The Alto Knights

Today on Art of the Cut we speak with Doug Crise, ACE about editing Barry Levinson’s latest film, The Alto Knights.

Doug was nominated for an Oscar and a BAFTA and won an ACE Eddie for Babel. Then was nominated for a BAFTA and an ACE Eddie for Birdman. Also nominated for an Emmy and an ACE Eddie for Dopesick.

Doug, thank you so much for joining me to talk about The Alto Knights.

Nice to be here.

I want to talk about your relationship with Barry Levinson. You’ve worked with him two or three times?

It’s actually my fourth project with him. I did the movie The Survivor, which was originally called Harry Haft, which we had hoped to be a theatrical release but it was going to be released right when the pandemic happened, so it ended up on HBO.

Then we did two episodes of Dope Sick Together, then two episodes of The Calling for Peacock, then Alto Knights.

What is that collaborative relationship like?

Lately I only wanna work with people I can get along with, and I’ve always gotten along with Barry really well.

I respect him. He’s been around a long time. I give him my viewpoint on things, but he ultimately decides what we do and what gets done.

But he gives a lot of freedom to me in the editing room initially when I’m putting it together. He likes to come in when he is shooting to work with me a little bit.

He’s never in the situation where he needs to see it really polished. He’ll come in and want to see a scene that he shot the day before, and I just got the dailies an hour before he walked in the room. I’ll throw something together really fast and he’ll say, “Yeah. That’s good.”

There’s never pressure to get it perfect for him. Even when we start cutting after the shoot, he’ll say, “That’s good enough for now,” and go on to the next scene.

He never wants to let me nitpick at things like, “Let me fix that sound.” He’ll say, “No, that’s good enough.” So that kind of stuff I have to do when he’s not around.

Do you think that’s because of his long experience as a director, that he knows that editing’s a process?

Yeah. I think so. He doesn’t get bogged down in stuff. Like all directors he’ll go home and come back the next day and say, “Hey, I was thinking about this one scene.

We should look at that.” I’m never working from the beginning of the movie to the end of the movie in order. We’re kinda hopping around a lot.

Is that something that you need to negotiate with each new director: how complete a scene has to be in order to show it to the director?

Luckily, I haven’t had that too much. There were only two or three situations in my life where I’ve had a director want to obsess about stuff to a point where we literally could not go to the next scene in the movie until he had this one the way he wanted it. I just find that near nerve wracking.

I worked with a director once on a film where we got to the end of the 10 week director’s cut and we hadn’t got through the whole movie. He hadn’t watched the whole movie since he saw my editor assembly. Like, “Can we please just go to the next scene?”

What you always find out - which you know - is you’ll get to a later scene and realize that what you’ve done to that later scene means you have to go back and work on a scene that happened before it because you’ve changed something that relates to that scene that comes later, and that’s what he would do.

He’d literally want to go back to the previous scene. I love a director who will go through the whole movie in under a week.

Let’s get through it. Let’s do some changes. Let’s get out the shots you hate. Change this or change that. Let’s pace up a scene or delete a scene or whatever. Barry works like that.

Before we get to the specifics of The Alto Knights, I do have a question for you on Birdman. I interviewed Lee Smith - who edited another “one take” movie – and he said it was the hardest movie he’d ever edited.

I wouldn’t say it was the hardest movie I ever edited, but I found myself realizing that I had to figure out things that I wouldn’t normally figure out.

I did learn a lot from it. Sometimes we would overwork audio just to switch out a performance on the take, because we couldn’t cut to another take if you prefer a different performance audio-wise.

We would do tricks that I had never done before where we would speed up a scene within a scene without cutting anything. We would ramp it faster then slow it down to normal speed and ramp it faster, slow it to normal speed.

There’s a scene on the roof with Emma Thompson and Edward Norton where we’re doing that constantly. Between each line of dialogue, I’m speeding the film up then slowing it back down so that they can be in sync.

Then there’s a small jump cut where he flubbed a word and we blended the image so that you would not see the cut.

They had their planned edit points. The longest setup was about three and a half minutes, but we would always find new edit points within a shot if we wanted to switch something out. It’s always great if somebody’s walking past an edge of something then you put in a wipe.

