By Iain Blair
Editor Kevin Tent, ACE, has had a long and fruitful collaboration with director Alexander Payne. Their first film together was 1995’s Citizen Ruth, and he’s edited all of Payne’s films since, including the Oscar-nominated Sideways. Tent earned his first Academy Award nod for his work on The Descendants.
Kevin Tent, ACE. Photo by Peter Zakhary
Tent was just Oscar-nominated again, this time for his work on Payne’s new film The Holdovers, a bittersweet holiday story about three lonely people marooned at a New England boarding school over winter break in 1970. I spoke with Tent about his workflow and editing the film, which got five Oscar noms, including for Best Picture.
How did the process start with Alexander?
When he first had the idea, he didn’t even have a full script yet with writer David Hemingson. I read the first few drafts, and it was in very good shape, even early on. I would give him my comments on the script and stuff like that, and he’d take them or not. Then when they began shooting, I started cutting right away.
Alexander told me you went to the set on his very early films like Citizen Ruth, but not really since.
Yeah, as usual, I stayed here in LA for this film, while he shot in Boston. I do like to go to the set just for one day to say hello to the actors and everyone, but after you’re there for 20 minutes and have nothing else to do, you’re like, “What the hell am I doing here?” So I don’t spend too much time on-set, and anyway, there’s so much work to be done at the cutting room, as I’m doing an assembly while he shoots.
I assume you’re in constant contact during the shoot.
Yes, we talk every day, at least once a day. I usually send him cut scenes for the weekend if he wants to see them, but on the last couple of movies, he hasn’t wanted to watch cut scenes while he has a weekend off. I think he’s got too many other production issues on his plate to have the time to do that.
He doesn’t watch dailies anymore either, and it works out really well because by the time he comes back to the cutting room, he’s going to look at the dailies with fresh eyes. And I know the footage fairly well by then because I’ve been through it and cut it. So we’re both kind of on an even playing field when we start to cut together.
I know he shoots very precisely, so it’s not like there’s a ton of material you have to wade through and cut?
Right, he was really focused on his coverage on this, which was good. He’s always super-smart about coverage. He doesn’t want to burn out his actors on wide shots and masters and stuff like that. So he gets what he thinks he needs to get us in and out of scenes. Then he spends a lot of time letting the actors find their footing and their characters and give their performances.
He’s a four-to-six takes guy on average, but he allows his actors to take their time and get these great performances. It’s our job when we get to the cutting room to try to condense them and make them efficient… pace ’em up, that kind of thing. We’re getting great raw material, and then our challenge is usually trying to get it all moving and flowing together.
He told me that you’d work on the edit at his home in Omaha for a while and then come back to LA when you had to spend a lot more time here for post?
Yeah, we would go there for a month, come back to LA and then go back again. I was there for Citizen Ruth and About Schmidt. I like it back there, and we had a good time. He’s got an awesome place.
We would cut there using Jump Desktop — we’d log into that and do all the editing. It was remarkable. It’s just the most amazing thing. And we were able to cut away on the computer in California from his place in Omaha. We would then use Evercast for work sessions with associate editor Mindy, Alyssa, music editor Richard Ford and sound supervisor Frank Gaeta. The whole process was efficient and phenomenal.
The whole thing from shooting to finishing was probably nine months. So not overly long. Then we spent a month or so doing the final mix and the DI and all that stuff.
This is Alexander’s first period film, and I loved all the dissolves you used that you don’t see in movies so much anymore.
Yeah, that’s true I think, but we love them. They’re so beautiful. They create emotion, and I was a fan of them even before Alexander and I started working together. I always thought they were amazing, and we’ve been doing them forever, going back to Citizen Ruth. We also did some really long dissolves in Election and in About Schmidt, which has a bunch of really beautiful dissolve sequences when his wife dies. There’s a huge, two-minute dissolve sequence of Warren Schmidt after she passes.
What was the most difficult scene to edit?
