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My first indication that editor/filmmaker Robert Larkin was a cool guy (apart from his past patronage of Movies Unlimited) came years ago when I learned he had sold his independent feature film Just Work to Troma (who promptly branded it with the more exploitation-friendly moniker Viral Assassins). What? You sold the movie you made to the guys who put out The Toxic Avenger? Awesome!
That’s the fan’s (and friend’s) reaction, of course—though, as any filmmaker could tell you, the behind-the-scenes details of selling one’s film often turn out to be more emotionally (and financially) nuanced.
Bob racked up an additional cool factor once I’d watched his film, because you could sense that he had all the right artistic heroes—including David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick—but he was not an artist out to steal (as the great Francis Ford Coppola might advise him to do) but to pay affectionate homage while cultivating his own voice.
Lastly, Bob is saddled with the characterization of cool because he’s agreed to spend a little time enlightening MovieFanFare readers about the nuts and bolts of editing and what he brought to the table for director Nick Stagliano‘s contemporary 2011 ensemble thriller Good Day for It.
Stagliano’s picture, which screened as the Closing Night film at this year’s Philadelphia Cinefest and was an Audience Award winner at the Sonoma International Film Festival, stars Robert Patrick as a man with a shadowy past who engineers a secret reunion with his daughter even as a former criminal associate plans to exact revenge on him for a long-ago betrayal. Kathy Baker, Mika Boorem, Samantha Mathis, Lance Henriksen, Robert Englund, and Hal Holbrook are other members of the strong ensemble cast.
Bob served as editor and post-production supervisor for Stagliano’s film, but he was already a pretty busy guy: He teaches editing at the University of the Arts, Temple University, and Filmtech; his indie short Romaine won a post-production grant from the Philadelphia Film & Video Association (PIFVA) and the PA Council on the Arts. I visited him at his home studio to talk about his career so far, his collaboration with Stagliano, and his aspirations for the future:
GDA: Before we get to Good Day for It, can you set folks up with a little backstory on how you got into the post-production scene?
Robert Larkin: I went to the University of the Arts for my college education. The first year there is called “Foundations,” so you don’t have a major yet. You go through that and learn drawing, color theory, all that stuff; I had a portfolio, I was interested in drawing and painting. Then I was exposed to their film program, and that really ignited my interest.
Even before college, though, I was always using my dad’s Super-8 camera. I made a little film—I guess I was about 8 years old—that was a take-off of The Godfather, called The Godchild. I wrote and directed that, with everybody in the neighborhood acting in it, wearing suits and carrying machine guns.
But while going through the filmmaking process in the UArts film program, I always went towards editing. Someone else would be really interested in audio, so they get into audio editing, while somebody else might really get into cinematography. You just found your niche in that program. I had to write my own piece and direct my own piece, but as other directors have said, that’s just gathering material to get you to the editing phase.
We shot on film, edited on film—editing on flatbeds, Steenbecks…
You just anticipated my next question – I suspect our readers are either taking for granted that editing movies is all about computer work and they haven’t the slightest idea what a Steenbeck (is/was), or, they can only picture the job getting done in a room littered with reels and strips of celluloid hanging in a bin. So you’ve had that experience making the transition.
Yeah, in fact, a friend of mine, Dave Deneen—who’s now a teacher and a cinematographer—he and I bought a flatbed together. It’s now at his house. It used to sit in my dining room here. He shot a documentary (about the controversy) in Hegins, Pennsylvania, where there used to be a pigeon shoot every Labor Day to raise money. It was a big, controversial event. Animal rights people would go there and picket it—they basically had these pigeons in a box, they would let them go, and people would shoot them. So he made this documentary, and the title was: They Shoot Pigeons, Don’t They? I was the editor. It was shot on 16mm, edited on 16mm.
So you did a negative cut. I’ve done that—it’s a horrifying thing.
Well, we didn’t do the negative conforming ourselves. From there, that’s when I did my feature film Just Work (aka Viral Assassins), and that was cut on the flatbed, and we moved it from the dining room to a bedroom on the third floor. Before we had kids, that was my editing room. For that, I hired a local person who was a negative cutter. His name was Mario. He did a great job. Yea, (cutting the negative) is dangerous, you don’t wanna do that yourself!
After I got out of school I continued editing, working at a local production company called Visual Sound. There I went from film to editing what they call A-B roll, three decks, 3/4-inch U-matic decks. It wasn’t nonlinear, so you were really under pressure—if you made a mistake with a client, you had to go back (to the beginning) and start all over again. With nonlinear, the first thing (I worked with) was Media 100. When Final Cut Pro came out, we were one of the first companies to have the first version.
