Paradise

Today on Art of the Cut we speak with Julia Grove, Howard Leder, and Lai-San Ho, who edited the Hulu TV show, Paradise.

Julia was nominated for an ACE Eddie for her work on This is Us. She’s also edited Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, and How to Get Away with Murder.

Howard has edited The Newsroom, American Gods, This is Us, and Perry Mason.

Lai-San has edited This is Us, Rabbit Hole, and The Company You Keep.

Lai-San, Julia and Howard, welcome to Art of the Cut.

TEAM: Thanks for having us.

The show is interesting to me from an editorial standpoint because of the time shifting. Tell me a little bit about any of that isn’t maybe scripted.

GROVE: Most of that is scripted and it’s really just finding the right moment to cut back and forth. The reveal at the end of 101 is big and we wanted to get all the marbles out of that.

So deciding when we really start to reveal the thread of Sterling’s being invited into this top secret Versailles mission. That little scene used to occur in Act 3.

We felt like once we had all the pieces laid out that it made sense to move that closer to the end of the show.

Once Cal poses that question, “Will you ever forgive me?” we felt like that was the place to start to unravel things a little bit more.

LEDER: All three of us had worked on This is Us with Dan Fogelman, the show’s creator. That show also occurred in a constantly shifting timeline that at some points had as many as four different timelines that were going the present day, childhood teenage years, and an early adulthood years.

I think all three of us were comfortable speaking that language of “now we’re in the past.” It just became a question of when do you break away to go to the past? How long are those flashbacks?

What is that flashback informing in the present day? What is it telling us for our current story? All of that is pretty flexible.

Things moved around in the finale in particular. We added quite a few flashbacks or what we called “flash pops” ‘cause a lot of them were very short - just to contextualize particularly emotion, like “what is he feeling as he’s making this decision?”

How does it tie back to something that’s happened in the past that we may have already seen? We would just briefly flash into it to remind us “this is what’s at stake for him. This is what he’s thinking about.”

GROVE: There was something that was in Act three of episode one, that we moved towards the end of the show in Act five.

If this show had been your typical broadcast show, you’d have already delivered that. Talk to me about the idea of looking at the whole expanse of all the shows and making those kind of determinations.

LEDER: This was not all released at the same time, but the show was finished before any of it aired, and that’s a luxury.

You’re looking at a multi-volume story that’s all made as one story as opposed to something that’s coming out piecemeal.

This is Us was sometimes a challenge where that ship has sailed, on a story point, so now we have to make this conform to what we’ve sewn several seasons ago, whereas with this, you’re looking at everything on balance for the whole season.

“How does this affect things in episode eight? How do things that we do in episode eight go back and affect things that happen in episode one?

We had a Hulu cast and crew screening and I was still discovering things when I watched where I thought, “This sets up what happens in episode six.”

That conversation was getting reawakened. For example, how much detail there was in the show and all the episodes were in communication with each other

HO: It was really nice at the end of the season to be able to look back at the character arcs for each individual character and make sure that they were following the trajectory we wanted and that characters were reading the way we wanted, so towards the end we went back to earlier episodes and said, “Maybe we recalibrate this performance here based on where she ends up at the end of the series or the season.”

Can you think of a specific example of that?

HO: One character that we spent some time trying to make sure was calibrated the way we wanted was the Sinatra character, because she is our villain, but she is also a human being, and we spend a lot of time seeing her backstory and understanding the motivations for why she does the things she does.

She was one person that we went back and did a pass on, making sure that we were feeling her vulnerability in all of the episodes.

GROVE: Even though this was a who-done-it and we wanted to preserve the mystery that surrounded each character, we waned to make as many characters as possible seem like plausible villains or ax wielders.

We really did ultimately set as our north star the humanity of each character and favoring that. We got to know a lot of their backstories, like Sinatra having such a profound loss being what motivates her character.

So that was where we looked to, in terms of calibrating, making sure the audience truly had empathy in some way or another for each character.

LEDER: No single character in this is good or bad. Everybody is revealed as having a backstory, but also you see how they grow into the person that they are in the show and how the events that happened and transpired and how they reacted to it, when it happened, then how that has made them into the person that they are, which isn’t to excuse their behavior or celebrate their behavior.

It’s just, this is the shape of their life relative to these world-changing biblical-level events that are happening outside the cave, and how that shaped them, how that maybe warped them as a person.

I don’t wanna spoil the person who’s ultimately revealed to be the killer. We show they didn’t just one day wake up, pick up a weapon and murder the president.

