The Studio

Today on Art of the Cut, we speak with editor Eric Kissack, ACE,  about his Emmy-nominated work on The Studio.

In addition to his Emmy nomination this year for The Studio, Eric has been nominated for an Emmy for Veep. He was nominated for an Emmy and three ACE Eddies for The Good Place. He also directed a comedy short called The Gunfighter, which was nominated for and won several short film awards.

Thank you so much for being on Art of the Cut. Congratulations on your Emmy nomination.

Thank you so much. 

You also direct. Can you tell me a little bit about how your directing skills play into your editing skills and vice versa? 

Oftentimes it really helps how I approach the scene, because I see the scene as how I would direct it. I think, “If I was on set, how would I come into the scene?

How would I structure the shots?” I have a blueprint in my head already, which is very useful.

It also just helps me appreciate all that goes into making everything. I’ve met plenty of editors who are often frustrated or curse the crew for not getting this shot or that shot, and sometimes they’re justified.

But, now that I’ve been on set a number of times, I know how chaotic it is and how easy it is to miss things and how easy it is to know you need something and just not be able to get it.

It gives me a grace, a kindness towards that. Also an ease of communication with directors and producers. Knowing the process better enables me to maybe talk through things that I need or that might be reasonable to get.

I know what is reasonable to ask: “Hey, is it possible to pick this thing up because you’re still on the same set?” As opposed to asking, “Is it possible to reshoot this thing that you shot a week ago with an actor that’s no longer shooting?” There’s a lot of understanding of the process, which is helpful.

I notice you’ve also got a bunch of producing credits. How do you get some of those producing credits?

It’s sort of a case-by-case basis. The first time I got it was on The Good Place. It was sort of like an honorarium. They were kind of saying, “You’re very integral to the show.

You were one of the people that’s really helping keep keep it on track, helping keep the themes and the characters consistent.” We’re all cogs in the machine, but you’re maybe a bigger cog.

I have a producer credit on a feature with a director that I work with named Sean Anders, and I read many drafts of his script and gave him a lot of good notes, so he gave me an associate producer credit.

And on The Studio, my role was very specific and very different from my normal role, so that warranted the associate producer credit.

You’ve edited a bunch of huge TV shows and - like many big feature film editors that I’ve talked to - you’ve also cut some short films. What is the value of doing those short films at this point in your career? 

The main thing is just relationships. If someone interesting is making a short film that I think would be fun to work with and develop a relationship with, then it’s worth doing.

It’s usually not a lot of time. I probably wouldn’t do a short film from a student filmmaker at this point, but I have plenty of friends and assistants who who might.

Editor Eric Kissack, ACE

For me it’s just about the relationships. That’s the main thing. You are nominated for an Emmy. You’ve been nominated for Emmy. How do you judge editing?

I’m not sure is the true answer. I could be convinced otherwise, but I think there’s a sort of a bias against the idea that you judge editing based on just what you think of the finished product in total. Maybe that’s some sort of lazy shortcut, but I kind of disagree.

People describe editing as the invisible art, and for a long time, I thought that that meant that good editing didn’t make you aware of the work.

If you were engaging in the scene - if you were feeling the emotion - then you wouldn’t be aware of when there were cut points and that kind of thing. I kind of thought that’s what they were referring to.

But I now think that it’s a little bit different - a little bit of a larger idea. I think an editor does so many things that it’s almost impossible to know what they’ve done.

That’s sort of the invisible part. I recently heard a really interesting interview with a magazine editor who talked about what he does as helping the truest intention of the writer come through, and I actually think that’s a lovely metaphor for what we do.

I think there’s a script and I think that there’s a filmmaker with a vision, and I think that his job is to make the truest version of that come through.

That can mean so many different things. It can mean honing the dialogue in a scene to make sure that things are clear.

It could mean restructuring the story so that the pacing is more engaging or the themes are more present. It could mean reworking an actor’s performance which maybe didn’t hit the mark.

It can mean so many things, and you just have no idea unless you’re in the edit room.

You have no idea how much hand-holding an editor did for a young, nervous director. You have no idea how much the editor played diplomat with the studio and protected the filmmaker’s vision. It’s nearly impossible to judge an editor’s work.

So the best metric we have is: Is it a great show? Is it a great episode of television? Is it a great movie?

You have cut a lot of comedy. Is there a magic comedy button on your Avid? What’s the deal?

It’s an incredibly fun puzzle. Sometimes there’s four jokes here and there should be three, and when we take out the one joke, everything just sings.

