By Ben Mehlman

Anticipation for the big-screen debut of Black Adam has been high since Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson announced he was playing the titular character way back in 2014. Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra (The Shallows, Jungle Cruise, Orphan), the DC Extended Universe film became Johnson’s highest solo box office opening of his career. The film’s cast also includes Viola Davis, Pierce Brosnan, Aldis Hodge and Sarah Shahi.

Michael L. Sale

Recently, I sat down with the film’s editor, Michael L. Sale, ACE, (Bridesmaids, Red Notice, We’re the Millers) to discuss handling comedy in such a CG-heavy film and balancing the film’s story while also servicing a cinematic universe. He was co-editor on the film with John Lee.

(WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!)

This is the fourth Dwayne Johnson project you’ve cut. What’s that working relationship like?
Yeah, Dwayne won’t leave me alone (laughs). I’m kidding. I’ve done four pictures with Dwayne, and I love doing them. We’ve met a couple of times. As an editor I’m not on-set, but I do see him sometimes in ADR. What I will say is that he’s a humble and wonderful person who makes you want to kick ass at your job. He also has a great group around him, including producers Beau Flynn and Hiram Garcia, who I’d worked with on Red Notice.

If you look at my resume, Black Adam might seem like a strange project for me, but it actually made a lot of sense. Beau and Hiram came to like the character work I was doing, and for this film, they had the difficult task of launching a lot of characters. So they wanted me to join the team and help create characters that could go forward and, hopefully, have other movies made about them.

What was your post setup, and what did you edit on?
We used a large, networked Avid Media Composer, so we had probably 10 Media Composers connected to central storage that we could all access. And of course, we were working with VFX people all over the world, so shots were coming in and out, but picture editorial was mainly in a building with the Avids. Due to the pandemic, we were also able to use Jump to get into our systems and work from home if needed, which was terrific.

How long was post, and was it a hybrid of in-person and remote?
They began post when they were shooting, which I believe was around April 2021. I joined in September 2021 after I finished another film. Since there were vaccines by that time, we had a large office to accommodate a VFX department of about 25 people and an editorial department of about 10.

Generally, when everyone can access the storage at the same time, it’s highly efficient. So we were all working in our offices with masks. Even if we had VFX meetings with people in the same building we would do them on Zoom from our offices. Additionally, all the assistants and editors had the ability to work from home, so if there was even a hint of someone not feeling well or if they had a positive test, they would work from home.

What was the work-from-home setup?
We didn’t need an Evercast or a PacPost.live because the bulk of the work was at the office. We did use Jump, which allows you to remotely access your work computer. Then we used FaceTime and Zoom for our editorial group chats. For high-resolution VFX shots, we used Screensync and myriad other software, depending on the vendor.

Did the pandemic hit during preproduction?
Yes, the movie was postponed for quite a while, so they made previsualizations of the fight sequences for almost a year. They were the best, most detailed and longest previses you’ve ever seen. There was a previs editor named Krisztian Majdik who we kept on the movie as an additional editor because of all the work that went into the previs. This gave us a chance to work with someone in a department that we’re usually very separate from.

How was it balancing the film’s comedy when it’s so CG-heavy? Especially when the VFX is a part of the comedy?
I’m not going to lie; it was really hard — harder than anything I’ve ever done before. Comedy alone is hard, and this particular movie is very ambitious in that it’s launching the Justice Society of America (JSA), Black Adam and a new villain. There’s a lot of information you’re juggling as you’re explaining the Crown of Sabbac, Kahndaq and Intergang. Trying to achieve comedy in the middle of that can become very tricky. You also don’t want to have the comedy change the tone so much that it takes away from the action and drama.

On the other hand, you don’t want to be overly serious and self-indulgent the whole time. So for me it was about being disciplined about when to use comedy, not overdoing it and not breaking any character by trying to be too silly.

For example, Black Adam’s not particularly funny at the beginning of the movie. He gets some laughs, like when he first wakes up at the apartment, but he’s not really funny. By the time everyone gets on the ship together, he is funny, but then he gets serious again at the end. So it was really about not overusing comedy as a weapon.

How was the work divided between you and John Lee, the other credited editor?
The plan from the beginning was for us to work together as a team. If you look at our combined credits, John has an extensive comic-book movie background, and mine is more in character development and comedy. John was doing the assembly while I was wrapping up another movie, and during that time I’d come home at night to check in on dailies and early cuts and then give him my thoughts.

Even doing all of that, it took me a little while to catch up when I officially joined because you not only learn the footage from watching dailies but also from cutting everything. It took a couple of months for me to get up to speed with those guys because they were already moving. Then how it worked was someone would take a scene, work on it and get it to a place we mutually liked, and sometimes we’d switch scenes. So over the course of time, we both worked on all parts of the movie over and over and over again. We poked and prodded and tried every version possible, and when we both liked something, we’d present it to Jaume and the producers.

The film’s slo-mo sequences, like the one set to “Paint it Black,” had a unique palette. How was that accomplished?
Believe it or not, that “Paint it Black” sequence was one of the last ones to come together. It was always in the movie and always prevised, but they weren’t sure exactly how much of it there was going to be during the original shoot. A lot of times with these types of movies, they intentionally don’t shoot everything the first time, knowing they’re going to go back after they learn more about what the movie is.

It took us a while to make a version of that scene, even in previs, that played well to an audience, so they shot a lot of elements for that very late in the game. The VFX company was really pushed — I was dropping in shots for that in September. It was almost the last thing we completed in the movie, but it’s an epic sequence. Jaume always had it in his head and knew it was going to be great. He kept telling us, “Don’t worry, when you get these shots, it’s going to be great.”