They had their own series of losses and their own series of conflicts with what was happening with the building of Paradise that shaped them into that person, so it was a long series of life changes and life decisions that lead to that, and everybody gets that treatment.

HO: After each episode that focuses on an individual character, you just feel so much more deeply for them.

After the Billy episode, he becomes such a favorite. And after episode five with Cal and Robinson, I feel like I cared so much more about both of their characters after that episode.

Did you find that - outside of the way it was scripted - that you felt that we really needed to inject this character’s backstory? Or we need to provide that kind of “Save the Cat” moment for a certain character earlier than it was, or that you needed to withhold later than it was in the script?

HO: I feel like over the arc of the season, it was pretty planned when we were gonna be focusing on the backstory of each character, but in episode 103, the opening of that episode changed a lot because we initially started out with several scenes showing young Xavier when he was maybe seven years old with his father who was starting to instill values in him that his father had instilled in him and that he wanted to pass on.

We realized that it wasn’t setting quite the right tone for the beginning of the episode, so we ended up condensing that way down and just using small little glimpses of those scenes as a tease that this is a relationship that has really impacted Xavier, and you’re gonna find out more about it as the episode goes on, but it was more intriguing and compelling to just leave a little bit of mystery there at the beginning of the episode and let them discover how the relationship plays out.

I’m assuming you really didn’t have any time constrictions on the episodes.

HO: I think we were supposed to stay between 48 and 52, but we definitely had some leeway and some episodes ended up shorter and some ended up longer than that.

GROVE: I think our only time constraint was the act lengths had to stay above three minutes.

LEDER: One episode that changed a lot in terms of the flashback structure was the finale. That episode, of all the episodes, changed the most radically from what was actually scripted.

That episode had opened with a long flashback to a mysterious couple who we didn’t know who they were.

This was how it was on the page. It had opened with this couple on the day of the day of the climate catastrophe as their wristbands start beeping in this mysterious box in the closet, and they wake up, they find the box, they get their wristbands, they rapidly pack their car.

There’s all this panic and alarm, and they get in their car and they end up in this long line of cars of climate refugees who are on their way to paradise.

Then only later in the middle of the episode was there then a long series of flashbacks that tell the story of the killer.

In watching the finale - which was very long in its first iteration - it was just felt like we’re too all over the place.

We’re telling these people’s backstory. We’re telling this guy’s backstory. There was just a lot of material and it was somewhat difficult to follow and it was too long.

Eventually as a group we all stumbled toward this solution of eliminating the couple and their story of waking up on the day and really taking Trent’s backstory, breaking it up.

And that’s where we opened the episode. We opened with a long piece of his story and how that linked up with how he gets into Paradise.

You do see the couple, but you’re introduced to them from his point of view, rather than them being this objective thing.

That’s a device that Dan Fogelman, our show’s creator and showrunner, has used many times in This is Us. We had numerous episodes where we meet strangers. We don’t know who they are. We don’t know how they align with the story.

We don’t know where they fit in. And only over the course of the episode is it slowly teased out and revealed, “Oh, this is so-and-so’s child. Oh, this is gonna intersect with this story.

Oh, this person comes in this way.” So it was something we were used to working with. But in this story, we decided that’s not the best way in. Instead, let’s come in on the librarian and his tale.

And once we made that change, then all of a sudden things moved very rapidly. We all knew the story we were telling. It just popped into view and worked from then on.

Interesting. As an audience member I never gave that a second thought that there would be a backstory to those people. They’re in line to get into Paradise and it made sense.

LEDER: Their story is told very quickly. That long line of cars, then you see them and you know instantly where you are.

GROVE: It’s a great editorial lesson in storytelling because that teaser following that couple around was a really rocking teaser. It was exciting!

But it ultimately wasn’t paying off downstream. So we scrapped that and started Trent’s story up until the assassination attempt, which was I thought was a really great cut point to bring the audience up to speed.

Getting to watch that without the VO ‘cause when it was in the later act it was with his voiceover explaining to Xavier how he came to this place.

So getting to just watch it unfold really allowed the audience’s empathy to kick in.

Howard mentioned the idea that you watched the finale as a group and came to this conclusion. Talk to me a little bit about collaborating between the three of you.

GROVE: We go way back. I feel like we have a very special and unique working relationship. I worked on all six seasons of This is Us, then Howard and Lai-San came on in the second season. So we’ve been working together for many seasons. Because of the strikes we were in a position that the three of us were available to work on Paradise.

