My assistant editor, McKenna Cook, and Anna’s assistant editor, Adam Neely - the four of us, which we named Spice Team Six - would really collaborate.

It was really nice for the four of us to sit in a room and watch down the whole episode together, talk about the sound design, talk about ways in which we’re confused about the story, or we’re not connecting, or we are connecting.

And to be in the room and to feel the energy and to watch it all sitting on a couch together is something that I believe can’t be replicated remotely.

Remote is a really good tool, but I think that there’s nothing like watching something in a room and feeling the energy.

Hauger: Both McKenna and Adam received additional editor credit on episode six, and their input was invaluable. So it’s nice being in person, particularly for assistant editors, I think because I try to be a mentor for my assistant.

I want them to go into the editing chair if that’s something they want to do. So I want to give them opportunities to watch and learn and cut scenes and talk about them and learn critical analysis. So that is a huge benefit of being in office.

Allwarden: I think for me, one of the most important qualities for an assistant editor -and McKenna has this in spades - is to be my creative collaborator. I feel really lonely as an editor.

If I work with an assistant editor who I don’t feel has story instincts … they could be the most technical person in the world, but for me, I need somebody who is has that story element to them.

I can tell when I work with somebody how they give me feedback and how we work in the editor’s cut if they have that or if they don’t or if it needs to be developed.

I think that I’ve worked with McKenna for three years now and she’s somebody that I really rely on to be my first audience and to work with and bounce ideas off of. She can help me with notes and things like that. That’s why they both earned additional editor credits on the finale because they were really instrumental in our creative collaboration.

Talk to me about developing that with an assistant editor and how you get them to open up and provide that feedback and know that’s valued and how you can even give them notes on how to give notes.

Allwarden: I think a good example that I always think of is that one thing Doc always established with me when I was his assistant editor: we would watch the editors cut together.

So when we were finished assembling the day before, we were gonna send to the director, we would sit down together, we would watch the editors cut, and we would discuss the episode really just for story and Doc has been a leader for me in showing how to be an incredible mentor.

I have always adopted the way he works. I took that and ever since I became an editor, I always have watched the editors cut with my assistant editor the day before, talked it through, and I’ve worked with many assistant editors over the years and sometimes when I say, “Hey, what do you think of the episode?”

After we watch it, I get the feedback of “There was this continuity error here. I noticed this jacket was off here and it was on here.”

Great. You can point that out to me, but the first time I worked with McKenna on Daisy Jones and the Six, we watched down the editor’s cut, and I asked her, “What do you think of the episode?” This is the first time we had ever worked together, and she said, “I really like it.

I’m confused about this character’s motivation. I don’t understand if she’s happy or sad about this thing.” It sparked a conversation.

I could just tell right away she was thinking about the story. I held onto that and tried to encourage, “This is the type of feedback I want.”

That’s how, over the past years we’re on our fourth show now together we’ve able to understand each other’s language and be able to mesh brains a little bit in terms of her being able to collaborate with me on story and empowering her to follow her instincts and say, “Yes, this is a good instinct.

Now let’s develop this. Let’s talk about it.” That’s what Doc always did for me.

Before I hear from Anna on this, what were some of those shows that you worked on with Doc?

Allwarden: I was his assistant editor on Good Behavior. We did the pilot together. We did the first season together. We did the second season together where he directed, and then I edited an episode. 

We edited Impulse together, but that was after I was an editor. But even though it was actually only one show, it was over a two year collaboration and he was one of my first editors.

That’s why I talk about him a lot because I was such a young imprintable mind at the time, so he has instilled in me all the wisdom of being an amazing editor and mentor.

Hauger: Yeah, I was very lucky to have incredible mentors as well, and I think that makes a huge difference and makes you as an editor want to give back and mentor others.

I worked with brilliant editors like Michael Ruscio, Tanya Swirling, Paul Zucker. They really helped me become a better editor and a better assistant, but it’s the same kind of thing.

We watched cuts together. We talked about them. We talked about the story, and you learn so much through that process of what’s important and what’s not.

