By Iain Blair

Bob Ducsay

Thanks to such hits as Knives Out and its sequel, Glass Onion, director/writer Rian Johnson has almost single-handedly revived the murder mystery genre. His latest project is Poker Face, a 10-episode series following Natasha Lyonne’s Charlie, who can tell when someone is lying. After leaving her job in Las Vegas, she hits the road with her Plymouth Barracuda at every stop encounters a new cast of characters and strange crimes she can’t help but solve.

To help edit and set the tone for his new show, Johnson turned to his longtime editor, Bob Ducsay, ACE. I spoke with Ducsay about the editing challenges and the post workflow on the show, which streams on Peacock. Poker Face was recently nominated for four Emmy Awards, including for production design and lead actress for Lyonne.

What were the main challenges of editing Poker Face?
One of the big ones right out of the gate was that we made Episode 9 first instead of doing the pilot. That was because of scheduling and some other issues.

How did that affect setting the very specific comedic tone for the rest of the series, especially as that episode is a lot darker than the others?
Normally you do Episode 1 first, and that sets the tone for the rest of it. Doing it like this was far more of a challenge because the episode is so tonally different. But Rian and Natasha knew where this was ultimately going to land for the audience, and I just did my best to follow their cues. And while in a way it was very challenging to work backward, I did have the benefit of having read all the other episodes and understanding where we were headed.

We then shot Episode 1, or at least a big chunk of it, and we were able to get our footing. I think my having a good grasp of the whole season helped a lot. But looking back, it was pretty interesting and challenging coming off Episode 9 and going into such a contrast with Episode 1, which, while it does have real violence and real stakes, has a lot more lightness and comedy in it.

You’ve cut so many of Rian’s projects. What is your collaboration process like?
Rian and I have worked together for over a decade now. I started with him back on Looper, and since then we’ve done Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Knives Out, Glass Onion and now this show. One of the great things we have now, which we certainly didn’t have back when we did Looper, is a real shorthand.

My job as an editor is to serve and enhance the vision of the director – and in this case, the writer/director, which is even better. That’s all a lot easier now after all this time working together since we understand each other really well.

The show had multiple editors. How did that work?
We had three other really great editors – Glenn Garland (ACE), Shaheed Qaasim and Paul Swain – who cut the other episodes, and we were all equal. As I cut the first two – 9 and 1 – they were able to look at them, which was so helpful in terms of establishing the tone. In fact, many of the other episodes are a lot lighter and more comedic than even the pilot I cut.

While I didn’t oversee the other editors, I did give them some tips about the kinds of things that Rian looks for as well as some general advice. These one-hour episodes are all treated as mini-movies with different directors and different DPs and different writers, but in the end it’s all Rian’s coherent vision that pulls it all together. We cut and posted it all at Keep Me Posted, and FotoKem’s Nextlab did the dailies.

What about integrating the VFX and post?
We were still posting Glass Onion when we began making the first two episodes of Poker Face, so I had some resources, like VFX editor Vaughn Bien, who was also on the film with us. He did a lot of temp VFX right away, and that helped a lot since Episode 9 had a lot of VFX. Almost the entire episode takes place at night, and DP Steve Yedlin (ASC) shot a lot of stuff day-for-night, so we had a lot of post work to do on all that coverage.

Then, just generally, we had a lot of VFX, especially for the snow, as we shot it in New York in the summer. In fact, all the episodes had a lot of VFX, done by Rocket Science VFX and Ingenuity Studios, and we had a great VFX supervisor, Craig Clarke.

Tell us about the workflow and the editing gear used.
We cut on Avid Media Composer, rented by EPS-Cineworks, with the then-current software version 2021.12.1, and our storage was 10TB. Our SFX and music library was 4.5TB. Storage was less than ideal because we were finishing Glass Onion at the same time, and we weren’t physically in the same space as the rest of the editorial and post team.

The other three editors and their crews were right down the street at Rian’s production company on a separate Avid Nexis system, while the Nexis storage we were using had both Glass Onion and this show on it.

What was the most difficult scene to cut and why?
It’s the scene in Episode 9 where Charlie gets found out and is trying to leave the hotel, and they want to kill her. It was very tricky because building tension requires very specific timing with all the quiet moments… the pauses, the looks. It’s all pure editorial. Is she going to die or not? And building all that is very challenging, as it all comes down to feeling, and the pace is very intricate and quite precise.

I assume you must have used a lot of temp sound?
Yes, and I’m very sound-centric. I cut in 5.1; I’ve done that for almost a decade now. Sam Bollinger, my first assistant, starts the temp while I continue to do additional work, and then of course we get elements from the sound team. We do a lot less than we would on a movie, but I put a lot of effort into the mix while we’re cutting.

I know it’s obvious, but there’s a huge interaction between the soundtrack and picture — even though the soundtrack doesn’t drive the initial edit — because I cut without music and sound effects. The initial edit is based on the picture, story and characters, but once that’s done, I like to get into all the sound and get a nice temp going with the soundtrack. That’s when I take another pass on a sequence, and that’s when you understand how key sound effects are going to work.

How would you sum up the whole experience? Where does it rank in terms of challenges and satisfaction?
Right up there, as I’ve done virtually no episodic TV before this. So the format, with the act breaks, was novel to me and very appealing. And I just loved the show and the whole tone.

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.