So having the gang back together was something we were really grateful for, so we had a shorthand. The last two seasons of This is Us was remote work, so we have it down at this point. We use Slack abundantly throughout the day to send GIFs … and to do actual work.

I feel like we try to imbue our remote relationship with a little bit of in-person spirit. We’re constantly saying, “Hey, can you take a look at this and tell me what you think?” or we’ll FaceTime each other.

HO: When we were on This is Us, it was so nice to be able to just go into each other’s bays and watch each other’s episodes and talk about them. Now it’s not quite as easy, but we do still try to do as much of that as we can and give each other feedback.

It’s super helpful when we’re trying to solve issues or address notes. Sometimes we’re trying to create something out of nothing and I’ll say, “Do either of you guys have a shot of Presley doing this or something?” And we all pitch in and help.

LEDER: I think it was the first remote season of This Is Us, which was season five. There we were in a situation where we were trying to meet air dates.

Toward the end of that season, we were really backed into a corner. The shoot dates were quite close to the air dates - uncomfortably close in some cases - so we were using Trello where we would have cards for each scene in a show.

In the morning, the three of us would meet in the morning and see what came in overnight. “Julia, you take this scene, Lai-San, you take this scene.

This is my episode, so I’ll take the big meaty scene that came in.” Everything would get fed to the single editor who was getting credited for the episode. So all the work was channeling through one person, but it really was a situation where all of us were simultaneously working.

Also at various points we had a fourth editor, Erin Nicole Wyatt who was on that. But I think the three of us definitely have a real trust and kind of a shared style.

There is a similarity of language, and we’ve all worked with Dan so much that we know where his taste lies. We know what kinds of choices he likes, so you don’t feel like you’re fighting upstream. We just know each other’s work so well.

Dan has a definite style that he prefers which I think all of us have learned over time. And as you’re making choices you don’t have to adhere to that strictly as you’re making editor’s cuts, but it’s definitely in the back of your mind all the time, “He’ll like this versus this kind of thing.”

What is your approach to a new scene? How do you watch dailies? Do you do a string out? Do you just go from the bin?

HO: I like to have my bin where I can see all the angles. So I have the multi clip with the individual cameras underneath, so I can just visually, quickly see all the angles that I have. I like to watch all the dailies first.

That’s my first step. I just watch the multi clip usually, and I’ll start from the master and just go in shooting order.

That’s one of my favorite parts actually, is watching dailies and just getting to see what the actors have done, what the directors have done and see what moves me and what things jump out at me.

When I first started, I would pull selects for everything and then eventually I picked up the way that Howard does it, which is just leaving markers because it’s so much faster.

So I’ll leave markers on things that I found particularly moving or reactions that I think might be useful.

Once I’ve watched everything, I just take a step back and think about “What’s the point of this scene? Whose perspective do I wanna favor here?”

Then basically just start from the beginning and try to use as many of those moments that I really loved and start building the scene and see where it takes me.

GROVE: I kind of follow a similar process depending on the length of the scene. Obviously if it’s a number of oners or single number of masters that are meant to be oners, I’ll just watch those down.

If it’s a large scene like in episode seven, that first scene in the war room where everyone is debriefing.

That’s a big scene, a lot of angles. At a certain point I just start digging in. There were various angles, but I’d start in the master and just see how long I could live in that moment, then cut around the table if I needed to.

But I’d say in general, I’m definitely more of a maximalist editor. I love watching the moments in the dailies and just when you see like a reaction from a character or the way a character delivered a certain line, I think “that speaks truth to me”.

So I wanna try to use as many of those as possible. I’m inclined to put more into a first pass then start to whittle away. That’s why I really rely on my relationship with Romina Rey, who’s been my assistant since season four of This is Us, and often co-editor too.

She has a great truth detector. She’s a great person to bounce things off of and say, “Okay, maybe this is doing too much.”

Some editors build from version to version. I’m usually carving that clay away and distilling it down to what is essentially needed and hoping that I can still preserve some of those great moments.

HO: My assistant is Stacy Pietrafitta. She’s been with me since I first got bumped up on This is Us.

She’s incredible and also a great resource for being the first pair of eyes besides me that watches the scene and will give me great feedback about what’s working and what’s not working. I really trust her judgment, so she is invaluable, for sure.

LEDER: For the record, I have threatened to steal Romina Rey at every opportunity.

It’s like an episode of The Voice!

LEDER: Exactly. My assistant is new to me with this show. Samuel Bellamy joined me for this show. I did something that I hadn’t done in a long time.

