Sinners

Today on Art of the Cut we speak with editor Michael Shawver, about his work on Ryan Coogler’s feature film, Sinners. Michael’s been on Art of the Cut in the past for his work on Black Panther. His other work includes Abigail, A Quiet Place 2, Creed, and Fruitvale Station.

Michael, it’s so nice to talk to you again. I really enjoyed the film. It’s getting great buzz and people are loving it, saying “Top 10 Movie of the Year” and the year’s not even started yet.

The response has been something that you obviously always hope for when you put the work in. Really, it’s a reflection of how much of ourselves. can we put in this? How much of the human experience can we put in the movie?

How can we get people who are just, “Hey, I got a couple hours on a Saturday” how do you let them relate to people from a different time, a different place and maybe don’t look like them.

Obviously, we all care about Ryan - everyone on the team. Ludwig, Michael, Ruth, Hannah, top to bottom. This was our time to just put everything we had- leave it all on the floor and see if we can make something new and crazy.

The critical reviews are obviously amazing. The box office is great and if this movie can be successful, does this allow other filmmakers and studios to take chances on other original things? There are a lot of steps and a lot of work to do to get to the point where the art you do becomes equally specific and universal.

That’s the crossroads of where you want to be with things - no pun intended for southern gothic musical tales. I’m incredibly grateful to be a part of this and that people are responding to it.

Do I remember correctly that you went to school with Ryan?

Growing up, I always wanted to be a filmmaker. I’m from Providence, Rhode Island. That’s not really something you do there.

So I just took a shot, applied to USC, got in and went to film school like most people do to be a director because that’s really the only thing you know about movies: actors and directors. In my second year in, I was in a directing class.

Most student films are about death and breakups because that’s the only conflict people really know at that point in their lives, but this guy was just making these incredible shorts - sometimes with no dialogue - that you’d wanna cry at the end.

I was the guy who sat in the back of the classroom and would only engage if I was called on. I’m introverted like a lot of editors can be, but something in my gut said, “You just gotta talk to this guy.”

I went up to him and said, “I wanna make the kind of stuff you’re making. I dunno how, but I’d love to work with you. I can edit a little bit.” Things unfolded and I helped him out production designing things and found an opportunity with him.

He picked me to be one of his editors for a short film at the school, and he has fought for me and several other team members every single step of the way when producers and studios and whoever just didn’t think that it was a good idea to bring on someone without experience at that level - which I totally get.

I don’t judge anybody for believing that. The one thing they didn’t understand was how great the relationships are with Ryan and his coworkers and how he tends to find the people that are going to figure it out, and not be afraid.

We all come from a place of not knowing when it comes to the work. I think you can either act like you know all the answers.

Or you can say, “I don’t know what this answer is, but I’m gonna find out the answers. I’m gonna find the best way, and I’m not gonna have expectations.” I’m not gonna pretend like I know everything and I’m gonna learn from everybody around me and we’re gonna be a true collective and let everybody shine in their own ways.

I think Ryan has cultivated his filmmaking family. Because it really is. We all know each other’s kids. We all hang out outside… birthday gifts. It truly is a very special experience. And it all started in film school.

Having that with Ryan and his loyalty and how great of a human being he is and the trust he has for everybody - that we would figure it out - truly has paid off, even back in the day when we didn’t know that we were building something.

We were just trying to do our best and make the best work and affect people in the best ways.

Let’s talk about the beginning of the movie -  the opening flashbacks in the church and some of the sound design around that and whether that was the scripted beginning of the film.

What’s great about Ryan is that he’s not precious about his own work at all. If we look at the cut and it’s just not feeling right and something’s not working, then we try something else and we try something crazy.

That started on Fruitvale (Coogler’s debut film, Fruitvale Station), originally that YouTube footage of the real life Oscar Grant being shot wasn’t the way we started the movie. It wasn’t in the movie at all. Again, that’s coming from a place of not knowing, originally.

This movie started with the scene where Remmick shows up to Burt and Joan’s house when he is being chased by the Choctaw.

