by Nancy Jundi as originally published by CinemaEditor Magazine
Going into 3:10 to Yuma I had braced myself for what I thought would be a typical Western. Not being a fan of the genre, I didn’t think I would want to write this article. In less than ten minutes it was obvious that this film was going in a new direction – one that wanted to celebrate the possibilities of the time period instead of offer up ham handed ideas on how the West really was. Director James Mangold delivered a picture that gave us action, drama and the hope that the American Western could be done right – and not only by Clint Eastwood. Mangold took Delmar Daves’ original 3:10 to Yuma from 1957 and made it his own in every way.
More than anything I love the journey, both internal and external, that these characters went on. This wasn’t just a ‘shoot ‘em up’ and this wasn’t only for the boys. With enigmatic performances by the entire cast, the editing was allowed to take n its own brilliant life. One of the hardest parts of watching an older Western, for me, was seeing characters on horses for long, drawn out periods of time, talking about what had just happened or what was about to occur. . It never made any sense why they didn’t simply show the actions or decisions after the fact. In this version of 3:10 they never danced on that line. The dialogue and performance never led to a dull moment or allowed you to wander away from the action and intensity of the people in front of you. The action was there and the conversations allowed you to breathe and allowed you to better understand the people you were rooting for or against. With a big opening weekend in September and box office numbers in the top ten for weeks afterward, I think it’s safe to say we’ll be seeing more Westerns – and we can thank the Mangold/McCusker team for setting the bar high and leaving big shoes to fill.
After working together for several years, James Mangold and Mike McCusker, A.C.E. have developed an intuitive and conversational workflow between them that not only proves beautiful and effective, but also lead McCusker to his first Oscar for Walk the Line (2005).
Mike, how did you get your start in editing?
Mike Mcusker: I went to Emerson College and came out to L.A. thinking I’d be the next great American director. I started working as Jim Brooks’ assistant and then I moved over to working with ADR and sound on “The Simpsons”. It was still new and there hadn’t been animated sitcoms on primetime network television before, so it was an education in itself because we were all learning on our feet as we went along. I still wanted to be a director though, and so I got into development – six years after college, there I was doing script coverage. I was considering leaving the business at that point, but it was my mother who encouraged me to stick with it. She reminded me how much I had really enjoyed post when I was on “The Simpsons”. I ended up on a show, “Fallen Angels” where I got to know David Siegel, Stan Salfas and Quincy Gunderson who took me under their wing and taught me a lot. After that I just kept looking for good people and caught good breaks. Quincy Gunderson was working with David Brenner on Independence Day and they brought me on as an additional assistant. That’s where I finally became union. I think I’d put in around 200 hours by then. David and I went on to do a number of pictures together – What Dreams May Come, The Patriot, Kate & Leopold, Identity – we had worked together for about 5 or 6 years when Walk the Line came around. David wasn’t available to do it so James Mangold gave me a shot at it. I got really lucky. I ran into people that helped me along the way and I worked really hard at every step. I got really lucky, too; I came in at a time where people were switching from handling film to editing on computers. I never took a Lightworks or Avid class. I learned everything on the job. I don’t think you could do that now. People knew how to run a cutting room, but not many knew how to work the computer – since I knew how, that gave me a lot of opportunities. Timing was really good for me.
Jim, you’ve covered so many cinematic genres – was that your intention or did you just follow different passions?
James Mangold: I was conscious of never wanting to be branded. I never felt pressured into a corner. The first two pictures I wrote were very different, but after Copland, which was entirely men, I had a strong desire to write roles for women and began adapting Girl, Interrupted. The filmmakers I’d always admired weren’t slaves to any one genre. Even Howard Hawk and Glen Ford didn’t stick to one genre. The business tends to plug you in and say you’re a specialist in horror or drama, etc. I think most filmmakers are only offered certain genres when they would prefer to be in a position free of stigmas. Audiences let me make these kinds of films. Billy Wilder didn’t make a comedy until his sixteenth film.
How do you work during and after the shoot? Are there dailies sessions?
