The Accountant 2

Today on Art of the Cut we’re speaking with Oscar-nominee Richard Pearson, ACE, about editing The Accountant 2.

Richard’s been on Art of the Cut several times in the past for the original The Accountant film, also for Wonder Woman 1984, and Kong: Skull Island. Richard’s also worked on Men in Black 2, and the Bond movie, Quantum of Solace.

He was nominated for an Oscar and an ACE Eddie and won a BAFTA for United 93. He was also nominated for an ACE Eddie and an Emmy for From the Earth to the Moon.

Rick, thank you so much for joining me to talk about The Accountant 2.

My pleasure.

Was the beginning scripted as it was? The beginning is Christian in his Airstream getting ready for a date, and also the bingo scene.

The bingo thing was not scripted as a bingo hall actually. That came from [director] Gavin O’Connor going on a location scout.

That particular location had all of these different interesting environments. It’s actually a dance hall. It was the one location where they could service the issue of Ray needing to get up and run to the restroom, but also had another place where someone could enter.

He wanted to do something that had the spine of a piece of music, which is that Nina Simone tune running throughout.

I was never quite sure how that was gonna work, but we got it to work and [composer Bryce Dessner] did a fantastic job. The composer deconstructed that Nina Simone song and wove it throughout the entirety of that open piece.

It was scripted in a rough sort of thumbnail. We knew what was gonna happen in terms of when the intercutting happened, what actually was being said.

It was also a place to drop little expositional nuggets for the audience in terms of things that they could reference back if they watched it a second or third time and say, “Oh, I see what Ray was saying to her there that meant this.” We did a bit of that with regards to Ben and the Airstream, that was pretty much as scripted.

There’s a lot of adlibbing in this film. That particular scene, as I recall, was pretty much as scripted.

The actual speed dating scene kind of jumps around the timeline. It starts with the speed dating and then it goes to after the speed dating event, when the two hosts of the speed dating are interrogating him, so we’re jumping back and forth between, those two timelines.

That was scripted that way, but a lot of that content is adlibbed by Ben. The ladies also adlibbed. It was a lot of fun going through those dailies ‘cause there’s a wealth of comedic treasure there.

Were there additional women that we didn’t get to see?

I think there was just one more woman, but she was also given similar content as one of the others, so it was an either/or and we decided to go with what you saw in the film because they all worked the best together.

The character, Chris, is pretty obviously and notably autistic, or at least on the spectrum. Talk to me about what you did as an editor to enhance that idea: either increasing awkward pauses or blazing through his incredibly fast ability to think.

It’s some of all of that. Some of that is awkward pauses as you say. It’s also talking over the top of someone because he’s just spitting out information and it doesn’t really matter how they’re reacting, it’s more about him and from his point of view, just getting stuff out. It also has to do with when he makes eye contact and when he doesn’t ‘cause he often doesn’t. Leaning into that.

The way that DP Seamus McGarvey shoots and Gavin directs, there are a lot of times the camera’s locked off, and so it allows me to do a lot of split screens to play with the timing between characters.

So you wouldn’t know it - or hopefully you wouldn’t know it - but the scene on the Airstream is full of split screens changing timing.

So suddenly one character will be slowed way down so that another character can say whatever they need to say, then there can be a thoughtful pause and then the other character begins. It’s a little bit of all those things - playing with how he interacts with people or doesn’t interact with people.

People always talk about the pacing of a scene should be based on the footage you’re given and the purpose of the scene - the intent of the scene. One of the places where I noticed that was with the kids at Harbor Neuroscience in this hacking scene. The speed of that is super, super fast. Talk to me about using editing pacing to show how smart they are.

That scene went through a lot of contraction, expansion, contraction in order to both tell the story in an interesting way, but not overstay its welcome.

Also it needed a lot of handholding for the audience because as written - and as we experienced when we would put it together - you oftentimes had no idea what it was they were doing or what the kids were referencing, but the beauty of Justine [the AI/Siri-like character] is that she can be our little expositional helper, so she’s constantly talking to them and saying, “Zoom in on that thing. Check the front entrance.

Go back.” So that all of that was added. We probably went to that well at least three times with Alison, the actress who does the voice of Justine.

We kept writing additional lines for Justine. There were wholesale chapters that we lifted out of there because we felt it was either overstaying its welcome, or it was becoming confusing.