We did one that was really creative, I thought, where Michael Keaton is doing his monologue on stage and the camera’s going around him and Edward Norton’s in the background drinking and he realizes it’s water and not real booze.

We wiped along the side of Michael Keaton’s body to switch the background shot from the shot we’re in. It’s about a 45 second wipe, and that was not a planned edit. Obviously I would have to commend Chivo, the DP.

A lot of the movie was SteadiCam or handheld. There were only a couple motion control shots in the whole film.

The takes were really close to one another in sizing and framing to the point where you could do that and get away with it. It was really quite amazing that we were able to do certain things like that.

So I learned those kind of things and I actually employed some of those things on films afterwards that I hadn’t really done. I had done a little bit of that speeding up and slowing down within a take or doing jump cuts and hiding them.

On Arbitrage I did that a lot. We really paced the film up by doing that. It was Birdman where I found all those tricks. We locked that picture in seven weeks, then it was nine months of visual effects.

Let’s talk about The Alto Knights. Tell me about editing the opening assassination sequence.

The movie was originally supposed to open in the Copa Cabana as Costello is on a night out. He was out for that night, then says, “Hey, I gotta go home,” which is something Frank Castello did.

He went home every night to conduct business on the phone. We decided, we needed to open the movie with a bang.

He’s gotta get shot right away. It took a while before we got there. We tried like 20 different variations of him getting shot at the beginning or doing something at the beginning, then getting shot.

I think once we decided to just shoot him at the beginning, we wanted to have that sense that it stunned him. He doesn’t know what happened.

It was never conceived that way, but we decided to edit it that way and put some blurry shots and mess with it just to give that sense that he’s out of it.

Maybe give the sense that maybe he did get killed. But then immediately, you know that he is not dead ‘cause he’s talking and narrating from as an old man, then you see him in the hospital.

Talk to me about The Alto Knights photo montage over the opening interview. How did you decide when to be on DeNiro doing his performance and when to be on photos?

DeNiro did that monologue and because he interjects a lot of his personality into it, you kinda wanna stay on him as much as you can.

You want to tell the story from the images you have, but every time I’d go back to him and he would do something like saying: “Prohibition, it was legal to drink. It just wasn’t legal to sell it. I never heard of a law like that.”

He makes a face and he puts a lot of personality in his performance, so you hate to just hear that and not see him do it. It’s mainly a thing of stringing the dialogue of what you want him to say, then you’re working in the images we were using to tell that story.

Barry said early on, that he wanted to tell a lot of the backstory of the mob and how they got started and how Frank got started. They were talking about filming a lot of it and they ultimately decided, “Let’s just do it in photographs.

Let’s just take existing photographs and we will make our own photographs to tell the story without having to shoot whole scenes and do it through narration. That’s how that concept happened. So it’s always a choice.

One of the other choices is the intercutting after the assassination attempt. The police visit Costello in the hospital as he’s recovering and they’re trying to get information out of him at the same time that you’re hearing the other side of the assassination attempt with Vito.

That was not scripted. It was scripted as two separate scenes. When I saw the movie for the first time, there’s a scene with Anastasia at the end where Frank wants him to go to Cuba and another scene where Veto says, “Why is Albert going to Cuba?” They were two separate scenes.

I immediately said to Barry, those scenes need to be intercut. A couple weeks later Barry says to me, “We should also intercut the hospital scene and Veto scenes after the assassination attempt.” It came off funnier to me with them intercut.

I was worried about losing the humor of Veto yelling at Vinny the Chin. I was worried about too much cutting back and forth, but it helped pace up the scenes a little bit.

Barry likes a lot of the back and forth - the mob talk where they repeat themselves. We could always cut that stuff down, but then you lose the humor of it. We also did it when Anastasia got killed in the barbershop.

I also remember some intercutting as Costello’s wife goes home and wipes up the bloody mirror. I can’t remember what that’s intercut with.

It was Frank walking out of the hospital with the cops and it’s intercut with the guy doing the  radio broadcast from Lindy’s restaurant, then we also threw in Bobby looking at the blood on the elevator at the same time.

