The Fire Inside

Today on Art of the Cut we speak with Harry Yoon, ACE about his editing of the film The Fire Inside.

Harry has been on Art of the Cut before for his work on the films Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Minari - for which he was nominated for an ACE Eddie - also The Best of Enemies, and Detroit. He’s also been on for the TV series, Beef, for which he won an ACE Eddie.

Harry, it’s great to talk to you again. You’re an Art of the Cut frequent flier! Today’s interview number six for you, talking about The Fire Inside.

Thank you so much. It’s always so much fun talking with you, Steve. 

This is a true story. Did you do any research beyond just reading the script? 

A lot of the movie was inspired by an amazing documentary called T-Rex (2015). That’s the only research that I did before. It’s a beautifully shot, beautifully edited documentary. You watch that and you think, “Why haven’t I heard about Claressa Shields before?”

She has such a remarkable story and she’s such a great character. She’s such an amazing individual and her accomplishments are incredible. I thought, “Wow, this is a story that really has to be told and I’m so glad that this is the project that Rachel Morrison chose to be her feature debut.”

How did that collaboration go?

I was honored to even talk to her. I knew of her work - first woman to be nominated for an Oscar for Mudbound. I knew she shot Black Panther, and Fruitvale Station, and I was a big admirer of her work as a DP.

When I heard that she was talking to people about her feature debut, I was excited just to speak with her and a little intimidated initially, but then I really loved it. She jumped on the Zoom and she had her feet up in her chair and was so chill and so casual and so open and immediately jumped into why she was choosing this story, why it was personally meaningful to her because she herself is a pioneer as a woman in what was traditionally a men’s industry - or men’s part of the industry.

She had a lot of personal investment in his type of story, and she was such an admirer of Claressa as a boxer because she trains as a boxer herself. It’s just wonderful to hear those personal touch points. Even though this is her feature debut, she’s done quite a bit of directing in commercials and series. I knew she knew her way around being a director.

What I wasn’t prepared for was how incredibly inviting and collaborative she would be at every step of the process -at the script stage, talking about the conversation she was having with the studio – in every aspect of the filmmaking she was inviting me as one of her department heads to weigh in and getting my opinion on questions that were -  beyond post questions - very much story questions, filmmaking questions. So that made it even more enjoyable.

Anytime you’ve got a boxing movie, you’ve got to ask about training montages.

Obviously, you think about all the montages that you were inspired by in watching boxing movies in the past, and you want to live up to that sense of sweep, that sense of energy. For me it was very much not just the montage itself, but what are we going into the montage with? How much do we know what it means for the character?

I think that was definitely something that we wanted to set up was to make sure that Claressa’s story up to that point before she’s training for the gold medal. You understand what’s at stake, not just for her personally, but for the town that she lives in.

That’s what I really loved is that when Rachel was shooting this montage, it wasn’t just about the physical rigors of Claressa training. It was very much about her interacting with people in the community, people shouting out from cars, driving beside her on a go kart. In fact - like a lot of those people - like the guy on the go kart, for example - are people that know the real Claressa Shields.

When we were in Flint she wanted to be sure to include that: actual people from the community who knew of Claressa story were invested in it and wanted to be sure that aspect of the town rallying around this remarkable young woman was just as much a part of that montage as the physical rigors of her training. So we wanted to be sure to include that.

One thing that we did do editorially was that we actually added a mini-montage.

Director Rachel Morrison with editor Harry Yoon, ACE

The film was shot in two parts. Part one was before we were shut down during COVID - where we did some exteriors and some running and a few scenes in Flint, Michigan. Then, years later, when the film revived and we got to shoot the lion’s share of it, we had a part two of the shoot.

One of the things I was able to do is to utilize some of that part one footage for a mini-montage that gave us a sense of time passing of her - developing as a boxer before she goes into her Olympic run.