There was a whole section where they went to the DMV in Iowa and did a deep dive on their computer and we don’t need to do all that. We can use facial recognition as opposed to going down that cul-de-sac.

As Gavin and I were working on the bulk of the movie, Gavin said, “We should have somebody else just tackle this sequence for a bit, so I had some great help from both Jenn Horvath and Jeff Groth, ACE, both did a couple of weeks on that.

They were really helpful because I had done a rough assembly of it, but it was clear from that assembly that it needed to be pared down.

Also it needed some expositional help from and Justine is a perfect tool for that because we can have her say whatever she wants by typing into her tablet. Jenn would work on the sequence for several days.

We’d go down the hall, look at it and say, “Okay, great. Now I see what this is. Now we need to clarify these connections.” Or “Let’s lose this chapter.”

She got it to a point, then we brought Jeff in for a couple of weeks and he did the same thing.

It was really helpful because it was useful to be away from it ‘cause it was its own movie really. Then I took it back and condensed it even further because now we had seen where all these different threads would go and it became clearer what needed to go away, and what needed to yet be enhanced

Oscar-nominated editor, Richard Pearson, ACE

She’s AI, so you could have done an AI app and it would’ve been fine.

For temporary purposes. We did do some of that, but it was always with the actor’s knowledge ahead of time, and we never did it as a replacement.

But that is a really useful tool. Not too long ago you just needed somebody that was a good mimic. Sometimes you have that and sometimes you don’t. My first assistant, Sean Thompson did a lot of great work using…

Eleven Labs, maybe?

I think that’s right. It was really useful to mock things up because it doesn’t throw you the way that someone else’s voice does, which is the way it’s been forever.

That’s a really strong, useful tool for that purpose, but only for temporary purposes.

I love talking about montages and there’s a lovely one when you go down to Juarez with the kids playing jacks.

I had done an assembly, which was based upon what was scripted - as you do. I think you and I have talked about this in the past.

You don’t get any bonuses for trying to be clever on the assembly in regards to ignoring scripted material. The director shot something for the reason that they did, and they need to see it.

And even if you don’t like it, it’s a chance to say, “There it is. Doesn’t work, does it?” Gavin said, “I want to hear the sound of that ball - that sonic boom before we even go to Juarez - so when we go to Juarez and we discover what that is, it’s almost like improvisational jazz.” When he said that to me I asked, “Why did you not tell me that ahead of time?”

He said, “Because I wasn’t in the room.” He’s one of two directors that I’ve worked with in the 26 or 27 years that I’ve been cutting features that doesn’t want to see cut footage ahead of time.

Both of those directors are so focused on production that they’re just leaning into what they’re shooting on a day-to-day basis.

And my job is to come to them if I think there’s an issue or if they’re missing something, but otherwise they don’t want to know unless there’s a problem.

The Juarez section was a really lovely opportunity to do this kind of lyrical montage where you really don’t understand what that place is, but it will be revealed. There’s a lot of that in this film. “Why did they say that?” “What does that mean?” “Oh, I see.

That means this.” As Chris says, when he’s looking at the collage of photos up on his ceiling, he says, “It’s not a school. It’s a prison.” He’s putting the pieces together himself as the audience is, so we shouldn’t be ahead of Chris there.

It’s an interesting idea: the idea of how much do you allow the audience to put something together on their own and discover something and have that process of discovery be something that pulls the audience into the movie, and how much do you say, “I wonder if the audience understands?”

Certainly there were our own initial reactions, Gavin and I. That all gets boiled down when you start doing preview audiences and finding out what people track and what people don’t track. Without giving a spoiler, there’s a fairly significant reveal of who a character is in the third act.

We had to really carefully craft what was being said to that person so that you could go back with later viewings and say, “Oh, I see this is what was being said.”

It was trying to be artful about how much can we say and how much can we not say?

Can we get back to the Juarez montage? What guided you? Did you start visually? Did you know that there was a piece of music that you wanted? You talked about the sound design of the jacks and the ball.

I stream instrumental music in the background while I’m cutting. Part of it is just wallpaper, but I’m also looking for something that I feel might be the DNA of the movie.

Gavin is also one of the few directors that I’ve worked with that doesn’t want to hear any temp music during the assembly, but there was a piece of music that I had come across that I had lined up with a different section of the movie.

