By Randi Altman

The film The Harder They Fall is a full-out Western starring Idris Elba, Regina King, LaKeith Stansfield and Jonathan Majors. Directed by Jeymes Samuel and streaming on Netflix, it focuses on outlaw Nat Love (Majors), who gets his gang back together to take down enemy Rufus Buck (Elba), a crime boss who just got out of prison. While the film is what the director calls a “revisionist Western,” its characters are based on real people. It’s part history, part bloodbath, part comedy… and quite a ride.

Editor Tom Eagles

We recently caught up with the film’s editor, New Zealand-based Tom Eagles (Jojo Rabbit, What We Do in the Shadows), who actually started on the movie twice. The first time was when he flew out to New Mexico in March of 2020 to prep for the first shot. But soon after he arrived, everything started shutting down due to COVID. “There was a week when we really didn’t know what was going to happen,” he says. “During that time, Jeymes and I hung out on FaceTime and talked about pressure points in the script and things I thought needed clarifying.”

The second time was when shooting resumed, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t thinking about the script during the downtime. Eagles spent his time back in New Zealand working on some projects, but he would periodically return to the script in his head. “I was thinking about what it needed, what we could prep, sourcing temp music and sound effects. Finally, when the film started up again in September, we were much better prepped than we would have been otherwise.”

Let’s find out more from Eagles…

Were you on set, near set, remote?
All of the above. I generally eschew going to set because I don’t want to know anything other than what’s in the frame. If a shot took all day to set up or an actor was difficult, it’s hard to un-know that stuff. That said, the opening scene of the film was initially planned as a oner, so Jeymes had invited me out that first day of filming in March 2020 to check on some hidden cuts and generally weigh in on how things were timing. That turned out to be the day we were shut down.

Flash forward to July 2021, and we were out in the desert again reshooting that scene; it was the only scene we remounted completely. We had to match in some material from our original shoot, and we were also picking up inserts for scenes throughout the film, so once again Jeymes invited me out.

Through the shoot proper, however, I was cutting from a house on the beach in Aotearoa. I was about as physically distant from the set as it was possible to be.

How often were you showing Jeymes your cut?
I actually had more access to Jeymes than I’ve had to any other director during the shoot period. Because we were all nervous about the long-distance thing, we scheduled a catch-up every weekend, and I slid my week to accommodate that. We would catch up on Evercast and look at the scenes I’d cut and just shoot the shit and talk about the movie and movies in general. It was invaluable getting-to-know-you time, and by the end of it, I had a really good handle on who he was and what he likes.

Can you talk about working with Jeymes in the edit?
It was the most fun I think I’ve ever had in the cutting room. Jeymes is just a supremely joyful, fun individual. We had a wonderful and surprising synchronicity, especially given we were working long distance for the first three to four months.

I treat each director as a unique genre or sub-genre, and I’m a quick study. It’s especially rewarding with a first-timer because you are kind of inventing the language together as you go along. I figured out quickly, for example, that Jeymes likes to go large — more is usually more with him. If there’s an opportunity to be expressive or stylized, he’s likely to be into it.

What directions or notes were you given?
I was nervous showing him scenes for the first time, but he generally loved what he was seeing. In fact, he was a great defender of my first instincts, even against myself. I would feel the need to investigate a note or pivot our intentions, but Jeymes would often say, “You did that for a reason.” It’s something he learned from music. Often your first instincts or a mistake you made or work that you do without too much rationalizing or intentionality has some magic to it, and you need to find ways to hold on to that feeling … while still moving the edit forward, of course.

There was an odd synchronicity between us, as I mentioned earlier, even in those first four months when we were on different continents. There would be times when we’d be thinking the same thing on our different continents and time zones without having shared a word.

