Editor Geofrey Hildrew, ACE, has cut many episodics, including the upcoming Ryan Murphy show American Sports Story, Carnival Row and The Walking Dead. One of his most recent projects was editing Netflix’s Painkiller, which is a fictionalized retelling of the origins of the opioid crises, including the Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma. It’s based on the book Pain Killer by Barry Meier and the New Yorker Magazine article “The Family That Built an Empire of Pain” by Patrick Radden Keefe.
Geofrey Hildrew
We reached out to Hildrew to talk workflow on the pilot, Episode 3 and Episode 5.
You cut Episode 1, essentially setting the tone for the series. How did you work with the showrunner to get this right?
One of the most unique aspects of the show is that the tone is constantly shifting. At times it can be devastatingly heartbreaking. At others, it becomes so heightened that we begin to question, “Did this/is this really happening?” Tonally, that’s an extremely broad canvas. We always had to question, “Are we being true to the story we’re trying to tell?”
Peter Berg is a masterful filmmaker – he’s a feature director, a documentarian and an actor (among other things). When we first started receiving dailies, it was immediately clear that this was going to be something different. Pete really used those different skill sets to give us some nontraditional and unique material. When he’d shoot a scene, he’d constantly play with shooting styles, improvisational techniques and even music to get to the emotional and dramatic truth of each moment.
As you can imagine, especially in television, this isn’t a traditional way of covering scenes. I remember some early moments looking at dailies and feeling a little uncertain about how to approach the material… until the lightbulb moment happened. Pete called one day and said, “Be nontraditional. Be experimental. Be surprising. Be Fearless.” That became our mantra in the cutting room, and it opened the floodgates for creativity.
No two episodes are alike, and that’s one of the things I adore most about this series. Episode 1 created some unique challenges: There are a lot of characters to introduce, and we tried to introduce each in a memorable way. We had a nonlinear timeline, not only jumping between past and “present,” but also needing to service each of those aforementioned characters. Additionally, we needed to introduce a lot of bold, stylistic techniques, which we’d use increasingly throughout the series, in a way that the audience could understand.
There is a lot of information and backstory in Episode 1. We needed to make this digestible so that it was simultaneously respectful of the subject matter and also entertaining. We wanted to create an experience. One technique Pete would often use while directing was to play source music on-set to help set the mood and atmosphere. That’s something I latched onto very quickly because it helped me get inside his head. It was an insight into how and what he was feeling on-set at that particular moment and what he was trying to convey with his material. Music became an important aspect of the show — not just the source cues we used but the wonderful score that Matt Morton composed for us.
Another breakthrough was the use of found and stock footage. There are some crucial moments throughout the series when we used that footage to help us emphasize key moments. An example of this technique in Episode 1 is the pleasure/pain montage. We went through many iterations of that sequence, some of which pushed the boundaries with extreme visuals. But that was the joy of working with Pete. He wasn’t afraid to hit that breaking point and sometimes go beyond it to see where we could take the material. And when we pushed things as far as we could, Pete had great instincts for pulling the pendulum back toward a happy medium that was evocative, experiential and best served our story.
Can you describe the pacing?
The pacing was always on our minds. Because we were playing with varying stylistic techniques throughout the series, we were constantly modulating the pacing. It changes, sometimes rather dramatically, throughout the series. With every scene, we first asked ourselves, “What do we want the audience to experience in this moment?” Emotion almost always took priority when approaching a scene. And our pacing and cutting patterns always evolved to service that.
There always has to be a reason to make a cut. Like any dramatic story, there are plenty of quiet moments… sometimes we’d let scenes play out in one-ers, and we’d want to live with the characters as events unfold. Other times we’d get quite aggressive with cuts, and an intimate scene might be purposefully nonlinear or cut like an action sequence. It was always about aligning the audience with the story arc of each character in an experiential way.
Because we were working with multiple storylines, I think we had a little more latitude to take some of these big swings. We’d examine how late we could get into a scene. How early could we get out? Executive producer Eric Newman once described the show as being shot out of a cannon. And that feeling is something very deliberate because I think it represents, in a very real way, the trajectory of the OxyContin epidemic. This all started and snowballed very quickly, and the epidemic was out of control before most people knew what hit them. I hope the pacing of the show emulates that sensation as it continues to build.
