Arrival’s Editing Is a Masterclass of Tension And Time

Arrival’s Editing Is a Masterclass of Tension And Time

And the Oscar goes to… Dune. Wow. Wow. Thank you. So you may not know, but the words Oscar nominated can be used in the hands of a skilled 17 year old as an insult. My daughter once said to me in an argument, It’s all very well for you. Oscar nominated Joe Walker. This is two time Oscar Nominated editor Joe Walker winning his first Academy Award for Dune. He worked on some of the best films of the last two decades, and in my opinion, he is the best editor working today. The second part of Dune in 2024 was his fifth collaboration with visionary director Denis Villeneuve. So thank you to the Academy for this upgrade. I need all the help I can get. If I wasn’t a director, I would be an editor. I know that I have things where I’m weak. But one of my strengths is editing. The editor is someone that is also a psychiatrist. I mean, he’s the one who’s dealing with my anxiety and my panic attack and my fears. Very early, I think week one or week two on Sicario. He said to me, I don’t want to offend you, but I think we have the same sensibility. The thing I deeply love about my editor Joe Walker right now is that he is a very strong artist, you know. Denis is an amazing leader who comes with tremendous specificity, I would say. He comes along with such a plan and he pays me the enormous compliment of sometimes loving what I do. Otherwise I would edit alone. I would be able to edit a movie alone. The movie will be less good, that’s true. With Denis, I’m so glad I don’t have to waste all that energy trying to kind of get somebody to trust me, honestly. You know, not to demean directors, but it is like being a horse whisperer and trying to kind of get a horse to eat out of your hand. I remember one director sat down on day one and just said, I don’t need you. And I was like, well, let’s just see about that. I feel that collaboration with Joe just create something much more powerful. The chemistry with the director doesn’t always work. When it does, you can see why people in the industry stay together. There’s so many partnerships that are lifelong. I really like the way that he directs me, and that’s the secret of why I love working with him. Editing is a very important part of the filmmaking process for me. Maybe the most important. I mean, you just go through this brilliant process. I mean it’s just the greatest job on earth, I think what we do. You know, it’s a combination of being technically skilled and having an eye of what audiences want. A good story. There’s something about the fact that you have all the alphabet in front of you. And there’s so much creativity. It’s amazing how you can transform things, how you can create fear, joy, tension. It’s an enormously collaborative process. And Denis gives me inspiration and love and wills me on to make the best edit of his material that I possibly can provide him. Yeah, love at first sight. With Dune’s first book behind him, Villeneuve established himself as one of the best sci-fi directors of all time. His upcoming rumored project is also an adaptation, based on Arthur C. Clarke’s amazing Rendezvous with Rama, which the director called Arrival on steroids. But what is it about their collaboration with Joe Walker That works so well for sci-fi adaptations? For this, I want to revisit Arrival, which was their first sci-fi project together. Being a big sci-fi fan, I thought it would be like just when I said, alright, let’s go, let’s do a sci-fi movie. I was like, I thought it would be a lot of fun. The dream became quickly a nightmare because it’s like to try to create something that will feel new, that will create an appropriate emotional response in the audience. It’s uh, I thought it was pretty tricky. Arrival could have been a total disaster. We were flirting with disaster a lot during that movie, so I was very afraid. With arrival I think there was a lot of freedom. For example, all of those screens were green screen. So telling that story that we felt we needed to do of the world, we had total control over that. It was a lot of effort, you know, writing news reports and getting stock footage, and building them up and all the Skype screens. It’s a movie that was fragile until the end. Why? Because two of the main characters were digital, you know, were not there for real. Abbott and Costello were not there on set. For the most part, it was somebody in a green Lycra suit holding a tennis ball. I deeply hate green screens. We worked with green screens on Arrival for a day and a half and I was about to kill myself. It’s so uninspiring. I think the choice is to focus the film on the central character and, you know, I’m sure it’s something that VFX companies hate. You know, because you could look at any one of those shots of the heptapods and it would be photo real, and then we covered it up in mist. because, you know, Denis wanted to hold back. I really love… to try, I don’t know if I succeed, but to try to create tension, create tension, and sustain tension through time in a one shot. I think it’s also part of the choice of Denis is, you know, to create a hunger for, you know, a look at the aliens and to hear the aliens. So that starts right at the beginning of the film. We don’t show a news report of a shell landing. We show Louise’s face in the classroom. So it’s kind of this gradual exposition, that sort of piece by piece. You build it up and then you tease as much as possible. He’s kind of quite mean with the exposition, you know he knows how to tease. The average shot length in today’s cinema is between 2 and 4 seconds. Arrival challenge this, its average shot length is 6.9 seconds. But comparing it to other works by the duo and some of Joe Walker’s projects with Steve McQueen, this is not an anomaly. Hunger for example has a 17-minute long shot, without any cuts. I’ve heard talk about slow, you know, the slow, a bit like the slow cooking, you know, as if there’s an editing style that’s about slowness. And I don’t think it’s that at all. I think it’s a sort of measurement of tension and time. Avoid cutting. Which is something I like to do. It doesn’t mean to say I just sit there and look at it. It means that, you know, trying to restrain the number of times that you intervene in a scene so that the audience doesn’t feel overly manipulated. It’s about sometimes I think in editing, if you edit too much, then you’re holding the audience’s hand, and you’re doing all the work and you’re doing all the work for the audience. I don’t want to be dragged through a story. And sometimes I understand that kind of necessity to get pace up in things, but it seems a very artificial way of doing it. we go to great lengths to try and make sure that that tension is maintained through tricks and cheats and all manner of things to try and kind of keep those moments alive and and as tense as hell or maybe building up to them by compressing time and then allowing the thing to be a real moment in real time. But it was really trying to build that sense of, you know, an oppressive pressure on this woman in a hazmat suit, hearing thousands of voices, disconnected voices from the Army base, the radio transmissions, always trying to tell things from her point of view. The suits are clumsy at first, but you get used to them. The suspense and tension when you’re piecing together what’s going to be there and people are kind of telling you basically, wait until you get there. You know, I can’t describe it. Wait till you get there. It felt like we could really tease out that moment and build huge anticipation that’s been building right from the beginning of the film. It really helped us to create that world, working on that real set. It was like a huge, gigantic chamber with a long tunnel. And at the end of this there was that gigantic screen. It was really like being in the belly of the beast. This 2-minute segment is at the 30 minute mark of the film and it contains 16 shots. Keep in mind that this is the first time the audience have a chance to see the ship and potentially the aliens. The suspense is building with an average shot length of 7.4 seconds Stretching the rubber band as far as we could. And then, when we finally confront her with the aliens, it’s over very quickly. Dr. Banks, you can start. I came up from sound and music. That was my background. I was, you know, trained as a classical orchestral composer. And I did that until quite recently, until about eight years ago. I think I bring a load of sound attitude. I mean, sometimes I think I’m just a composer that went in the wrong door. Sound is a huge ingredient, sound is just something that preoccupies me all the time. if the sound is good and we’ve developed the sound and the sound of the heptapods and the sound design and the music’s coming in all that time. So you know, as much as can be as fleshed out in the cut. I mean, you know, really good blueprint and then the sound design just came on. They added a whole load of wonderful stuff. But you know, it’s from a solid worked out basis. The earliest hallucinations are mute, there’s no sound at all it’s absolute silence. And then gradually, you know, there’s a little stick in some water that makes a splash and it shocks her. I don’t know, I’ve got a real predilection for cuts that end hard.

