Tick, Tick … Boom!
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Netflix musical Tick, Tick … Boom!, about the life of Rent creator Jonathan Larson, was always going to conclude with his 30th birthday and the song “Louder Than Words,” which he performs onstage. But there were still aspects of the ending that needed to be unlocked — “a way to contextualize the ending with Jonathan Larson’s legacy and the success of Rent,” explains Andrew Weisblum, who edited the movie with Myron Kerstein.
For all the Oscar nominees in film editing, their respective endings posed specific questions.
“We reached outside of the script to start playing with archival footage,” which was incorporated into the final scene, Weisblum says of the conclusion. “It became clear that that was an important ingredient for [anchoring] the rest of the film, not just the end.”
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They also included video footage of the actors. “We played around with whether [Andrew Garfield as Larson] would actually blow the candle out [the scene cuts just before he does]. That was all an emphasis thing, trying to find the right note to hit for the very end, but the ingredients were all there,” says Kerstein.
During the editing process, it was also decided to bookend the movie with narration from Susan (Alexandra Shipp), Larson’s girlfriend, though the editors and Miranda also discussed other characters (and, briefly, Miranda himself) for that role. “Finally, we landed on Susan, and we thought that gave some comfort and meaning and gravitas to the beginning and end of the film,” says Kerstein.
Weisblum admits a “late concern” over Susan’s narration. “You have Jonathan as a narrator essentially for the whole film,” he says. “You’re putting another narrator on the frame, but what I didn’t realize at first and became clear later is that Tick, Tick … Boom! would’ve been forgotten and would’ve disappeared if his friends didn’t bring it forward to use it to honor him. … The idea of one of the people closest to him in his life narrating this piece and presenting it to us as the audience is an echo of that.”
Don’t Look Up
Adam McKay’s climate change satire Don’t Look Up shows the folly of mankind trivializing the import of a comet hurtling toward Earth, concluding with its impact and the end of the world. The final scene shifts to a more “non-cynical” tone and combines a touching family dinner scene with characters including Dr. Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Kate (Jennifer Lawrence), with stock footage, such as whales mating, and found footage. “[McKay] did cover certain shots of people trying to assimilate what was going on,” editor Hank Corwin says, adding, though, that because of the pandemic, the director couldn’t send crews everywhere he had planned. “[We were] able to find stock footage that felt very human and humane. … [And the found footage was] just the way I envisioned [how] people would photograph the end of the world. The photos won’t be beautiful, but it’ll be very sincere.
“Netflix gave us access to their employees from all over the world, and I asked them to shoot honest reactions of themselves going into the streets. We had hundreds and hundreds of clips that we went through,” Corwin adds, admitting that he included a clip from his own wedding video. “It’s really one of the first times I’ve ever put anything of myself in a movie. The movie was so powerful for me.”
The Power of the Dog
The twist in Jane Campion’s Montana-set 1920s drama The Power of the Dog, also from Netflix, occurs when rancher Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) completes a cowhide rope that he is making for Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), not knowing that the cowhide Peter gave him is contaminated. What is essentially Phil’s murder by anthrax is a misdirect, made to feel more like a love scene. “It was really important here that it felt really sensual and really tense,” says editor Peter Sciberras.
He cut two versions of what occurs the following morning, including one during which a sick Phil comes downstairs for an awkward breakfast. But Campion and Sciberras chose the cut in which Phil doesn’t come downstairs and his brother, George (Jesse Plemons), goes to his room to find him ill. “It was far more interesting to not see [Phil and Peter] and wonder where they are and what’s happening.”
In the finale, Peter watches through a window in his bedroom as his mother, Rose (Kirsten Dunst), and George return from Phil’s memorial service. Sciberras reveals that at one point, the camera then slowly panned across Peter’s desk over his books and stopped on a page about anthrax. “That was the last shot, which is the same way the novel ends,” the editor says, adding that they made the decision to remove it. “It was so clear that it was the only thing you would think about when we cut to black. [But] Jane’s such a layered filmmaker that she really wanted to leave the audience with much bigger questions. … You definitely don’t want people to not know what happened, but it’s also OK if they’re trying to figure it out.”
King Richard
Warner Bros.’ King Richard, the drama from director Reinaldo Marcus Green’s that follows Richard Williams (Will Smith) as he steers his daughters to the top of the tennis world, comes to its climax when Venus (Saniyya Sidney) plays in her first professional tournament against Arantxa Sánchez Vicario, who at the time was among the world’s top-ranked players.
“We found that if that final tennis match was not emotionally calibrated in such a precise way, that the subsequent scenes would not pay off. It’s not a typical sports-movie ending. I mean, she loses the match,” admits editor Pamela Martin of the delicate work cutting that match, which she says she tweaked until the end of the editing process. “You have to really feel her low without wallowing in it in order to feel the high of the subsequent scenes, and to be able to walk away and say, ‘She did win. She won in another way.’ ”
What follows is a touching moment between father and daughter in the locker room, which Martin says she shortened during editing. “We did it with less words because what Richard does in that scene is so beautiful. He says to her that he’s ‘never been more proud of a person in his entire life.’ It’s like he’s living the lessons that he’s teaching his daughters.”
Martin says she cried watching the dailies of the final sequence when Venus and her family leave the tournament and are greeted by cheering kids and fans. “When she comes up outside and sees how meaningful it was for so many people to see her out there on that court, that’s such a beautiful, uplifting moment. You feel all the positivity of the family’s hopes and dreams in that moment. And you know she’ll be back.”
Dune
As Denis Villeneuve’s feature Dune concludes, Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and his mother, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), are on the run after the surprise attack in Arrakeen, and finally reach the Fremen in the desert. As part of the Fremen ways, Paul participates in a duel and joins them, and together they walk into the sunset.
“Paul points out to Jessica that there’s something in the distance, and it’s a worm rider on a sandworm going across this flat, expansive sand,” says editor Joe Walker, adding that Chani (Zendaya) utters, ” ‘This is just the beginning’ … and we get a look from Jessica that suggests it’s going to be quite a bumpy ride” as they walk on.
The ending of the Warner Bros. epic came together quickly. “The planning and the execution was so excellent that there was nothing that I really needed to do apart from get it in the right order (chuckles) and pick the best bits.” He says that he spent “the best part of 20 months tinkering with” other scenes, noting that in the later part of postproduction “we spent a lot of time really trying to home in on Paul’s inner visions.” That included moments before the duel’s climax, when Walker “inserted a series of shots and a little flash of visions. … It was a great way of almost bookending with what is the opening scene in the book, which is a little bit later in our version of it.”
Walker says Villeneuve planned Dune‘s ending early on.”It was the way of splitting the film in two, which was such a necessary thing to do in order to preserve the world-building. That was decided, I think, by [writer] Eric Roth and Denis at a very early stage.” With a nod to Dune: Part Two, which is in preproduction, Walker adds, “I really can’t wait to get back to Arrakis.”
This story first appeared in a March stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