Did any of that change through the series, especially as the story progresses and becomes increasingly uncomfortable? It feels like the editing and presentation of the material mirrors the discomfort and puts the audience in each character’s mindset.
Since we’re following multiple storylines, each one evolves at its own pace. And there’s a good reason for that – each character has a different entry point to the story and their experience with OxyContin. I think it’s cool that we get to examine our story from so many points of view. On one side, we meet Edie (Uzo Aduba) as the reluctant storyteller, sharing her involvement with the epidemic.
As she begins telling her story, the cutting is much more traditional and deliberate. She doesn’t even know what OxyContin is. But she’s about to find out. As her investigation begins, her investment in the story and the toll it takes on her becomes more intense, so the pacing evolves to reflect that experience. By the end of Episode 3, the cutting is quite intense as we start to understand the real psychological impact this is all having on her. It’s like a form of PTSD.
This is also the case with Glen Kryger’s (Taylor Kitsch) story. In many ways, he’s the emotional heart of the show. We meet Glen and his family having an ordinary day at work. He, too, has no idea what OxyContin is. But his experience with it soon becomes more intimate, and things quickly escalate. So does the cutting. I think, more than any other story in the show, the editing style evolves most as we follow Glen. I don’t think I’m spoiling anything by saying Glen becomes an addict. And as we follow that trajectory, our style changes. What does it feel like to take OxyContin for the first time? What does it feel like to become dependent on it, to start going through withdrawal? The cutting gradually evolves to reflect that.
In Episode 3, the cutting steps up to a new level. There’s a sequence where Glen is really beginning to feel the effects of withdrawal while brushing his teeth and making breakfast for his family. We really wanted to put the audience in Glen’s shoes. What does that elevated state feel like when you want to crawl out of your skin? The cutting and sound here are all very disorienting, even cacophonous, to help you feel that heightened sense of tension and anxiety. This further evolves in Episode 5, when Glen is deeper in his story. Glen is now on a mission to acquire OxyContin, no matter what the cost. Accordingly, his scenes are cut much more in the style of an action movie – because that reflects his emotional state. He’s a man with a very specific goal in mind, and that’s how we want the audience to experience it.
On the other side of the coin, we have the story of Purdue Pharma. The Purdue drug reps are introduced through Britt Hufford (Dina Shihabi), who ends up recruiting Shannon Schaeffer (West Duchovny). Britt is already deep into the “story of Oxy” as we meet her, but Shannon is playing catch-up. Accordingly, the cutting is very fast-paced to reflect that aspect of Shannon’s journey. She’s thrown in headfirst; we’re all catching up just like her.
Finally, we have Richard Sackler (Matthew Broderick), who is at the center of this whole thing. There’s a sort of whimsical style to the way his scenes are cut early on. He is the story; he’s not catching up to it. And maybe that also says something about his state of mind. Richard had a very complicated relationship with his uncle, Arthur Sackler (Clark Gregg). We see some interactions between these two characters in rather unexpected ways. And as that relationship develops, so does the cutting style to show Richard’s attitude toward Arthur.
Richard had a vision and had a singular focus on executing that vision. That whimsical style evolves to help portray what his emotional state of being might have been. In Episode 3, he gives a grand “blizzard of the century” speech. It builds in intensity, like an avalanche, using some stock footage as accents to help illustrate the intensity of his state of mind. It’s over the top and surprising at times.
Episode 5 and the Miami sequence are sort of where the story builds to its apex – it’s a fever dream of insanity, where all our stories finally collide in devastating ways. This was quite a balancing act as we checked in with each of our main characters. It’s a lot to keep track of, trying to best convey their emotional states while a party is happening around them. It’s over the top and decadent, yet tragic, heartbreaking and emotional at the same time.
