Unstoppable

Today on Art of the Cut we speak with Oscar-winning editor - and now DIRECTOR - William Goldenberg, ACE about his directorial debut - the NUMBER ONE GLOBAL MOVIE on Amazon - Unstoppable. Of course, we also have William’s editor - no, he didn’t edit it himself - Brett Reed. Brett and William have been working together for more than 20 years.

William has been on Art of the Cut many times, including for The Instigators, Air, The Outfit, News of the World, 22 July, Detroit, and Live By Night. Billy won the Oscar for Best editing, a BAFTA and an ACE Eddie for Argo.

He was nominated for an ACE Eddie for Air, an Oscar nomination and a BAFTA nom for The Imitation Game, nominated for an Oscar for Zero Dark Thirty, nominated for an Oscar and an ACE Eddie for Seabiscuit, and for The Insider… and an Emmy for Citizen X. 

Brett was also on The Instigators. He was an editor on M. Night Shyamalan’s Old. He was also an additional editor on Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, Detroit and Live by Night.

Billy, congratulations on a great film and your directorial debut. 

GOLDENBERG: Thank you. I appreciate that. From another editor, that means a lot. 

And Brett, thank you for being here. I must be quite an honor for you to be chosen by Billy to be his editor. 

REED: Yeah, it definitely was. It was a project that I’d read a really long time ago and had hopeful was hopeful that eventually when I think it made the stars would align. So I was very happy. 

Billy, what led you from the edit chair to the director’s chair? 

GOLDENBERG: Over the years of editing I’ve been fortunate to work with some incredible directors… some of the best in the world, I think. Watching them tell stories was very inspiring. I got to the point in my career where I felt like I wanted to try it.

After I was lucky enough to win an Oscar on Argo I got approached by some managers and agents, asking, “Do you ever think about directing?” Then I started to take it more seriously. I started trying to look for material and that was really hard to do while I was still editing because - as you know - editing is an all consuming job.

So the idea that I would have time to read a million scripts or books or magazine articles just wasn’t happening. Luckily for me, a friend of mine and Brett’s who we’ve worked together a couple of times, named David Crockett, was one of the producers on Unstoppable was trying to find the director.

He and the other two producers, Andy Fraser and Gary Lewis, approached me with the idea.

I found Anthony’s story incredibly inspiring and a genre that appeals to me. It’s something I was comfortable with. Then I met Anthony and thought, “This is one of the most amazing people I’ve ever met.” His story is incredible.

His family’s incredible and it sort of lit a fire in me. Through my whole career I’ve just followed my instincts - both editorially and picking projects and who I work with. My instincts all told me that this was the right story to tell as a first time director.

What are some of the skills as an editor that translated to your success or your ability to direct? 

GOLDENBERG: A lot of them actually. It really helped me so much to wait as long as I did in my life, because now in my career as an editor I feel really comfortable knowing what coverage it takes to make a scene, what good performance is, where to put the camera, and once I decide where to put the camera, where to put it in the next shot, and the next shot, and the next shot, and how things would go together.

All that has become very instinctual, although I’ve never actually been behind the camera. I can see when a director’s shooting something, “I’m gonna have this shot then I know I’m gonna get this, this and this. Then when I don’t I think, “I wonder why not?”

So I really have a feel for what I need to make a scene work. That freed me up to think about things in a more creative way and think about what I want to get from the actors, which was a little less familiar to me. But having all that other stuff in my arsenal made it easier to do the stuff I was less familiar with.

 

When you were directing, were you thinking of the edit? When you were planning the shots, when you were prepping a scene, were you thinking about being in the edit room with that material?

GOLDENBERG: Of course. I can’t tell you how many times cinematographer 
Salvatore Totino would say, “Why don’t we put the camera over here?” And I said, “That won’t cut. The angles are too similar or the sizes or whatever.”

