To watch (or listen) to our interview with the editors, click here, and read our story below.

By Randi Altman

FX/Hulu’s The Bear has become a classic after only eight episodes. The story of Carmy (Jeremy Allen White), an elite chef whose late brother willed him his Chicago restaurant, is frenetic, gritty and real. And the show’s editors — Joanna Naugle and Adam Epstein, ACE — were tasked with creating that feeling in the cut.

Joanna Naugle

Naugle is senior editor/co-owner of New York’s Senior Post, whose partner Josh Senior is an executive producer on The Bear. She has cut shows including Ramy, Human Resources and John Krasinski’s Some Good News. Epstein’s long roster of work includes SNL, The Other Two and Documentary Now!

postPerspective recently chatted with the two to discuss their process and the challenges of working on the show, created by Christopher Storer and co-run by Joanna Calo. Naugle had worked with Storer on the series Ramy, so her cutting his new show just made sense. “I loved working with Chris,” she says. “He’s a great director with a very specific vision, but he still leaves so much room for collaboration.”

After the show was greenlit for eight episodes, the team knew they needed another editor to make it work. “The first person we wanted to ask was Adam,” explains Naugle. “We had worked with him on a couple of projects and knew he was suited for The Bear’s style, which was going to be a bit fast and crazy. We knew Adam could handle that after so many years at SNL.”

Adam Epstein

Let’s dig in a bit deeper on how they cut The Bear’s Carmy, Richie, Sydney and the rest of the strong personalities who work at The Beef…

What were you told about pace? It’s a really frenetic show. How was that described to you?
Joanna Naugle: When we were cutting the pilot, Chris said it should feel like you are drowning — like you were thrown into the deep end of a pool, and it’s sink or swim.

The pilot was scripted with the opening having a lot of different scenes back to back, and as we were cutting, Chris said we needed to get to the chaos faster. So we just kept condensing and condensing and turning the first 10 minutes into this crazy montage of Carmy cooking, selling his jeans, trying to get the meat for the sandwiches —introducing all this information at once — and setting the scene for Chicago.

I never got the note “make it crazier” before, but I just kept getting that note, which was so fun as an editor because a lot of times, if we’re doing our job right, you’re not paying attention to the editing because everything is happening seamlessly. This show was just the opposite. It was like, “make it loud, make it in your face, jump cuts, cross fades,” all sorts of things. So it was really cool to have that freedom to intentionally make things feel intense. Doing things that might feel jarring and wrong in another show actually had a place here, which was great.

Adam, when you came on, the frenetic and chaotic pace was already established. How did it feel to edit that way?
Adam Epstein: It was great, and I was lucky to have this as a jumping-off point from the pilot. When I started talking to Chris about it, he said — especially about the first episode — that he wanted people’s reaction to be either “I love this so much” or “Oh my God, I can’t do this. Get away from me.” So having that as a reference point was incredibly helpful.

Throughout the series, there were moments that were incredibly intense — the entirety of Episode 7, pockets of Episode 5 and the opening of Episode 2 — but they were really smart as far as the evolution of the anxiety.

The pilot kind of stands alone… you’re clueless about everything, and you don’t know who any of these people are. And while the pace might maintain throughout the series, the pilot establishes the backstory, and you get used to the rhythm of it.

How did you tackle all of that?
Epstein: I tried to use what Joanna established in the pilot, and then I spoke with the directors and EPs about how we evolve it so it’s not just repeating the same moves over and over. It was a constant discussion and push and pull on how crazy we wanted things to be. How contemplative and introspective should the like scenes be? Where do we break from the madness?

How were you sharing your cuts? I’m assuming everybody worked remotely?
Naugle: Strangely enough, we didn’t have a lot of remote-attended edits. We were working independently in our own apartments or houses, and then we would share cuts, mostly in Frame.io. Chris would watch them, and then we’d have a phone call or talk to Josh Senior because he was talking to Chris.

It was cool because Chris had so much trust in us — he wasn’t sitting over our shoulders and getting into the nitty-gritty editing notes. He was giving us more emotional notes for the scenes — “This should be where Sydney gains her confidence” or “This should be the scene where Richie’s at a breaking point” or “How can we make this feel lonelier?” As an editor, I love those notes because it’s like a puzzle to solve as opposed to just checking things off a list.

We all had the media remotely on LucidLink, and we were all working with Adobe Productions.

(To watch our full interview with the editors of The Bear, click here.)