Sometimes joke isn’t landing because the audience is catching up too much, so we need to put an ADR line in a previous scene that gives you an important piece of information. There’s a forensic fun to it.

When I first started editing, I was very self-conscious because I didn’t think I was that funny. I was funny enough, but I was working with these comic geniuses. Like, what am I doing here? Then I did a project with Jay Roach. He was a producer on Bruno.

Jay is a funny guy. He’s incredibly smart, but he’s incredibly analytical, and he’s not cracking jokes. It would be me and Sacha Baron Cohen and Jay Roach, and Jay’s not being funny, but he’s analyzing jokes and trying to understand why it’s not working.

He’d say, “It was working last time we screened. What did we change?” He taught me that I didn’t have to be the funniest person in the room or even a funny person in the room, but there was a way to deconstructe and understand it to a certain extent.

That was really a wonderful lesson. So much of it is just experience. Every time I’m editing a new show or movie I can see, “Oh, this is the joke where one character says something four times, then turns around and says the opposite.”

So you think, “Okay, I’ve done that before. I know how to make it work, or I know why it might not work. You just see things and get into a rhythm about understanding how they work. 

The thing that I think about most when it comes to comedy is the metaphor of the hurdle jumper in track and field. If there are five hurdles in a row and on the third hurdle the runner’s toe touches it, he’s going to stumble and not land the next few hurdles, so a lot of times my job is to remove the third hurdle.

I just like take out that third joke because, for whatever reason, it’s messing up the rhythm. So when you take out that third joke, the fourth and fifth joke, just sing.

Or sometimes there are five jokes and there’s one little extra joke that’s funny, but if you take out the little extra and you end on the “blow” - the funniest joke - the energy and the laughter carries you forward to the next scene.

The Studio has a lot of big oners. Are those shot absolutely as ones, so you have no choice? Do they protect you with a little bit of coverage that never gets used?

When Seth called me to do this show, he told me essentially the idea that every scene is a oner, and we only do cuts when we have a time jump.

I thought, “Oh boy! That’s going to be really challenging because so much of what we do is compressing time.” Comedy is is a lot about speed, so being able to just cut around the room and take out a breath here and take out a breath there or remove that third joke - remove that third hurdle - can help the scene sing. That’s a big part of it. 

The other part of comedy is improv. Sometimes you have really talented improv actors and they’ll do something really funny in take five, but in take six and take seven they won’t do the same thing, so part of your job is to take the best moments - and the moments that all fit together - and edit them all together. So we wouldn’t be able to do that if the whole show was a oner.

We realized that the only way that this could work is if I was on set, essentially solving for those problems as they shot. So I was on set every day for 60 days, and I was cranking the pace. So we would usually shoot for 3 or 4 takes and no one would say anything because the actors were just dialing it in.

Then, around take 5 or 6, I would start suggesting cuts. I would say, “Joke number three is kind of messing us up, so let’s cut it.” Or, “At this moment here there’s a little dip in the energy, so like maybe let’s add another line or maybe move to the door faster so there’s less shoe leather.”

It was basically doing the stuff that I would be doing in the editing room, but doing it on set. Then improv would start usually between 4 or 5. I would identify the moments where the actors just naturally wanted to do improv. Kathryn Hahn - you can’t stop her from doing improv.

A third of the way through the scene there’s a moment where Kathryn Hahn is going to do something crazy each time, so in order to protect for that, I would go to the camera operator and say, “Mark, you have to make sure that before this line - every time you pan from Seth to Kathryn your body has to be in this position so that you can pan and we can use that pan as a cut point. Every scene had these designed cut points in them.

We had this rule that every 90 seconds we would have designed a moment where we could swap out some improv take. Usually by take 14 or 15 we had really dialed in, and those moves allowed me to combine different bits.

Mark, our camera operator, was a genius. He would remember everything. He would remember everyone’s dialogue, so he knew where to be, and he knew when to do those moves, and he would do them so consistently that it worked. If another camera operator was doing that move a little bit different each time, it wouldn’t work.

We needed someone who was like a machine. That was a huge part of why this worked. A lot of what was going on was on my shoulders, because if I structured the move wrong then then it wasn’t going to work, but thankfully a lot of it worked out pretty well.

With the camera movies, I was thinking about the scene with Martin Scorsese.

That was a funny scene. We had dialed in how we were making the show. We have a lot of incredibly, incredibly talented actors on set who could do amazing, uninterrupted, hilarious dialogue process. Marty was really, really, really funny, but he never quite got into the flow of it.

He would throw in little side improvs and it was really funny, but you couldn’t tell Scorsese to just do the script. He was going to do what he wanted to do, you know?

