Se7en Editor Reflects on the Transition from Film to Digital
An interview with three time Academy Award nominated editor Richard Francis-Bruce
Season 4 of the Artwell podcast is available now! I studied the career of Mad Max creator and director George Miller, interviewed his collaborators, and shared everything I learned with you.
Richard Francis-Bruce is a three time Academy Award nominated editor for his work on The Shawshank Redemption, Seven, and Air Force One. He is also known for his work editing films such as The Green Mile, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, The Rock, Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone, Perfect Storm, and more.
I got the chance to speak with Richard about his editing style, the transition from traditional to digital editing, the perfect film run time, and more. If you’d like to listen to my full interview with Richard where he shares stories of David Fincher on Seven, George Miller on Mad Max, and Michael Bay on The Rock, you can find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
*The below has been edited for pacing and clarity.
Do you have a style? What is your philosophy when you sit down to cut a picture?
Do no harm. Be invisible. Unless it's for shock effect, I don't really want to see the cuts. That would be the only thing I'd say about my “style”. I'll go to extreme lengths to make that work. It’s easier nowadays because of the way we can split the shots. If you're doing an over-the-shoulder shot of somebody and the foreground person is moving and it's distracting, you can split the shot and select a different part of that person's acting so they're not moving, so your eye is going to where the attention should be on the screen. Little things like that, I would do that all the time just to concentrate the eye.
The absence of style is the style itself. When you start on a new project, what are the important questions you're asking yourself about that project to give you a sense of how to approach it?
Well, I always like to talk to the director and get their input on what they're trying to do. Unfortunately, that comes less and less the theme these days.
I know the dailies process is another thing that’s been lost, everyone's watching them on an iPad in their hotel room, no one's there together anymore.
That's the main reason. We always used to have the dedicated dailies sessions. The editor would always sit next to the director and there'd be constant conversation back and forth. And my assistant would be sitting on the other side taking notes. That is the main thing that we lose now. You're right, everyone's in their hotel room watching on a DVD and that's a shame. It makes the process a little bit disjointed.
What makes a great editor?
A good listener. Leave your ego at the door. You’ve got to remember it's not your film. A lot of it's personality. Most of the time it's just you and the director in the cutting room. If you don't get on with that person it's not gonna work out. Generally speaking, editors are very much easygoing, uncomplicated people. There are the odd ones, I'm sure, that are difficult. But yeah, it's a fun job. It's a great job. Consider yourself lucky if you've got a job like that.
Do you have to find your own personal way into the story as an editor or because it's not your film, do you intentionally try to stay somewhat disconnected to it?
Oh no, I get very involved in it and very attached to it, especially if it's really well written. You've got to remember, you spend months and months, a year on this. It's like your baby. It really is. I don't know if there'd be too many editors who wouldn't get attached to the work that they're doing. Sometimes you get attached and you kid yourself that it's a good film and you realize all of a sudden one day – probably at the first test screening – it's not as good as you thought it was, or the opposite, where you go, my God, it's better than I thought it was. Those are rare.
Is the audience always right? How do you feel when a film you're so certain on doesn't land?
Well, some of the time it's the wrong audience. I know that can sound silly, but when we tested Seven, it tested really badly. However they'd picked the audience, these people were never going like this film. We had people coming out of the theater after they’d filled out their cards and they could tell the group of people over here was the filmmakers, and they’d come over and start yelling [at us]. “How dare you make such a revolting film?!?” But people who liked it, liked it.
How do you know then as one of the filmmakers when to have conviction behind the idea after a test screening versus when to listen to the feedback?
There comes a point where you just go, “Are we gonna make this film or the film that they want to see?” I don't know if I've ever worked on a film where we've actually been able to change the film enough afterwards to satisfy the test audience. I mean, we've tried by shooting alternative endings and things, or one ending where this guy's the bad guy and the other ending where that guy's the bad guy and whichever one scores the highest, that's the way [it ends] – really silly stuff.
I think part of the beauty of art is the fact that it is imperfect. And now with digital, we can be so close to perfect that we lose some of that imperfection that makes art beautiful,
The films that we used to make, the ones we're talking about [like] Seven, they were perfect in a lot of ways. They just worked. They didn't need all that. It just goes to show you, you can go back to making movies like that.
What are some of the things you appreciated with the digital revolution?
I like to work fast because I want to see what I have in my head. The mechanical process of splicing film and then pulling the tape off and doing all that is laborious. [With digital] I could be working with a director and he could be talking about doing something and I could be doing it as he's talking. You can get through things a lot quicker. I like that. But I also try to still work like I'm working on film. I don't like to do a lot of versions. I still like to just have one version, maybe two. You can only have one film so why are you having multiple versions? There are some good things [with digital], you can add music and sound effects [but] I’ve worked with directors who don't want to see any music anywhere near their film until it's time because the film should work without any music. Music and sound effects are enhancements. Music is the emotional coder of the film. I love it when we finally get the music or go to a scoring session and all of a sudden a mediocre scene has turned into this wonderful thing that you never realized was there, but the composer saw it. He saw something, and he wrote this beautiful theme. On Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, John Williams had written a beautiful score. John likes to get a copy of the film very early and he scores to it. A lot of composers will go, “We want the latest version so we can adjust everything”. John doesn't care. He says my music editors will fix it. We went to a scoring session and it was an old, old version of the kids arriving at Hogwarts crossing the lake. [In the new version] we had cut it down because it was too slow but John had written this beautiful score and Chris Columbus looked at me, I looked at him and I said, “Yeah, I know, I'll go back and put that in now”. Those are the surprises you get with those added extras. Music and sound effects make a huge difference to the film. I find that's the hardest thing to do when you're cutting, to leave room for the music and leave room for the sound effects. Don't try and squeeze it all together.