Those weren’t really scripted to be put together like that, but it was trying to pace up the front of the film a little bit.

There’s not a single scene cut out of this film - maybe that’s good or bad, I don’t know. But there’s not a single scene missing. Every scene that was shot is in the film. They’re not as long as they used to be.

They’re cut in different ways, and they’re done differently from the script, but there’s not a single scene on the cutting room floor.

Now, there were a couple times I tried to get a couple of ’em on the cutting room floor. Barry would say, “What did we cut out? Didn’t we take a scene outta here?” And I say, “Yeah, we took this one scene out.” And he would say, “Put it back in.”

How rare is it for you to not drop a scene?

I’ve never had a film where that has happened. Even in Birdman it happened. And Birdman, the whole movie’s depends on the fact that you know what the next scene’s gonna go to.

But director Alejandro Iñárritu did a smart thing where he actually shot alternatives a couple times where Naomi Watts is going into the room, then he shot another take where she goes in the room, but the camera doesn’t follow her.

It goes over and catches Ed Norton going up to the roof so that we didn’t have to go in with her and have a scene in there if he didn’t want to ‘cause he thought maybe he might be cutting the scene out, but he didn’t.

But there was a scene cut out when we go into the iPhone and then it comes to a different spot. There was an extra scene that was lost, so there was even scenes cut outta that movie.

Let’s talk about the editing of the prohibition and World War II montages over the interview. Lots of photos and archival. How did you organize that?

They started gathering that stuff before I was working on the movie and we were constantly looking for new photos and asking the studio if they had different photos for different things, different parts of the story we might want to tell.

Of course, now you just go on the internet and Google a photo and we had the script and the story you wanted to tell. So it was just finding the imagery that you wanted to go to accompany it. Some of the photos are doctored.

We put the guy who played young DeNiro’s head on someone else from an actual archived photo. Then of course they shot photos for that scene too. They shot a small scene where Frank wants to open a bar and Vito doesn’t want to.

One of the things that I love talking about is the times when you are able to jump the 180. You had a couple of instances where you needed to jump the 180 or maybe it you did it for impact. Talk to me about when you can do that and how you do it. In the funeral parlor, where they’re in with all the caskets, the camera’s going around them and there are a couple of 180 jumps in there because sometimes the camera’s going one way and sometimes the camera’s going the other way.

I don’t think it bothers me as long as you know where everybody is. They walk into the room and you see them, and we even have an opening wide shot where they’re both standing and you know who they both are.

He was moving the camera around them a lot in that scene, so it was motivated mainly by performance and where it felt interesting to change the performance.

The camera’s going around their back, then all of a sudden you’re on their face again, and it’s perfectly fine. Audiences are so sophisticated now that it doesn’t bump people anymore.

You alluded to building the tension with the intercutting of the house moving scene before he goes to the barber. I didn’t know he was gonna get killed, but based on your editing, based on the way you were building tension, I knew something bad was going to happen.

Barry really wanted to show that this guy had a family, he had a wife, he had kids, that’s why he wanted to do it that way.

You saw his children, packing and moving and leaving. I think with the music and then his intercutting with Frank watching the baseball game, and we took away all the clues that were obvious that he was gonna get killed.

It’s only through the tension of the scene that you know something dreadful is gonna happen.

In the original edit, when he pulls him up in the car in front of the barbershop, the guy who’s the driver looks at the two assassins on the street and they look back and that’s been deleted from the movie, so that you don’t give that away. We also took out shots of the assassins walking into the barbershop.

You don’t see them walk in. But we create a lot of tension with the razor blade going back and forth. You think maybe he’s gonna get his throat slit if you don’t know the story, you don’t know that he gets shot a half a dozen times.

At one point we had a song over that whole sequence. It was softening it too much. You still knew he was gonna die.

The song was very melancholy. We finally decided, “We’re gonna just leave score and we’re gonna play the baseball game so you can hear the baseball games going on.” And I think it made a lot more tension and a lot more realism to it that way.