I actually went out and interviewed and met with a lot of assistant editors just to see who was out there and coming up.

He was absolutely great and pivotal to this season. Really enthusiastic. It was interesting. He was an assistant who came of age during COVID.

He had never been to a studio before. We had parallel cutting rooms at Paramount and he  said, “This is my first day on the studio lot.”

You remember that excitement of the first time you walked into Fox or the first time that you walked into Paramount and how cool. It was great to be reminded of that. He did a wonderful job. All three of them were just absolutely terrific.

My previous assistant on the final two seasons of This is Us, was Joanna Phillips who ended up becoming our visual effects editor on Paradise Season one, and really did an outstanding job in terms of building temps and tracking an enormous number of shots.

So it was great to bring them along.

My process is that I like to work very quickly, particularly in dailies. I don’t like to agonize over the shots or how I’m gonna put the scene together.

For me, the cutting of dailies isn’t all that fun. The fun and the play and the excitement of it emerges later in working with other people, with the director, with the producer, or even just with myself saying, “Maybe there’s a better way to fry this fish.

Let me go in and find it.” I do watch all the circled takes, and I’m a copious note-taker. I just keep a pen in my hand while I’m watching the dailies and I just write down, “This line is good.

This is good.” Just quotes or an interesting visual or a paper log almost of what the dailies are doing. From that, in my mind, I’m already sort of paper cutting.

This is how I imagine this going together. I’m also always looking for kind of the moment, like this is the guts of the scene, or this is the kernel of what I want to push towards. So I’ll really think about how do I construct the coverage to arrive at that moment.

And then once I start cutting, it just becomes very playful. I’ll be like, oh, I wrote down this, but that doesn’t actually work. So what do I do? How do I get myself out of this situation? I’ll move as quickly as I can because in dailies the scenes kind of pile up very rapidly.

Then, for me, once it’s built, that’s where the actual work begins of watching it and really evaluating and testing everything and questioning, “Does this work?” and revising as I go along. For markers, I tend to go through and mark reaction shots.

I’ll just drop a locator so that when I go back later, I don’t actually have to watch the whole shot, I can just very quickly go to where interesting visuals are or where the reaction shots are.

GROVE: That’s great ‘cause those are always hard to find.

LEDER: I think that was learned over time - after hundreds of hours of looking for reaction shots. I learned to kind of leaves breadcrumbs behind so later on I can find them quickly and easily.

GROVE: One thing I do is I edit with waveforms, so it’s like my fast version of “line script,” (Avid ScriptSync) so I can quickly, once you memorize the beats of the scene, you can quickly jump along in a cut.

I’m assuming you aren’t using ScriptSync.

GROVE: Romana scripted the large war room scene for 107. I believe that was scripted, but generally no. I prefer to work out of the dailies bin.

LEDER: When I was first bumped up as a scripted editor, it was on the show Big Love where everything was (ScriptSynced).

I had worked as an assistant on some shows that were ScriptSynced, so I used it at first and then I grew away from it.

Every once in a while, I will definitely have the writer’s room send the script over. Every once in a while, like Julia was mentioning, I’ll have a big scene with a lot of coverage and a lot of dialogue.

It’s how it lies on the page. If it’s five pages of dialogue with 20 characters, I will have them “script” it because that’s just too much to keep in your head over six months, but for simple dialogue scenes that are maybe just two or three people, I don’t need it so much anymore.

I’m very spacial, so to me, I can open a clip and go to that line and I’m usually very close to where the line hits.

I used ScriptSync the same way in a feature. I only needed three scenes or four scenes done with ScriptSync.

LEDER: The Big Love producers wanted it.

Don’t you think that’s the best place for it?

LEDER: I think for them - because that’s how they think in terms of the page -  in terms of seeing the script it was useful for them.

They would say, “Can we look at that one? Can we look at that one? Can we look at that one?” It worked very well for them. For me I appreciated it, but in the long run, didn’t need it.

GROVE: Yeah. I think for me it’s more if I know I’m gonna be working with a director or producer that will sit in the bay with me and want to see every take.

Dan’s not like that, so I think we know that process will not entail that. So it’s really just if a. A guest director or another EP that we’re working with would be inclined to do that.

What about music? Do you wait to put music in until you start threading things together or do you find you like to put in music when you’re just cutting a scene?

HO: We actually have a really interesting music process with our composer Siddhartha Khosla who we’ve worked with for a long time.

He was the composer on This is Us and he has a very close relationship with Dan.

LEDER: They were college roommates. They go way back.