So we specially designed that scene to allow for him to do whatever he wanted, so that’s really the only scene where we did that kind ofback and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

It was just for Scorsese, which we were all fine with, but for the most part, it wound up being this really elegant dance with the camera doing some really wonderful moves, but also giving me the freedom to change takes on everything.

In the oners are you replacing audio performances in the middle of them or doing ADR or anything else? 

A lot of times we’re adding ADR. Anytime we’re off of a character, we were adding some. We wanted the show to feel like this freight train that couldn’t be stopped. so anytime there was any dip in energy, we would fill it with ADR.

Not necessarily a joke, but just something for the rhythm. Every now and then there’d be a great take, but someone would flub a word or something like that, and rather than throw out the take, we would just ADR that word and stick it in their mouths.

So there were a lot of little nips and tucks and and Band-Aids. Everyone got better as we went along. By episode ten, they were doing gigantic long takes.

I was still combining and tweaking it, but it was only making it like 1 or 2% better, and it was worth it to do that, but you could just watch those oners and they were great.

Because of the nature of the way the show was shot, did you have to change your editorial style? Or the way you organized? Were you making editorial decisions on set saying, “Okay, I’m going to use take six. I don’t have to look at any of the other takes.” 

I just sat there typing notes into my iPhone the whole time, so sometimes it would be: “Take seven. That’s the one.” Sometimes it would be “For the first third use take two, for the second third, use take 15, and for the last third take 20.”

Sometimes I would just write down a line: “This line best in take ten.” I would be on set pretty much all day, then usually in the morning, there’d be an hour or two where they were pre-lighting or something where I would see that I wasn’t needed. I had an office on the Warner Bros.

lot and I would walk over and break out my notes and edit this part of take six in and this part of take ten and this part of take 20… getting a rhythm with that.

It got a little bit tricky when we were, on location - which we were for about half the shoot - because I didn’t have access to my office.

I started falling behind a little bit. I called up Mike Manning, my post supervisor, and asked, “Is there any way you can get me a laptop so I can, not fall too far behind?

The next day a full-on Avid with the standing desk showed up in a room in the house that we were shooting in. After that we shot an episode at the Golden Globes - and backstage at the actual place where they shoot the Golden Globes was an Avid on the standing desk!

We shot two episodes in Vegas and I had a suite in The Venetian with my Avid on a standing desk. So it was pretty cool to to be able to have the media and everything with me so that I could make sure that things were working and not fall too far behind.

Did you give your notes to your assistant?

I work with the Avid Script tool. My assistant organizes things with the Script tool. Because I had my notes I could use the script to go straight to the lines or the bits, so it was a pretty smooth process. 

When you’re analyzing a take, are you treating camera movement almost like it’s performance? 

Yeah. Mark, our camera operator, was so good. It wasn’t even so much like deciding between A and B. It’s more just marveling at the moves.

Usually the first five takes or so they were still figuring it out, and he was figuring it out, but after that… he’s an artist.

He’s a machine and he’s an artist. He’s machine in how consistent he is, but he’s an artist in that there’s so much life to it. He always knows where the camera wants to be and he was really amazing. So there wasn’t a lot of difference, honestly.

Once we dialed in the move and where the camera was going to be, it was just consistent, so for me it was just choosing performance.

There’s a bunch of licensed music in the show - some great needle drops. Talk to me about how much of that is you, how much of it is in the script, how much of it is a music supervisor?

A lot of music came from Seth. He had very specific ideas - often riffing on who the filmmaker was in the scene or what the tone of the episode was. For instance, in the first episode, Martin Scorsese was the big star. We used a bunch of tracks from Martin Scorsese movies.

Three of our big needle drops are songs that he’d used in his movies. We did an episode called The Pediatric Oncologist, which is sort of like a Woody Allen-esque episode, so we used a bunch of songs from Woody Allen movies.

We did a noir episode that was kind of riffing on Chinatown, and we used music from Chinatown. The tone and the feel of the show is very 50s… the fashion, the architecture, that kind of thing - even though it’s set in the modern day. So early on Seth handed me this playlist of great 50s and 60s jazz. I just would listen to it nonstop.

Then, of course, once we put all this amazing music in, our music supervisor, Gabe Helfer came in and said, “Okay, so you guys are $1 million budget. What do you want to do?”

So we spent the next few months with him finding these amazing alts, many of which were instantly rejected because Seth would say, “I can tell this is not a vintage 60s track.” And we’d say, “Yeah, but it’s a fifth as expensive.”

We fought for all the tracks that we loved, then found some really great alternatives. Gabe really went above and beyond and found some amazing stuff.