I talked to a lot of the directors that I work with a lot, including Paul Greengrass and his biggest piece of advice was: “Make sure you know what you need to make the scene work at a bare minimum, because you may want to get 20 shots and then the day’s half over and you’ve gotten six, and you’re only going to get six more.

What do you have to have to make a scene work?” That was always running around in my mind. Fortunately we were able to get mostly what I wanted every day, but there were some days where I had to do “an audible.” I’m not gonna have a scene if I just shoot the way I’m shooting now, so that was invaluable to me.

(For our international audience: an audible is when a football quarterback changes the planned upcoming play because of what he’s seeing from the defense and tells the rest of the team the new play by calling out, audibly.)

How does an Oscar-winning editor choose an editor to work with? Why Brett? I know a little of your history together, but how did you choose your editor? 

GOLDENBERG: Well, the first 10 people said no…

REED: Only 10? 

I had to turn you down. I said, “You might wanna try Brett.”

Goldenberg directing Jennifer Lopez

GOLDENBERG: To be quite frank, I never thought of anybody else because Brett’s really talented. He’s worked with me… When was Coyote Ugly in ‘95 or ’99? 

REED: 99.

GOLDENBERG: So I’ve known Brett for 25 years. There’s no editor who knows that much about me. I knew Brett would always be completely honest with me and give me the good news or the bad news, which is something I wanted to hear.

I knew that if I was screwing it up, Brett would say, “I don’t think this is working” where somebody I didn’t know as well might be a little less upfront with me about it. Ultimately I knew that Brett was really talented and saw things in a similar way to how I did. There was never anyone else that was ever going to cut this film.

How did your collaboration go? 

REED: It was great. The pressure of cutting for a director who is another editor and knowing the level of his first cuts -  what he’s used to looking at, what he’s used to working on … We have the beauty of having a long relationship.

There is no filter… maybe there should be sometimes. We can be open and honest about things which helps because you’re not afraid to say anything. You’re not afraid to say, “Let’s cut that out of the movie” or “I don’t like that” or whatever. We do that very openly, so it helps it helps us find things quickly.

It’s interesting that you mentioned that you know the condition that Billy delivers his first cuts to his directors. Does that help? Maybe you think, “Oh, I can show him a little something rough…”

REED: You can eliminate the word “rough.” Billy’s a great editor and I learned to cut from sitting over his shoulder and observing for a long time. You want to give the material the best foot forward because you want to know what’s there. I think the idea of loosely slapping things together and sending them back is useless.

He’s shooting. He’s got a world of pressure and 500 people swarming around him. You don’t want to give him something that’s going to cause him to ask, “Wait! What happened?” You want to deliver him a scene that you know is effective and works. That was my expectation: not to show him anything that wasn’t in good working order. 

Brett, you’ve edited for a lot of other directors. Was there a difference between cutting for Billy and M. Night Shyamalan?

REED: Stylistically I think the approaches were pretty different. This film is a little more verite style, a lot of handheld camera, whereas M. Night is a little more single camera, more presented and makes a lot more sort of decisions in the shoot.

Where Billy, I think, is more in that style of Kathryn Bigelow or Michael Mann, where you’re going to gather as much great footage as you can, then piece it together in the editing room. So, workflow-wise, it’s fairly different.

William Goldenberg, ACE

Billy’s a first time director. You were talking about being unfiltered. What kind of feedback did you provide during shooting? Based on what you’re seeing in the dailies.

REED: I expected Billy would do a great job. The footage was amazing, and the performances of the actors were amazing. Billy worked so well with cinematographer Salvatore Totino to develop the look of the film and everything was so good so there wasn’t a lot to say, other than “keep it up,” because he was blowing me away in terms of what I was expecting. 

The actors and Billy and Sal, everything elevated off the page. The script was great, but I felt like - as the dailies were coming in - it was feeling much more special than what I had even hoped for. 

You’ve worked with Billy for a long time and seen him interact with a lot of directors. What did you learn about collaboration from watching him as a collaborator on his early projects?