Harry Potter was two and half hours long and there were concerns with its runtime when you released it, especially for a kids movie, but it works.
Go figure. I hate it every time people would say, “A movie can't be more than 110 minutes”. Who says a movie can't be more than 110 minutes? I've seen some pretty slow 90-minute movies, and I've seen some pretty fast 2.5 hour movies. I've actually seen a very nice 3 hour and 15 minute movie called The Green Mile. People go, “What do you mean three hours? It's two and a half hours”. My point exactly.
I watched The Green Mile for the first time a couple of days ago and I felt that absolutely. Why do you think that is? Why does it feel like it's moving so quickly?
The writing, the story, the characters, they just suck you in. That's what a good movie is. Time should just slip by. It even happens when you're watching TV sometimes. You're watching something good on TV and then the end credits come up and go, oh, hang on, what happened? You look and 90 minutes went by, you were just sucked in. When we previewed Harry Potter, we only did one preview in Chicago. It had all the rough previsors of the Quidditch match and everything – it looked awful but the kids wanted more they were so into it. [At first] they didn't know what they were seeing, when they found out they were seeing Harry Potter, they just hit the roof.
You mentioned how sometimes it's just a great script that makes time slip by. I heard in another interview where you said Shawshank was the best script you ever read. I was speaking with James Cromwell the other day and he was saying The Green Mile was the best script he's ever read. What was it about Frank Darabont's scripts that were just so good?
Well, this is the best way to describe Shawshank. When I got the script, I was busy doing something else and I was working seven days a week. I didn't have time to read it. I got two scripts sent to me, one was Shawshank, one was My Father the Hero. I asked my wife to read them and let me know what I should try and find time to read. The first night I came home and I said, how's that script going? She said, oh, it's about guys in prison. The second night I came home, she said, “You’ve got to find time to read this script”. So I squeezed it in, in lunch breaks and things and I could not put it down. It's the writing. It's always the writing and the characters. No matter what they tell you, it's the writing and the characters' story. I didn't read the novella. I didn't want to read it until I finished Shawshank and I was on another film. When I read it, it solidified in my brain what a brilliant script it was because the novella and the script are nothing alike. I don't disagree with James Cromwell. The Green Mile was a really well done script too, but I give it to Shawshank only because it came first.
Is choosing Shawshank the most important decision you made in your career?
Yes. But I would say I got chosen. I wanted to do it and I was chosen. I found out later that they'd interviewed almost every editor in Hollywood for that. I got it because Niki Marvin the producer and I hit it off so well. Frank was a bit preoccupied with all the casting decisions and we discovered that we'd had a very similar road through our careers, she with the BBC and me with the ABC in Australia. I think she pushed for me to do it. Getting on well with someone is so much of getting the job.
When did you realize how successful Shawshank was going to become? Because unlike some other smash hits that come out the gate fast, Shawshank wasn't necessarily the biggest hit right away.
It was a very slow build. It bombed at the box office. It didn't even make its budget, I don't think. Then when it was released on VHS through video stores, it got its word of mouth going. The fact that it got seven Academy nominations helped it. The industry knew about it – I would get phone calls from other editors saying, “I just saw your film, it's amazing”. And then when it went into the video stores is when it took off. It was the first film that really benefited from the video market. I think that's where it's made all its money, and syndication.
And one of those seven Academy Award nominations was yours. You went back to back with Shawshank and Seven and then after a year break were back with a nomination for Air Force One. How do those accolades and recognition impact your career?
You become on the radar of. From 1992 to 2001, I basically worked nonstop with a couple of overlaps of films. That was my time. Basically, anything I went for, I got. It was just the way it worked out. It was great.
Are you able to appreciate that in the moment? Or because you're working back to back on so many things, you don't get the opportunity because you're moving so quickly?
I knew this was a special time. There were a couple of misfires there, but they can't all be great. I was lucky enough to have what I had.
Now that you're retired, how do you feel when you look back?
Fortunate. I'm glad I was doing it at the time I was doing it. I'm very proud of the work that I've done.
Do you miss editing?
I do and I don't. I don't miss the lack of variety in films. You can't go past a bus without something there about Wolverine or something on it. I've done one of those. I don't want to do another one. I think all the best stuff now is on HBO and the streaming services, which is fine. There's not that many feature films that are made these days that are really classified as feature films – I'm not just saying that as somebody from the nineties. I can't even tell you what won Best Picture last year, I can't remember… Oh, Oppenheimer! I suppose you say that is a “movie movie”. That's what you should be seeing in the movies, but they're rare.
What does it mean to you to do art well?
To have people appreciate it. The fact that people are interested in the films that I've worked on, to have someone like you come on and say you liked that film, and ask me questions about it.
Thanks for reading! If you haven’t already, make sure you subscribe to the newsletter for more interviews that help you become a more thoughtful artist. If you want to learn more about George Miller and the making of Furiosa, you’ll lov Season 4 of the Artwell podcast where I studied his career and interviewed his collaborators to find lessons that are relevant for modern creatives.