What about the flashbacks to how life was when Carmy’s brother was alive? How did the feel change, if at all?
Epstein: I did Episode 6, which is where we have that main flashback scene with Mikey (Jon Bernthal). The direction I got was to make the audience understand what it would mean to lose someone with this much magnetism and charisma, so it was about playing him up as big and as loud as possible. It was also a little dreamy as far as cutting between the golden shots of the food being made and the lights flooding in from the windows, and everyone’s smiling and happy. We needed to get that golden moment in contrast with the chaos, so it was probably a bit of heightened reality. Was it really that beautiful and that happy in the moment? Maybe not, but in the memory, it plays that way.

It was also about leaning on the actors, who were really good, and letting their performances shine through. That was kind of the North Star on that chunk of the show. But also, stylistically, it felt a little more linear than the chaos of the rest of the show. I had initially built that scene to be a little slower, and then toward the fine cut and close to lock, Josh Senior said, “This is great. Let’s keep it chop, chop, chop and moving, moving, moving so that when we get to the break, you see Richie in an awkward and slower environment.” It makes the switch between the happy old times and the shit of the present that much more deliberate.

What about the flashbacks when Carmy is being abused by his boss at the restaurant? That must have been an intense scent to cut.  
Naugle: That was the start of Episode 2, and it was one of the toughest scenes for me to edit because we wanted it to feel different than The Beef. Everything at The Beef is so fast, and this restaurant should also feel fast, but in a very different way. Everything is so choreographed, and there’s a coldness and fear, because there’s this tyrant looming over them.

Joel McHale, who plays the abusive boss, had so many horrible but great improvs just destroying Carmy. So part of the editing struggle was choosing the meanest ones without going overboard. And the shots are so close to his face; it feels so invasive and aggressive, and you can feel him breathing down your neck. Jeremy Allen White has such sad eyes; he’s working at the top place in the world, but he’s clearly so broken and empty.

That scene was setting up something that’s totally the opposite of The Beef in that it was so clean and organized, but also very soulless. The Beef is filled with problems, and it’s dirty and messy, but there is heart there, something that’s binding them all together. So we really wanted to emphasize the difference between those two restaurants.

In Episode 7, when an uglier side of Carmy comes out, it’s hinting at who he could become if he wasn’t checking himself and finding that balance with his employees. Anytime he had a panic attack or a nightmare, we tried to sneak in some of the audio from that scene — a flashback to the trauma that’s playing in the back of his head and influences who he wants to be as a chef.

The people are the heart of The Beef, and there is the evolution of those relationships. How did you guys play that in the edit?
Epstein: The scripts were so great and had lots of natural character arcs, which is really impressive in a first season. The amount of development and growth across multiple characters in just an eight-episode season was like three seasons’ worth of development and growth.

Sometimes we would talk about how we hadn’t seen a certain character in a while. So even if it wasn’t necessarily scripted, we were lucky enough to have lots of b-roll of, say, Marcus working on cakes or Sydney prepping onions and carrots. We could place them in to reset the mood or to remind people of the journey that person was on. Again, it was leaning on great acting and finding the balance between the naturalism and the stylistic embellishments.

Do you feel the same, Joanna?
Naugle: It really is an amazing ensemble, and the writers did a great job giving even the minor characters moments to shine or to be funny. It makes it feel like a real kitchen when there are so many different voices and people.

Like Adam said, adding some b-roll of Sydney working on her short ribs, for example, just made it feel very lived in, like everyone was moving through the space very naturally.

Did you have a lot of coverage?
Naugle: The shoot itself was pretty fast, and most of the time it was four angles or whatever you would need to cover the scene. Chris and Joanna had a clear idea of what they wanted,  but there was a ton of b-roll, which was really great. Our assistant editors — Josh Depew and Megan Mancini — did an awesome job of organizing that.

We had footage of the interior of The Beef clean, the interior dirty, outside The Beef. Everything was well-organized, so we could choose b-roll for the arc of them getting their act together. The dirtiest stuff went in the earlier episodes, and as they were starting to organize, we saw that the shelves were more in order and there were clean dishes. Those b-roll shots helped to reinforce everything coming together and starting to look more professional.

Joanna had mentioned the Joel McHale scene as one of the most challenging. Adam, do any stick out for you?
Epstein: In Episode 5, the one where Marcus blows the fuse, there is a conversation between Carmen and Richie that was written as a slow, deliberate scene. We used that as a base and then wove in Marcus flipping out because he’s behind on cakes. That leads to Sydney prepping a dish, which we pulled from another episode because Josh said we should get Syd in there and show how everyone’s in chaos and in their own world at the same time. Then we had to figure out a way for all three of those situations to come to a head at the same time. Hence the power outage. That took a while from a technical perspective and figuring out the right rhythms.