REED: Everything. The director leads the room, but you want to have your voice heard. You want to give them ideas. They don’t all have to work. You want to be there to make your opinion known but always know it’s the director’s film.

So you want to be able to say, “This is what I think” and when the director says, “I think the opposite” then you have to say, “Great! Let’s go make the best version of what it is you’re trying to do.”

Billy, did you get your hands dirty in the editing room or did you, did you have a hands off approach?

GOLDENBERG: A little bit, but not much. Brett exceeded my expectations. Not that I didn’t expect it to be good, but it was even better than I thought it would be. It would have been hard for me to do nothing.

Every director is an editor. Just because you’re not pushing the buttons doesn’t mean you’re not editing. You hear directors say, “When I was editing the film…” then as an editor, you’re thinking, “What do you mean ‘when YOU were editing the film,” but it’s kind of true.

They’re making big editorial decisions all the time. When I work with Paul Greengrass, he doesn’t have his hands on the Avid. I’m sure he couldn’t make a trim if he had to, but at the same time, he’s still editing. The collaboration of the editor and the director makes it special.

That’s why those two jobs exist for a reason because it works better that way. The editorial process is what it is for a reason. That’s why I knew that Brett was the right person because I knew that we get along so well and see things in a similar way.

A couple of weeks into the cut, Brett said, “Oh, this won’t end up in the movie.” I said, “What are you talking about? Of course it will!” Then of course he was right. The night before we were showing Ben Affleck the movie, I literally woke up at three o’clock in the morning and I thought to myself, “Brett’s right! It shouldn’t be in the movie. He was right all along.”

I’m sure that’s happened to you as an editor in the past.

GOLDENBERG: Brett gave me that note in a similar way that I would have given it as an editor to a different director. Brett and I wouldn’t pound our fist on the table, and get into a fight about it. My attitude is like, “I’m going to give my opinion, and I’ll keep giving it, but in a sort of gentle way.”

Michael Kahn - who was my mentor - used to call it “the nudging style.” Just keep coming back to it through the process. “Are you sure you need that?” “Yeah, I do.” “Okay.”

I’m sure Brett never said, “I told you so.”

GOLDENBERG: Not to my face. 

Now’s your chance, Brett! 

Did you two watch any movies together? This is a biopic. It’s a sports movie. Did you say, “Hey, let’s sit down and watch something similar?”

GOLDENBERG: No, we didn’t. We know each other so well at this point. We worked on so many films together. Ali and Seabiscuit come to mind because they’re sports genre movies.

I think our cinematic language between each other is so familiar and we have all these films we’ve done together that we have as reference points.

It never felt like we needed to because we have not only watched a lot of movies together we have worked on a lot of movies together, so it’s really much deeper.

Billy, did you get any insights into the editing process now that you’ve seen it from the other side? 

GOLDENBERG: It gave me more insight into when I talk to a director as an editor. There would be times when I would think, “Why the heck did he do it this way?” Then when you’re directing you say, “Oh yeah! This is really hard!” I certainly won’t complain privately about directors anymore.

It gave me great insight into the difficulty of how hard directing a film is and how many decisions you have to make and how much of it you just go with your gut because there are so many questions and so many decisions to make.

I respected the directors I worked with before, but now it’s a much more complete picture of what a difficult job it is.

I talked to editor Myron Kerstein (Wicked), who has directed, and that’s exactly what he said. It’s not so much anything in the editing process, but it gives you the understanding of who’s sitting behind you after you’ve been the person sitting on the couch.

Structurally, it seemed that there was a jump in the story from when his dad left to the start of his freshman year. Do you remember if that was scripted or was that something that you needed to tighten?

GOLDENBERG: That’s actually where the montage we spoke about earlier in his junior year. That montage - in a much different form - was at the end of his freshman year. We decided to move that to save seeing him really wrestling until he was fully on the team to give the film a burst of energy and a burst of momentum.