I have to admit that I don’t recall score but there must have been score. Talk to me about temping the score-type stuff.

That was a huge challenge and a really interesting one. I started off trying a bunch of different things. Like you normally do, grabbing temp from other TV shows and movies.

We discovered early on that the scenes all wanted something. They wanted some kind of energy, but a lot of it would overwhelm the dialog and fight the rhythm of that.

There’s so much rhythm in the dialog that it was very challenging. Early on I wondered, “What are some movies that have big oners - famously Birdman.” So I thought, “How did Birdman do it?” So I got the Birdman score and it’s all percussive jazz drumming.

For the most part, I just slapped it on, and realized, “Oh, this works!” It added to the energy and cranked up the tension in just the right way, but it wasn’t distracting.

It was perfect. So we thought, we should just hire the Birdman guy, right? So we reached out to Antonio Sanchez, who did score for Birdman, and he came on board and he was amazing. He did his jazz drumming, and a lot of other things.

He did most of his jazz drumming, but he crafted it so specifically. If you pay attention, you’ll notice that the drumming is just perfectly in tune with the dialogue. It’s just supporting everything.

It’s supporting all the right emotions, all the right tension. 90% of the show is score, and the fact that you don’t notice that is great, because it just means that it’s perfectly in tune with what the actors are doing.

I think the score added so much. Every now and then we’d think, “Maybe we’re doing too much score. Maybe we should drop out something here?” But then we’d think, “We’re bored. The scene is flat.”

Can you think of a specific moment in that first episode where you specifically said, “This should not have score?”

The score in the very opening shot - when we’re inside the movie - originally we had score start immediately when we pull out of the monitor. We actually pulled that one back: “Let’s give people a moment to sit in this and just take in what we’re trying to do.”

Also, there’s a moment at the end of the pilot when Seth and Catherine O’Hara are sitting and talking in this big wide shot at her house, and we push in on this palm tree that they’re talking under. We found this jazz track that I love that’s very simple, just piano.

In contrast to Antonio’s jazz drumming it feels like the first time in the pilot where you’re allowed to take a breath. It’s this moment where the tension is released for a moment.

Everyone loves that scene. It’s a beautiful scene, and everyone’s grateful that we allowed this moment where we turned the tension off for a scene. It was nice to do that.

Then, of course, the next scene, the tension gets ratcheted up again as you have to go face, Martin Martin Scorsese and tell him that he’s killing his movie. 

How is it to do notes with a director and a producer who’s also the star? I’ve been in that position myself. I don’t envy you.

I’m very grateful that Seth is very good at it. He doesn’t have a lot of vanity. He doesn’t say, “I did something stupid in this shot. I don’t like the way that I look.”

He partially created this role for himself as kind of doofus, so he’s leaning into that in further episodes.

There’s a scene in episode three where he literally falls flat on his face.

The pilot episode has him tripping up the stairs, which I figured was real. Right? 

That was real. That was real. That was a great example. It was a great take. The energy was great. He actually tripped. He recovered.

He said, “Let’s keep it in. It’s real.” But there was a ton of planned pratfalls. I’m a big fan of pratfalls, so I was always appreciative when he did it. He was great to work with. It wasn’t so much an issue that he was a performer in the scene. 

Yeah, I was thinking more writing. You’re the one that’s got to say, “This joke doesn’t work.”

Seth is a writer on the show, but there are five writers. Seth’s done this long enough. He knows that not every joke that’s written is gonna land. Not every joke that works on the page is going to work on the screen for whatever reason.

How close were you to being scripted as far as structure or keeping all the scenes? From what I watched, it seems like it would be hard to drop scenes out. 

I’m pretty sure there are only two scenes in the entire series that we dropped: one in the pilot and one in the last episode. Both were just pacing: “OK, it’s a little flabby here, and we actually don’t need the scene, so let’s lose it.” But for the most part, it was very tightly constructed. We didn’t end up trimming a lot out.

I’ve worked on shows like Veep or The Good Place that are definitely overwritten. You write twice as many jokes as you need, knowing that you’re going to use the best ones.

That’s part of why those shows are so funny and so rat-a-tat, but it’s also a heart-breaking process because if the episode is ten minutes too long now we have to start cutting things that you like.

So this show had a little bit of a different attitude where you want the scenes to sing - you want them to be as funny as possible - but we weren’t being super ruthless.

The show looked great. You had great sets and locations, so it was you could live in a moment even if it wasn’t the most hilarious thing, it was okay. So we didn’t do as much trimming and cutting as we would in another show. 