HO: Before we even started shooting, he wrote music for the show and sent us the Paradise theme, which ended up being so pivotal for the whole season.

So that was amazing to have that in our minds as we were going into the show and seeing the footage for the first time and starting to put things together, with the blessing of our directors and producers, we actually get him involved very early in the process.

Even during our editor’s cuts, we’ll be sending him scenes and sequences that he’ll sometimes score for us or send us pieces that he thinks will be appropriate and will manipulate and work with them. It’s really a very collaborative process with him.

The score evolves along with the cut in a really interesting way. We have a lot of phone conversations with him when he’s trying to figure out the sound for an episode or for a moment, and he’ll pull out his guitar and start playing something.

Or maybe he’ll have an idea but it needs to be more active or it needs more of this or that, so getting to work with Sid is I think one of the coolest parts of this process, for sure.

LEDER: You hear stories about how bands come up with songs where one person’s writing the guitar lick and the drummer says, “What if I do this?” and the singer says, “Then I could do that” and it’s all growing organically together.

When I got on This is Us, Sid was entering the process at the director’s cut. The longer we worked the more it crept back so that now he’s starting at the editor’s cut on this show.

I don’t think I temp scored anything. I would just assemble an act.

As soon as I had an act in any kind of condition I would tell him,  “These are the scenes in their roughest state. Go.”

And he and his music editor and the people who work with him would either write something or they would cut something from pre-existing score to fit it and send it back. That kind of became where we started from.

Sometimes we ran out of time, and Samuel and my assistant and I would jump on it and begin scoring it ourselves from pre-existing material.

The picture really grows side-by-side with music. It’s a very organic process on this. It’s a lot of conversations with him. “What is the tone?

What do we wanna feel?” And that all grows out of discussion rather than the normal kind of thing where you temp and send it to the composer and they write the score, then you see it at the end.

It’s all evolving so that by the time you send it to the producers it’s actually very far along - much farther along than I’ve ever encountered before.

GROVE: Across episodes, themes start to emerge. Going back to the jumping through time device that we were talking about, I love that it’s very simple. We don’t rely on excessive sound design to take us in and outta the past.

We have this score that I call “chaos strings.” (she sings what sounds like the Psycho shower strings theme).

We can be in our more melodic presidential theme and then these chaos strings come in and it takes us right back into the scene of the crime and how cohesive and innate that all felt, so we were all speaking that same language.

LEDER: You could jar something loose - and Sid, because we’re working so closely with him - for the finale in particular, he was struggling on getting the tone right.

I have this phrase I use with him, “You need to go wide screen here.” You need to write me a wide screen theme, big. We’re on the big screen.

GROVE: Anamorphic, baby!

LEDER: Anamorphic! But I said to him, “It needs to recall the theme, but it needs to be symphonic. It needs to be operatic.

Two hours later, a theme arrived called “Opera” and that became the backbone of the finale. You jar something loose in him, he sends you the music and you think, “I can cut to that.

I can shape the picture this way to go with that,” so it all unspools together.

HO: The music in one episode will evolve and then inform the music in future episodes. So I remember in episode 106, which is the big action episode where Xavier is executing his plan to try to take control of the city and Dan really wanted it to feel like a thrill ride, the whole way through.

So Sid and our music editor, Chris Foster, did an amazing job of creating this really big, active, propulsive cue that had so many different instruments.

Chris Foster, our music editor, told me that they maxed out the tracks in ProTools, they had so many different instruments going on, and it was great. It gave us that propulsive driving energy that we needed to give us that feeling we were looking for through the episode.

But when we get to the end, there’s the kind of standoff between Xavier and Sinatra. Sid said, “We’ve heard that big loud cue through so much of this whole episode. We need something different here. We need a new type of tension.”

And he did this really simple cue that’s like a repeating bell. It gives you just as much tension as the gigantic cue just in a different way. Then I think that ended up developing further and becoming important in 107.

GROVE: Yeah that heart racing thump that I described as like making you wanna vomit after the first three acts of 107.

LEDER: We should say that we do this with the director’s blessing. We are sending early assemblies and editors cuts and the directors are all informed, and I think for them it becomes a tool as well.

It liberates them in some ways because now they’re not having to figure out, “What’s a movie I once saw that I can pull score from?”

They actually can get involved and call Sid themselves if they choose and ask, “Could we do this?” Tt gives them a little bit more control over what their director’s cut is.

GROVE: …and a language.