Then when I was bumped up to editor on Westworld I chose as my assistant editor my really good friend, Yoni Reese. We had both gone to AFI together, so we both had  taken so many classes in critical analysis and had amazing teachers, Don Camber and Farrell Levy and Howard Smith, who all taught us how to critically watch something and figure out what’s working and what’s not working, and how editing is such a tremendous powerhouse tool and being able to solve story problems.

So Yoni had that in spades and we worked together for five years until he finally was able to spread his wings and fly away from the cube to my great sadness.

But he is having tremendous success. He was just nominated for an Emmy for Fallout. I’m so happy for him. But that was an incredible creative collaboration.

And he actually came on to Dune for a month to help us with dailies. We were inundated the last month or so when they were filming ‘cause they were filming all episodes at once, trying to finish everything out. So Yoni came on as an extra set of hands.

Reeves: Our assistants do incredible detailed temp sound work. That becomes a lot of times the template for what the sound team will incorporate.

But also on our show, there’s a real important unsung hero that most people don’t know about and most shows don’t have: we had a full-time music editor working on our show with us the entire time in office and he had his ProTools connected to the network.

Christopher Kaller - an incredible music editor - we would send him our sequences and he could cut music directly into our Avid sequence. Having that kind of exquisite music talent nearby. He knows all the temp scores. I wish we had a Chris on every show.

Hartzell: I’ve never had an in-house full-time music editor before. That was pretty extraordinary. To have somebody who can help you with music and really get creative or help you out if you’re in a pinch is is great.

And our full finishing sound and music team was incredible.  Dune Prophecy had some extraordinary sound and music work.

Did either one of you work on Valya’s agony montage? Lila’s agony in episode two? Oh, I guess it’s, I guess it’s Lila’s more than Valya, right?

Hauger: I worked on episode two. I cut that montage sequence, which was another really great creative challenge. It was really fun to work with the footage and put it together. Similar to the Mind Killer sequence it was an editorial playground.

I am struck by the fact you talked about it being a playground and you can do anything. Those are the hardest places, right? When there’s no restrictions.

Hauger: I think I’m the happiest in those places. I love a great emotional scene. There’s so many great scenes that are two character scenes that you really see the emotion, but to me, it’s fun and it’s freeing when you don’t really know what to do.

You have all of these pieces and you have to know what the story is going to be, but how do you get from point A to point B? That’s where I’m the happiest.

When you were developing that talk about the interplay of the audio with the video. ‘cause for something like that Lila Montage, the audio is going crazy and that’s helping your video transition. So how are you ne negotiating both of those things: the audio and the video?

Hauger: They were intricately combined. We wanted an audio cacophony at some point. Then you need stillness. So when we enter Lila’s agony space, we called it “the cavern.” So you enter this mind cavern.

You have a cacophony of sounds of her going through the agony. She’s screaming. There’s a lot of auditory stimulation going on.

Then we drop into this cavernous space and we’re still, so we dropped out the music, we dropped out the sound, and you just hear the space, some water dropping. We as an audience are thrust into this surreal space and we feel like Lila - we don’t know what’s going on. We approached it a little bit like a horror scene.

She sees the ancestors emerge and she’s in shock. The first time we see the ancestors are behind her and they light up in the spark of light, that’s when we start the bigger horror sound design. It’s a jump scare.

We milk that and as the ancestors go into this circular, undulating dance, we just amped up the music, and the sound until she passes out. Then again, more silence as she’s on the ground.

Allwarden: When we work in offline, we want our sound design to sound almost airable. We want to be as close as possible to the real end sound.

Of course the sound design team is eventually going to iterate on that and make it even more amazing than what we could do, but when we’re working, we want it so that this could play on tv. I personally don’t like to do sound design. I have my assistant editor do all of it.

That’s something that I really give specific and harsh feedback on the sound design and build up my assistant editor to have really specific and strong sound design skills.

Hauger: I think it’s very important, especially in these VFX sequences, like the agony ‘cause you’re not really seeing the finished effects, of course.