I believe Ryan was influenced a bit by the Wes Craven style of horror filmmaking, which is scare the shit out the audience right away - plant that seed - then let it simmer until things get crazy again.

We test the movie a lot with filmmaker friends. We have test audiences, and one of the consensus was that - while that scene was great - there’s a lot of movie before they return.

You wanna let the audience know what kind of movie they’re watching as early as you can. And with comedies, you want to tell the audience it’s gonna be okay to laugh.

We tried dozens and dozens of different orders of this movie and iterations. We had a version that was divided into musical chapters: like verse, chorus, coda.

What we ultimately came around to were that we needed to set up the mythos of the world and the legends of music and the fact that it can cross between life and death.

But that was done to set the stage for the tone of the movie - to give you a little bit of a history lesson, let your imagination take over. It also helped set up the midpoint sequence with the generational music happening, where you accept, “Okay, this is in the world.

And it doesn’t take us by surprise about “Why is Bootsy Collins the movie?” We did that for a bit, but we realized that the movie started with those vampires, then went to Sammy in the field and the cousins.

What we realized was we needed to bookend this with Sammy because it was truly his story. It was his lens. We were looking at this world through his eyes: his wonderment, his looking up to the cousins, then his growth and his coming of age.

I’m constantly trying things. That church scene was never intended to be at the beginning. It was always at the end.

I noticed the incredible Saul Williams, who played his dad in the movie, was doing sort of grander gestures and I realized  Remmick was doing those same things in the previous scenes.

I said, “What if when Sammy sees a certain motion he just went through” – he’s just gone through one of the most insane, traumatic experiences you can think of – “what if we throw in some jump scares here? What if we throw some intensity?

On one hand you give a jolt to the audience and energy and fun, but also it really put you in the shoes of Sammy, in terms of his PTSD of what has happened.

Even the gestures that his dad made and the congregation…there are a lot of parallels there, so I tried that and Ryan really liked it and he really responded to it.

But what we did with the actual ending of the movie, when we started to intercut the church and the shootout, it was a bridge too far for that moment, for confusion and following along with the action and the emotion and the music together, so I took that old cut and we reworked it a little bit and put that at the front. so we told people, “Okay, we’re gonna jump scare you at times.”

It also gave it that bookend where once you see at the end - where Sammy drives up again to the church - you say, “Oh, I’ve been here before. And it just helps pump up the audience engagement.

Why isn’t Bootsy Collins in every movie? That’s my question.

Lisa, the shop girl, walks across the street to get her mom. It’s a great oner. You hear the men talking behind her as she’s walking. Was it scripted to have that conversation over the oner?

I can’t remember specifically if that was the idea, but I will tell you that Ryan is an extremely mindful, present, in-the-moment, director and will find things.

So whether it was in the script or not, he shot them with that scene. He also knows we might need cutaways, we might need this, and it’s a little bit of a safety valve for the oner if it’s not working. At one point that oner was outta the movie.

There were so many iterations and we tried to intercut a lot of things.  But them discussing the gambling aspect - when we found the picture edit of that and the flow of everything - I had put that in there, but it wasn’t as loud or clear or as long as that. I played it as Lisa’s perspective.

One of the core themes of the movie is coping, and every single one of these characters is coping with something with a different device. Either it’s through religion, or alcohol. So with Bo, you see him gambling and that’s his vice. We wanted to incorporate that.

And it helps set up scenes like the cheating gambler later. It’s about the setup, but at the same time it’s building the characters and the world - elevating the idea of these people living an existence that’s hard. They’re working hard.

They’re in the south. There’s poverty. It’s hot. But they have one night to go out and let loose, and that’s a lot of what the movie’s about in terms of scripted and intercutting. Most - if not all - of the scenes in the movie were shot to be their own scene in order.

That was the three hour version of the movie. The editor’s cut of the movie essentially - which worked! - then we got to two and a half hours and it worked, then we got to two hours and it worked.

There’s a 90-minute cut of this movie and it worked. That was a good problem to have. The tricky part in terms of “What is this movie?

What is the structure of this movie?” was tricky for us because on Fruitvale Station was about the last day of a guy’s life.

