By Iain Blair
Created by Steve Martin and showrunner John Hoffman, Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building stars Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez as three New Yorkers with a shared interest in true crime podcasts. They become friends while investigating suspicious deaths in their affluent Upper West Side apartment building and producing their own podcast about the cases.
Shelly Westerman
Recently renewed for a fourth season, the Emmy-nominated show features the work of editor Shelly Westerman, whose credits include Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail and Julie & Julia, HBO’s The Wire and American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace. She was an ACE and BFE nominee for her editing on Only Murders in the Building, Season 2.
I spoke with Westerman, who has an Emmy nomination for her work on Versace, about the challenges and workflow.
What’s your collaboration with John Hoffman like?
We start very early on… when we first get the scripts. Then there’s casual conversations between him and the editors, about what’s coming, and then there is a full schedule of meetings. We do a concept meeting with the production designer and costumer designer and all the departments, which allows us to get an idea of the episodes. Then we have a separate meeting with the directors, editors and John, with a lot of discussion about how each scene is going to play out. We also listen in on all the production meetings so we can figure out the logistics of how the episode is going to go down.
All of those components give us a really good idea of what we’re stepping into, and once we get the footage, we go through the process of the editor’s cut and the director’s cut. Then we send it out to John and EPs Dan Fogelman and Jess Rosenthal to get their feedback, and then we start our one-on-one work with John to dig into the episode.
He’s on-set or watching on a monitor in his office, so he’s very familiar with the material. He and I developed a relationship in Season 2, so we were more prepared for Season 3. The editors knew his likes and dislikes. We’d often prepare alternative sequences to have ready to show him, so there’s a lot of background prep work going into the actual work process with him. He’s usually very busy shooting, so it’s late at night or on the weekends when we get time with him during production.
How many episodes have you cut on the show?
I began on Season 2 and cut Episodes 2, 5, 8 and 10. I also cut Episodes 2, 5, 8 and 10 on Season 3. And I got co-producer credit on Season 3.
Did that involve a lot of extra work?
It did, but it was good since I have a side of my personality that serves me well with the work. And coming from feature films, where editors are very much involved in the whole post process from start to finish, it was a bit of a shock when I transitioned to TV, where you have a much bigger post staff that takes over some of those duties. So it was more work, but it was worth it to be involved with the process and be able to see things through.
What were the main challenges of editing this show?
The hardest part is always balancing the comedy with the dramatic and the more poignant emotional moments without getting lost in them. We have a great team of collaborators, like composer Siddhartha Khosla, who always has my back. I might cut a scene and use some really dramatic music. Then I’ll show Sid and he’ll go, “Shelly, we’ve got to pull that back. Let the actors do their thing.” And he’s usually right… but sometimes he’s not, and I love that back and forth. It’s the same with [re-recording sound mixer] Mat Waters, who’s in charge of our sound department. I’ll show him something and ask for his opinion, and if we need some texture in the background, he’ll jump in with some sound effects. It’s also about our core trio of actors and making sure we’re focusing on them and tracking their relationships.
What was the most difficult scene to cut and why? And how involved is John in the problem-solving process?
It’s been very interesting because. John’s a great showrunner in that he also thinks like an editor, and he’ll almost always patch a difficult cut.
I was having trouble with a cut in Season 2 in a scene with Steve Martin and Shirley MacLaine. The rhythm wasn’t right, and I couldn’t figure it out. Sure enough, he looked at it and said, “Everything’s great about the scene except that one cut,” and it was the cut I was struggling with. He suggested trying a few more frames on Steve’s side of the cut. I did that, and it was perfect. It’s so fun to be free, knowing that if something’s not OK as is, you’re going to work on it together. That alliance you build with someone who sees things the same way you do is really special.
Another example is Episode 10, the finale of Season 3. It was quite challenging because we had to find a way to tell the story visually, and there was a lot of intercutting between Martin Short and Paul Rudd’s characters, which was very tricky. We had Paul for the entire song sequence, and he shot with Meryl Streep for two months before we shot the scene, as he had to leave. Then we shot the whole thing with Marty and then had to figure out how to match the cuts. In addition, we had to trim out some of the song for time, which affected our storytelling and where people were geographically.
I assume you must have used a lot of temp sound?
Yes, and we chose scenes very early on for Sid. He starts composing while we’re still shooting. If we had a longer schedule or more time, he might not get the episode until a director’s or producer’s cut is ready, but since we move so fast, he’s often doing sketches of scenes and writing stuff very early on.
Now we have a lot of his music stored, so we can go and pull from old cues and edit those together to give us some idea. He’ll give us his score material in stems, so sometimes I’ll cut and patch, take a piano from here and woodwinds from there to create a temp.
Did you use any temp VFX shots?
Yes. We had an on-staff VFX artist, Josh Bryson, this season, who helped us with temps in addition to our VFX editor. Our assistants do great temps too. Our VFX editor did some of that technical work and also managed all the VFX shots. Our main VFV vendors were Molecule, who did the bulk of the work, and Ingenuity. We also had Atlanta VFX in Atlanta and AB Studios in India.
Tell us about the post workflow and the editing gear you used.
The show’s shot on the Sony Venice 6K at 1:85. Pacific Post was our fabulous Avid vendor. We used Avid 2018 with Nexis storage, and we were fully remote using Jump Desktop. We reviewed cuts using PacPost.live, which is similar to Evercast.
Picture Shop processed our dailies in New York City, then sent them to LA for color timing. Our media was transcoded to Avid DNxHD 36. Dailies media was pushed to our Nexis storage. All final color timing was done in LA by colorist Timothy Vincent. We used Formosa for sound, and Mat Waters and Lindsey Alvarez were our sound mixers.
How would you sum up the whole experience?
It’s so much fun. John always brings such a sense of joy to it all. And I’d previously worked with Payton Koch and Peggy Tachdjian — the other editors this season — on other shows, so we had a great shorthand. The show was just renewed, so we’re all excited about Season 4.
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.