The piece that was underneath the montage came from a soundtrack I’d found which was from a television show. There was this thematic whistling of this tune “Pop goes the Weasel” that comes to play in the third act in a big way.

I found this piece of music that had this kind of mournful, violin music, but that also could be a call-and-response to the whistling of “Pop Goes The Weasel” which just happened to work with this piece of music.

That piece of music came originally from this television soundtrack. Gavin really responded to it. He said, “Wow! That’s the DNA of our movie!” We ended up going to that soundtrack many times with the music editor. Then Bryce artfully created his own version of that

You alluded a little earlier to the conversation on top of the Airstream and how carefully that was paced using invisible split-screens. Talk to me about the ebb and flow of that conversation ‘cause I thought it was really lovely. It’s two brothers trying to get to know each other again, so there’s joking around and fast-paced banter and there’s also moments of pain and discovery about each other.

That was an interesting scene to work on and it evolved over the period of the director’s cut, and then again with several screenings. It was great that Gavin wanted to let those brothers do exactly that.

There’s sort of snarky banter, but then there are also moments where we just let them sit in the moment, particularly when Brax is saying, “Is it me? Or is it you, Chris?” They talk about being a cat person: “At least a cat would miss me.” “No, maybe, it’s doubtful.”

And we just sit in that. It’s absurd and it’s funny, but then we sit in their silent reactions, then Brax is finding that gets to a painful place. He wants to connect with his brother.

It was a real dance to figure out when they should be talking over each other, when they should let the air hang.

God bless Gavin, because at one point I wanted to bring in a piece of music near that back third of the scene when there’s a big turn because he said, “No music.

It’s all there in their performances. They don’t need any support. In fact, it’s more beautiful to let them just do it themselves unsupported.” And he was right.

I’ve been reading some of the reviews and people talk about the pacing and how some people just love it and some people think it’s uneven.

I think it’s those moments when - yeah, you could just cut that entire scene out - those things could have been either removed or made much faster, but that was the point.

It’s this is a character study about these brothers’ relationship almost more so than anything. They want to relate. They’re both lonely and how do they connect and that’s really the core of the film.

Another scene that’s like that is when Braxton is rehearsing, trying to buy a dog from a lady. That’s a lovely scene. It shows you who he is. But is that important to the plot? Barely.

Gavin said the movie’s gonna stop and take a left turn here for the next 10 minutes, and you’re either along for the ride or not.

An interesting side note: that is my wife on the phone on the other end of the phone. I was cutting that scene at home. It wasn’t scripted that we would hear the other side of the call, but I thought it would be fun to just hear that kind of Charlie Brown’s teacher voice every once in a while.

You don’t need that scene except that it’s a double setup: one for the picture on the phone, that’s Greg. Then with the setup at the end when he goes in the front of the bus and picks up a different animal.

There’s also a scene around there where he’s talking to a prostitute or somebody on at a table. She looks absolutely terrified. You’re not quite sure why she’s terrified. Then, as he leaves the table you see dead bodies strewn all around the apartment. Did you get to see all those people killed at some point, or no?

Oh no! It was written that way. That was a reveal at the end of scene as Brax says to the girl, “What could I have possibly have done that would make you think that I’d wanna hurt you?” Then you reveal that there are six, seven bodies around her that he’s annihilated.

I think it might be a dozen!

They just keep showing up. That shot was designed so great. You’ve revealed the one, and then there’s a second, and then you do the coverage and there’s another on the staircase.

Talk about the honky-tonk. Editorially, that seems like it would’ve been a very difficult scene of Chris trying to like grok the dance. He’s not a dancer, but he’s mathematically trying to figure out a pattern of movement in the dance that he can understand. Then Chris slowly goes from awkwardness to a truly joyful place.

In the first movie Chris doesn’t really interact with anyone except Anna Kendrick’s character, for the most part. He’s very solitary.

This is nine years later. In a conversation on the couch at the hotel with Anna Kendrick’s character in the first movie, he says, “I have difficulty reading people.

I have difficulty connecting with people. It’s not that I don’t want to. I want to, but it’s very difficult for me.” I think this is just him experimenting with different ways of trying to connect.