So there was a real life reference to that. And, we wanted to stick to that. Creed has the wrapping of a Rocky movie, so we could always reference these other movies. Black Panther, obviously was Marvel. You could say From Dusk Til Dawn.

We looked at movies like Jurassic Park where the setup is two thirds of the movie, then you just hit the ground running and it doesn’t stop. Similar to Alien.

So we were constantly trying to find: what is the identity of this movie. It ended flowing from the emotional journey of Sammy, but letting every character have their shine - have their everyday life conflicts, their situations, and be affected by this growing group of people and community that are gonna put on this event.

So there was a lot of reworking things, a lot of flipping things around. And that was one of our big challenges on this movie. I do think that we found what the movie wanted to be and I think that’s really important.

What were the difficulties for you – in not just the special effects of having Michael play Both Stack and Smoke - but the creative performance choices and that kind of thing for you as an editor you’re dealing with as one person playing two roles?

Great question. Like if we have too many wide shots that are clearly split down the middle and they’re talking, are people gonna say, “That’s a simple effect!”?

We obviously have them sharing a cigarette and passing things along, which obviously Ryan’s brilliant to have that moment not only be smoking but a character thing ‘cause Stack always rolled smoke cigarettes, so at the end - between the trauma and missing his brother - if you watch the movie closely, he’s got some tremors from the war.

It’s equally showcasing it but not showcasing it too much and also hiding it when it came to some of the wide shots that we wanted to stay in or there’s a scene a little after the midpoint, when the vampires show up to the juke, where it’s the twins and their respective partners.

There was no coverage for that scene. There was one escape coverage of Cornbread. That was tough because you wanna stay in that shot, you wanna be there. There’s also a camera move that was programmed into the camera.

But sometimes the timing is just a touch off because the actors are in the zone. So if Mike wants to make an acting choice of taking a breath they have to remember that.

Or if Mike wants to change something after he is already shot the Stack side and he wants to make another choice of the Smoke side, they’re beholden to what that was.

I was able to use little things in the Avid that wer helped by VFX, like FluidMorphs to take some air out, or a little speed ramp to get the ultimate performance, so it was a bit like 8-D chess, ‘cause you’re worried about performance, you’re worried about camera, there’s also background.

There were those aspects to it - those technical things to make it feel real and let people stay lost in it, because anything short of exceptional work on everybody’s part would have people all over the internet saying, “I saw this” or they’ll pick out the little things that don’t work with it.

We were always mindful the fact that we have one guy playing two characters and the only really distinguishable thing about them physically is what they’re wearing - more specifically, their hats.

Once they lose their hats are people understanding who’s who? Credit to Mike and to Ryan. Those characters are such a great performance because - and I know this more than anybody, having watched every single take and his process and even being on set and everything with him - Michael was so locked in on this movie, they felt like true siblings in terms of having a shared past and a shared life experience.

Because of the different roles they took in their brotherhood, have different life experiences and different results and coping mechanisms and consequences which separate them - even down to the voice and the tone of the voice and the pitch of the voice.

Smoke has a lower, intonation than Stack does. Just making sure that comes out because that work is incredible. There was talk about “Do we change his voice? Are people getting it? Do we need to do something different?”

And we really just trusted the process and trusted ourselves. Pretty early on we knew that this was something really special.

Normally when you’re looking at a performance of an actor he’s performing one role. All you have to do is make sure that they’re consistent. With this movie, did you have to think about distinguishing those performances in the edit? Making sure that they were really separate?

For sure. Smoke is the guy who shoots first and asks questions later, as we saw in the movie. One of my favorite scenes - and it has such a Western feel -  is when he goes out and shoots the guys trying to rob his truck.

Those actors - the robbers - are hilarious. So while Stack will react quicker because he’s better with words and he knows how to BS really well, so if you look at some of the cadence of the cut, Smoke is a little more thoughtful.

He’ll shoot, but leading up to the shot, he’s looking around, he’s gauging everything he’s thinking whereas Stack would talk paint off a wall.