Another one that was challenging to cut was actually a pretty slow scene. Carmy and his sister (Abby Elliott) were in Carmy’s office looking for some papers. It was just them talking about the history of the restaurant and how she feels like he never asks about how she’s doing. Carmy has a great quote — something like, “I never know how I feel, so the thought of asking someone how they feel sounds insane.”

It’s a slow dialogue scene, but there are a lot of time jumps and hidden jump cuts within it. For example, someone would be reaching over, so that meant covering the person’s mouth so I could use a line from 40 seconds later to then be able to jump to the next part — cheat stuff like that. The challenge for me was finding the right balance of that deliberate pacing, but I really like how that scene came out.

Naugle: Yeah, that scene turned out so well. It’s such a nice intimate moment of them connecting for the first time in the season. I feel like there are so many good shots of them just looking at each other too. They are finally seeing each other for real.

Epstein: That was a great example of the coverage too. The DPs — Andrew Wehde (Episodes 2-8) and Adam Newport-Berra (pilot) — and camera operators on this show did such a great job. There would be two cameras running, a master setup and then a wandering B camera, but it was never haphazard.

In that scene, there was a great move where the camera is coming down off Carmy’s face, and you see that he can’t stop bouncing with his hands or playing with his spoon. He is always shaking a bit, and you can tell he is nervous. It was just great texture that plays into the themes and vibe of the scene while also, from a technical perspective, being great glue to let you cover large cuts or make time jumps or stitch things together without it being obvious.

Let’s talk gear. It was shot on ARRI Alexa Mini, and you edited on Adobe Premiere, which is interesting because often TV shows are edited in Avid Media Composer.
Naugle: I’ve worked almost exclusively in Premiere the past few years. Not even intentionally, it just seems that’s what my projects have been. This was my first time using Adobe Productions, which was really cool because it made things so much easier for us working remotely.

Adam Epstein’s pic lock timeline for Episode 5

We’ve commiserated about what a rough time it was transitioning to at-home work at the beginning of 2020 and how nobody had quite figured it out. Everyone had their local hard drives, and if you downloaded something, you had to make sure everybody else was mirroring their hard drive, and you lost so much time drive-syncing. Now, two-plus years into the pandemic, having the media on LucidLink made it such a seamless process.

Everyone was working within the same production, so I could see that Adam was in a certain episode folder, for example. Our assistant editors could organize things in a way that was easy to find. It would’ve been so much more difficult if we hadn’t all been accessing that same master project. We were all able to operate within the same footage, sharing b-roll, music, sound effects, all that stuff.

Epstein: I’m probably 60/40 Media Composer/Premiere these days. Before The Bear, I had Avid projects back to back for like a year and a half. Then The Bear was Premiere, and the feature I’m doing now is Premiere, but then the next show I’m doing is Avid. So I’m pretty agnostic. They each have their strengths and weaknesses.

Adam Epstein’s pic lock sequence for Episode 3

For a show like this — where the offline edits were so much more audio-centric and sound-design-heavy than for strictly dialogue-based shows — Productions worked great because it took what people think of as the main multi-user advantage of Avid Media Composer and put it into a Premiere environment.

Joanna Naugle’s lock sequence for Episode 2

Dealing with multiple sound layers and selecting things while you’re playing and getting feedback in real time is way more dynamic in Premiere than it is in Media Composer. You can do much quicker and more drastic audio work. Not that you can’t do it in Media Composer, it’s just leaner and cleaner to do it in Premiere. But as far as the actual cutting itself, they are pretty similar. You know, cuts are cuts.

Is there anything I haven’t asked that you feel is important about your experience on the show?
Naugle: As an editor, it was such a blast to get to do something that called so much attention to the editing. And we got to use techniques that might not have translated so easily into other projects. A lot of what they filmed was long takes of everybody yelling at each other in the kitchen, so that energy was already coming through in the footage, but it was just such a fun challenge to keep track of where everyone was in the kitchen. It should feel overwhelming when they’re all yelling over each other. We basically had that starting point of complete chaos and grew it from there.

Joanna Naugle’s lock sequence for Episode 4

Epstein: So often you work on something, and even though the end product is good and people like it, the process was draining. But that was not at all the case on this show, which I think is kind of funny considering the intensity of the subject matter. It is a very intense and emotional sort of show, but this was one of the most pleasurable, seamless shows I’ve worked on — truly smooth sailing pretty much throughout the whole thing. Everyone said this was the most chill set, and everyone was happy and supportive. I feel that carried through to post. If everyone is enjoying what they’re doing, then theoretically the end product will reflect that.

(To watch our full interview with the editors of The Bear, click here.)

Randi Altman is the founder and editor-in-chief of postPerspective. She has been covering production and post production for more than 25 years.