Editing Insights with Oscar Winning Editor Craig McKay
By Tom Soper
Craig
McKay is the Academy Award winning editor of such
films as Silence of the Lambs, Copland,
and Philadelphia. He spoke with Zoom
In after completing Maid in Manhattan, starring
Jennifer Lopez and directed by acclaimed filmmaker Wayne
Wang.
Maid in Manhattan was your first collaboration
with Wayne Wang?
Yes. It was the first time and I hope they’ll
be more. He’s somebody who’s very open
to the new technology, and so am I as much I can be. Actually,
I completed the first cut of Maid in Manhattan one
day after principle photography.
You were finished editing just after they’d
finished shooting?
The editor always does a first cut on a feature. As
they’re shooting you’re cutting right along
behind them. There’s a lot of advantages
to that. If you’re working on a scene and
you see that it needs something, you can ask them to
pick it up later for you. When I was using film,
before I went digital, I might have a final first cut
a week to a week and a half after principle photography. This
time I had it in one day. That’s clearly
the advantage of the Avid.
You’ve been working on the Avid for
what, five years now?
Since Copland. In 97’. But
I had been fooling around long before that and I was
Apple literate, so learning Avid wasn’t at all
difficult, but Avid wasn’t ready for feature work
for a while, and then it got there, and now it’s
the standard. One of the things we did on this
film was use Mag-less dailies. Usually there’s
a separate picture and a separate sound track and when
you show dailies those elements have to be synched up
physically, but what we did was simply load everything
into an MO and we were able to sync the disc from that
with our picture. This practically eliminated a
big step in synching. Normally if we’ve got
dailies in at nine o’clock we probably won’t
be able to see them till late afternoon. On Maid
in Manhattan we got dailies in around then and we
were screening at one o’clock. The technology
has helped us quite a bit. There are many advantages
doing all the functions I do digitally. But it
struck me, when we finished Maid in Manhattan,
everything in the process was digital until the very
last moment when we got our final print back from the
lab and then it’s film, all of a sudden it’s
film. It kind of takes you back a little.
Must be very nice to see the quality jump up
like that. Are there any disadvantages? Do
you feel like you’re missing anything not editing
on film?
No, I’m very clear about this. I don’t
care if I never touch film again. These tools that
we have today are really wonderful tools. But it’s
really who’s operating the tool. The tool
gives us great advantages. With me, on an Avid
I’m twice, three times as fast as I’ve ever
been. The other thing about these tools is that
the editor gets to be more of an orchestrator now. I
do it all right there. Compositing, mixing, sound
mixes. It’s all right there.
Do you work a lot with the sound editor?
Oh yeah, I’m always working the tracks hard. In
fact that’s one thing that Avid could work on. I
want to get as detailed as possible but it only lets
me put down on a frame, whereas on film I’ve got
four perfs in each frame and I can go in any of those. For
that accuracy on an Avid I have to go out to Pro Tools
and back in.
You’ve edited all genres of movies. Can
you compare say editing a romantic comedy, like Maid
in Manhattan, to a thriller, like Silence
of Lambs, for which you won an Oscar?
Well, it’s all story. With a thriller you’re
always trying to bring up the tension. It’s
a slow build. With a romantic comedy there’s
more of an ebb and flow, but you’re still trying
to hold the audience in the story. I would always
edit a comedy in exactly the same way that I would a
drama. There are moments that have to have truth
in the performance and the image. A joke is like
a small truth.
There must be tricks you learn with experience?
Well, film has a grammar, like a language, like English
and yes, that’s where I start from. The two
hardest points are the beginning and the end. The
beginning because you’re trying to pull them into
the story. I think it’s takes some years
before you learn how to deal with the ends.
Would you edit a film chronologically, following
the order of the scenes, if you came on board after
all the shooting had been finished?