And he says it to his brother on the Airstream I’d like to have someone to check in on, I’d like that. And so he does have - in that scene in particular – he’s got this joyful moment of connecting. He stumbles at the end and steps on her feet and he is so apologetic.

She just gives him this huge hug and you can see it in his physicality. He doesn’t really know how to react. He awkwardly puts his arms around her. It’s this thing that he longs for and he’s trying. I think he just did a beautiful job of that and it was fun to show this other side of him.

He does want to connect with people. He doesn’t want to just be a robot, but he’s not sure how to do it. In the end he gets her phone number, which was great with the preview audiences. People applaud when they see that!

At the conclusion of that dance is a gigantic fight. Did they film the fight?

No they didn’t. It might have been scripted but it was both an economy of time and also it would just be another fist-fight. Wouldn’t it be more fun to do what we did and leave it to the imagination of “this is gonna go sideways”?

It was Gavin’s idea to do a freeze frame on Brax ‘cause he was never sure how to get out of that; “What are we gonna do?” So we tried that and that also got a huge reaction in the preview audiences.

It’s a great freeze frame.

It’s such a funny call. It’s like that kind of Magnum P.I., Mannix, Starsky and Hutch situation.

Then you cut from the honky-tonk to the hospital.

That’s where the doctors recounting the story of this “Jane Doe.” There are a lot of flashbacks. That was scripted, although there was some additional photography there because people were confused how that woman became a killing machine, so we had ended up with an additional footage of her watching kickboxing, then with the disarming the security guard and leaving the hospital.

That was all done after the fact because people just didn’t understand, “She’s mean and really good at chess, but why is she now killing people?” So they just needed a little connective tissue.

One of those things that I’m fascinated with is that these scripts are written and developed by very smart people - great writers – but often you don’t see issues until you get them edited together.

That’s right. For example, in the bar scene at the beginning, Ray has a whole lot of other exposition about what he used to do and how somebody used to help him do it.

It was all servicing backstory from the first movie - if you hadn’t seen the first one - so that you would understand, but it was just all too much.

It just felt like, “Why are you talking so much about yourself?” So we ended up crafting some ADR for

Ray while we were on coverage of Annais, that you could understand on subsequent viewings: “Oh, I see what he is saying when he says, I need you to help me. You’re really the only person that can.”

That means something. You only find that out downstream, but it’s all elliptical. Getting back to your point, until you edit it together you begin to understand.”Oh, I don’t understand this connection.” Or, “Oh, we’ve over-explained this,” or any combination thereof. It’s really a process

Let’s talk about the intercutting during the Marybeth fight scene in her house intercut with Ben on the motorcycle trying to rescue her.

When you’re trying to set a ticking clock, that instinct in terms of when you cut away, what’s the last moment of jeopardy?

One of them is Marybeth getting knocked to the floor and a knife falling beside her. Where’s that gonna go? It’s an opportunity to cut to Chris racing to the scene.

Will he make it, won’t he? It’s such a trite thing to say that the footage dictates where those things want to happen, but it really is the case.

You discover that after you’ve pieced it together and maybe you try moving things. Although with this particular sequence, once we did it they more or less stayed in those places.

Was the process of editing that, that you cut the entire fight scene knowing that there would be places to cut away?

It wasn’t scripted as intercut. It was scripted as a fight, so that fight works on its own, but when Gavin and I started working together, we played with the idea of the intercuts asking the question: “Will he make it or won’t he?”

There’s a montage as Anais sees the photo on the wall. Talk to me about building that montage and how you did that.

There’s a piece of music called “The Causeway.” It’s from this limited series called The Third Day: Winter. I’ve never seen it.

I don’t know where it came from, but we ended up going to the DNA of that soundtrack quite a bit during that flashback sequence when the photo is triggering her to remember her past. It has this very mournful singular violin line.

That’s me whistling along with it, by the way. I did that because I needed to see how it was working. It was constructed in such a way that I could whistle “Pop goes the weasel” around these violin lines.

It was a way to try to tie in this whole idea of this whistling “Pop goes the weasel” and how it’s a kind of trigger for her. It was Gavin’s idea.

He said, “What if we split up the beginning of the montage and the end, so it, it begins with them being ambushed and it ends with the conclusion of that ambush?” Then you see - in a nonlinear way - their journey, which I thought was pretty effective.