In 2022, Joe Walker won the Academy Award for Best Film Editing for his work on Denis Villeneuve’s Dune. He’s been also nominated twice before for Arrival and 12 Years a Slave. He is a long-time collaborator of Villeneuve, with films such as Sicario, Blade Runner 2049, and their most recent film Dune: Part Two in 2024. With rumors of upcoming projects for the two, such as Rendezvous with Rama, I went back to revisit their second film together, Arrival. In this video essay, I take a look at their approach and mindset to sci-fi adaptations through interviews and breaking down some scenes and parts of the editing process.

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Timestamps:
00:00 – Oscar Nominated Joe Walker
03:07 – 1. Back To Arrival
03:37 – 2. Create Something New
05:20 – 3. Create Tension
08:52 – 4. I Bring Sound

Sources:
‘Dune’ Wins Best Film Editing | 94th Oscars

DP/30: Arrival, Joe Walker (super-sized chat w/ the editor)

DP/30: Arrival, Denis Villeneuve

Denis Villeneuve Director’s Close Up | Film Independent

A chat with film editor Joe Walker

‘Sicario’ editor Joe Walker on creating tension in new film

“Arrival” editor Joe Walker on cutting sci-fi film with Denis Villeneuve

Amy Adams on Denis Villeneuve’s ‘Arrival’

Denis Villeneuve and Amy Adams talk Arrival

94th Oscars Best Film Editing Nominees | Academy Panels

Denis Villeneuve – Editing Dune Remotely

‘Dune’ Best Editing Joe Walker Full Backstage Oscars Speech

Editor Joe Walker, ACE, on Having an Eye for a Good Story

Denis Villeneuve chats directing sci-fi epic and awards contender “Arrival”

Cinergy Prague: Masterclass with British film editor Joe Walker

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