One of the questions that we had early on was, “How did she get to be from this girl who didn’t really know how to throw a punch to being one of the best boxers to come onto the women’s scene back before 2016?”

In some ways we needed screen time to give people a sense that it didn’t just happen overnight. We needed screen time to give people a sense that they didn’t miss some critical aspect of how she became a boxer. 

Some of that montage footage we repurposed to create this sense of time passing that gives you a sense that she’s been training so that people don’t feel like they missed something in her development as a boxer. That was one of the interesting things that we discovered in the edit. 

One of the things I’m cognizant of as an editor - and it’s credit to you and to the director and the writer - is that every scene has a purpose or an intent. I definitely felt that, watching this movie. 

I’m so glad you asked me that because I think one of the most interesting things about this film is its structure. It’s different than a traditional sports pic. The movie doesn’t end at the climactic match when she wins the gold medal. The movie continues for a good third of the film.

So, it’s like a sports film in the middle of what is essentially a coming-of-age story, and it’s a coming-of-age story that I think becomes very relatable to anybody who’s lived a few years and experienced the disappointment of getting to some place that you thought was going to change your life. Maybe it’s a particular job.

Maybe it’s even getting married or whatever it is. You have this goal, and you think “Oh, that’s going to change my life.” Everything’s going to be fine afterwards, then you realize life is complicated. The details are a little more nuanced than you expected them to be.

Ultimately this story becomes that story for Claressa. It’s about not just how did she win the gold medal, but how does she become an older and wiser woman about what life is like when you get what you want, but it’s not what you expect it to be? 

We wanted to be sure that larger story was woven into a traditional sports story about an underdog who makes good. So, you want to see what are the aspects of her background? What are the aspects of her coach’s background that set you up for that larger story?

We would love for this to be a story in which she wins the gold and her life is fully changed, but America isn’t like. Life isn’t like that and I think it becomes a richer story for it becoming a coming of age story in that way.

So, we wanted to be sure that each scene served both purposes That it made you root for her but it also made you not surprised when there are challenges ahead and that those challenges may be just as interesting as the physical challenges of winning that gold medal.

We wanted to be sure that aspect of the storytelling was in place as we were shaping the movie. One of the things that was fascinating for us was: how do we start giving a sense to the audience of history versus story.

The distinction that I’m making is I think in history you want to say, “Here’s that place. Here’s that date and I need to understand the mechanics of how does that affect X, Y, or Z?” I thought about this while I was watching Napoleon because I wondered, “How does this battle relate to what happens later?”

Similarly, in a sports story, particularly because she’s heading to the Olympics. You want to understand, “Okay, is this the qualifiers?” You want to have that sense of following that history aspect of it.

One of the things that we found was that when we put a date or a year - we originally had a date for that beautiful oner that introduces Claressa in her  teenage years. Jason says, “I never thought about training a woman before… then we hit the bell and went through that second floor down to that boxing match.

Then we introduced Claressa as a powerful boxer. That was one of the earlier qualifying matches, but we found that when we put a date and a time to it, people started to do the math of “Okay, that’s only X months before this…” they started to focus more on history than story.

Instead, when we removed the date, the audience focused on the fact that she’s physically remarkable. It became this sense of this background package that we had put together to say “here’s who she is. Here’s where she comes from.

Here’s her physical giftings.” Then once we put a date in Spokane later on in the precursor to Shanghai, that’s when her journey starts. So, it was calibrating that, then figuring out how much of that backstory do you need before you start that Olympic journey.

That was a little bit of the back and forth that we did editorially. That was interesting for me to understand: when do you tell “here’s the background and here’s the sort of mechanics of the run” versus when you get into that nitty gritty history. Calibrating that was one of the fun things.

Editing is always expanding or contracting time. I think once you put a ticking clock on, people start thinking, “Okay, time is significant.” One of the pieces of feedback that early audiences had was “I’m not getting enough of how she developed as a boxer.”