It was Ben Affleck’s idea, actually, to move it there. That’s when we combined it with Judy’s story of trying to find a way out of the foreclosure. So we made a decision to just jump the time in a way based on the emotional elements of the story and not so much the chronology of the story.

I really liked the way it worked, those sort of jagged kind of edges of it. It felt like it was surprising and unexpected. One thing led to another, which led to something that I was very happy with editorially. 

REED: That was a sequence which moved around a little bit. Anthony finding success was originally between his freshman and sophomore year, then it became something that happened as he came back from the program being shut down - interweaving his recovery from that tough period along with Judy’s getting things together for the family and the finances to take back control of her life.

It felt like those two things mirrored one another rather well. It felt like a good place to put it for the two of them to get back on their feet together. 

There’s another montage - the “I’m running out of time to be someone” montage. Was it always intended to be a montage or had they been full scenes?

GOLDENBERG: It was intended to be a montage. It’s a transitional moment as well as a montage because it’s not very long, and it was meant to portray his re-dedication to the sport. He’s sitting there in the stands with Michael Peña talking about, “If I don’t win, I’ll always be seen as the guy who almost made it, but having one leg won’t be the first thing they see about me.”

It’s a re-dedication and the images, in combination with the music, was like, “I lost but I’m not giving up! I’m gonna refocus! Work even harder!” I think what’s cool about it is, you have this little montage and you’re expecting things to sort of go well because he’s re-dedicating himself and the first thing that happens is that he comes home and his siblings are sitting on the stump of the tree in the middle of the night.

It turns out that Rick is home and things have gone really sideways. What I love about it is it feels like it’s gonna go one way and you have this unexpected moment which becomes the final piece of the puzzle for Anthony, which is to rid himself and the family of Rick. You try and make juxtapositions that feel illustrative, but are unexpected. 

Can you talk about a little bit about the step-printing film effect that was in the Tick Tick Boom montage?

GOLDENBERG: It was a transitional thing. The thing that influenced that final sequence - you were asking earlier about films that may have influenced this film – was Warrior, the film with Joel Edgerton and Tom Hardy.

I would say that is the film that influenced me the most in the storytelling - it’s MMA and this wrestling.

Not that particular shot, but the way Gavin O’Connor, the director, handled it. In boxing there are no preliminaries and quarterfinals or semifinals. You just land and here’s the big match. But in wrestling and mixed martial arts, there’s a progression to it.

So it was designed a little like it was in Warrior. It was a way to sort of make it exciting, make it fun, and propel ourselves through that, and tell the story through the montage. It was kind of like a montage, but at the same time there are ups and downs and story being told and it was designed that way.

Editor Brett Reed

REED: I think it was shot at four frames per second for the step printing. It was something that was just meant to be a sort of spark of a transition to make a clear mark of a transition because it was all such a sequence of transition after transition after transition, so it was an artistic way to sort of delineate one round from the next. 

GOLDENBERG: The first film I cut was called Alive - which I co-edited with Michael Kahn - and there was an avalanche sequence in that film where the survivors of the plane crash get covered in snow and have to dig their way out, and Frank Marshall, the director, shot the sequence straight - like it is in the film - and he also shot it all four frames a second, which we printed each frame six times - that’s the first time I saw that and I just thought it was a really cool, beautiful, painterly feeling.

When cinematographer Salvatore Totino suggested it for this, I thought that’s a beautiful thing, and I just loved the way it looked. 

You mentioned the fact that a lot of this is handheld. Brett, is there a trick to editing handheld or screening it so that performance of the camera operator is also part of the daily screening process and the selection process?

REED: I love handheld footage. There’s a built in frenetic energy that has the ability to amp up a moment of great performance with the camera movement on top of it. There’s occasionally a risk, but the camera ops on this film were fantastic, so I think you’re just looking at it as an image.

I’m evaluating it as I’m evaluating the performance. Sometimes you want to keep something ‘cause it has a great little wiggle on it or a great little shake.

