By Iain Blair
Writer/director Todd Haynes, who was Oscar-nominated for his ‘50s romantic drama Far from Heaven, has always been drawn to classic melodrama and period pieces that examine provocative issues. His new film, May December, tells the story of a shocking affair between 36-year-old Gracie (Julianne Moore) and 13-year-old Joe (Charles Melton). But it’s the fallout from the salacious tabloid-ready romance that Haynes is most interested in. Some 20 years later, Gracie and Joe now lead a seemingly picture-perfect suburban life. But their domestic bliss is disrupted when a famous actress (Natalie Portman) arrives to research her upcoming film role as Gracie.
The film was edited by Affonso Gonçalves, Haynes’ go-to editor who also cut Carol, Wonderstruck and The Velvet Underground. I spoke with Gonçalves, whose credits include True Detective, Winter’s Bone and Beasts of the Southern Wild, about the project’s challenges and workflow.
You’ve cut six of Todd’s projects, starting with Mildred Pierce. But this was a very different type of project, so how did you collaborate on May December?
Usually what happens with Todd, and it happened with this film, is that as soon as he has a script, he sends it my way. If I step back a little bit, what happened was that when we were cutting the Velvet Underground documentary, he was preparing to do this film about Peggy Lee. That eventually didn’t happen, and then this script came up.
He was talking with Natalie Portman about other projects, but she had this one she offered to him, and he really liked it. He sent the script to me, I read it, and I thought it was great. And it came about pretty fast. He sent it to Julianne Moore, they found Charles Melton and that was that.
Then Todd did what he always does, which is work on this kind of image book. And that’s visually how he communicates with the DP, with the production designer, and he sends that to the main people involved. So I got that, and he was also talking about the films that Natalie was watching and stuff for this, and definitely the music from The Go-Between that ended up being a really big part of the creative process.
What kind of discussions did you have before you started work on this? Or did you just get the material and start cutting?
That’s basically what happens, because with Todd it’s not really a discussion about how it’s going to happen. We just talk about the film itself, and how it’s going to work. And Todd has a very specific way of working, which is he never, ever watches dailies. He only watches dailies if there’s a technical problem, or if there’s a performance issue or something like that.
As he doesn’t like to do dailies, I’m cutting everything at the same time and my assistant does DVDs of all the footage. By the time he’s finished shooting, he takes a little break, comes back and he watches all the footage by himself. He takes notes, then he sends the notes to me, and then I kind of do a little bit. I already, by the time he’s finished shooting, have a version of the film that I cut while he was shooting. But then he asks me to do a version based on his notes. And then from that point on, we start working together.
So you are not on the set at all?
Correct. For this one he was shooting in Savannah, and then we met up in Portland, Oregon, where he lives. Then we cut the film for the most part in Portland.
So what were the main challenges of cutting the film?
There were two main challenges, and I think I would say they’re fun challenges. One is the tone, and how to keep the right tone because it’s a story that unravels as it moves, and there are so many layers to it. And you have to start questioning yourself. You have your ideas of what these people are and what’s happening to them. And then slowly the more you know, you question your concepts of relationships, your moral integrity and their moral integrity. It’s really interesting. Plus, there’s humor. So how to keep [the right tone] for something that is almost like a thriller and also a melodrama, but it’s also a dark comedy. Keeping those tones moving in and out, and weaving them to make sense, that was a challenge.
The other challenge, obviously, was working on a soundtrack that already existed. The way we usually do it is, you cut the film, and then you come up with a temp track that kind of feels, that pushes, which is all motion. So I had to reverse engineer the use of it. That was an interesting challenge. And ultimately our composer did a really beautiful job in adapting and changing it a little bit to fit.
Todd told me you have “a great ear” for music and that you’re “very attentive to temp tracks and finding really useful music to cut to.” But this was very different, as composer Marcelo Zarvos adapted Michel Legrand’s score from the 1971 film The Go-Between. It’s like a very strong counterpoint to what we’re watching on screen, and it must have impacted your approach to the edit?
It did. I had to really listen to it and understand what it was doing for the film. It’s like, okay, this applies a bit differently. One part of the process that I love is doing the temp track and finding the music. And finding the music that maybe is not what you expect and maybe in tone. But for this one, Todd had very specific ideas [about how to use the score] that were even in the script, where he had a specific track number that was going to fit with a specific scene. So I just tried it, and sometimes it felt like, wait, this doesn’t seem right to me. But the more I worked on it, the more it was like, okay, now I understand what Todd wants from this.
I could adjust the cutting, or I could get another piece from another cue that actually enhanced the scene a little more. And then you really get to study that piece of music, as there’s a beginning and end, and I can just start a little further in, or end at this point. So you start really trying to maneuver the music to fit what I’m cutting.
Todd has always said he’s a very hands-on guy in the editing.
Yes, he’s right there. Basically, we worked nine to seven, five days a week. Sometimes we worked weekends too, because on top of cutting the film, we were actually cutting a short film for a showing of his films at the Pompidou in Paris. But yeah, he’s by my side from nine to seven. He has notes, and he knows the footage intimately because he studies it. He can be like, ‘On scene six, let’s take a look at take four, and how Julianne reads this line here,’ and that’s how it goes. It’s very, very detailed.
We used Avid Media Composer 2018, QNAP was the server, and then we used Nextcloud to sync files. We had about 4T worth of material.
What was the most difficult scene to cut and why?
I think the most difficult to cut was probably the scene where it’s the first time they all had dinner together, when Elizabeth comes to Gracie’s house, because that was a long dialogue scene. It was actually much longer than it is in the final film. And the challenge was really when to be with whom, because of the coverage. We have the medium closeup of the three of them and the boy, but then the boy leaves, and then it’s just the main wide front or the wide from the back. So it’s just basically finding a way to get to know everybody. And at some point, Joe doesn’t speak, but we have him listening to what was said, and it was so important when we realized we have to be on a silent Joe just reacting to what’s being said there.
It was a week of work just on that, and that’s the scene we probably went back to the most times, like, is this correct, is this precise? Do we have enough of Joe? Even though he doesn’t say too much, are we getting his reaction? There’s so much subtext in his reaction, because when he looks, he reacts to things. And he’s clenching his jaw so much that there’s an effect on the side of his head. So what’s funny was actually using the stuff that’s not being said, and all the stuff being reacted to is where we really had to be very precise. We kept going back to the scene many, many times.
You’ve worked with Todd a long time now. How do you sum this one up compared with some of the other projects you’ve done?
Wow, that’s an interesting question. It was fun and interesting to do something that has more humor than we used to have [in our films]. To play with humor is something that was kind of new for the two of us, and that was exciting. Even though it is a dark story ultimately, I think to be able to play up the humor and understand how to use it was a great experience.
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.