LEDER: Yeah. A language so we’re all in the same place and it’s not gonna become a radically different TV show later down the road when the actual music joins it. You’re working on what it will be.

GROVE: It’s taken a couple years, but we now have that trust with Sid that we can essentially send him, “This is not a polished cut, but it’s giving the sense of that” because he just wants to know what the beats are.

Whether he sends a piece that just drops in and is amazing or he sends us more of a sketch. He always sends stems or Chris Foster sends the stems so we can start manipulating that. Sid’s so prolific.

On This is Us he would write unique score for each episode in season six. They were always entrenched in the DNA of lthe show but unique to each episode. It was like a film in that way.

So for the linchpin scene or sequence in the episode he’d write a big piece, then whether he and Chris Foster or we, the editors take the stems and start to score the rest of the episode with those pieces.

So it’s a really beautiful experience. I love working that way.

LEDER: It’s very unique. You really feel so connected to the total product, you’re so a part of it. And in this show there was also extra bonus challenge of placing these 1980s rock songs that were all part of this mixtape that we learn that Cal is creating.

There was a lot of discussions of what is that language? Which songs are we using? Some of them were known, some of them were unknown.

Everybody was constantly discussing and trying alts and what is this language ‘cause that was such a big part of the show as well.

At the end of this last year, Spotify sent me my biggest hits of the year, and number two for me was Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger.” I took a screenshot of it and sent it to Dan and said, “Look what you’ve done to me!”

Let’s talk about spotting the cues. Do you just say, “I don’t care if there’s no music that’s up to you, the composer,” or are you saying “We need a cue that starts after this revelation is made, that’s when the music should start.”

LEDER: Immediately after I send something to him we’ll jump on the phone and I’ll say, “I think the music should start roughly here, come out roughly here.

It should feel roughly like this.” Then Sid will always tell you when you’re wrong and he will push back quite vocally.

Sometimes, we will move a spotting place later after he’s done his spotting and that just becomes part of the discussion as well.

So there is some discussion. Not always, but some, but sometimes we’ll specifically call out places.

GROVE: If I have the time while Romina is prepping the sequence to export and send, I’ll write an email with time codes and spotting ideas ‘cause Chris Foster will often help score.

We do have a library of music at this point, so that way everyone’s on the same page.

A lot of times we’re running and gunning. So it’s just either a phone call or “here’s the basics that I wanna cover.” We have the stems, so we can always fine tune.

Glenn Ficarra has an editing background, right? I did an interview early on in the Art of the Cut series with his editor on Focus, and I swear he said that they both edited in Final Cut.

LEDER: I think you’re right.

GROVE: He does. Yes.

Director John Requa and Producer Glenn Ficarra

How’s that to work with a director with a really strong editing background.

GROVE: It’s great. I feel like he really speaks the language of editorial because he and John have been working together for so many years.

But Glenn, especially having that editor background will know how we can push the footage visually. He has a keen understanding of visual effects. So I think it’s an asset to just to play around in the director’s cut with how far we can push the footage. 

They’ll often reach out during production and give you a play-by-play in the way that we were often trying to balance this thriller genre with the kind of more human character-driven element of the show.

We have these very stylistic directors who imbue the show with all this cinematic scope, then Dan has this more like classic storytelling sensibility.

The main thing is that the story and the character drive everything, so if a visual shot is going to step on that or distract, we should lose it. So a lot of that was playing around with it.

LEDER: He loves straight cuts and it really in informs both of these shows. I came up through documentary/reality TV and we had this term “fuzz,” which was just, a flashy, gimmicky, razzle dazzle cutting that you do sometimes on reality shows to obscure the lack of content.

But on anything we’ve ever done I can’t think of anything that’s survived that’s in the fuzz category.

It comes out. He really likes a very clean sort of almost old-Hollywood feel where it’s just as simple as can be.

GROVE: Not overselling someone’s head space with gimmicky jump cuts or effects. It’s just trusting in the actor’s performance.

HO: Our cast is so great and they do so much with their faces that sometimes when we’re jumping back and forth between these timelines, it’s just so evocative to go with a straight cut from a closeup of a face to a close of a face.

It’s so incredible and you can really feel the difference in Sterling’s character from the past timeline to the present timeline, so you get to see that juxtaposition and it’s pretty cool.

Lai-San mentioned that she got bumped up on This Is Us. What do you think led to that promotion?

HO: I started out as an assistant editor on This Is Us. I assisted Julia for one season, then when she was on maternity leave I was assisting another editor who was really my mentor, Susan Vail.