You try to keep those moments. It’s something that I’ve seen with directors like Michael Mann, who just love that kind of stuff. I’ve learned to look for it but it’s just part of the picture. 

GOLDENBERG: I find that when I cut that kind of material, you find all these beautiful pieces and performance that you love and it seems like it’s going to be amazing. The first cut’s going to be incredible, but then you put it all together and look at it and say, “This is terrible.”

You really have to get used to it. You think it’s going to be one thing and it has this sort of life of its own that it really takes some shaping and playing with the material to get it to really feel like a sequence that flows.

To me, it takes a lot of experimentation editorially to get it to look like it looked like it was effortless. I find that every time I put a big scene like that together as an editor, it’s never as good as I think it’s going to be. Initially, it takes a lot more work to get there.

But like Brett said, I love that kind of material. That’s why I shot the film like that. I thought it would separate the film from the genre a little bit and I thought it would be more experiential.

I really wanted the audience to experience this along with Anthony and put them in the room with the family or put them on the mat with the wrestlers.

Is it kind of scary as a director to shoot handheld? It gives you this great energy, but it’s not as cut-and-dried and foolproof as a lock-off shot where you know it’s gonna work.

GOLDENBERG: Yeah, you have to have a good script supervisor for sure to make sure you got everything because no one take is the same as another take. There are a couple of scenes in the film where I was really – “loose” isn’t the right word. We had two cameras all the time, sometimes three.

I basically showed the two camera operators the blocking and said, “Shoot the scene. We’re going to start on this side. You guys will figure out so you’re not shooting the same thing. You guys are storytellers.

When you have great operators who understand story and what is happening in the scene story-wise and emotionally, they follow the action, they follow the emotion and then they would shoot some takes and we would look at it and say, “Now let’s do this, put it over here but then do what you want, then we’ll move the cameras over here and we’ll do this and that was the most unscripted shooting-wise way I ever did it.

It was only a couple of times. Mostly the scenes were all handheld but more planned out. But with those scenes I just felt the energy of what was happening.

One of the scenes is when Anthony comes home from losing the wrestle-off and Rick starts in on him, and Anthony exposes him for being fired from his job. That was sort of verite and documentary style as anything in the film. I just said, “Okay, we’ll shoot one side and then we’ll shoot the other side and we’ll do as many takes as we need to get all the coverage we need.” And I just loved it.

I love the way it came out and it’s a real testament to what great storytellers cinematographer Salvatore Totino and his team are. 

I loved the places where you gave the audience a chance to reflect on a big story moment or let something breathe. Can you talk a little bit about the pacing of those emotional moments, Brett? 

REED: The performances in this film were such that the silent moments sometimes were the most powerful. So just giving them the opportunity to sit there on screen felt like it conveyed as much of the intensity as what came before it.

Billy, you’ve been in edit rooms long enough that you’ve seen those scenes where the director calls cut too early. I have a feeling that you knew better.

GOLDENBERG: I did. Some of those moments are scripted and planned, but some of them are just great actors doing great work. One that was planned is when Jennifer is throwing all Rick’s clothes in a cardboard box and asking, “How could I have let this happen?

How could I have stood by and just watched it?” Then there’s that moment where Jennifer looks at herself in the mirror and realizes “how could she have stood by?” She has a responsibility to take care of herself too.

That’s why we shot in the mirror as well as on her. It’s a real self-reflective moment where it’s the beginning of her starting to take responsibility for her own life. Then there’s other things in the film where it’s great actors doing great things - not even on their face. 

Like in the scene we were talking about earlier where Bobby is giving Jarell hell and Judy says to Anthony, “Go to bed” and Anthony goes to bed and Judy walks by Rick and leaves him standing in the hallway and Bobby just put his arms out on each wall and dropped his head.

You don’t even see his face, but it’s a beautiful moment to hold on because you see that Rick does have a conscience. His intention, I think, in a lot of the scenes and a lot of moments, and I think as a person, were to be a good father.