MM: Gone are the days when we sit and watch dailies together. I think everyone watches on location or alone late at night. The pluses are you get to make more cuts; the minuses are that you’re not always certain of the director’s intentions. You just have a bunch of material to sort through for yourself. An upswing of that is I have a shot at getting across what I think the scenes should be like. If we start getting into lifting dialogue and such, that will happen later. My perspective is that cutting a film is just one long conversation. I think you have to try and start the dialogue by asking ‘this is what I believe the movie is about’ or ‘this is what I think the scene is about’. Then Jim may say I’m wrong or we talk about it if I’ve hit on something. If he hates it, he hates it and if he really likes it, he really likes it. There are times I wish I knew what he was thinking and I’ll call the script supervisor to ask what he was doing, but if I don’t get enough clarification, I’ll call Jim.
JM: I come in after we’ve wrapped. I’ve worked with Mike for a long time and he knows how to read my strategies pretty well. Since I’m ultimately coming to the cutting room, there isn’t much value in me putting limitations on him. The value comes from letting Mike cut the movie without me and then I arrive with all of my notes and ideas. There are things he does that I might never have thought of or I may have squashed by creating rules from the beginning.
Do you look at a story in a linear manner or do you play with different cuts to build the film out from the center?
JM: I never think about the theme in an abstract sense – in the cutting room I focus more on transitions, how we’re moving from one scene to another. The most creative cut in a movie is from one place or time to another. Once you’re inside a scene there are a million interesting choices to make, but they’re not abstract, meaning you’re ruled by logistical and eye line continuity. Once you’re inside a scene it’s like you’re writing a song. That moment when you cut from scene to scene is entirely different. How you come in and go out is enormously interesting to me. Each scene is another domino – you want them to kick right over into the next, it can be a beautiful machine kicking forward. You work at giving the film dramatic integrity – ‘how are we getting from here to here’, ‘is there too much fat on the front’, ‘are we focused on the right person’? You’re doing what you can to make the scenes the most effective, the most dramatic.
MM: Any good director is concerned with the transitions. Often times those decisions are branded by the story. In Walk the Line we did a lot of pre laps of the dialogue, but this film didn’t allow for that, we didn’t have those opportunities. Jim and I are on the same page about being sensitive to and concerned with making everything as natural and efficient as possible. There’s not a lot of flash in them, but it’s effective. With this film especially we recognized how older westerns would often talk about ‘finding camp’ before the sun goes down while it was broad day light and then they would cut to camp and it was pitch black. It was comical. This isn’t a film about rustling cattle, we weren’t on a trail to Oregon, it’s not Red River. We had action scenes and a lot of drama moving us along here.
JM: I’ll often make decisions because widescreen lends to it. I’ll make compositions of two or three faces even though the frame is dominated by one. You don’t need to cut to a person because they’re hovering – they’re just there like a gargoyle.
MM: During the camp scene, while Wade is talking to William, Dan tells William to stop talking to Wade. During that exchange, I stay on Wade staring Dan down in a close up. He goes from looking at William, to Dan, who you’d expect to see a reaction from when he resumes talking to William, but we follow Wade’s eyes back to William. It’s those little things that made Wade seem more in control. Here he is, hand cuffed and held at gun point, but he’s still always in control of the situation. In the hotel, when he and Dan are discussing the thousand dollar reward, Wade doubles it. He starts talking about everything Dan can buy with that money and how it will change his life, make him a more respectable man and his family can stop working so hard. We stayed on Dan the entire time. Christian Bale and Russell Crowe deserve that credit. They’re completely focused in on and listening to each other. Christian is actually sitting there, considering that offer. The cards are shuffling in his head about taking this offer. It’s all there and really beautifully. He’s so good there and I had to stay with him. And while you’re staring at Christian you hear Russell so clearly that he’s practically in the shot. You can envision Wade because he’s coming across so strongly. We’re on Christian for 45 seconds which is a lot in screen time. In neither of those instances did I feel like I wanted or needed to be somewhere else. There’s always that instinct to over cut – you have to turn off the editor switch for a second and just let the actors carry you. If we, as filmmakers, have done our job, you’re in the scene with everybody. All of the other characters should be as riveted as you are. I look forward to letting the actors have at a scene. I enjoy not cutting away from them and just letting a scene play out.