Something that starts as good fun becomes utterly grotesque. It took a lot of work to get this right, but I’m very proud of what we accomplished here. Despite all the “noise” that is Miami, I think we found a way to cut through all that as we shift focus toward Shannon and Glen. Both characters have tremendous arcs in this episode. There’s so much more I’d love to talk about here, but I don’t want to give away any spoilers.
What about maintaining clarity in the interweaving narratives and timelines for the audience as the story unfolds in a nonlinear and nontraditional way?
As we began work on Painkiller, we had a lot of conversations about how we would maintain clarity.
Throughout my career, I’ve worked on multiple projects with non-traditional narratives. One example is a show called Once Upon a Time for ABC, where I edited all seven seasons as well as directed. Tonally, that show couldn’t be more different than what we’re doing on Painkiller, but it gave me a lot of confidence handling many characters over interweaving storylines.
Edie’s deposition was the through line that kept us grounded. Beyond that, we’re hopping around in time and place quite a bit. We tried multiple techniques in early versions of the cuts, oftentimes experimenting with on-screen graphics. But they never felt right. As we continued to revise the cuts, we often felt they got in the way. The time we spent reading graphics and banners distracted us from the experience of the show. So gradually, we started removing them. When we started screening early cuts for friends and family, something surprising happened. We received a lot of early feedback from test viewers that they were so engrossed in the story that they were not having trouble keeping track of the timelines. This was a big victory for us.
You used jarring, aggressive cuts and asynchronous footage to show the progression of the opioid crisis and the toll it takes on individuals. Can you discuss?
I think I’ve discussed this quite a bit in previous answers, but yes. It was always our desire to create an experience — to best use our cutting style to create an emotional connection between our characters and the audience. There’s a moment I haven’t talked about in Episode 3 when Shannon is out visiting a doctor’s office and witnesses, for the first time, two people taking drugs inside a car. This was a big moment for us. Again, we wanted to create an experiential moment. Briefly, we break from Shannon’s POV and move inside that car to be with the drug users. How would we show that?
Pete said he once heard someone describe the feeling of taking heroin as “warm honey,” so we worked to achieve a visual language that might convey that feeling. I think what we came up with is quite evocative. There’s nothing literal about the moment; it’s all visually based. That was something we designed in editorial. Later, in Episode 5 (during the Miami sequence), there’s another sequence with the girls in a bathroom using OxyContin. Since we had already established a visual language for this, we tried to replicate that same feeling there – this time with a character who we’ve come to care about.
How often was the showrunner looking at your cuts? Were you also showing cuts to the other editors, or did you all work separately?
Almost daily. We had an extremely collaborative editing process on this project. During dailies, Pete trusted us to explore and experiment with the footage as much as we could. Be fearless, he said! Once we started reviewing completed cuts, we moved from our home cutting rooms into Pete’s offices. He’d be in editorial most days with his dog, Esso. Eric Newman (Narcos), who I had previously collaborated with on the Netflix series True Story, made frequent visits to the cutting room. Garret Donnelly was my editing partner on the series (cutting the even episodes).
After dailies, we worked a little over a year refining cuts. The four of us would usually screen cuts together chronologically until we had a shape we were all happy with. (We also had wonderful partners in Alex Sapot and Andrew McQuinn at Netflix.) After each screening, Pete and Eric would give us some time to explore the notes. During that time, Garret and I were extremely collaborative with our cuts… constantly sharing ideas with each other and questioning each other’s cuts. It’s rare to have such a close collaboration with another editor. I valued that tremendously.
Once we had revised cuts of all the episodes, we’d sometimes start back from the beginning. Other times, Pete would come to the cutting room with an inspired idea about a scene or sequence we had long put to bed and asked us to try a radical new direction. The cuts were constantly evolving and changing. I’ve never had so much fun in the cutting room, having the opportunity to play and experiment. It really was an editor’s dream come true. I estimate that there are some scenes and sequences where I have created hundreds of different versions. I’ve never experienced that before but loved every moment of it.
What are some of your favorite scenes to cut, or maybe the most challenging?