That does affect the energy and the pacing. When you edit, you want every scene to have its own specific shape. If you cut every scene the same way -  wide shot, medium shot, close-up, out - then the audience subconsciously feels like it’s just the same thing over, even though different things happen.

As an editor, you’re planning, plotting, instilling the emotional blueprint, that journey that you want the audience to go through in the scene is what you want to try to have the baseline and figure out and work through and workshop throughout.

That comes from the performances first and foremost. Listening to the performances is extremely important. The next step is deciding, “We have five great performances, which one we put in? We have 10 great scenes.

We need to cut some of these out or cut down and you whittle it from there.” But every scene with every character, every relationship has its own unique existence and shape for the purpose of the story.

 There’s a discussion between Annie and Smoke where they’re talking about supernatural protections and there are some interesting sound effects or score under that.

One of our tasks in this movie - after we started testing it, getting a sense of how audiences were feeling about it - was to keep the supernatural, ominous, magic stuff alive.

We introduce it early. We did that with the animated intro with Annie speaking about people who can play music. Annie is the representation of good, loving maternal. natural magic.

The hoodoo. The protection. The life force in terms of giving life and protection versus Remmick who takes things. Ryan had this idea - and he can quote it perfectly - It’s inspired by Gandalf:  “DO NOT TAKE ME FOR SOME CHEAP CONJURER OF TRICKS!”

It was actually inspired by that. We wanted to do our own version of it. Smoke comes back, sees Annie. He left town. She thought she was never gonna see him again. They had lost a child. It’s very emotionally difficult.

He’s saying, “I’m fine. I’m safe.” And her response is, “That’s because of what I did to protect you.”

She gets mad and there’s like a rumble. Before we figured out the sound and the voice thing, it was about the lens that they use at the end when Smoke is dying and sees Annie, that lens has a blurred vignette thing on it, so Ryan said, “What if we use that as a visual cue to the supernatural?”

So if you watch that moment as she walks up to him and the voice changes and the sounds come in, that lens effect comes on. Our VFX team was able to replicate that pretty successfully.

So establishing that early with their relationship, showing how much power she holds, but is holding back, showing her ability to have that magic and putting a stamp on that and elevating that moment.

You not only you remember it because of those things, but it’s also a huge character moment for her and it’s a way we’re winning the audience over that she’s standing up to this tough guy. Her withholding of  power is even more powerful than letting it go sometimes.

So having people remember it and having it be a character thing is great.

That scene ends with an intimate scene and then we blast into what might be my favorite grand cut of the movie, which is from outside of her trailer into the IMAX of them driving the truck.

Ludwig has built this score up to the end of that scene where it’s just like an explosion. You could feel the chills. I saw it at IMAX on Saturday.

In 70mm, it’s so incredible. In that cut, if you don’t put a punctuation on it, then her magic can possibly get lost in the shuffle. We wanted to keep the magic alive.

I suggested VFX of some crows and Ryan said, “What about vultures?” Then cutting to the sky with an ominous score. That voice served a lot of purposes, but it came from trying to keep magic alive and keep it a real thing in this world.

You mentioned how much this movie got restructured. One of the things you’ve gotta figure out - since you were saying that shot of Remmick running from the Choctaw up to the cabin was the beginning of the movie - is “If this scene’s not gonna be in the beginning of the movie, where’s it gonna be?” How did you decide?

Every movie we do, we get better at having the ability to watch and know how we feel… trusting our own taste. That’s where it starts. We had actually tried to move Remmick’s intro to after the sun went down for everybody else, but that just didn’t feel right.

After the opening church scene, the movie follows the course of the day, so there were only two places that it could go to feel like a natural flow: beginning or middle. That was the big back-and-forth. What do we do? Does this work?

There were scenes in Creed where Rocky was at Adrian’s grave before Adonis even went there, but we cut those out because it wasn’t through the experience of the vessel of the story.

But because – in this movie – that’s not Sammy’s ultimate journey, the foundational journey. Originally Remmick arrive the night before the juke preparation.

Most of the trickiness in editing was what scenes do we keep in? How long are these scenes gonna be? Does this scene have a fighting chance?