We didn’t want them to focus on that. We just wanted to focus on what she was encountering as someone who was physically gifted to begin with. When we delayed that ticking clock - when we delayed that history - people didn’t fixate as much on her development as a boxer or how she was trained to become that boxer which is something that you might traditionally get from a sports film.

There’s some voiceover - or at least some off-camera dialogue as the words “the fire inside” are spoken. Can you talk to us about that?

Actually, we begin by establishing that voice as Jason talking with her by the pool as they’re about to go into that first match that sets her up for Shanghai. This is in Spokane when she’s about to battle and a much older boxer.

Then we combine that with this beautiful, slow push-in to a mirrored closet door that’s behind her. I really love what Rachel was signifying: that there are two sides to this young woman. There is this sweet caretaker side to her, then there’s another aspect of her that has this kind of fire - this kind of violence within her.

Which is, I think, what all boxers need to have to be successful in the ring. We wanted to start talking about that duality as Jason starts to say, “You’ve had a really hard life, and we know that fire comes from somewhere.”

So, he’s encouraging her to harness that, so we wanted to collapse those two scenes to make sure that you saw that he’s not just encouraging her as a coach. He’s telling you something inherent about Claressa as a person: that fire comes from a place of pain - in that scene in the hotel room where you push into the mirror door.

Originally that intercut with a flashback of her as a very young woman that addressed obliquely the abuse that she had experienced, but we found that having that element took you away from the present Claressa in a way, and also raised a lot of questions at a time in which I think you should be focused on her story, heading towards the Olympics.

It wasn’t until much later, when she was well on that story, that we could talk explicitly about some of the abuse in her life. That was one of the things that we lifted then instead collapsed that pool scene and that mirror scene because we felt like those two paired beautifully before going into a match in which you saw that fury in action.

The point of that particular match is to show that sort of close-quarters violence that’s happening between her and that opponent and how that’s an essential part of who she is and that Jason’s voice calling to her from the sidelines is one that sort of can create a structure around that - around that violence, like he’s the one that’s like directing her and coaching her and making sure that she doesn’t lose focus as that fire comes out.

So at some point, did you cut that entire “fire inside” monologue as an on-camera scene with the coach? 

Yes, absolutely. That actually was a separate scene, then the scene inside the hotel room was paired originally with that flashback.

You used a pre-lap in the first real match that she has. What do you think the value of a prelap is?

I think it’s to create that association. I think one of the things that I came to understand while editing this film – and I had the opportunity soon after to do some additional editing on another boxing film - was that each match really needs to tell a story.

There’s the story of what’s happening inside the match - the technical details - like maybe there’s a reach advantage that you need to show, or maybe there’s a particular tick that one boxer has that you need take advantage of, but there’s also the larger story of what does this match mean for our protagonist?

Or what does this match mean for the people who are watching? That was something that Rachel and I talked about all the time was: “What is the point of this match?

Why is this match important?” Because I think when you watch boxing in and of itself, without that narrative focus, without understanding why - what we’re supposed to get out of it - that it becomes a lot less interesting.

It’s ironic that without understanding the purpose of something or understanding what’s at stake for the protagonist or for the people outside of it that the details of boxing can get complicated. They know when a punch lands and who’s throwing it and who’s receiving the punch.

They know how to keep score that way, but in so many other aspects it’s hard to tell what’s going on.

Often what a pre-lap does or a music cue or the dialogue that happens before, during or after is intending to do is to tell you exactly what the point of that particular match is. That first match in Spokane isn’t just about showing the fire that’s inside her and the aggressive quality that really marks Claressa as a boxer, it’s also intended to show that sometimes she could get a little confused unless Jason brings her back.

That’s a little bit of a foreshadowing of what happens when Jason isn’t there in Shanghai. Then also a foreshadowing of what happens when Jason has to run down to the floor close to her boxing match as she approaches the gold medal. So we’re trying to lay the seeds of later matches as well in that match. 