He thought that he was doing the right thing. He thought he was giving them great advice, telling them the right way to live and the right way to do things. He didn’t have the tools to know any better. I think that’s a moment of self-reflection that brings a three-dimensionality to Rick’s character. That was Bobby - those moments.

As far as temp score is concerned, did you two have a discussion of temp score? Brett, were you kind of left on your own for that? Did you get some advice? 

REED: We talked about it a little bit. This was temp that wasn’t really dominated by a particular film. A lot of times you draw from one or two movies that sort of set the tone for everything that you’re doing. This one was a little bit more pieced together because there was so much source music.

GOLDENBERG: It was important to me that the music was supporting the story and not overpowering it. I didn’t want things that were incredibly orchestral. Obviously the end of the movie is going to be that way, but I wanted to let the acting and the performance and the writing do most of the heavy lifting, then just have the music support.

We talked about not slathering music all over everything. We had strong writing and strong performances and I just needed the music to support certain moments, but not carry them.

Let’s talk a little bit about the creation of the final victory celebration. I think that the sound gets dropped there. Tell me a little bit about building that and what it took to create a climax. 

REED: In a way I edited it backwards. I knew where I was heading, so I just wanted to sculpt tension throughout the whole match to lead up to that one moment. I think maybe we had had a conversation about dropping out the sound.

GOLDENBERG: I don’t really remember. I think you just had the sound really low, then I said, “Well, why don’t we drop it completely?”

REED: Yeah. It was fairly muted when I had first done it, then we went all the way. It’s just something that felt right. It felt like everybody in that moment was so united. You didn’t need to hear anything. It was kind of beautiful to just let the visual speak for itself.

Can you walk me through this scene, Billy? Anthony’s looking for a college scholarship with this – his final high school national match.

GOLDENBERG: This is a scene where we’re establishing how talented he is. What I think is great about this sequence is that you see him basically dominate this opponent - winning the high school national championship - and you think, “What’s so bad about this guy’s life?”

The movie starts out with him winning the high school championship and he’s trying to impress Tom Brands, the Iowa wrestling coach. All he wants to do is go to Iowa and he feels like Tom’s watching him, then the rug is pulled out from under him. He’s standing on top of the podium, but looks at the guy who he just defeated getting the Iowa jacket.

To me it was a great way to start the film where he’s at the top of the world, but he’s being underestimated and ignored. You’re experiencing this victory with his coach and his mom and everybody’s so elated, then you see the gut punch at the end of it. The guy he defeated is getting what he wanted. That was sort of what we were intending there. 

I think the very first shot in that scene was really Anthony. I’m not 100 percent sure. I would say I could probably tell now about half the time whether it’s the actor or the double wrestling, but they did such a great job visual-effects-wise that sometimes I’m not sure.

Brett, can you walk me through this scene - especially things like the reaction shots - the shots of his mom or the coaches in the stands when to go that or shot sizes? 

REED: The one thing about wrestling is it doesn’t have exactly the same dynamic quality as boxing which is the thing people are used to.

A lot of the times I’m trying to maintain the tension by going to the mom and going to the coach and working the pattern around so that we understand the emotion of everybody being so centered on the moment.

In terms of navigating between  the footage of Jarrell and Anthony, that wasn’t that complicated of a process. I just cut it for what was the best wrestling. Whatever was the best way to express the move, then we solved it with the visual effects and coming in to see a close up when we needed to. 

Here’s another scene I want you to walk me through. This is a great dialogue moment. Talk to me about the performances or the direction you gave and the decisions of camera angle, camera size…

GOLDENBERG: In his real life Anthony got letters from these third grade students and it sort of reinvigorated him. It’s when he realized he was wrestling for other people besides himself and it really did change his life: where he realized how much he meant to other people, including his mother.

The interesting thing about this is: in the beginning of this scene she apologizes to him for the mistakes she’s made. She tells two little stories. One of them is that she blamed herself for him being born without a leg.

