By Iain Blair

Michael Harte, ACE, who already owns an Emmy and a BAFTA, has received another Emmy nomination for his work on Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie. Incorporating documentary, archival and scripted elements, the Apple TV+ film chronicles Fox’s personal and professional triumphs and travails and explores what happens when an incurable optimist confronts an incurable disease, such as Parkinsons.

Michael Harte

I spoke with Harte (Three Identical Strangers, Don’t F**k With Cats) about the editing challenges, collaborating with Oscar-winning director Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient  Truth) and the post workflow.

Tell us about working with Davis, and your creative approach to editing this.
I had never worked with him before, but I knew his work. After director Tim Wardle and I did Three Identical Strangers, we approached Michael J. Fox about making a documentary and found out Davis was already making one — and he needed an editor and knew my work. So we teamed up.

His idea for this was to make a documentary about Michael J. Fox that felt like a Michael J. Fox movie. He wasn’t sure exactly how it’d work, and initially there was talk about shooting recreations. He told me to just watch all of Michael’s films and TV shows and archival material. That was our starting point.

What were the main challenges of editing this film?
Typically, by the time I come onto a project, most of the footage has been shot, but there was nothing here… not even definite ideas about the overall approach. All we had was Michael J. Fox. So the first place we started was with his audio book “Lucky Man,” which Michael had recorded himself.

On day one in the edit, I began to break it down from seven hours to 90 minutes, which gave us the rough structure of a movie or documentary. At that point Davis was very clear that he wanted to use recreations to tell that story, and mix in archival footage of home movies, behind-the-scenes stuff, interviews — a pretty standard documentary approach.

We had no idea we’d end up playing with his movie clips in the way we did. I have a bit of an aversion to using recreations, especially when it comes to doing them with such a famous actor, as you never show their face – just the back of their head. I think audiences get a bit bored with that technique after a while. And Davis knew we had to come up with something unique to tell the story because Michael is such a unique character, so I initially spent a couple of months going through all the movies, shows and archival footage. But there was so much of it that we had to bring on a team to help go through all the material, and they were always working away in the background.

So all that was a huge challenge, especially because we were looking not so much for material to tell an already compelling story, but for micromoments. For example, Michael might be playing with his hands to distract the audience from the fact that he was developing symptoms of Parkinson’s in his left hand. We treated the film and TV footage less like archival elements and more like verité moments we could mine to allow audiences to see things in a different way.

Tell us about the workflow. What editing gear and storage setup did you use? Give us some of the technical specs on this film.
The editing gear was Avid Media Composer with Jump Desktop for remote access. For the storage setup, we had footage backed up onto drives and LTOs and proxy files stored on Nexis. Footage was mixed-format — a blend of archival, verité documentary footage, interviews and scripted recreations.

Verité documentary shots were done on the Sony FX9 at 23.967fps, DCI 4K (4096×2161) using AVC-Intra VBR 400, 4:2:2 10-bit. Recreations were shot with an ARRI Alexa Mini LF, 23.976fps, Open Gate (4448×3096) using a high-density encoding workflow. Pickup inserts used Blackmagic Pocket 6K in Blackmagic RAW. The offline edit was achieved using Media Composer 2022.12.3 working in Rec. 709 and using DNxHR LB 1080p as our codec.

The final online/conform happened using Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve 17.4.5. All footage was transformed into ARRI Log C color space before sending out for the final color grade.

Where was all the editing and post done?
I cut it in London. During the COVID lockdown, I set up my own edit suite near my home, so for the first four months, I was on my own working away, but Davis and I were in constant contact. Then I moved with my whole family to LA for the last six months of post, and we cut at his offices.

Once Davis and I were in the same room, that’s when the film started cooking. It’s funny because initially during COVID I really liked working alone, and all the technology made it possible. But there’s no substitute for being in the same room and talking. Davis would say, “It’s not about the editing as much as the conversations you have before you start the day,” and it became a very creative process for us. Davis doesn’t like watching me cut since I cut very fast and give him stuff to watch, which is hard for a director. So he’d leave for a few hours and come back later.

Then, in a genius move, for the last six or seven weeks, Davis decided we needed to have a fresh perspective, so we all moved to Martha’s Vineyard and finished the film there at a small edit suite we set up. It was the best thing to happen to the movie because we were able to slow down and step back from it.

What was the hardest scene to cut and why? 
It was the whole sequence that jumps between Family Ties and Back to the Future, when Michael is shooting the TV show all day and then shooting the movie all night. Typically, I like to watch all the material in one go and not cut it, and then I like to cut chronologically. That’s kind of my method. But this sequence was so tricky to get right. I kept going back to it over the course of a year and playing with the shots and rhythm and pacing. It was all about finding the right shots, and with such great source material, it had to be just perfect.

There are a few VFX. Did you use temp VFX?
No, but we had a storyboard artist in Barcelona, and he did the recreations you see in the movie. Davis was in LA, I was in London, and we’d do Zoom calls with the artist. We’d go online and say, “Cut the trailer here. Michael walks out here,” and so on. He’d do it on a screen on Zoom and create maybe 15 storyboards at a time so we’d have movement to watch. He would do the camera work, and it was an incredible process. He’d do any of the VFX Davis wanted as well.

What about sound? Did you use sound temps?
Yes, and I get obsessive about sound and music as I’m cutting. I don’t like to leave that till the end, so all the sound design was temped so that when we sent it to Apple TV+ and Michael J. Fox to watch, it had all the sound. My brother works in sound, and for years he’s been telling me that sound is the most underrated weapon in any project, so I’m always very conscious of it. I can’t send a cut to anyone unless all the sound is right. Bad sound is more jarring than a bad picture, so I was very involved in the sound – more than with the mix and score – as they could send me stuff. I wasn’t as involved with the DI at Company 3 in LA as I was in London, and the last thing Davis needs is someone telling him how to grade his film.

Congratulations on your Emmy nomination. Where does this rate in terms of creative challenges and satisfaction for you?
It was an amazing experience… to be able to be as creative as I got to be on it. I was nervous about doing it because it’s Michael J. Fox! If you get it wrong, you’re going to look silly. Davis was brilliant at keeping my confidence up. He was like, “Don’t worry about what anyone else thinks. If we do this for the right reason, it’ll work.”

Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.