In one of the early fights, you cut out of it before the match is even over to go to the press conference. Is that correct? 

That’s the Spokane right after a round ends and we have this long ring out and for a long time we just hold on a close up of Claressa looking really angry and upset without knowing what’s going on. We love that cut. That’s actually an homage to a cut that exists in the documentary as well.

It’s just such a great question that lays over that cut: Did she win? Did she not win? She doesn’t look like she won because her face doesn’t seem like she won, but it looked like she was doing well. We loved that sense of drawing out that question for the audience.

When she finally breaks - thanks to her coach kind of needling her a little bit - it becomes a really wonderful relationship moment for the two of them: how he’s the only one that can get her out of her own head. That’s one of my favorite cuts in the film.

Wall of storycards: Left (Chelyse Abrams, PA), Right (Irene Chun, 1st AE)

There’s a bowling date - she goes out with her boyfriend to bowl - and I love it. There’s not a spoken narrative to that scene. It’s just a couple of beautiful images letting you see how happy she is.

Rachel shot such beautiful stuff for that bowling alley and our incredible DP, Rina Yang, lit it as if it was this kind of teenage dreamland. We decided to use slow motion for that. I think we just wanted there to be moments of Claressa being a girl – and for the audience to be reminded that you just saw the coach saying “no dating” at the gym and of course, the next thing is her not listening to his advice.

There’s that thing all of us can identify with from being a teenager. I love is that lighting with her love interest Zay echoes the prom later on.

There is this part of her that could be happy not boxing, could be happy in this love interest that is something that we all desire. It foreshadows that choice that she has to make later on where boxing isn’t treating her well, but does that mean that she makes this choice to focus on this love relationship?

We wanted to make sure that looked appealing – that it’s something that is a part of her life as well. We had to choose the right cue for that and use slow motion. We just wanted to show what young love felt like for Claressa that that was part of who she was as well.

Avid timeline for The Fire Inside

There’s a discussion that Claressa has with her boyfriend about some childhood trauma, and it’s a very powerful, emotional scene - beautifully played by both actors. My recollection of that scene was that there was no music.

We wanted to just make sure that sound design gave you a subconscious cue to say that this is an urban neighborhood. This is a neighborhood in which - as she’s talking - the background sounds of Flint at night exist, but not in a way that’s distracting you from what’s what she’s saying.

We wanted to be sure that there’s a big tonal shift that happens because that discussion happens literally right after the bowling scene. So we wanted to show that the draw of wanting to be normal, wanting to have this sort of like normal relationship was something that Claressa really wants.

But at the same time, there is a history that she has to grapple with - another fight that she has to have because of her past and because of unfortunate things that happened in her past, that she has to fight in this arena as well.

We wanted to be sure that you took this relationship seriously. It’s an amalgamation of other relationships that Claressa had. We want you to know that this isn’t just a passing thing - that this is someone that is important for her - so that when she has to make hard choices later on, that there really is a sacrifice that’s going on. They’re both serious about it.

They’re both sensitive about it, and it’s handled in a way where you start to really invest in this relationship so that the choices that she makes later on have weight.

Harry’s editing space

You’re always paying in so you can draw out later. 

Exactly.

When Claressa gets back from China, there’s a discussion in the kitchen. She comes back and she’s blaming her coach, and the wife is in the kitchen too. The dialogue is overlapping. Can you talk about constructing overlapping dialogue, or dealing with dialogue that is actually overlapping, and how do you cut in and out of overlapping dialogue?

I think that happens a couple times, when there are three people overlapping. That happens with the three of them later on when there’s a big break as well. I love the challenge of that. I think you obviously need to understand what you have, and especially when there’s overlap like that.

I try to figure out where do I want to be for certain critical lines. For example, when she says “gold medal” in the big fight, I definitely wanted to be on her. And are there runs where they overlap? Then I can take the B side to finish with something that Jason’s saying, or the A side to come into it from something that she’s saying.