Albert in our movie, actually unfairly in many ways, is portrayed as a nicer man. He was a monster. He was an assassin, a killer, a horrible human being.

But in our movie he’s best friends with Frank and he has a family and he is sticking up for Frank. We don’t want to glorify him as a good guy who got gunned down, but he was Frank’s protection, so that was the reason Veto took him out.

Do you have any advice on a scene like that barbershop scene to build tension?

I think the nice slower pacing of it actually helped it a lot. The way Barry directed it and how he built the whole moment so you knew something was going to happen because it had been building to that.

I think it’s just the audience knowing that, then taking your time and laying it out. It’s the horror movie trick where you just hang on stuff and she’s walking down the dark hallway and you hear a noise and and nothing happens for three or four minutes.

Then it finally happens. I’m not a huge horror movie fan, but my son is, and he’s been making me watch horror movies more.

Nothing horribly bloody happens for the first hour, but you’re sitting on your seat just knowing this is all gonna go horribly wrong, then you see people getting stabbed in the chest with a pitchfork and everything else, but nothing happens for a while and I find that kind of riveting how they just build it and build it.

This movie builds to Costello’s big plan to get rid of all the mobsters. Once that happens did you find that you needed to change the pace once that happened of the epilogue? Did you and Barry say, “We need to stretch this out a little bit,” or “we need to tighten it.”

We go through it pretty quickly. It was important to Barry to get as much information out there as he could. He wanted to tell the story and have people understand what was happening.

One of the points he wanted to make in the epilogue was that this forced J. Edgar Hoover to investigate the mob.

Before this, Hoover didn’t wanna believe there was a nationwide mob, or he knew there was, but didn’t wanna do anything about it.

It was only after Appalachia and all those mobsters getting pulled over. One of the things we took out was the fact that the mobsters wouldn’t have gotten in trouble if they hadn’t run away. Once they’re in their cars and they’re driving, the cops can pull them over.

If they’d stayed on the farm, nothing would’ve happened, but it’s only ‘cause they panicked. We don’t explain that that’s why the cops were able to pull ’em over and get their names, get their licenses and all that stuff.

We wanted to convey the information that this brought on these investigations into the mob.

I was trying to remember whether you used any jump cuts in this movie. Do you remember doing that?

Oh yeah. I’m certain I did. I sometimes consider things jump cuts that maybe aren’t.

In a movie where you can remember doing a jump cut or in a TV show where you can remember doing a jump cut, what’s the value of that?

I think it just quickly takes you to a new image that keeps telling the story and breaks it up. Spring Breakers is full of jump cuts.

The movie’s one whole big jump cut. We’re always going from one thing to another and repeating and going back to something we’d seen before and going forward. It keeps it visually interesting and almost added a poetic sense to the film.

It’s not always just about pacing things up. The standard linear jump cut where you’re seeing someone tear an apartment apart looking for something - they’re pulling a drawer open, then they’re ripping the bed apart - those type of jump cuts are always done for that reason: so you can speed through the scene and show the chaotic motion of it.

That’s not why we did it in Spring Breakers.

Was there a particular scene or editorial challenge for the movie as a whole that you would like to talk about?

Like all movies, the beginning and the ending are always your biggest problem. I guess it’s because they’re the two most important parts.

You can always figure out how to pace up the middle of the film or do something else, but it’s all on how you get people into the story and how you tell the opening and that’s probably the bigger challenge we had on this film was how to open it and how to get us into the movie and keep all the information we wanted to keep and work our way up into that montage until the movie really gets started with the actual story - we see Frank get shot, we’ve gotta introduce Veto, and we introduce different things and we introduce their childhood and we talk about different things like that.

So that, to me, was probably the biggest challenge. Then the ending too, figuring out how to wrap everything up and tell what we wanted to tell in that epilogue.

There used to be a whole scene where Frank gets his award for growing flowers - when I see a scene wasn’t cut out, it wasn’t.

It was just photographs with his voice over: “I won an award for flowers.” There was an actually shot where he gave a thank you speech, but the rest of it is still there.

Doug, I don’t think I have any other questions. Thank you so much for joining us on Art of the Cut and talking to us about The Alto Knights.