For example, the prison scene was not supposed to be the first time that Nat Love and Rufus Buck meet as grown men. It was actually supposed to happen in the previous scene out in the street. But I was cutting the jail scene, and I just thought, this is a much better entrance for Idris. There was this wonderful roving POV shot that Jeymes had captured, and I had my assistant, John Sosnovsky, whistle over it — like Rufus is whistling a tune, the same tune that Nat has been whistling to Mary (Zazie Beetz) … How does he know that tune?

Then I got a call from Jeymes. He said this terrible thing had happened: They’d had a false positive on set, and that had led to them losing Idris a day early, so they never got his entrance in the street scene. But Jeymes was strangely calm, happy even, and said to me, “I think that jail scene is a better entrance for Idris.” I just started laughing, I showed him the scene and he loved it, he called Idris up straight away, and we reassured him all was not lost.

Of course, that had some flow-on for the street scene. That became very much improvised, so I had my work cut out for me trying to figure out what ad-libs would tell the story best. In the end it became Trudy’s (Regina King) scene.

In terms of direction, most of it comes via storytelling. Jeymes is hands-down the best storyteller I know. He could make standing on line at CVS into an interesting story. So every point he makes comes in the form of these very long and entertaining stories that always have some kind of moral or lesson for the film. It’s a nice way of working because it’s not too didactic; he gives you space to interpret what he’s saying — and that is, after all, my job.

His direction is also very musical. There’s no real distinction for him between music and dialogue and storytelling. So he’ll say to me something like, “Bill Pickett [Edi Gathegi] is not Nat Love’s backing vocalist,” and I know what to do with that. Pickett is not just a sidekick; he plots his own course.

Tom Eagle and the benefits of working from home.

Were you keeping up with the camera? Able to tell him if something was missing in time to get another take?
Barely. I would prioritize scenes I was worried about or scenes I knew they were going back for. I would show scenes to Jeymes on a weekend and talk about what I thought might be missing. Then I would get in touch with the second unit and ask for the shot. Say, for example, some of the shots of the iron box that Rufus is locked up in — the key going into the lock. I knew I wanted to make a real meal of the moments leading up to his release.

The climactic shootout was huge. It was being picked off in bits and pieces by both units throughout the whole shoot, so I was constantly in touch with both Jeymes and second unit. Both units were shooting two or three cameras and 48 frames, so there was a lot of material to get through. It was hard to tell sometimes whether we had it all, and it was easy for a beat to slip through the cracks. For example, we didn’t have any shots of Carson (Rufus’ sharpshooter) exchanging fire with Pickett, keeping him pinned down on the roof, so that was the kind of thing I’d ask second unit for.

DP Mihai Malaimare and director Jeymes Samuel

Did he shoot a lot of footage? Do you know what the film was shot on?
He shot a ton, maybe 200-plus hours. It was shot on a Panavision DXL2 (which is built Red Monstro 8K VistaVision sensor). The DP was Mihai Mălaimare Jr.

What system were you editing on? Was there a specific tool within that system that you called on a lot? ScriptSync?
We used Avid. I think we upgraded to Symphony so that we had all the tools available — better grading tools. I do find ScriptSync useful, but I never use it the first time I’m viewing dailies; I just like to watch everything through. But it is useful later — if I’m swapping out a line reading, for example — which I did a lot on this film.

I also used tools like Fluid Morph, Re-Speeds and Animatte to create split screens for timing purposes. The performances were often close, but I’d use these tools to get a pause or a line to time exactly, to give it the cadence and musicality that it needed, which was particularly important for this film.

Were there many VFX? Were you editing with temp VFX?
Yes, we had about 800-odd shots, I think, including the odd omit. A lot of it was small stuff, some of which I was generating, like the aforementioned timing effects. We would do as much as we could in Avid. I would sometimes rough something out for timing and then hand it over to my first assistant editor, John Sosnovsky, or to one of the other assists to do a more refined version.

If it was outside their/Avid’s capabilities, we would farm it out to our brilliant in-house temp artist, Hadrien Malinjod, in London, who would always give us absolute gold and at great speed. The time difference again worked in our favor because oftentimes I’d wake up to new temp FX in the morning.