It’s a fun sequence. How much of it was practically shot elements?
All of it was shot on greenscreen, like Dwayne flying. They also shot plates for a lot of the medium shots of the guys getting electrocuted as well as the stuff from the Intergang battle. But some of the bigger and wider shots are entirely CGI, and while some of the helicopter stuff is real, a lot of it isn’t. The tanks, the rockets, a lot of that is all CGI now. For the guy with the hand grenade in his mouth, we had an element of the guy and an element of the hand grenade and then made it look like they’re going to interact and work so it would feel real enough.

You mentioned that was a difficult scene to crack. Was it the hardest?
The two hardest things to crack in this movie, as in most movies, were the beginning and the end. I always joke that I make my living working on the beginnings and the endings of movies. The last 20 minutes of this film, basically from when Sabbac comes out of the water, have a lot of people and boxes to tick off.

(SERIOUS SPOILERS AHEAD!)

For example, the crowd fighting the undead. Trying to balance it all was very difficult, and we had many versions. You can’t have Fate die and then jump right to a comedic moment of Karim hitting the undead. Cracking the end was also a really fun experience because Jaume and I had many good versions, but he would say to me, “Let’s keep working on this.”

We went way past all our deadlines — we had VFX to finish, and the composer was trying to score the movie, and we were also doing the final mix. Jaume still told me, “When we make the version, we’re going to know it.” One day, when he was going away for some publicity, he gave me three versions to do over a weekend, and once I made the first version and watched it, I said, “That’s it!”

When Jaume came back on Monday, he asked if I made the three versions, and I said no. He smiled and asked, “Did you make one?” I showed it to him, and he knew immediately that this was the order of events. We then made a few tweaks to finish it, and the good news was that it used most of the VFX we had and didn’t require too many changes.

Can you talk a bit more about your relationship with Jaume?
I love working with Jaume; he’s super-talented and a hard worker. He’s also creatively generous in that he gave me creative space to fail, and I think that’s very important. If somebody’s telling me “make this good or else,” then what you might get is a mediocre version because I’m not willing to take a risk. But Jaume would say, “Michael, go rogue. I don’t want to see the same version of this reel. Show me something different.” It’s such a wonderful thing. I did show him a lot that he said no to, but every once in a while, he’d watch something and say, “That’s amazing.” And while not all of that ended up in the movie, some of it did.

How did you balance telling a singular story while also accommodating a cinematic universe?
It’s difficult. I mean, as a fan, I would love to make a four-hour movie people want to watch, or even make three movies. It would’ve been great to do the JSA movie, the birth of Black Adam and then a movie where they come together, but that wasn’t the assignment.

The assignment was “JSA and Black Adam are both coming out. Get them to work.” So you have to make difficult choices, and one of them is you can’t spend too much backstory time on the JSA because by the time you tell Black Adam’s and the villain’s backstories, you need the JSA heading to the problem. You can’t sit there and show Atom Smasher putting on his suit for the first time. It was a choice early on to go light with that group, with the idea being — and not everybody might like it — that instead of following the JSA from the first introduction, we want you to want to know more about them by the end of the movie. The hope and goal was that there will be more of Dr. Fate, Hawkman, Atom Smasher, Cyclone and obviously Black Adam in future DC movies.

Did the story evolve a lot during post?
The story evolved a lot, but nothing really changed in terms of what was in the movie; it was more of how and when we told it. For example, Black Adam’s backstory was originally told by other characters — Hawkman told the story of ancient Kahndaq in the original script, and Dr. Fate touched Black Adam and saw how he killed the king.

What we discovered as we went was that this approach created a lack of intimacy for Black Adam. So by telling his story in the beginning — even with a little misdirect around Hurut — and by having Black Adam share more of it with Hawkman later, we had a more intimate and emotional connection. This helped drive the emotion at the end of the movie, when Black Adam has to wake up and is talking to Hurut. It was the same information — many lines are the same — but with different characters saying them in different places.

I need to ask you about the big reveal at the end. How early on did you know that stinger was happening?
I’ll tell you how secretive it was. I didn’t even know we had it until like a day before.

At what point in the process was that?
Right before a screening, and we had to be super-careful. There were a lot of versions of the movie, some with that in, some with it out, and some with Superman in the shadows. There were a lot of people with a much higher pay grade than me who were making those kinds of decisions, and to be honest, we didn’t know what we were going to do until the very end.

I do know that Dwayne was very excited about it; we all were. Everybody from the director to Dwayne to the producers are all about the fans, and we know Black Adam is a special character to a lot of people. It comes from a time when there wasn’t a lot of representation in comic books, and there’s a whole generation of people who related to the character. We’ve been listening to those fans. Dwayne wanted that moment for them.

It’s so fun to go on Twitter and see people posting the audience reactions to it because I’m a Superman guy. It was emotional the first time I saw the footage. I used to clean movie theaters when I was 14, and one of the movies that played was the 1978 Superman. I’d sweep popcorn to that theme song.

Finally, what are you watching that you’re loving right now?
My wife and I just watched the new Lord of the Rings series, and as someone who’s loved those books since childhood, I thought they did a great job of making a new story in that world. But I usually wait to be in between movies to catch up, so I’m looking forward to taking some time off in November and December to catch up on a lot in the comic book world.

I’m dying to see Peacemaker and the new Black Panther film. I also love going to the theaters when I can. I’m psyched they survived all the madness. I saw Black Adam in a packed theater, and it was super-fun. I’m very bullish on the future of theatrical.

Ben Mehlman is a writer/director. His script Whittier was featured on the 2021 Annual Black List after being selected for the 2020 Black List Feature Lab, where he was mentored by Beau Willimon and Jack Thorne.