I try to avoid separating these things in a way where I have to construct an overlap that doesn’t exist, or do violence to an overlap that exists. I try to find Those connection points on those overlaps that will take me one way or the other.

Listening to the ISOs is really important for that kind of weaving in and out. I try to use or create those kind of overlapping things, particularly in a scene like that, because it just “brings the real” into the room. It just feels like this is the way people talk, so I don’t avoid those.

I’m much more attracted to when an overlap works. It brings that sense of energy and that sense of reality to an argument or to a discussion.

Editorial team and director: Left to right: Uriah Gibson (2nd AE), Irene Chun (1st AE), Rachel Morrison, Harry Yoon, Chelyse Abrams (PA)

At the Olympics, there’s a transition between the quarterfinals and the semifinals.

That was one of the fun things that Rachel really wanted to play with to advance time as we get to the gold medal match. She designed this beautiful shot where it’s like a Texas switch where our hero does a costume change as the camera leaves her.

She goes from wearing a red outfit with red headgear to a blue outfit with blue headgear, then her opponent switches as well.

That’s all in camera, but it was so seamlessly done. And because the headgear is just red and blue we found that early audiences couldn’t tell that the opponent had changed, so we had to really use sound design and work with our incredible mixer, Onnalee Blank, to make sure that as you were going around in that shot that the tonal quality of the audience, as well as the noise level, all those things changed audio-wise, in addition to picture so that you understood that we had gone from one opponent to the other, because we wanted to get to the gold medal match as soon as possible.

So that was really fun to design both from a picture standpoint and from an audio standpoint. 

Somebody else just mentioned to me that they worked with Onnalee Blank as the sound mixer…

She’s fantastic. Very creative.

Final Mix, Left to right: Jeremy Emery (Dialog Editor), Sebastian Zuleta (music editor), Richard Jordan (Post Super), Harry Yoon (Editor), Bobbi Banks (ADR Supervisor), Rachel Morrison (Director), Onnalee Blank (Re-Recording Mixer), Katie Halliday (Sound Supervisor), Demetri Evdoxiadis (Re-Recording Mixer), Brian Ortiz (Mix Technician)

Oh! It was Joi McMillon. 

That’s right. They worked on Mufasa together. She mixes all a lot of [director] Barry [Jenkins]’s projects.

As I watched it, I didn’t know what the heck had happened, but what a cool transition - a Texas switch in the middle of a boxing match! It was awesome. Very cool. For those who don’t know, tell people what a Texas switch is usually used for. 

For example, when you’re switching between a stunt double who’s just done like a big flip or something like that, then they leave camera for a second, then your lead actor comes back in from where that person left camera and says a line of dialogue or finishes a stunt move or something like that, so it’s a way of doing an in-camera switch between one performer and another.

Editor Harry Yoon, ACE

In the final match, there’s a sequence that leads into round three.

That whole gold medal match was one of the most challenging things to edit because there’s so much that needs to be established and so much storytelling that needs to happen as far as what’s going on outside of the ring, what’s going on inside Claressa’s head, what’s going on for all of the people watching the match.

One of the interesting things is that Gold medal match was only supposed to be two rounds originally. There was round one where she was experiencing problems. Then round two, when a fateful decision by the U. S. Olympic coordinator, brings Jason down closer to the match, then things turn around for Claressa.

What we found was that it was too much to try to collapse all of that into two rounds, but we didn’t have the budget to go and shoot more rounds, so that was one of the editorial challenges to attempt to add a round so that we can show that this problem is happening and the audience understands what’s happening. Let’s make sure that gives us enough real estate - enough canvas - to tell all these stories. 

Oh, my gosh! That’s crazy! 

I had footage from different angles and I had to be very careful about when I showed – choreography-wise - the same moves. We either put them on a TV or with a different angle or from a different perspective, so it felt like you weren’t watching similar stuff.