The scene where Delta Slim has the monologue in the car - which we basically thought of as a horror story that he’s telling. That was really hard to cut down because that scene was much longer. The full scene is absolutely brilliant.

Delroy is absolutely brilliant. In the three hour version, it is an incredible scene. It does everything. But that went in and out of the movie because we’re trying to balance art and commerce.

Ryan wants to make movies for the people who have all the Criterions and for the people who maybe get to see one movie a year, on a date night or something.

That’s who Ryan is. Ryan’s a community-based person and loves sharing things and togetherness and knows that movies can bring people together. So we had to balance that selfishness of what we would want versus what other people would get.

It was such an intense and challenging shoot. I was in Louisiana and it was the first movie I’ve ever been on where they had snake and alligator wranglers protecting us from the wild snakes and alligators in Louisiana!

It was like a hundred degrees. I don’t know how Mike dealt with those wool suits. Heat index 112 some of the days. We finally took a couple days off around Christmas. At that time we were intercutting way more at the beginning of the movie.

The tricky part about that was that it was fun, but it didn’t serve the journey of the characters and the ending and the emotion that we needed the ending to feel.

As an editor, you wanna do what’s right for the movie. When I’m watching these takes, I could sit in some of these takes forever! The production design, the camera work, the costumes, the performances… we could just live in this world.

Memories of Murder is one of my favorite movies and it’s so poetic and they just sit in these shots, but it’s so gorgeous.

So we realized we had to do it. We’re gonna have crazy stuff later that I can do modern cutting and modern intercutting and use all those incredible editing techniques that I learned working with John Krazynski on A Quiet Place 2 and on Abigail.

I learned so much from them about genre stuff and how to subvert the audience. We’re gonna have that crazy stuff, so what if the first half of the movie is cut closer to how a movie in the 1930s would be cut? Let’s hold a little bit longer.

Let’s have these extra scenes with some more time and space. That duality plus Ludwig’s absolutely incredible, complex, gorgeous score allowed us to be able to have that experience. The thing I keep hearing about the response is that it’s a great experience.

You’ve never been here before, and you’re not gonna forget it. You’re gonna have a great time. You’re gonna be scared. You’re gonna laugh. You’re gonna cry. Let’s get this experience to be something unique.

But there’s an appetite for it. There’s a longing for something not the same and thoughtful and complex and deep. I’m so grateful that we found the right thing and people are responding

Let’s talk about the intercutting between when Mary goes out to talk to the white “musicians” and what’s going on inside the juke.

We call that “the pale moon sequence.” After, Mary goes out and talks to them and  the scene where Smoke tells Sammy to go to Mount Bayou and don’t be a musician. He’s doing the uncle thing even though he’s his cousin. That was in the middle of that sequence.

Basically Sammy’s watching Praline sing, and then somebody says,  “Hey, Smoke wants you.” Then he goes upstairs and they have this whole conversation.

I had enough experience with movies and how could be scripted as one thing, but as an editor I need some leeway and it’s understood totally that if it doesn’t feel good, why would I cut something in a way that doesn’t feel good? I can cut it as intended, but then I’m gonna do a version that I want to do that I have fun with.

So the thing is that it’s such a long conversation in the middle of what should be the big ramp up of the movie when things are just about to go crazy. So that scene was out the movie because it just didn’t work with the flow of everything. We took it out, but we kept coming back to the performance, which is one of Michael’s best emotional performances that I’ve ever seen.

It’s a great moment in the movie. It’s on theme. It’s Sammy’s journey. It shows the volatility of this and how these pressures in this world can get to everybody and get in between families and so much to offer that we decided “Let’s get it back in. Let’s intercut it. Can we do little bits?” But it needed to live in the movie and we needed to figure out where it wanted to be. We did so much intercutting this movie.

Some of the best work Ryan and I have ever done in the editing room no one will ever see because it’s just different versions. We did this intercut of Sammy’s dad’s preaching at the end intercut with mowing people down with a machine gun.

We were trying to go for The Godfather baptism/murder intercut. It just lives in our memories and it was a masterclass in how do I take this three hour movie that everything is good in and everybody would like and make it into something palatable?