She was so great about getting me in the cutting room with her when producers were there and when directors were there so that they could meet me, get comfortable with me. Dan is the kind of showrunner that will ask everyone’s opinion.

Even if you’re just an assistant editor or a PA, he’ll say, “What do you think about that?” So I got to have some face time with him and give my opinions on things, and I think that was really critical.

There was this one situation, I think it was at the beginning of season four where Dan needed an assistant editor to cut the promo for the season.

I volunteered for that even though I was pretty nervous about it and not quite sure if I would be able to pull it off, but I cut that and that was one of the first pieces of my own work that he was able to see where I took it from start to finish.

He was really happy with it. I think that - in addition to get cutting scenes here and there for Susan - gave him the confidence to bump me up when the time came that Susan was moving on from the show.

GROVE: You cut that teaser right for 403?

HO: I did. There was a teaser for an episode that was very self-contained and almost a little short film that my editor gave me the opportunity to cut.

She told Dan and everyone that I had cut it and that was a great opportunity too.

GROVE: I remember we played it in my edit bay and there were cheers among the whole writing team when Dan screened it. Dan loves to screen for his writers on Paradise.

Howard on your IMDB page, I was trying to figure out whether you’re an actor. Does being an actor help you as an editor?

LEDER: I’m Hollywood’s weirdest hybrid. I’m an actor/editor. I only know a couple. I had been an actor when I was younger then went behind the scenes and went to film school and followed this path, then snuck back on stage a couple years ago.

I think it definitely has informed me as an editor. One of my favorite experiences in my whole life is just sitting in the dark watching actors put on a play, and now I’m in this job where that’s what I do all day long.

I’ve been very lucky to be front row to some of the greatest actors in the world, and that’s endlessly pleasurable to me.

One time my brother was here visiting me and he said, “You watch a lot of TV.” I said, “You do know what I do for a living? I literally watch TV.” I’m endlessly fascinated by what actors can do.

Are there specific scenes that any of you would like to talk about?

GROVE: I’d say in 107, the ending missile montage sequence. I’d say that was quite challenging because you’re trying to keep alive the kind of emotional stakes of Cal making the decision to actually engage the Blue codes.

You’re cutting between Xavier having his last phone call with his wife, then we also have to sell the graphics.

We wanna make sure that the audience can track that these nukes are headed towards these domestic locations and really make it clear that - especially in terms of Atlanta - that these are projected targets.

The editors cut was about 50 seconds longer than the locked cut, so it was just about elongating it and creating the tension in the script. The Xavier phone call was split up a bit more.

He starts his phone call with Terry, then about five minutes elapses with that Sinatra/Cal scene, then we go back.

So it just was feeling like we wanted to move the pieces around to create the utmost tension for that.

Working with John and Glenn and during the director’s cut we realized it was not quite working, and in the script, I think just for sheer purpose of the script to convey to the studio what’s happening we pull out to a view of the earth as viewed from space and see the satellites being knocked down.

So those were slugged in the editor’s cut, but once we really dove in on it, we realized we didn’t wanna leave the plane.

We wanted to stay in the perspective of Cal and Xavier, so we got rid of those. We figured we can convey this with our visual effects on these screens, so they left me alone.

I just did a pass. Moved the Xavier scenes closer together and maybe broke them up a little bit more. 

I felt like Sinatra needed to be at play in this sequence too, because she had just implored Cal not to use the blue codes. I actually stole some footage of her from the previous scene in the comms room, then the closeup of her is from the scene with Cal.

So I just married those two together and tried to create a sense that she’s watching the ticking clock as well.

Then we jump around. John and Glenn, when they saw it thought it was great. I thought it was just a proof of concept but we eventually gave it to Dan and he really loved the structure.

Then once we were locked, we had what we called a “missile summit” where the writer, John Hoberg, came into the bay and we spent about eight hours walking through the graphics: “Where are the missiles coming from?

How fast are they going?” We realized that on the playback, things were moving a little too quickly, so we just slowed it down. Joanna Phillips, our in-house VFX editor, was so invaluable across the whole season.

But on 10  with all those screens and having the characters react to what’s on the TV screens in real time was really invaluable to have her be able to do that work.

She mocked up a lot of the missile sequence then we just honed it and came up with that pop-up window of the EMP blanket and viewed it for a lot of people. Is this making sense?

Do you get what Cals fixed on and what Sinatra is? Then just hope that it’s clear enough that the audience gets it, but it’s still really locked into the emotion of Xavier, having his last phone call with his wife.

