THE MAKING OF: "WRITING THE LAND", locked

Because I realized that this series is really just a thinly veiled attempt to get everyone to read the work of these amazing writers. It’s very exciting.

The more I watch film the more I believe that a film is made (or potentially broken) in the editing room. As writer-director-editor of non-fiction, how and when do you start to think about editing, how do you collaborate with your team on that and what guides your decisions in what stays or goes or moves?

I begin thinking about editing—or how certain sections of the film will look and feel when edited—when I write my first treatment, or outline, of a documentary film or series. I see each episode in my mind. I imagine how certain scenes will go together, how the stories will flow. What the structure will be and how the images I’m envisioning will make the structure come alive. None of these visions are final, and whether or not they will actually line up with what’ll happen on a non-fiction set is a different question, of course. Things always change. However, with a project like this, i.e. a series that is not really observational in style (simply because we have an extremely limited amount of shoot days), planning and “editing in my head” before we even shoot anything is key.

Also, drastic decisions are made in the edit room because at the end of the day you can’t actually say if a sequence works until you see the sequence played. For example, originally the idea had been to open each episode with each writer reading an excerpt of their new work. It sounded very evocative on paper as I was preparing each script. Once edited we realized very quickly, however, that this didn’t work at all. Emotionally speaking, the excerpts, while still beautiful, fell flat because we hadn’t had the chance to develop any connection to them or the people who were reading them. We decided to move them almost to the end of each writer’s story—and boom, suddenly they resonated. Now they had meaning because they felt like the culmination of each writer’s story.

For the most part, my editors and I make these types of decisions together. We talk things through. I trust their judgment and they trust mine. It’s a very collaborative process. A lot of the time it’s about how a section “feels.” Does it move the story forward? Does it have emotional impact? Is the information presented here absolutely necessary? And of course, with a series like this, there’s always the broadcasters who have opinions and directives that need to be taken into consideration.

You didn’t realize when you set out last year that you’d be editing with your Toronto team in the times of COVID-19. How did this process go, how have you adapted to the current limitations?

In short, it’s been absolutely insane. And I’m saying this in a non-complaining sort of way. Working with two editors, i.e. editing two episodes at the same time would have been a challenge at the best of times. But it would have been a fun challenge and not the “work-around-the-clock-including-weekends-keep-all-moving-parts-coordinated-while-entire-production-team-is-working-remotely-challenge” it turned out to be in 2020! Our production schedule —and the time allotted for the edit —didn’t magically expand because of COVID. We still had to get everything done within the timeframe set before the pandemic. However, everything takes easily twice as long when you’re apart from each other. Every creative decision that would take a few minutes when you’re sitting together in the edit room takes much longer when everything needs to be communicated via zoom.

Saying that, I have to reiterate how extremely lucky we are to be working at all. Many others in the film industry are struggling desperately. I have to credit my editors Robert Swartz and Ian Sit, as well as the rest of the production team, producer Felicity Justrabo, production assistant Maeve Kern, title editor Graeme Ring and composer Matthew Chalmers and everyone else at Primitive Entertainment, the Dark Studio (sound) and Jaxx Creative (colour and online) to keep everything humming along with me.

And ... it's a lock—which we will talk about in our October interview, when the series premieres.

interview by @JuttaBrendemuhl


image: Editing ”Writing the Land" on zoom, clockwise from bottom: Robert Swartz, Ian Sit, Steph Weimar