The invisible man
Editor Simon Price would prefer that you didn’t know he’d worked on a film or TV programme, as that means he’s done a good job, writes James Croot.
Somewhere between a short-order cook and a brain surgeon. That’s how Kiwi film and television editor Simon Price describes his role.
It’s a summation borrowed from one of the greats of the profession, Walter Murch, who has worked on everything from Apocalypse Now to The Godfather trilogy and The English Patient.
‘‘You start by following a recipe and what you get is the bad, first assembly,’’ says Price, who has carved out an impressive reputation over the past two decades through his work on features like The Orator, documentaries like Antarctica: A Year on the Ice and, most recently, Trans-Tasman TV series Cleverman.
‘‘Then the process of refinement really starts, with conversations with directors, producers, and others. In a lot of ways, the job of an editor is also like being a pop psychologist, helping the director to work out what they are saying and how that relates to everyone else.’’
He says he likes to boil that down to something as simple as a single theme.
‘‘People always talk about characters driving stories, but behind character, I always think it’s themes – although people don’t always necessarily register that. So for me, the first, most important question always is – what makes the story tick?
‘‘A film like The Revenant is about revenge – full stop. Generally, I’ll talk to the director or other creatives in order to find a few phrases that can help me make choices about shot selection, scene selection, and the overall story structure.’’
Those kind of discussions, he says, are what he really loves about his job.
‘‘You end up having very deep – quick, but deep – conversations with a few other people about essential human dilemmas.
Raised in Dunedin, where he first became interested in editing thanks to cameras borrowed from the local teacher’s college [cutting involved connecting two video recorders together], Price moved to Australia to further his education in the mid-to-late 1990s. Named most daring graduate at Melbourne’s VCA School of Film & TV in 1998, he worked on the other side of the Ditch for a while, until the chance to co-edit Peter Jackson’s King Kong lured him back across the Tasman. Since then he’s been based in Wellington with wife Brita and 5-year-old son Pelle, although work means he probably spends more time in Sydney and Melbourne now.
‘‘It’s interesting how it all curls around. I’ve set up an independent storytelling outfit called Arc Edit in Sydney, and the opportunity to work on Cleverman came from my agent in Sydney, even though it is actually a job with a Wellington-outfit [Pukeko Pictures].
Used to working on features that have an obvious beginning, middle, and end, Price says Cleverman was a big learning curve for him.
‘‘When you arrive, you’re working with a very absent crew. Everybody is putting stuff together in isolation and you might get the director for half an hour at the end of an exhausting day.
‘‘The process here is about building a world, creating a lot of potential and energy. Getting Episode 1 right took so much time because we’re dealing with a world in the near future and one that is different from our own. There’s a whole sub-human race [‘‘the Hairies’’] that has to be explained, so all these things have to come out through the characters, their world and the story. All that is sort of articulated in the pitching note and script, but it still takes a lot of work to make it feel natural, seamless, and like it always existed.’’
Casting can also have a huge impact on editing, Price says. ‘‘So much of looking at cinema is looking at the human face. I take a lot of lead from looking at the rhythm of the leading character. In Cleverman, the actor who played the lead [Hunter PageLochard] had a little tic that I could build a rhythm around.’’
Price did something similar on the award-winning Samoan film The Orator.
‘‘A lot of people think we cut that with a sense of island time – to make it slow. But actually, it was about meeting the character of that cast. The central lead Saili [Fa’afiaula Sagote] walked at a very particular pace through the space and the kind of space he was walking through had no walls.’’
Price admits it is difficult now for him to watch other people’s films without a critical eye.