There were a couple. It would seem like they were simple, but we spent a lot of time on them. First, the scene where Paul gets fired at the end and takes the hit for the kid. I wouldn’t say we struggled, but we were constantly finessing it, going back and taking things out and putting things back and trying to get it just right. That one took us quite a while.
Then there were scenes that were a little long that needed condensing just to get them right. The first scene, with Mary and Paul watching The Newlywed Game, was a challenge because it had a fair amount of dialogue that we lost. That was a tricky scene because it had a lot of stuff going on in it. It had emotion about her son and her anger with the kids at the school. There were a lot of different transitions and stuff going on characterwise, and that was a challenge in that little area.
I assume you did a fair amount of music temps?
Yes. Mindy Elliott, who’s been our assistant forever but got an associate editor credit this time around, was the first one who imported music from The Swingle Singers, which is the a cappella Christmas music we hear. It was a great call because I was having trouble “hearing” whatever the music would be in the movie. That ended up being a huge element we embraced — using that type of music throughout.
At points it’s ironic and kind of funny, and at other times it’s very poignant, and it became a really important musical element in the movie. We also worked with our music producer/supervisor Richard Ford, and he’s brilliant. He also started bringing in lots of music, including scores from Mark Orton, whom we’d worked with on Nebraska. That became our score sound of the movie. Then we threw in all our fun ‘60s music — that’s just a free-for-all. It worked great, but then you find out it costs $100,000, and you can’t get it. That happens all the time.
Obviously, it’s not a big visual effects movie, but there are some. Were you doing temps for those as well?
Yeah, we had things like comps and fluid morph, but the visual effects were really all about evening out the snow. There were certain scenes that needed it, like when all the people are leaving the church and there’s snow coming down. Believe it or not, that scene was shot on the same day as the scene where all the boys are talking out in front of the truck. It was blue skies in the morning, then it was snowing like crazy, then a couple hours later, it was all blue skies again.
Crafty Apes did the visual effects, adding snow, wetting the road, putting clouds in the sky, adding some snowflakes at points and trying to make it match a little closer to what was shot earlier in the day… those kind of things.
Tell us about the post workflow and the editing gear you used.
We cut on Avid Media Composer 2018, supplied by Atlas Digital aka Runway Edit. While in production, associate editor Mindy Elliott, assistant editor Alyssa Donovan-Browning and I worked from our homes, and we worked with separate projects, which we kept updated via Dropbox. We had separate drives as well.
Our dailies were provided by Harbor in New York and London, and each morning — sometime between 2am and 6am — they would send us a downloadable link. I would check my email around 4am, and if I had a link, I’d start the download and then go back to bed. Around 8am, Mindy would use TeamViewer to log on to my computer and copy the organized dailies bins, etc. onto my local drive. Mindy and Alyssa also had local drives. We communicated constantly using a dedicated Telegram Messenger chat, and whenever I needed anything or there was new media (small amounts), we used TeamViewer and Dropbox to download and import it.
Once Alexander was back in town, we moved into a more traditional cutting room in North Hollywood, and we switched over to a Nexis shared media storage in the same building as our cutting rooms. Once we were finalizing the cut, we moved permanently back to LA to finish, and we mixed in Santa Monica with our longtime mixer, Patrick Cyccone.
Were you involved in the DI at all? Did you go to the sessions?
I didn’t go so much on this one because our DP, Eigil Bryld, was shooting in New York, and Alexander and Eigil did it at Harbor in New York with colorist Joe Gawler. I would see it, and when they were done, I’d go and we’d screen it.
What makes it such an enduring partnership with Alexander?
I think we’re both pretty easygoing guys, and we’re both always looking to enjoy life. We take our work seriously, but we don’t ever let it get ugly. We have a good time when we’re working together, and we work hard, but we keep a positive attitude. I guess we’re just very similar in that respect. And we’re pals after all these years, so it’s not even like going to work when we work together. We basically are doing our job and having fun.
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.