There are so many sequences in Painkiller I’m fond of for different reasons. I talked earlier about the Glen breakfast scene. That was a fun one to cut because there was a musicality to the cutting. It was so nonlinear and rhythm-based that it was a blast to conceptualize and piece together. Miami was a crazy thing to put together. There was a massive amount of footage to play with, an embarrassment of riches, with so many iterations of that sequence along the way. It’s something we kept finessing until the very end.
I also love the way we introduce Glen in Episode 1. Pete did such a wonderful job blocking that scene, it was such a joy to put together. It starts as an ordinary “day in the life” of Glen. Very quickly, we learn so much about his character — what it’s like to run a small business and the stress that comes with that, and what his relationship is with his family (his wife, daughter and stepson). All the while, his son, Tyler (Jack Mulhern), is horsing around with an excavator. It seems playful, but it immediately introduces a level of tension into the scene. I think any smart viewer will realize pretty quickly that something bad is going to happen. We just don’t know how or when. The excavator becomes this ticking clock running in the background throughout. And then, when the inciting incident does happen, Glen’s injury, we’ve already fallen in love with this character – and hopefully, that makes it even more surprising and heartbreaking.
There are a couple of Richard Sackler scenes that I’m quite fond of as well. The opening scene in Episode 1 – Richard hunting the smoke detector – was so much fun to play with. It’s all just kind of crazy. And it says so much about this character without many words. When I had the idea to add “Sound of Silence,” the whole scene came alive in an almost absurdist kind of way.
The same thing goes for the scene in Episode 3, where Edie goes to Purdue and meets Richard for the first time. He’s throwing a tennis ball around the lobby for his dog, Unch. Again, I love the way Pete staged that sequence; it’s so inspired and unexpected. The way I built that sequence almost came about accidentally. The dog wasn’t cooperating on-set. As I began piecing the scene together, I didn’t know how I was going to address the continuity issues with the dog. This was a big dog, so he was almost always in the frame. So I decided I was just going to concentrate on Matthew’s performance and solve the dog later.
I built together a string-out of all the best pieces (and improvisations) from Matthew. And when I watched it, there was something kind of magical about the nonlinear nature of it all. Matthew was so good, mischievous, and maybe unhinged that it added another dimension to the character he was playing. I embraced the imperfections and continuity mismatches. I think it all came out rather delicious.
Possible to share a note that the showrunner gave regarding a scene or episode?
Originally, we didn’t meet Richard Sackler until much deeper into Episode 1. It started much more linearly with Edie and followed her into the deposition as she began to tell the story. Uzo’s performance is amazing throughout, and we knew the strength of her acting would carry the show. But there was a lot of heavy exposition to get out of the way. As we started experimenting with editorial style, we knew we also had to get the audience comfortable with the visual language of the show.
Pete and Eric came up with the idea of moving the smoke detector scene to the top of Episode 1. Now we had a way to ease ourselves into the exposition and introduce Richard Sackler sooner (hopefully in an entertaining way). It was also a chance to tease some of the stylistic chances we would be taking as the show progressed. When we screened this version, we all felt that we had figured out a way to tell the audience, “This is something different.”
What did you use to cut the series? Any particular tools that came in handy for this one?
Avid Media Composer. We had a really cool setup designed by Tommy Pham and TriCoast Media for this show. We had local hard drive media on all of our Avid setups, but our project files were all cloud-based. That way, no matter what system we decided to work on, at any location, we could load our projects seamlessly and work without any downtime. Our assistants were all working from home, so all our interactions with them were over PacPost.live or Slack. One benefit of the pandemic is that it’s really forced us to think outside the box and come up with some really creative workflows.
Finally, what stands out about this show from your perspective in terms of the editing?
Pete and Eric not only trusted me to be their partner in telling such an important story but were brave enough to give me the time to experiment and play. Sometimes showrunners get nervous when you show ideas that are half-baked or “works in progress.” This was very rarely the case with Painkiller.
Some of the craziest ideas would spark new ones and push us into surprising new directions. I’ve never had a creative collaboration like this before, but I sure hope I do again. I know, without a doubt, the experience of working with Pete pushed my skill set to new levels. He made me a better, more confident, fearless editor. I’m really proud of what we all accomplished together.