Intercutting the Mary/Remmick and Mount Bayou scenes was one of those nice days where I didn’t have pressure. I can just ask Ryan, “Can I get a couple hours just to get in the flow state? Get in the zone, let something happen, try some weird things?”

We were trying to figure out where to put this Mount Bayou scene because of how important we thought it was. Sometimes when I cut a scene, I’ll edit the biggest moment first and then I’ll work out from there, because if those moments work, you could find a way to get there, right? 10 different paths, but if that one thing works, you got the audience, the scene is worth it.

This part of the movie is great. The line where he’s telling him, “Don’t do this. Leave all this improper shit to us,” then cut to her saying, “You robbed both sides.” So connecting him telling us don’t do what we’re doing, then hearing what they’re doing. At that point, it didn’t matter that these scenes were supposed to be in completely other place.

Then it was the connection of “My daddy beat Stack real bad” and you start to hear that as Stack is smiling and the juxtaposition of him being beat and seeing another moment of who he is in that, the character in the mask he wears in life after we already hear him say in the car, “Does your dad beat you?” and he says, “Yeah, but he didn’t mean it.”

It all tracks with the coping of things and how people are. And what we ended up finding for the final cut was throwing out any structural expectations or what we should do or shouldn’t do, or what it needs to be. Some of the best moments were found when we just had the freedom to throw the script out the window.What works here? What does this do? Then putting the time in. Putting the grind in and watching back, not being afraid to show as many people as we can and hearing their notes and finding the best thing. There was a lot of that, which is a challenge, but it’s definitely paying off at this point

To be able to have that kind of freedom to radically alter something. You’ve got to have the freedom to fail.

That’s a really great point. The scariest time for an editor is the first time you present a scene, then press play, and you’re thinking, “I’m gonna get fired.”

I’ve had some pretty monumental benchmarks in terms of my process that have helped alleviate that.

Even as simple as having a good work-life balance, getting sleep, exercising will take care of 75% of any of the stress anxiety. Just get it cut. Just throw it out there. Just do it. Take the risk, take the swings.

If you’re an editor, you should believe that you have good takes. If you’re sitting there afraid, thinking, “I don’t wanna mess this up” or “I don’t want to do this” then you’re never gonna find the stuff that’s different.

I would rather throw random takes down in order of lines and sit back and watch it and think, “That one take works, but the rest of it’s terrible. Let me work from that.” Then that already gets me in the reediting process, which is the more fun part and the more exploration part.

Ryan’s and my history allows us to do that. This was the first one I’ve done by myself, with Ryan. I had amazing team, two of my assists - Michael Fay and Travis Cantey - helped with some of these ideas.

Ryan came in every day with five ideas. I absolutely love it, but every day it’s a little much. So we said, “Travis and Michael help assemble stuff. Try different versions of things as we’re going.”

We had a really great team, so that took a little bit of the pressure off, but I don’t always have that relationship with the director to get that space.

But what I’ve learned with Ryan is: there are many paradoxes in life, with creative work. If you have a deadline that’s coming up, the instinct is to go as fast as you can. We gotta get this done. This has gotta be right. It should be like walking a tightrope, but when the tight rope’s on the ground.

But adding all these little anxieties and worries and fears starts to lift that tightrope up. I’d rather take one chill hour where I feel free, and I will find things way more than it if I work four hours. Ryan uses a quote, I think it’s Abraham Lincoln…

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”

Yeah. As an editor, one of the biggest things I realized is that  the biggest obstacle is me. I’m the biggest obstacle. My fear, my imposter syndrome, so I started therapy a little over two years ago. I can’t recommend therapy enough. It is absolutely unbelievable.

I could talk about anything. It’s another thing that keeps things clean, that keeps that top level of stress off. Being calm is a superpower.

I tell that to my son all the time. And that’s how I’ve gotten the best stuff done. Even when I have figured out big things, being really stressed affects everything else and it’s taken a bit of a toll.

It’d be interesting to think about what the value of therapy is beyond just allowing you to cope with things. How else does that help you to be a good editor?

