Zene Baker started building indie cred early in his career, when he hooked up with the young writer/director David Gordon Green on his debut feature, George Washington. Critics immediately made flattering comparisons between Green and Terrence Malick, and Baker honed his craft working on two more films with him. Baker edited two films by first-time directors that made it to Sundance this year – coming-of-age drama Dreamland and Tae-Kwon-Do comedy The Foot Fist Way. Film & Video asked him about technology, inspiration, and editors who do too much.

It’s been a really good year, about the best I’ve had in a while. I’ve met some really good people through other films. One of the projects I’ve done is a Wilco concert film. They did a four-night run at the Vic Theater in Chicago, and we shot it on 16mm. Through some friends of friends, I ended up meeting Sam Jones [director of Wilco doc I Am Trying to Break Your Heart] and we collaborated on that. I don’t know if the band is going to release it. From there I met with some other producers, and I worked on a film called The Shanghai Kid. This year has been really busy and good.

For Dreamland, they were really contemplating Final Cut Pro. And I said, “OK, it’s a good system and we can certainly do it. But at the same time, if you guys bear with me and think about Xpress Pro, I can get you what you need faster on an Avid than a Final Cut Pro. Your intention is to go back to film with this, and I like how Avid handles matchback better than Final Cut. It takes a lot of the guesswork out of it.”

I’m definitely a lot happier with the media management of Avid. I haven’t really worked on a film with a large enough budget to afford a full-time assistant, so most of the delivery items that go to negative cutting are being made by me. Just so I know what’s actually being sent out, I prefer how Avid does it. It’s what I’m more familiar with, from top to bottom. Working on a small-budget film, you don’t have a lot of room for a lot of drive space. There are times when you’re cutting in someone else’s office, and then you move to your own office, and then you move again.

I try to stay semi-current, but it’s almost impossible. The next thing I’d love to add to my own system is the Mojo card. I’m taking little steps here and there. But Shanghai Kid has a Mojo system, and that’s what I’m looking forward to the most – integrating the Mojo card into what I’ve got, and that’ll make cutting film projects even easier, going back to film and supplying deliverables and all that.

A lot of my friends are kind of faced with that. They got themselves into that rut – they got some pick-up work on music videos here and there for lesser-known bands. The indie producers wrangle them, and they deliver this amazing little video full of nice effects and everything, and from there they’re kind of stereotyped into that: This guy can deliver what you need in three days, with effects and everything. And they’re being severely exploited in my opinion. I’m a little bit old-school – I don’t have a great desire to get into the jack-of-all-trades editing style. I want to know about effects, and know what effects are going to give me the best result for the film. But I don’t want to throw in effects here and there, willy-nilly, and get into that trap. You hired me to cut it, and I just want to concentrate on cutting the picture.

It’s tough. It’s two very different processes, figuring out the narrative flow and then knowing everything you can possibly know about effects. It’s hard to find the time to learn the effects stuff if you’re working on longform narrative projects.

David Gordon Green and I were classmates in film school. We were in the same year together. We met and became friends, and after graduating he put together George Washington. I went to work at an industrials company trying to do corporate and industrial training videos at a fledgling company. I was with them for a year and they folded — and I was one of the first people cut. He had approached me before they shot, but I had this other thing, and then he shot the movie, and a week or so before he finished I was fired — or let go — and so I started drawing unemployment and starting working with David Gordon Green.

Sometimes it’s all of the above. If I’ve got the luxury of working with a director before shooting happens, we get together and we talk about movies that have inspired and that we want to emulate to a certain degree – not steal, but take something and adapt it to what we’re doing. Then there are other times where you have such a different idea that there’s no other movie to watch. Most of the time it’s falling back on a lot of 1970s movies, honestly. That was a golden era in film, where you could watch a movie and almost anything could happen. From week to week there were a lot of films that had a lot of interesting storytelling, from simple stories to pretty complex stories. That’s the well that we’ve been pulling our inspiration from.

Seeking the biggest dollar return has been the biggest fundamental change. Not every single movie you release has to have spent $20 million to $100 million to try to tell a story. I think they could spread around these budgets to tell a lot more stories on film. There are diamonds in the rough every year, and there are getting to be more diamonds. But at the same time, the bigger tentpole films have all kind of gotten homogenized. Sometimes it’s hard to tell one big-budget plot from another, because they’re covering a lot of the same territory. Someone gets ripped off, somebody kidnaps somebody or kills somebody. I don’t want to take away from any of the techniques used, but when you’re sinking a lot of money into one thing, yes, it gets homogenized. You’re asking, “How can we appeal to the lowest common denominator?”

I would love to say I've seen something recently. In that regard, it's been a bad year for me. But I will say there's one highly underrated 1970s movie that I've always loved. David Green and I have kind of taken it to heart as, like, one of the best American films of all time. And that's Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. Awesome. It's fun. It's a little deep, but not too deep. It's a great American movie. So we've definitely borrowed quite a bit from that. We’ve been inspired by it. Also I Am Cuba.

I can’t lie. Obviously, I’m hoping they are successful, and I’d like them to open doors for opportunities to work with new people. That’s the part I enjoy the best – getting to work with all kinds of different people. Putting in that one-on-one time on a film is personally rewarding to me. One day, I’d like to step up to a really awesome film with a decent budget where I could have an assistant – and learn some new tricks from my assistant. I didn’t come up as an assistant.

Filmmaking is becoming easier to an extent. The availability of the technology is getting more and more widespread. That doesn’t mean everybody should be telling a story on film. But it’s brought more of an awareness about it.

Take some interesting, risky opportunities. There are certainly a lot of sacrifices I’ve had to make along the way, and I will probably have to make more. But I can’t complain.