What about temp LUTs?
We had great temp LUTs from DP Mihai Malaimare’s regular on-set DIT, Eli Berg. We did do a little temp grading, but only where Jeymes asked for it. I tend to try to avoid it because we don’t have the tools or the bandwidth to really make it work, and it can slow you down. So we kept it simple — a little darker here, a little more contrast there, a little grain to emulate a film look.

There is a lot of blood. Was the blood all practical or an effect?
A mix of both. Practical is generally better, but there were times when practical was impractical (laughs).

You also edited Jojo Rabbit, a film about a horrific time in history that also used humor. Can you talk about the challenges of bridging those two things? 
Yeah, this film has a real mix of tones and emotions to balance. It has humor and a lot of style, and then a lot of pathos and tenderness and charm.

I can’t think of another Western the way this does. (Spoilers Ahead. Skip to next question if you haven’t seen it yet!) Nat Love’s pain and anger was the spine of the movie, but we had to make sure we saw some charm in him and that we believed the complicated relationship between him and Mary. You want to feel like there’s hope for them at the end.

So sometimes we had to give those moments a little extra time, like when Mary rejoins Nat and brings the gang back together and silently hands him the reins. Or just after that, when Nat talks to his horse and shows some tenderness and charm. Some of those things were little ad-libs or moments that were built to strengthen that side of Nat’s character or that part of the narrative arc. We used his smile in odd places — Jonathan gave him this really world-weary, tragic smile. There’s a kind of gallows humor in him too, and we would play it in odd places, like when he’s shot toward the end of the movie. It underscored a kind of nihilism in him, the inexorable pull of death and violence that he’s unable to escape.

And yes, there’s humor, and occasionally we had to fight for that, to create space, for example, to push the “I am sweet” joke to the next level with excessive repetition. It’s the humor and charm in Jim Beckwourth (RJ Cyler) that makes (another spoiler) his loss so devastating.

One thing I learned was that style was not the antithesis of substance on this movie. Where we tried sacrificing style, we usually felt we lost some of the soul of the movie. That’s perhaps one thing that’s consistent with Jojo — be it humor or style or drama or emotion, these things are not antithetical. They, in fact, support each other.

Finally, what was your favorite scene to edit?
There were a couple. I love the whole train sequence, but especially the splits screens. That was a really complex sequence to pull off because you can never know for sure where the audience’s attention is. But you can suggest and direct them a little. LaKeith was so magnetic that I would use cuts on the General’s side [General Abbott, played by Dylan Kenin] if I needed to draw attention over to him. Also, the two sides were not shot at the same time, and LaKeith is very free-form — he never says the same thing twice, so we didn’t necessarily have an appropriate reaction from the General or the right timing. He never did the countdown on the General’s coverage, for example, so I had to manufacture responses from him and his soldiers to eke out the tension. Then there were some fun discoveries — like when I found I could wipe the split screen off with the movement of the door.

I also really love the whole heist sequence in Maysville, the white town. I didn’t know that Jeymes was planning on making the town literally white, and I laughed so hard when I saw those dailies! That’s the only joke I added in the movie — the text “Maysville (It’s a White Town)” — just to double down on the humor. I was able to return the favor — Jeymes laughed so hard when he saw that title.

Danielle [Deadwyler, who plays Cuffee] gives such a riveting and nuanced performance in that sequence. I think you can see every emotion as she goes through it — her frustration at having to wear women’s clothes, then, against her better judgment and pride, you can feel her humiliation at the hands of the bank tellers before she takes control of the situation and transitions to controlled anger.

This was the most magical scene to watch with our test audience because it became clear as we watched it that they were with her every step of the way. This was another scene with a lot of ad-libbing, mostly from Nat, but we pared him back to his interaction with “blue eyes” and the men and let Cuffee take center stage for this one sequence.

Randi Altman is the founder and editor-in-chief of postPerspective. She has been covering production and post production for more than 20 years