Before I went to USC, I went to the University of Rhode Island and they have a great program. It was communication studies. There was some mass communication studies, but a lot of it was human behavior.

A lot of it was different terms and different behavioral patterns. What I learned was how people interact and how they act and how they would respond to things.

Reactions and responses are a major part of editing movies, so I think with therapy even the self-analysis helps you become a better editor, getting rid of anxiety but also being a little more educated on the human experience.

The other thing is, as an editor, we’re always acting at some point as a therapist for the director, so learning from an actual therapist can help the process of making a movie for sure.

Also, when you’re getting notes, not to take that personally. Being able to understand where the note is coming from and accept it and have a dialogue about it.

That’s a really great point. You can’t just tell yourself  that you don’t want to reject these notes. It’s a visceral thing, ‘cause you put so much of yourself and your love and your own emotion experiences into it.

When someone gives you a note, it cutting. I think with most things in life, it’s okay to feel emotion, but as soon as you possibly can, you have to take a step back and ask yourself why you’re feeling that emotion and to be able to see the note behind the note that is going to help this movie overall.

That comes around to “knowing versus not knowing.” Shed the ego and shed the preconceived notions and the anxieties and everything else, and just say, “How do we make the best movie? Let’s hear everybody out.”

Acceptance of the moment and acceptance of seeing something as an opportunity rather than a hindrance is the best way to be, especially in the editing room. And pressures are pretty high, especially you got producers sitting behind you.

You mentioned Ludwig and his score. When I was listening to the score - other than the obvious Blues music - it seemed like it would be very hard to temp. What did you do?

Ludwig Göransson is an awesome guy. Hilarious, extremely talented, so hardworking, his team is incredible too.

He starts writing stuff early from the script. He gets the script and he starts to work, just like I start to visualize and stuff, or learn the story so I can output it the quickest and most efficient and most honest way possible.

He does the same with music, so he’ll start experimenting and it’s been an evolution. With Creed he sampled punching bags and stuff like that and that.

On Fruitvale Station, he used train sounds. In the Black Panther score, it was another step up where he went to Africa and he finds the different cultures, the different styles. On Panther, he had this really crazy idea of a guy playing the flute and screaming into the flute for Killmonger.

And we got that before they even started shooting! I’m getting to hear his audible story and I can use that in my own thing. So it’s actually not just me by myself try to figure this out.

I’m a purist in the sense that I don’t cut to music. I’ll have music sometimes in the background if I need to feel a certain emotion that I’m just not getting at the moment. I don’t brag about myself a lot. I hope I don’t, but I am very good at music editing.

Between myself and our music editor - Ludwig’s music editor - Felipe Pacheco, he was there on location with us. So he and I had our own ideas. The music obviously evolved and took shape and changed, but we were taking that and auditioning it.

Ludwig also had to be on set. Not only was he the composer, he was executive producer - he and his wife Serena - and there are so many musical numbers and background music and even helping direct the movement of the background when the music cut out and which song is gonna be here.

In a way it became more organic because, Ludwig could write more isolated with the music and then he would give it to us and then with how we were feeling, we would find the right places and audition it and we’d play it back, then, he would say, “I wonder if we use this here?”

So it was a full-on collaborative thing.

 Ryan doesn’t want to hear music with first cuts at all. That’s what they teach us at USC. Music will hide mistakes, so don’t use it. Make sure the cut’s good and then put music on later.

Every movie, Ryan is more and more open to listening to music early because he understands now even more than he ever did, the relationship.

But once it was at the director’s cut, we were all involved in all opinions and everything. But then Ludwig really started to hone everything in and try stuff. I can’t even tell you the output that man does.

Not only with the score, but the soundtrack, which I just listened to last week and was blown away by it. I don’t know where that guy gets his time. Every score I hear of his justs gets better and better.

It really comes from the heart. It comes from the heart and the soul and for love of what we’re doing and understanding of what Ryan’s intention was.

This is Ryan’s love letter to music and cinema based on something that is the most personal for him and the most original for him. It’s also all of our love letters to Ryan.

Michael, thank you for a really interesting discussion. Congratulations on the movie.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Great questions.