Sometimes you’re lucky to have pre-vis, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes on the agony sequence, it was just Lila in this kind of blank space and we had to spell out what was happening around her.

The sound design was so important for that. And Adam Neely, my assistant, is brilliant at sound design. I was very lucky to have him initially build up the soundscape and we’d have long discussions about exactly what I saw in my mind happening at certain points in the story.

He’d have to build in the sound of that, which is so complicated and so subjective. Then the sound team took that and ran with it.

Talk about collaborating with the other members of the team. You talked about VFX. How involved are the directors? I know directors on TV shows often are hired guns. How do you navigate the relationship between the directors and the showrunner?

Allwarden: I think that it started with the director and the showrunner having their conversation. They’re involving us in the conversations. They’re sending us storyboards if necessary, and we’re talking with visual effects.

They’re going to direct and film the original intention. On this project in particular, the directors were all incredible and they did, their director’s cut, but then it was really just collaborating with Alison and Jordan.

So from there, it wasn’t necessarily changing the director’s ideas, but iterating on them and understanding what actually the show needed as a whole.

Once we got the footage, I think everybody understands that there’s the show you set out to make and there’s this show you’re making, and once you film everything, that’s what you film.

That’s always gonna happen on every show, but with a series that’s got so many visual effects and we can iterate on them in post in ways we didn’t know we needed in production, so it’s really just stacking on top of each other as opposed to this person wants this this person wants that.

Really at the end of the day, we’re all working toward Alison’s vision. Telling the story is the main goal and visual effects are supplementing that goal.

Let’s have each of you describe a scene that you’d like to talk about that you’re either really proud of or was really difficult, or that you were able to come up with a great creative solution?

Reeves: I really enjoyed cutting Kasha’s nightmare because it got to be so different from the rest of the tone of the show. It’s always fun to play in the surreal and try cool stuff that doesn’t necessarily make sense.

Just being able to cut that scene together and have it play out in the way that it does was just really exciting and cool because it was also using the sand worm in a different way.

I also think there were some shots in there that we tweaked and changed and came up with ideas that were different than what was initially drawn up.

Then specifically there’s a sequence that Mark and I, when we were intercutting different moments in episode five, stuff that I may have been intercut a little bit in the script, but we intercut it even more where we were basically setting up Desmond glowing up and what was happening with this fleet of fighters. We needed to come up with a transitional scene, but we didn’t have any more footage for it.

This is one of those things where sometimes you fix it in post, sometimes you fix it in VFX.

I threw out the idea of these ships that we keep talking about that Desmond keeps pointing to the sky about, like why don’t they just come down and do some sort of cool, militaryesque move over the castle. Mark referenced a specific maneuver.

Hartzell: Star Wars Force Awakens, X-Wing fighters.

Reeves: So the entire transitional shot of of everyone being excited about Desmond out in the corridor, then looking up and seeing these these fighters. I think that shot even made it into some of the trailers, so that was a shot of collaboration at its finest.

Hartzell: I don’t know if there’s one scene in particular, I’m just incredibly proud of the third episode. Young Valya and young Tula might be a bit sociopathic.

They’re anti-heroes. You understand what they’re doing, but you may not approve of their methods, but you will really see and understand some of the decisions they made based on the experiences they had and finding the moments in the performances that help inform that - help reinforce that and inform that was a challenge and a big treat.

Reeves: It was a great show to work on. So many shades of gray. You think somebody’s a monster, but then you see this other side of them and all of humanity, that we have different facets. And to see that nuance play out in a big IP show about space nuns…

Hartzell: Editing is not finite, editing is reediting. Somebody wrote something and then it got interpreted and produced and performed, then that gets interpreted and edited and reinterpreted in post.

Sometimes things I have cut the first time have made it onto the screen, but the part I was most nervous about when I was an assistant looking to become an editor was working with the director, the producers, then having them tell me that what I had done wasn’t right or wasn’t good. Now it turns out, that’s my favorite part.

Collaborating and getting notes and trying to figure out - with my background and my story sensibilities - how to interpret those notes. Then working with a director or a showrunner working with Alison and Jordan and having them ask, “What if we did this?”

