Robert Hoffmann on "Cutting Within the Shot"

How Art School Confidential's Reality Was Remade in the Editing Room

Robert Hoffman moved up in the filmmaking ranks the old-fashioned way — he got lucky. Years of working as a post supervisor and assistant editor paid off when he was post-supervising Ghost World for director Terry Zwigoff, who recognized his editorial talent and eventually hired him to cut Bad Santa. His latest project is Zwigoff’s Art School Confidential, and he told Film & Video how small but important parts of that movie’s reality were remade in the editing room. When do editors start thinking like VFX artists? And how much responsibility do they have to maintain the truthiness of a performance? Hoffman is one of the breed of tech-savvy editors who’s finding out.

What have you learned from being a post-production supervisor?

Understanding what my needs are in the editing room – where money should be spent and where it shouldn’t be spent. I would prefer to do as much of the work on the temp mix in the Avid [as I can], and that way money can be used for the final mix – the sound that people will hear in theaters, not just the sound we have for a one-time screening. Also, just understanding what the workflow is for everybody, and what people need to do to get their jobs accomplished hopefully makes me more patient when things don’t happen on time. As a post supervisor you feel responsible for everything and you get a tightening in your chest. As an editor, I’m much more relaxed, especially around a good post supervisor. And eventually everything falls into place, even in the darkest moments when you think it’s not going to happen.

How did you make the transition from post supervisor to editor?

I started off as an assistant editor, and I worked for the Motion Picture Corporation of America, Brad Krevoy and Steve Stabler’s company. I thought, “I wonder what being post supervisor is like?” And I started post supervising. But I missed editing and was lucky enough to edit a couple of independent features. One was called Rhinoskin: The Making of a Movie Star, which spent a year at festivals, and I really enjoyed it so I edited whenever I could. On Ghost World, [director] Terry Zwigoff found out that I could edit and I made some contributions on that film, along with some other really talented editors. And Terry hired me for Bad Santa. And that was my first big title.

Did you always want to be an editor of feature films?

I wanted to be an editor; I just didn’t want to follow the traditional route. I went to USC film school, and I remember one of the second-semester projects: you direct for the first half of the semester and your partner edits your film, and then you switch roles. In the film that you edit you’re also the cinematographer, it’s just a two-man team. And I remember shooting a particular shot, and I shot it out of focus and pulled back and the teacher said to me, “Ah — that’s editor’s eye.” And I said, “Really? Is that a disease?” And he meant that I was shooting it as a cinematographer but I was looking at it editorially because I knew it was going to make a good cut. I always enjoyed editing, and I was lucky enough to get scenes to cut in the early films where I assisted. It’s just very difficult for assistants to move up, and I wasn’t sure how to do that. I’m just lucky enough that Terry Zwigoff came along to open the door for me. But I always tell people to be ready for luck when it happens. There are, unfortunately, no specific ways in which a person can land a career anymore. There are no real apprenticeships any more, which is a shame.

But you used to have to be an assistant editor just to get time on the flatbed editing machines. Now, you can pick up a lot of it using Final Cut Pro on a Mac.

You can learn how to operate the equipment, but you can’t learn to be talented at it. By picking up DV Xpress or Final Cut you can see if you enjoy doing it — and if what you cut together actually makes sense to other people. But the thing you don’t really get anymore is to sit next to an editor and hold their trims or find things for them and pick up what they’re doing.

Creating the Take You Need

What did you use to cut Art School Confidential, and how did technology impact your work?

I cut on an Avid Meridian. I had not used the Meridian yet, but the director and I made it very clear that we wanted to stick with Avid — and it was the best choice we could have made for that show. It’s just an incredible tool. In Art School there’s a scene where the lead character is in a classroom in a drawing class and the girl of his dreams comes in to model for the class. [Terry Zwigoff] wanted to build a sequence that showed he was so infatuated with her that he couldn’t move. Everyone else starts drawing and he doesn’t. We were able to build that with singles, but the director asked about the wide shot where everyone starts drawing — was there a take where he does not draw at the same time as the rest of the class? And there wasn’t. But we just did a little split-screen — I assume Final Cut Pro can do the same thing — where we put a piece of the shot where he wasn’t drawing over the corner of one where he was drawing and basically created a take where the rest of the class starts drawing and he is still immobilized by her presence. It was remarkable to be able to do that, and in the Avid it looked flawless. We obviously did it as a visual effect eventually. But I started doing a lot of that. If we cut out some dialogue and then on the reverse angle someone’s head wasn’t in the right place I would just steal a part of the shot where their head was in the right place, do a picture-in-picture, and place it over the area I needed to replace.