Some of our readers might be interested to know what kind of gear it takes today to edit a professional feature film. Can we go a little tech-head and have a look at your current workstation?
There’s two separate things: What you need today to make a feature film is a lot different from what you needed 10 years ago, and then there’s the level of the budget and how fancy you want to get. In fact, I was just at a screening last night and two (of the movies they screened) were shot on an iPhone, it’s unbelievable.
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For Good Day for It, I worked with Final Cut Pro, version 7; maybe you read that Apple came out with version X, there was a big controversy where Walter Murch and every other professional editor who tried it out said they didn’t like it.
Yes. Have you seen it?
I’ve seen it, but I haven’t used it. I downloaded demos – but you really can’t use it, because you can’t open up any of your old projects.
It’s not backwards-compatible? At all?
No. And right there, you know, it’s just incredible. Murch said it’s like Microsoft saying “Here’s a new Word program, we want you to use it, but guess what: you won’t be able to open up any Word document you’ve ever created.”
Anyway, I’m working on an iMac, Core i7. 8 gigs of RAM. I have a lot of different plugins, like Magic Bullet – for color correction, you can play with a lot of different looks, create a sense of depth-of-field.
For hard drives, I’ve got, let’s see—a four-terabyte drive, and it’s practically full (from the film). I’ve got about 80 gigabytes left.
Let’s get into Good Day for It. How did you hook up with director Nick Stagliano?
I first met up with Nick in my screenwriting days. He got involved with a script I wrote called The Art of Decomposing, which took the Romeo and Juliet structure and combined with a gangster-type theme, long before GoodFellas came out –
Or, Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet –
Right. I got some people interested in it, and I’d heard about Nick shooting Home of Angels in Philadelphia. I met up with them, and they liked the script and optioned it. They wanted to make it, and it was actually pretty close to going to production—as all those stories go—but they had Abe Vigoda cast, he loved it; right before Friends, we had Courteney Cox; and we had Jeff Fahey. They were “attached,” but two or three months later, a backer backed out, and it didn’t get made.
Nick produced the movie The 24th Day with James Marsden and Scott Speedman; they shot in Philadelphia on PAL (video), and the producer had a friend who did a pass on the editing, but the investors weren’t happy with it. They didn’t have a whole lot of time, so Nick called me up and wanted to know if I could help them by re-editing the film. So we did that here in my studio for a couple of months—they came from L.A.—and it was an interesting experience.
That film got into DeNiro’s Tribeca Film Festival, and I got to go to New York, and I met Scott Speedman, and he said, “Oh, you’re the new editor, thanks a lot.”
That’s nice.
Yeah.
Readers may not be overly familiar with how directors can be very different when it comes to how much footage an editor will have to handle, how much influence they will want to have over the actual cutting of a film, and so on. At one end, you have a Kubrick or David Fincher shooting possibly hundreds of takes, and at the other end you have a Woody “One Take” Van Dyke or a Clint Eastwood, who moves on to the next shot mostly so long as it’s in focus, the sound’s been captured, and the performances are solid. I’m gonna make a prediction based on what I see as Nick’s clean, unfussy style that he would fall down the middle of that spectrum. Decent amount of coverage, not too much nor too little.
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That’s a fair description, but there’s a couple of other things to throw in there: One is budget, and the other is that they decided to shoot on Super 16, which means more money for processing. He limited the takes, maybe four at the most, a lot of the time two—but he never just shot one.
We ended up going digital—there was no film for theatrical (release), but a lot of people mentioned the quality of the image (as a result of shooting on film). Part of what I did as post-production supervisor, too, was getting a lot of the audio up to speed with a lot of background work.
I was involved with Nick doing the color correction at Dive, a nice facility in Center City; they do a lot of M. Night’s (Shyamalan) stuff.
So how closely then was Nick involved in the creation of the edit? Was he completely hands-off, or the director who hovers over your shoulder constantly, very insistent on what he wants?
Sort of a combination of both. There’d be times he’d just say over the phone, “Work on scenes 19-21,” a lot of talking footage, he’d say “do something with it,” and he’d come here to take a look at it. Minor tweaks, but as he’d walk away, he’d say “I should leave you alone more often!” I remember that. There’d also be days where he’d be here for 14 hours straight with one break. It’s a creative process, because we’d argue: No, make that cut there. I might disagree, and I’d say it’s because of a-b-c-d, and we’d just go back and forth.