Jim, you’ve written or adapted most of your films – how big of a departure was this for you to make 3:10, which had an earlier film version?
JM: I looked at it like any other adaptation, like Girl, Interrupted or Walk the Line. You’re still dealing with material that’s been handled by someone prior to yourself.
Mike, how familiar with 3:10 were you prior to working on this?
MM: Not very. I watched it once before we started and that was about it. I liked it, but I think it’s a simpler movie on all levels, particularly in the sense of the good guy versus bad guy. There wasn’t much grey, it was very black and white. The respect issues may have been the only part where you wondered. Jim made a much deeper film about other issues that were timelier and more complex especially between Russell and Christian’s characters.
What affected the decision to make this film more about the journey to Contention than the waiting in the hotel?
JM: I think we spent just as much time in the hotel, but more on the journey. From the time the stage coach left Bisby to the time it arrived in Contention is where we opened it up. The claustrophobia in the hotel room was imperative, and I felt we needed to sense the openness of America at that time to amplify how small that room was for Dan and Wade.
Did any immediate concerns or excitement jump out at you when you first read the script and envisioned the cuts?
MM: I think the only concern I had was in the journey and the events that occurred along the way. We start off with a bang and then there are a lot of intricacies that build the relationships on the road to contention. I didn’t want to lose the audience. My concern was always if we had enough plot to move the story along. What Jim did was allow the entire section I read to come to life by investing in the characters. Things started to ramp up when they hit the trail and by then you really knew all of the players. It was a slow burn. On the page, you’re always wondering if there’s enough happening. Jim is hyper aware of it as well. We see the same things, but we see them differently. Sometimes I may look at something I want to take out, but Jim knows he has the audience at that certain point. One of the things I think people respond to is that you can really dig into these characters. They’re not just window dressings – that’s a big credit to Jim’s writing and directing.
Jim, in all of your pictures you’ve had a number of very strong characters fighting for screen time, most notably in Cop Land, Girl, Interrupted and now 3:10 to Yuma – how do you help find that balance in the editing room?
JM: I see every film as a world and an ensemble rather than one or two people. The story of the central characters is greatly enhanced the more the other characters progress. They end up reflecting upon the other characters as they’re fully realized. In Cop Land, De Niro was very law and order. Liotta believed in putting yourself first. Stallone was a confused and decent man who wanted to do right. When I was working on 3:10, I was very conscience of all the plates spinning in the air – the second you lose track of any one plate the whole spectacle is diminished. The performances of your lead actors are significantly amplified by casting great actors in the smaller roles. Any way you can, you get them in those roles. They can bring so much life to them. They make you feel as if an entire life has been lived by each one of them. Ben Foster’s role (Charlie Prince) was intended to be small, but it became enormous because of the attention we ended up paying to his character.
MM: Ben Foster commanded that attention. I don’t think just cutting the film is what made it bigger, it was enhanced in editing and it was a part of the writing, casting and working with the actors. One of the things Jim is really good at is allowing the actors to express themselves. He really listens to them and he’s not afraid of ideas. I do know that I might have made choices in certain scenes because I wanted him in the frame or to see his face because he was always right there and in character.
Bringing Dan’s son, William, along on the journey was an amazing addition to this story – how did you initially see him working into the film and did that evolve more in the editing room?
JM: I saw two mirrored families – the Evans family and the Wade gang. They each had a disrespectful and disillusioned son. It created an architecture and gave a sense of what Dan was fighting for. I think the original is very sketched out and the arc of the story is a man who was born without courage. Wimpy guys who find a spine are less interesting. I don’t think anyone is naturally born a coward – I think we learn to be a coward. Dan is a man who has literally been beaten down by life. He’d lost his family’s approval. With this film, money wasn’t enough for him to risk everything, but the respect of his family was. What he did was amazing considering the incredible odds stacked against him. The ability to walk like a man was taken from him, but he walks a super criminal to the train station. He’d pushed past his own boundaries.
