MOVIEMAKER.COM SPRING 2020 25
HOW THEY DID IT
the space that you’re jumping
into. There’s no sunlight, so if
we decided, hey, we need to do
this, we got two hours before
the sun rises, so let’s tack
this scene on, we would have
known that this was a pos-
sibility going into that night.
Usually our grip and electric
guys would have run ahead
and lit that space for us. Then
if we got to it, great, and if we
didn’t, we would have to bump
it to another night. We couldn’teven use the practical lights
because they’re the wrong
color. Most city street lighting
now is sodium vapor, which
is orange, and mercury vapor
would have been what was out
there in the ’50s.
I was obsessed with the idea
that if you do your job right,
as a writer, you don’t have to
cut very much. If you’re telling
stories that are fascinating, you
don’t actually need the assis-
tance of editing. And I believeEVERETT (JAKE HOROWITZ)
SPEAKS WITH A CALLER USING AN
OLD-FASHIONED SWITCHBOARD
HEADSETthat cinema bears that to be
true; great plays prove that.
So it was never going to be
a heavily cut movie. There
are around 700 shots in
The Vast of Night: Some are as
long as 10 minutes, and obvi-
ously some are as short as a few
frames. The average movie sits
at about 1,800 shots. So we’re
about one third of the cutting
rhythm of your average movie.
The actual reason behind that
has to do with the fact that ed-“
EDITING DATES
MOVIE PRETTY
QUICKLY. WHEN
YOU CUT, HOW
YOU CUT, HOW YOU
CUT OVER MUSIC,
THAT’S WHAT DATES
MOVIES THE MOST.
”
iting dates movie pretty quickly.
When you cut, how you cut,
how you cut over music, that’s
what dates movies the most.
The movies that look the most
undated—Dog Day Afternoon,
Lawrence of Arabia,
All the President’s Men—only
cut when they have to. That
was always the way we were
going to shoot it.
I like the restrictions of mov-
ies like To Kill a Mockingbird.
You can see how they have