We had to create a whole second round out of whole cloth in order to make that happen. I think the end result feels pretty seamless - where you get a clear sense of why Claressa gets into trouble, and you have a clearer sense of when things turn around for her. It all feels of a piece.

Harry, you might have to take that act down to the Magic Castle. That’s very impressive. I did not realize that you did that. When you’re reading a script, you might not realize that’s going to be a problem until you construct those scenes and watch them in time and think, “Oh, how does he get down there that fast?”

Also when you’re shooting boxing or any kind of fight or any kind of stunt, you can’t run the whole match from beginning to end, because you plan particular camera angles to sell punches. The people aren’t actually hitting each other, so you have to be in a particular place to sell the punch either on the giving end or the receiving end.

So that was a particular challenge. There are only certain angles at which the punching or the being punched looks convincing, so trying to find those and repurpose them, then to put them in the right context and to have people reacting to them in a way that tells the story was one of the really interesting puzzles.

Discuss determining when to cut back and forth to see Flint and the friends and family - basically the reaction shots during that gold medal match. 

That was one of the most fun things to mine. It wasn’t just finding our secondary characters - like her family people or her love interests or her people from the gym - but also finding great faces that felt like people who grew up in those neighborhoods.

Featuring those faces and making sure that you understood that when she’s in the ring, a little bit of what Jason’s speech does beforehand, is it tells you that this match isn’t just about her.

This match is also for Flint. Trying to show that cinematically was fun. I think having cut a little bit of documentary before going into my narrative career, I think that’s always so fun to get those 16 frames of when someone who’s not an actor is giving you exactly what you want.

And that, whether you know that person or not, that’s part of the grammar of what you want in the scene. I think that was super fun, going through the hours and hours of the community members watching the footage, pulling all those selects, then having those selects in my select sequence to keep going back to again and again as I’m building these rounds, and being able to leaven in some of those community shots - particularly once she wins the gold medal - the faces that we see that have that unadulterated pride as they’re putting hand to chest during the gold medal ceremony.

That was one of the joys and one of the reasons why I think that sequence works.

I believe in that you pulled out all the production sound there. 

We wanted to be sure that became about pure emotion. And there’s something about good score - which we took time to really shape with our amazing composer, Tamar-kali - when it becomes pure emotion. I don’t think you need that natural sound. You don’t need production audio. You want it to be pure emotion at that point.

That felt like an obvious choice after a while, particularly because we were in slow motion as well.

We wanted the audience to feel just unadulterated joy in that moment and pride so that when we cut to what happens afterwards that they have this visceral sense of: “Wait, I thought everything was going to be okay?” in the same way that Claressa feels that contrast and that’s what starts to fuel the next chapter of the movie.

Immediately after the celebration is the very cold, depressing Flint montage that follows it.

It’s almost like a cold slap of reality. I think the question that that juxtaposition raises is the question of the rest of the film, which is: why doesn’t this feel as good as I thought it was going to feel?

Was there a lot of experimentation with how long the movie should be after the Olympics win? Or that balance of pre-Olympics and post Olympics?

That’s a great question. Yes, there was. There was a lot of calibration as far as how much of her background do we need to know before she starts the Olympic run? And we really reduced that. For example, we took out a scene early on where Jason meets an agent and says, “It’s okay. I don’t really need your help.”

That was a nice foreshadowing of the failure that might come later. We found that it was too much precious time on something that doesn’t really pay off until much later that was weighing down the time before we go on that sort of magical medal run.

So we had to make hard decisions early on. 

On the backside, there were ways to cut short scenes or to come in later in certain scenes and hard choices as far as what to include and what not to include to make sure that we were as economical as possible in showing what is happening with Claressa where it’s not turning out the way that she wants it to.

So we’re constantly shaving seconds off here and there to make sure that - once the audience understood the problem – it didn’t take too much time before they understood what choice Claressa needs to make as a result of the problem. I think we took a good five minutes out of that back part of the film.