Charlie was maniacal, with an almost lustful allegiance to Wade. As the journey to Contention moves on, Dan’s son, William (played by Logan Lerman), also develops a fascination with Wade – giving Dan one more point to win and Wade one more allegiance. We wrote Wade to be very Nietzschean, but he doesn’t see Dan as a fool, unlike the relationship between Angie and Winona in Girl, Interrupted or Liotta and Stallone in Cop Land. I’m very fascinated by sociopathic characters who take what they want. In a way, they’re more realistic whereas a regular person would act with a greater deal of humility. The frustrated compromised man deeply admires the man who can have everything. While the man who has everything also respects what the humble man does and has because of that humility.
MM: I think ultimately there’s something bubbling. Ben and Dan are challenging each other, but you have this young man who’s witnessing it all and he’s dealing with the idea of what kind of man he wants to be. The main characters are obvious, but Charlie Prince and Grayson Butterfield (played by Dallas Roberts) have their versions of manhood. Charlie has an obsessive love for his father figure, Wade, and Dan’s son is seeing this. Butterfield, the business man is there, the guy who morphs into the face of corporate America and he’s a bottom line guy. Whatever needs to get done for business he’s there to get it done. He’s the only one who walks away unscathed by this situation and, again, there’s William taking that in. I’ll say things like that to Jim and he’ll smile, ‘whatever gets your motor running.’ I’m very analytical. He knows the dramatic beats he needs to hit, but we still have that conversation. I think that’s what’s good about the way we work together, he concentrates on what’s in front of him and I think bits of those conversations sink in from time to time. Hopefully, if I’m lucky, I’ve got a career where I can have these kinds of conversations for years to come.
Did you run into any issues during post?
MM: The snow fall…We filmed in New Mexico at the end of ’06 and a large part of the film had been shot before we went on hiatus for the holiday. Nearly the entire first half leading into the third act, up to the gunfight, had been filmed. While we were on break there was a massive snow fall – our location was under something like 5 feet of snow.
They spent a week and a couple hundred thousand dollars removing snow from the entire city. Unfortunately, they couldn’t get rid of all of it. The complexity came when they reached Contention. They had shot the whole town without any snow, but the entire first half had none and now all these vistas had snow there. At first we thought we’d remove it digitally, but when we counted the shots it became really intense. So we thought about digitally replacing snow in scenes where we could add it, but that became just as overwhelming. We found that the snow didn’t become an issue until the train station. So we ended up adding snow to only maybe 4 shots, like on the horizons. Most of the scenes in that area – we didn’t lose the audience so no one really noticed it. We added the snow only in a handful of places and it worked.
Kate & Leopold had a theatrical version and a director’s cut –what challenges did you face in cutting that film?
JM: Basically, there was a last minute panic. The studio moved us from a Valentine’s Day release to a Christmas release. Critics had a problem with learning that Stewart and Kate were distant relatives after having seen them as a couple, albeit a malfunctioned one. Our team thought it was laughable – In Back to the Future Marty McFly was making out with his mother. Here, Kate and Stewart were seven generations removed, but it was a problem. The studio wanted it taken out, along with 5 more minutes, even after sneak previews that rated in the 80’s and 90’s. We didn’t wrestle with these things; we still made the movie we wanted to.
What is your overall feel on time spent in the cutting room?
JM: I view post as my most rewarding and idealistic time. We aren’t limited. We don’t stay up all night. We’re not fatigued or cold. No one comes in and says we’re out of money. We get to immerse ourselves in the beauty of narrative film. The great thing about working with Mike is that he embraces and understands that beauty. With any collaboration it’s important that everyone feels completely free to try something. Most directors who don’t allow that feeling do it out of a sense of insecurity. Maybe they believe they can’t put the genie back in the bottle or maybe they’re unnerved by not coming up with it on their own. Maybe they’re afraid of telling someone that they don’t like their idea. You have to really listen to your team. I don’t get any less credit for it being your idea and the audience benefits from the best possible choice.
MM: The work speaks for itself. You don’t often get the chance to work with someone like Jim, who really appreciates the people he works with.