The actress who plays. Anaïs - Daniella Pineda - had such a beautiful performance as she’s looking at this photo.

You see there was so much story being told by her face that it was a real interesting emotional challenge to find when to cut to her and when to be in her flashback. I thought she did a wonderful job. It’s quite haunting.

During the attack on the compound there’s a backhoe digging a big hole in the desert, and you’re using that almost like you used the motorcycle. It’s a ticking clock

For sure. That’s exactly what it is. The point is that they don’t have much time to do what they need to do.

I think all the trailers show the big attack scene. You’re watching the two brothers acting as a personal SEAL Team Six. Any thoughts or advice for young editors on cutting that kind of action and what to do?

The action in my opinion should be born out of the character, not just action for action’s sake. Here are these two brothers working in tandem with each other and they look at each other and it’s important to see that they’re clocking each other and they’re silently communicating.

Action for action’s sake is fine, but it’s just empty calories. Whenever action can be derived from a character’s motivation and what they need - what they’re after - that’s the bonus. To me, action cutting is fairly straightforward because you go from A to B to C to D.

You get the bare bones of what it wants to be because of the footage and the choreography of the fight, the car chase, whatever the action may be.

Are there any scenes that you’d like to talk about, either that you were very proud of or that might have been more complicated to cut than an audience might notice?

The scenes that are the most interesting to me here are the scenes that are quiet. I love the Airstream scene, just to be able to sit with characters like that. I feel like we don’t see that very much. I quite like the scene with the three “ladies of the night” in the hotel room.

That’s similar. There are moments of pauses and just letting it breathe. For example, when the woman is saying, “It’s gonna take a lot more than this to get me away from these people.” Braxton looks over at Chris and says, “Come on, Mr.

I can afford it.” So Chris hands her some more money. That got a big reaction, as did the next time when he just looks at it him and says, “Really?” Then really nice laughs, but it was paired with the severity of - and the drama of - the scene.

I like the montage in Juarez. That was fun to construct the lyrical aspect of it. I quite liked the flashbacks and playing with how to integrate musically, “Pop goes the Weasel”. When we finally did figure out that approach, that was very satisfying.

Talk to me about things that are improvised or adlibbed because obviously you’re not only making choices of performance, but actual content choices: “What’s the funniest line? Is that a funny line? That’s really funny, but not serving the story.” You’re making a lot of choices.

It’s all of what you just said. On straight-up comedies that I’ve done, oftentimes there are alternates for different jokes, so you try one version for this audience and the next time you preview you swap it out with a different version of the joke.

We didn’t do as much of that here, but Gavin really dove into the dailies. It was interesting on this one more so than on the first one.

He would often sit with the second assistant editor, Jon Lee, and just go through dailies, combing through all the adlibs. Then he’d create these sequences.

On that dance hall footage, it was over an hour’s worth of selects that he’d pulled, but the way that he and I would work is he would give me the space to put it together, then he would come back and react to it.

An hour of selects for a scene that’s probably two minutes.

With the “ladies of the night” it didn’t change terribly much from my assembly, with the exception of adding in some additional pauses and some looks and things.

But then again, other things like the Juarez montage when we first meet the kid playing Jacks, that evolved from a very different place because of something that was in his improvisational jazz mind.

I love the “ladies of the night” thing. They’re speaking Spanish and there’s no subtitling. You don’t need to know what they’re saying.

Yes, that was an interesting process actually, because they were subtitled initially. The whole conversation - if you speak Spanish - it all tracks.

But all you need to know is that there’s a conflict there and that the one woman is trying to say something and the other two are saying, “No! We’re out of here” and something about Juarez. That’s all you need to know.

The one thing that was very interesting to me was the process that we went through of: “How much do you need to help the audience understand what’s going on with the character? How much is too much?”

Because it’s a puzzle movie - like the first one - we can’t give away too much. If people figure this out in the first act, then what’s the point? It’s layered and complex. It’s very dense, so I think it bears repeated viewing.

I’ve talked to a couple of editors now that talk about the value of editing for repeated viewings.

If you rewatch it now, knowing where everything is headed, you can see that there are breadcrumbs all through the movie for where it’s headed.

Rick, thank you so much for talking to us about this movie. I hope everybody gets a chance to go see it.

Thank you. Let’s get some people back out to the theaters.