How did you land this gig?

Seth brought me on as a comedy fixit guy on an animated movie they were doing called, Sausage Party. I then cut the Black Monday pilot for them. Then I cut Pam and Tommy for them, and I did another comedy pass on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie.

They liked me. They’d seen some of my directing work. I think that was a big part of it: knowing that I was comfortable on set and that I could be an asset there.

Talk to me about the value of an agent and what what do you think the value is, especially if you’re getting a lot of these gigs by yourself. I know that most of what an agent does is not about getting you work.

Agents don’t get you work. They’re still super valuable. I hate dealing with negotiations. That said, the Sausage Party film that I mentioned was through my agent. I think that was maybe the only job that my agent just called me up and said, “Hey, Seth Rogen’s looking for a comedy fixit editor.

I thought you’d be good. Can I introduce you?” That changed the course of my career quite a bit. So thank you to Pete Franciosa at UTA, and thank you, Jason Garber at UTA, who’s my current agent, who I really love. 

You mentioned a rule of a possible edit point every 90 seconds. Looking back on the first season, would you say that you only have a visual cut about every 90 seconds?

We have this episode called “The Oner.” It’s episode two. It’s maybe our most challenging and possibly most successful episode. The episode is about a filmmaker trying to do a oner.

Sarah Polley (one of the show’s writers) is on set trying to execute this oner and the joke is that Seth Rogen’s character keeps accidentally messing it up. The entire episode - in a very meta way - is shot, as a oner. It’s “uncut.” In reality there’s probably like two dozen cuts in there.

Seven of them are necessary. We shot it in seven pieces over five days, and those were designed things that connected what we shot on day one with what we shot on day two.

But there’s another 20 edits because Catherine O’Hara’s performance in take 16 is 5% better than her performance and take 17, so let’s use that and let’s combine it with Sarah Polley’s line from take 18, because that’s 3% better than take 14.

It’d be interesting to do a side-by-side between the episode with no extra cuts and the episode that we ended up with. I don’t think it’d be that different, but but it adds up in the end. It’s worth it to do all these little things. 

There’s actually a nod to it in the show. At one point, Seth’s character ruined the take and they’re mad at him and he says, “We can just pick it up from the midpoint and you could do a whip pan to hide the cut.”

Sarah says, “NO! We’re not cheating. We’re not doing whip pans. We’re not like hiding anything!” That was our acknowledgment of hiding a few things. But it’s all in the service of comedy.

We had a scene where there was a line that was causing confusion in the middle of a take. It didn’t happen all that often, but when it did happen, now what are we going to do?

That’s when I called our VFX supervisor and we developed a method where we could create a kind of visual effect pan, so if a character had 3 or 4 lines that they were saying and we didn’t really want that fourth line in there, we could pan off the character early, even though the camera wasn’t moving at that point and pan onto another character from later in the scene.

Every time we did it, it was thousands of dollars. It’s a visual effects shot, so we couldn’t do it that often, but that’s what we did if we needed to edit in the middle of a oner.

Very often the choice of which episode to submit for Emmys is the first or last episode of the season. How did you make your choice?

I thought about it for a little while, then ultimately realized it didn’t matter that much, because I was the only editor on the show. It probably matters more if there are multiple people submitting, but because there would only be one option, it didn’t really matter that much.

I picked the pilot because that was the one I probably work the hardest on. It was just so much that we were figuring out, and I’m really proud of it. I’m really happy with how it turned out. 

I’m going to play devil’s advocate of being your agent, saying you should have picked the finale instead of the first episode. What would you say?

It’s hard to compare, but the pilot, I think, is the most ambitious storytelling because we’re setting up so much of the world. We’re using all these characters. It’s still funny.

Often, there’s this feeling of, “Okay, let’s just get through the pilot, then we can start having fun.” But I think we’re having fun on the pilot episode.

I love the last episode, but I kind of feel like the first episode was the most representative of my important, yet invisible contributions.

Anything else you want to talk about? 

Throughout the series we had these scenes from fake movies. That was an interesting challenge because they’re cut traditionally. In the pilot, the scene you see is a oner, but most of the other scenes are edited normally. In Episode six there’s a trailer for a movie that I had to cut.

In episode three there’s a series of scenes in this fake Ron Howard movie starring Anthony Mackie and Dave Franco. Those are shot traditionally.

There’s a couple of action scenes and it’s just really fun to think, “Oh! I’m an editor again!” So it was really fun to be able to wear both of hats. 

Thank you so much for talking to us about this show. Good luck at the Emmys. 

My pleasure. Thank you so much. It’s been really fun.