Then you do that, but then you take it a step further and “What if we did this to that?” You’re iterating and you’re growing and you’re trying. That’s the coolest, most creative part of editing: the experimentation.

Sometimes you go down really long roads and you do stuff that could absolutely have locked and made it to air, made it on the screen, made it on the big screen, but also you go down those roads to realize that where you started may have been the best point.

A lot of famous stories about long journeys end right back up at the beginning where you started, but you have to go on that journey to know that it was the journey that was the value.

Sometimes you go all the way down the iterative road and you get there and sometimes you go back to a version of where you started. You won’t know until you try. And you should always try.

Reeves: Especially people who haven’t edited but wanna get into the chair or work on Hollywood projects, especially when I was a kid, I watched the show and I literally did think that’s it, that’s the show.

When you are actually cutting a show or a feature, the amount of time you spend on it, the amount of scenes, amount of moments, the amount of storylines that are on the cutting room floor by the time you’re done the months and sometimes years of working on one particular show or one particular season, or one particular movie.

Hauger: I think for me, episode six - the Mind Killer scene was really the scene that required a lot of work and a lot of collaboration to figure out where all the pieces should lie in order to tell the story.

For example, one issue that we bumped up against is once we’re in Valya’s mind - in this Mind Killer space - we have to get out of it at a certain point ‘cause we have more story like be story to tell, so when do we leave this new space that’s so interesting and so dynamic to get to the B story? It went through a bunch of different iterations.

At one point we stayed in Mind Killer until Young Valya saves Griffin but it didn’t work very well there. Some of the tension was sucked out of the room when we did that, so we eventually landed on having Valya use the voice for the first time.

She says “Swim!” then we cut wide overhead and see her isolated, alone in this scary, surreal place. Alison and Amelia and Jordan and VFX and I decided it would be really cool to have this overhead shot with the cracks in the ice and then cut to the overhead shot of the Spaceport and see a ship come in and the spokes of the spaceport matched the cracks in the ice. And it was really a cool transition.

Allwarden: To that point, episode six was all about telling so many different storylines at once. Not only our palace and our sisterhood and everything that’s going on with Valya, but also our young actor flashbacks.

Anna and I really worked hard to feel intentional about when and where we are going in and out of flashbacks to tell the story in the past, so all the intercutting of this whole episode was really something that we experimented with endless versions and orders and the palace escape - when to intercut that with parts of the Mind Killer.

There were a lot of different ways it could have gone and we experimented with them all I think.

Hauger: We definitely went through so many iterations of everything. You’re on a rollercoaster ride and it takes you to the end, so there’s not as much leeway to move things around as there was in the first half of the episode.

I’m struck by the idea that there’s so much experimentation and I think for young editors you might feel like, “Wait, I cut that scene! Now I gotta do it again?” Talk about the value of doing something that does not end up in the episode.

Allwarden: I first met Anna when I was an assistant editor on season two of Westworld. She was an editor and I was Andy Seklir’s assistant editor. I saw the way my editor, Andy, was so not proprietary about anything.

Everything was getting reshuffled and a scene was going here and a scene was going there, and it just felt like he had this freedom about him, of what’s the best way to tell the story?

I think once you work in an environment like that, you understand that nothing you ever do the first time is going to be what it is.

I just go in expecting an iteration and I want it to get better, so I think that freeing myself from the expectation that it’s ever going to be perfect the first time and it’s always gonna be an iteration till the very end.

I think approaching it like, how can we continue to make it better until the last minute is the kind of positive way to work on something as opposed to: “Crap! I have to do notes again!”

Hauger: I think it would be hard to be an editor with an ego. I think you just have to get beyond thinking that your way is the best way, because the best things come with collaboration.

That’s always been my experience and taking on other people’s ideas and opinions always make the project better.

Whether those ideas work or not, it’s exploring the footage in a new, unique way and that can unlock something that you’ve never seen before.

Anna, Amelia, Sarah, and Mark, thank you so much for talking to me about Dune Prophecy.