You’re creating a rough composite so you can see whether your idea is going to work.

Exactly. But as it’s being done, it looks perfect. At the end, when we printed out the list of FX, we had many more than we ever thought we would. The producer referred to them as “Robert Hoffman’s opticals.” In a couple of cases, they were important story moments. But for some instances, there was a bad cut because a head was not matching and I would just composite in with a picture-in-picture the head in the right position. We once needed a character to say something in a different part of the scene. We actually tried putting his lips over his mouth from earlier in the scene. And that’s one that took us out of the movie every time we saw it. We couldn’t get it close enough because it really needed to be a 3D effect. We ended up, thankfully, not having to do that. But I’m sure it could have been pulled off by Digiscope (Santa Monica, CA), which was our VFX house.

You ended up going to a back-up plan?

We just cut it differently. It was very odd, and it made me feel like I was doing something wrong. I thought it was maybe unfair to the actor to put dialogue in his mouth that may not have matched his facial expression had he actually been saying that dialogue. I thought, “Boy, this is a little bit dangerous. I’m not sure it’s an ethical thing to do.” It’s a hard job to say something truthfully — and suddenly you’re giving them different dialogue.

But as an editor you’re constantly cutting away to reaction shots that may or may not have originally been in reaction to a certain line of dialogue.

That’s true. We do that quite a bit. You’re manipulating everything. It’s just this new thing that I call “cutting within the shot,” where you’re able to superimpose certain things. I suppose if it’s truthful for the film, that’s all that matters and everyone looks good. On a second or third viewing you can tell whether you’ve pulled it off or completely botched the job.

Is this something that you get the feeling other editors are doing?

Yes, I’ve heard other editors talk about it. One of my former assistants told me, “Oh yeah, we did that all the time” on this big effects movie he worked on. I don’t know that it wasn’t done in the old Kem and Moviola days — it’s just the immediacy of being able to see whether it works or not makes it easier to do and easier to sign off on. You have it there in the Avid and you can look at it and see if it works rather than waiting to see whether or not it can be pulled off.

Leaving Film Dailies Behind

I always think about guys like David Lean or Sam Peckinpah, how if they wanted a shot to look a certain way, they’d have to hang out and hope they’d get the light just right and go for that magic moment. And now you can get the moments that you missed in a digital composite.

Some directors just like to replace the skies because they like the way the skies look in certain elements they’ve seen at visual effects houses. It’s like a digital camera versus a film camera. You can manipulate things and change things, and you don’t have to be that careful because you know you can fix it later. It’s actually like digital editing versus film editing, too. It’s precise, but you know you can always slip it very easily with the edit tools on the Avid or Final Cut Pro, which has trim tools as well. I’m not saying it makes people sloppy — it’s just a different way of working. I know there are a lot of assistants now who, even if they go to film school, they’ve never touched film. And I think that’s a great loss because there’s something about the history of film and the nature of touching it and smelling it and knowing what the importance of a frame is. There’s something great about knowing where the key numbers are, knowing how important those are, how important it is to code a piece of film. I don’t miss the smell of the coding machines. But we had film on Bad Santa. We printed film, we had film assistants who sunk the film, we screened film dailies and then we transferred it to digital.

Does that mean you didn’t print film on Art School Confidential?

We did not print film on Art School. Jamie Anderson was our DP, and he would print selects that he wanted to look at. On Ghost World, we didn’t print film either, although we did conform film. We printed film for preview screenings. On Bad Santa the film was already printed. And in Art School we previewed on tape. We did an HD screening, which looked beautiful. We had never done that before. We found a place up in San Rafael called Intrepid Productions and they digitized the footage from our HD tapes. The only thing that wasn’t smooth was we had some of these VFX elements that had to be recreated. These little composites — somehow that list didn’t get translated. But they were easy enough to do. It was beautiful. It was so amazing to see it projected. And after that, we actually started making Betas right from the Avid for some screenings. And obviously they weren’t like the HD, but we saved a lot of money by not going to HD. As long as we weren’t screening in a 500-seat theater, it was good enough for our purposes.