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The film deals with a tight passage of time, but gets into depicting a lot of parallel events unfolding in different locations. We’re being pushed through the actions of many different characters towards one central spot and one fateful showdown. It’s a challenging juggling act to make the timeline appear seamless and sensible-what I’m interested to know is how much of how the film we see was shaped completely by the script, and how much if any adjusting or manipulating of the timeline was done in post.
Nick was really attuned to the clocks on the wall, and in some scenes, we would go back and forth (about whether or not rearranging some scenes would work better).
I would say 80% of the structure was sticking to the script, and 20% we fooled around with a little bit (if we felt it wasn’t working). Otherwise, there were little things, like a scene where (bad guys) Lance Henriksen and Richard Brake are in the car, and the other two guys (Englund, Chris Barnes) are in the back, and they’re all talking. We had audio problems with the two in the back seat. (There were suggestions) we had to re-dub it, and I just thought we don’t need these lines, we just make it a conversation with the guys in the front—it worked, and I thought it worked better than if we’d gone and tried to re-dub the (lost) lines.
I want to ask about one shot in particular that stood out for me in terms of process. The scene early on when we see Luke (Patrick) getting into his car, stowing his gun in the glove box, and driving away. Jon Dee Graham’s song “The Change” is playing. We cut to one of those “God” angles from above, and just as the car cuts across the sunlight and into the shadows, we hear the lyric: Somewhere, I guess I crossed the line. So, how’d that work? Was that little piece of subtext planned from the script stage? Was it what they call a “happy accident”?
I would identify that as a happy accident. But that exact scene kind of demonstrates what I was saying about how we kept going back and forth, because right before he pulls out, he looks at himself in the rear view mirror—and we’ve had two, maybe three days’ discussion about how long he should look at himself in that mirror. All that was cut without that particular song, so I would say that fell into place at the end.
So, was it a situation where the musician sees it and maybe creates a lyric to fit in that way?
That song already existed, but Nick knew he wanted to use it.
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Let’s do a little lightning round, a Dewar’s Profile-thing to close out our talk. First movie you remember seeing?
The first movie I remember seeing, or the first movie that really impacted me?
I’m getting to that.
OK, well the first movie(s) I remember watching are probably the Thin Man movies on TV with my dad. In the theater, I don’t remember my very first one, but we used to see a lot of films in the summer in Sea Isle City. I remember The Towering Inferno, Huck Finn…or was it Tom Sawyer…
Most recent movie you saw?
I guess it was David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method (at the Philadelphia Film Festival).
OK, so now: can you name the movie that affected you the most profoundly?
Oh, sure, that’s easy: Blue Velvet.
That was quick. Why?
I was in college when it came out. I was learning films and making films, and it just came out of left field. I knew Eraserhead and Dune, and liked Dune even though a lot of other people didn’t, but when Blue Velvet came out, it really impacted me. It came out in the same week, I think, as Hannah and Her Sisters. I kept skipping classes to go see Blue Velvet in Center City.
What do you think is the best thing about movies today? Pick anything: the movies themselves, what’s going on in the industry, anything.
I guess the best thing that’s going on is the easy access. Now, it’s not something I condone, but, if you wanted to see a film on your phone, you can download it and watch a film on your phone. But, I love what David Lynch said about that.
Me too. Here it is:
So, what’s the worst thing?
I think the worst thing is that everything feels so disposable. Somebody compared it to junk food. As soon as you leave the theater, it’s out of your mind…
And you think that’s a function of the movies themselves, or their ubiquity?
I think it’s a function of what’s being made by the studios, because it’s all about winning the weekend. But, at the same time, because the equipment’s so cheap, you see a lot more independent films. But, then it’s harder to see those films unless you’re seeing them on the Internet.
What are you working on now, and what would you like to see happening for yourself in the future?
A documentary called No Plan B, about a local mixed martial arts fighter named Eddie Alvarez. I’m working with a director named Dave Klayman. I’m cutting a trailer together. I also have a personal film I’m trying to finish up called Romaine, which I wrote and directed.
Bob hands me a disc containing a seven-minute excerpt from Romaine, and I am eager to have a look at it. The next morning, I start watching it and I see a shot that I think ought to last a little longer, so I’m going to ask him about that. Bob’s a pro, so that is bound to be a productive and enlightening exchange.