HO: One thing that was challenging for me – having more experience with the kind of emotional dramas than action - was in episode six.

It’s such an action packed episode, so getting the pacing of that and making it feel like that thrill ride that Dan was looking for, there was a bit of a learning curve to that one.

The climax of that was the scene where the billionaires are escaping after the sky has been shut down. That was a daunting scene ‘cause there was a ton of footage. There were four cameras that all were shooting at 48 frames per second.

So much coverage - which was really great to have - but I had to really think about what I wanted to focus on and how I wanted to tell that moment of the story, and I knew that we needed to feel that visceral panic and terror, and it needed to just feel like a frenzy.

I ended up using most of the footage in 24 frames per second rather than using slo-mo, just because it felt a lot more visceral that way.

I tried to really stay in the perspective and experience of our main characters who are in that scene - Sinatra and Gabriela - and just their headspace during that.

So the one moment of slo-mo that I used was when Gabriela is running towards the car and turns around and sees this crowd of people so angry at what’s going on, and we just get inside her head for a moment.

It was really effective to just use that one moment because it really stands out among the sea of craziness that’s going on. In the end, I’m really proud of how that scene turned out. Dan and the director were happy with it.

LEDER: I love that moment. I thought it told that story so eloquently.

GROVE: And it helped remind you of Gabriela’s perspective of what she was tasked with.

It’s like the use of a closeup, right? If you use a million closeups, they don’t mean anything. If you had used a ton of slo-mo of the chaos then that slo-mo of the crowd wouldn’t have had the impact that it did.

GROVE: I know that in 107 the first three acts were so frenetic and you’re whisking around the west wing, then when we’re on the plane - props to John and Glen - they got these beautiful shots that when I saw them I was thinking they were oners.

I felt this is the time to slow things down and stay in those oners. One of the things I identified is when Sterling gets on the plane and goes to sit with his kids and they’re just asking “Where’s mom? Where’s mom?”

As a parent myself, I can’t imagine that moment. The kids would really be asking about mom, but he’s not gonna answer.

There’s no dialogue scripted for that. So just stay in his head space, and kids do ultimately stop asking if their parent doesn’t respond.

Let’s just stay in that. So it felt like it was this very emotionally true moment, but it hopefully gives the audience a little bit of a reprieve from the previous 30 minutes of the show.

Howard?

LEDER: One of the big things was just trusting the actors. Even though this is a genre show, it’s really a character-driven drama and the genre elements are around them.

We’re watching these people experienced this extraordinary series of events and this extraordinary place where they’ve ended up.

In episode two -which is called “Sinatra” - is grounded on the character of Sinatra, and it’s built around, Julianne Nicholson’s amazing performance.

There’s three scenes in particular in that episode when she’s in therapy with Gabby. She has this fairly long monologue into which Gabby has some interjections and therapy questions.

In my first cut, I thought, “I’m going to edit this.” You cut to the therapist. You cut to a different angle. You hinge over here. It was edited.

But I did a pass early on where we just sat in a oner. We were living in this thing where she has a two minute and 45 second take where it’s just on her. The therapist is asking questions off screen.

We know the language of a therapy scene. We’ve all seen therapy scenes. We know she’s sitting over there asking questions. We don’t need to be constantly reminded of that.

Instead, we just got to really live inside Julianne Nicholson’s performance, which I think is a pretty incredible take that she has on that. They only shot two takes of the monologue.

Then later in that episode, there’s a lot happening at the end of the episode and she’s at the deathbed of her son and there’s all this stuff going and Dan was said, “Simplify it. Just simplify it.” What we live on is just her face, and that’s the last shot of the thing - talking to her child.

It’s such a simple shot, such a simple delivery that she gave on that line, and once that final piece moved over the temptation is always to edit.

Instead we just let it go. Just let it go to black. I’ve told my assistants over and over, “The simpler you can make it, the better.” That was really a lesson in that.

Amen. Just because they shot it doesn’t mean you gotta use it.

LEDER: That’s a hard lesson to learn, isn’t it? I remember I worked on The Newsroom and my first episode of that they had a party scene and there were three cameras and I thought, “Here’s camera one. Here’s camera two.

Here’s camera three.” (cutting between each) And the producer/director came in - it was Alan Poole – and he said, “I only need one of those.” I was still fairly green at that point. I was duly chastened. You only have to learn that lesson once hopefully.

Thank you very much for discussing this show with me. I really enjoyed watching it and I really enjoyed talking to all of you.

TEAM: Thanks so much for having us. It was fun.