That’s so interesting to hear you say that because - and I am not questioning this in any way - the prom montage is actually quite long. Not too long, but you spent some time there, arriving at the prom, dancing at the prom, showing her getting ready for the prom. You’ve trimmed all these other things around it to showcase this moment. Talk to me about the importance of that prom stuff. 

I think that was really important for two reasons. One) to show that this is a community that also experiences joy, and Two) to show what is it that Claressa has to say no to. We need to be convinced that this is a real choice - that when Zay says to her what he says, and offers a very strong choice, one that we can believe in, is to say maybe you could be happy.

Maybe this is better than continuing on to go through the physical rigor of training again. We needed to feel that as an audience, as a legitimate choice for her. I think it takes time to establish that.

Was the ending - basically with Claressa going on the bus to Colorado to train - the scripted end of the movie? I would think, but…

Yes, it was. One of the things that Rachel was very careful about was: “How does that final conversation with Jason happen? When does it happen? How long does it take? Who makes the choice to see one another to find that reconciliation before she can move on?”

But I think that final shot, that sequence of her being on the bus, heading off to her future was always the scripted ending. I loved it because I just feel like that’s just something that we could all identify with, which is that very scary choice - but also that really exciting choice - to leave home and to leave behind the people that you love, but for the promise of whoever you’re going to become. It feels very American to make that choice.

I love how that’s the sort of final graduation ceremony - the final coming of age for our very American heroine.

The coach asks, “Why are you taking a bus instead of flying?” And she says, “I won a gold for the United States and now I want to see it.”

The script could have continued from there – training, going pro, winning big purses. When do you end the story? 

What we wanted to show was that even though our coming-of-age story is over, we wanted to showcase that Claressa does not stop being this incredible force of nature. What was really fun about the choice to show the documentary footage of her in the Rio Olympics was that you get a taste of, how kinetic a boxer she is.

How fast those hands are and how dominant she is. She still has that little girl inside her and I love that. People get a chance to see that contrast that Ryan Destiny was able to portray, which is that she’s both this joyful girl, but also T-Rex at the same time.

You get a little taste of that in the documentary footage. It was so wonderful to also highlight her accomplishments after the Olympics as well as a professional boxer - the kind of purses that she was able to finally fight for, after having fought so hard for pay equity.

One detail is that we finished the film with a text card that she’s never lost a fight. We were so nervous as we were finishing the movie and waiting for it to be released because she had a bunch of professional bouts before that and every time Rachel and I would say, “Please help her win!”

Because it would have sucked to have to change that caption. But thankfully, she stayed undefeated.

Harry, anything else you want to talk about? 

I think one of the things I really loved about working on this film - and this is true of so many of the feature films that I’ve come up on - was getting the chance to work with someone who’s directing their first feature. The reason I love it so much is being an ambassador for post - which is what you inevitably become.

As you go through your editor’s cut, your director’s cut, the inevitable emotional rollercoaster that a director’s cut entails, as you go through your friends and family screenings. Talking people off of cliffs and things like that, and not making too extreme a change as a result of one person’s feedback, that type of thing.

It really highlights for me what I love about being an editor, which is being an advisor and a guide through this process that I love so much. That was certainly true in my collaboration with Rachel. I really loved showing her some of the technical stuff like, “Hey look! This split comp is possible.

We could cut this person’s performance out.” Or saying, “Hey, this might be a good time for us to have a meeting with the composer, or this might be a great time for us to push a little harder in our feedback to the VFX people.”

Being able to guide somebody through that process just makes it so much more fun and it makes it very new and that’s why I’ll always love working with first time feature directors. And it’s a chance to meet somebody new and to see how they think as a filmmaker.

The journey that Rachel and I took on this film is something that’s really bonded us and I’ll always see it as this kind of like special experience as a result.

Harry Yoon: Editing Sherpa. Thanks for talking to us about this film. It was great talking to you as usual. 

Steve, it’s always a pleasure.