The other being that when she was young and first had him she just wanted to be a kid and party. Her parents came to her and said, “We’ll take Anthony and raise him as your brother.” Those were true stories that Judy told Jennifer - that she hadn’t told me and she hadn’t told John, the screenwriter, but felt comfortable enough to tell Jennifer, and Jennifer had her blessing to put them in the film.

When we shot it that day, Jennifer mostly improv’d it, but we didn’t tell Jarell that she was going to do it. By that point, Jarell was embodying Anthony so much that he and Jennifer were locked together like they were really mother and son.

So Jarrell was completely taken aback by that. He didn’t know it was coming, so those reactions you’re seeing are real. He’s such a fine actor that he was able to process that new information and have the reactions come out how Anthony would have reacted. It’s a pretty special scene anyway, but I think it gave it even more depth and more meaning that Judy gave Jennifer the blessing to add those little beats in.

I’ve gotten to know Judy very well - how much work she’s done on herself - as someone who’s come from being a 16 year old single mom and having five kids and going through what she’s gone through and to hear her talk about it now, you just realize what an incredible person she is and when Michael Pena drops off those letters and talks about who she is as a mother.

I think it’s so genuine because it’s so true. At the beginning of this process, I knew what an incredible person Anthony was, but as I got to know Judy over the course of making this film I think there could be an equally good movie if we made one about Judy’s life.

Since this was kind of improvised, do you remember if maybe the first takes were better than the later takes? 

REED: I don’t remember if the first takes were better than the later takes. They were both terrific in this sequence. If you look at this from a wide perspective, it’s a scene in the movie where the mother gives the character these emotional letters written by children about how inspiring he is and she tells him, he is the titular line of the movie: unstoppable.

It is a scene that could go bad very easily, so the stakes were pretty high for me when I looked at the script and I looked at the way this scene was going to play out and the two of them did such a fantastic job of towing that line between being emotional and being over the top.

So the only thing I had to do in that that scene was just try and navigate how close to the line we could be with it being too emotional. My role was more reining it in slightly and letting them do all the heavy lifting with the acting. It ends up being one of the most satisfying moments in the movie.

Billy, I have to ask you about something that I just saw on social media about Argo, and I wanted to ask you if you remember this. I heard that there’s a Led Zeppelin track in Argo, correct? And that Zeppelin were considering not allowing it to be used because when they shot the record, the needle was being placed on the album on the first track of the album and the song is actually the last track of that side.

GOLDENBERG: That’s “When the Levee Breaks” and it’s 100 percent true. 

REED: We also had to replace the label on the record with visual effects.

GOLDENBERG: Yeah, they said, “We’ll sell it to you - obviously for a price - but we had to change the arm so the needle would drop on the last track. It was actually a way simpler visual effect than we thought it was going to be.

A couple days later we got the shot back and it was perfect. I was thrilled to have it be accurate. You know that sometimes with movies you don’t know what song you’re actually going to use in the end. I just love that attention to detail.

That was Ben’s idea, that song, and it worked so beautifully. I tried a couple of songs there. I think Hotel California was the first song I tried. It was so on the nose that Ben quickly made fun of me and threw it out. He came up with the idea to use that song, and I think it works great.

So that was VFX? It wasn’t a reshoot? Is that your recollection? 

GOLDENBERG: It was VFX. I don’t know how they did it, but they did it beautifully. They changed the label. I think it’s Columbia, right? I can’t remember what it was originally, but we changed the label on the record to make it the right company.

And the right track. A great bit of Hollywood lore. Thank you very much for that. Congratulations on a fantastic directorial debut. Congratulations to you, Brett, for putting up with Billy for another film 

GOLDENBERG: It is a lot to put up with. I will admit.

Thanks for being on Art of the Cut, guys. 

GOLDENBERG: It’s always great to see you. 

REED: Thanks, Steve.