Two Oscar-winning editors again find themselves in the conversation this awards season–William Goldenberg, ACE for The Imitation Game, and Kirk Baxter, ACE for Gone Girl.
Goldenberg’s Oscar pedigree spans one win and four nominations, two coming in 2013–for Argo directed by Ben Affleck and Zero Dark Thirty helmed by Kathryn Bigelow. Goldenberg, who won the Best Editing Oscar for Argo, is only the third editor ever to earn two Oscar nominations in the Editing category in the same year–the others being Walter Murch (in 1991 for The Godfather Part III and Ghost) and Michael Kahn (in 1988 for Empire of the Sun and Fatal Attraction). Goldenberg’s prior two Academy Award nominations came for The Insider in 2000 (shared with Paul Rubell and David Rosenbloom) and Seabiscuit in 2004.
Meanwhile Baxter and Angus Wall, ACE, teamed to win Best Editing Oscars for a pair of Fincher-directed films: The Social Network in 2011, and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo in 2012. Baxter and Wall earlier earned an Oscar nom for Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in 2009. Gone Girl marks the first Fincher feature that Baxter has cut solo; however, he has worked with Fincher as lone editor previously on the very first two episodes of Netflix’s House of Cards. For the Fincher-directed pilot, Baxter last year garnered a primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Single-Camera Picture Editing for a Drama Series.
The Imitation Game
Directed by Morten Tyldum, The Imitation Game won the Audience Award at the Toronto Film Festival, which has often proved to be a harbinger of Oscar success. The film stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing, a computer pioneer who broke the Nazis’ elaborate secret communication code, an accomplishment which Winston Churchill heralded as the single greatest contribution to helping to win World War II. Turing’s historic story is also a personal tale as he was a closeted gay man at a time when homosexuality was criminalized in the U.K. He was prosecuted for his sexual orientation and committed suicide in 1954.
Goldenberg recalled, “I flew through the script [by Graham Moore]. It was wonderful. You don’t read many like that. I then found out that Benedict was playing Alan. I’m a huge fan of Benedict. How could I not be involved? It was a film we all wanted to work on because this was an important story to tell. Morten was passionate about telling that story.”
As for the editing challenges posed by The Imitation Game, Goldenberg cited a couple, including the tone of the film. “There was a lot of humor despite the tragic overtones of the personal story,” observed Goldenberg. “Humor was part of Alan’s character so you had to do justice to that. At the same time you don’t want the humour to be outside the bandwidth of the movie. You don’t want a joke for the sake of a joke so we took some funny moments out when ‘funny’ didn’t serve the film. I had a similar issue with Argo. It’s great to have humor but it can’t detract or distract from the story.”
Goldenberg also noted the challenge of keeping three storylines going which all intersect. There’s young Turing’s story in the 1930s during his school days. There’s the throes of wartime in the 1940s. And in the 1950s, a police investigation into Turing’s personal life takes shape, providing an impetus to look back on the ‘30s and ‘40s. “They all come together to paint a picture of a man and what he dealt with–his historic triumph and personal tragedy. And the tragedy is not just in his individual life–it’s what he could have done to positively change others’ lives. His work with artificial intelligence could have resulted in so much more had half his life not been cut away.”
While he was drawn to the story, Goldenberg at first wasn’t available to edit The Imitation Game. He was scheduled to cut director Affleck’s next film. However, that project was postponed when Affleck took on a couple of acting gigs–in Gone Girl, and then the next Superman movie. “When my schedule changed, I reached out to Morten to let him know that I very much wanted to work with him on his film–and I’m so glad I did. There was a sense of purpose to this film, the big picture of it all. The film at its heart celebrates accepting people who are different. It celebrates being different, not conforming, thinking outside the box, walking to your own beat. Without thinking outside the box, the Nazi code wouldn’t have been cracked. And in the process we told the story of a man who didn’t get the recognition he deserved, someone who was relatively obscure despite his historic accomplishments. It’s incredibly gratifying to get Alan’s story out to an audience so they discover what he did, what an incredible guy he was and the shame of what happened to him.”
While Goldenberg’s aforementioned achievement of two Best Editing Oscar nominations in one year is indeed rare, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that he could duplicate the accomplishment this year. Goldenberg also cut (with Tim Squyres) the Angelina Jolie-directed Unbroken, which is already generating awards season buzz even though it’s not scheduled for release until Xmas day. Like The Imitation Game, Unbroken too chronicles an amazing life–that of Louis Zamperini, an Olympic runner who was taken prisoner by Japanese forces during World War II.
Kirk Baxter, ACE
“The pleasure of working with David Fincher is I’m not required to have an agent. I don’t have to vet material,” related Baxter. “David finds the best project and his taste and judgement are absolutely good enough for me. This means I’m not reading tons of scripts. I’m not having breakfast meetings. I can ignore that side of Hollywood and just do my work–and be busy in my commercials career in between. It’s a great luxury to be able to work with David.”
Based on the best-selling novel by Gillian Flynn (who also wrote the adapted screenplay), the mystery thriller Gone Girl stars Ben Affleck as a man (Nick Dunne) whose wife (Amy Dunne portrayed by Rosamund Pike) goes missing. Nick soon finds himself as the prime suspect in her disappearance.
As for what it was like to edit solo on a Fincher feature for the first time, Baxter observed, “Angus [editor Wall] is a dear friend and so good at what he does. When working with him, it was so good to have his company and to have him lighten the load. The main difference [editing solo on Gone Girl] is that I had to do twice as much work. And I didn’t have a friend to commiserate with at lunch time over the work we’d been doing.”
Making the transition easier, though, said Baxter, was that Gone Girl was “incredibly well written and as always with David so well shot and covered. You always have what you need in each scene. At first the audience is kind of behind the film, not knowing what’s unfolding. Then there’s a point when the audience is a step ahead. So for the first part of the film, my approach was to make it feel a bit long and a little frustrating on purpose, by design–which at the same time meant we had to make things as tight as we could, dropping a few scenes so it wouldn’t feel too long. There are different voices: Amy speaking from her diary, the reading of clues, Nick’s present day and the detectives’ perspectives–all of them come crashing into one timeline. Then once the audience turns the corner and is ahead of what’s happening, the story flies. That’s when we speed things up.”
As for his big-picture approach, Baxter explained. “You have to adapt all the time as an editor. And I find that I work better when I take less ownership of the work. That might sound like a bad thing to younger people but there are benefits to not feeling like it all belongs to me anymore. Instead I’m helping others to make it what it should be. Once I made that mental leap, the work became easier and I’m much happier doing what I do. If you come at editing from a stance of a defensive nature, protecting it from others, editing can be very tiring and exhausting, and quite a dull experience. But by always being willing to explore and adapt, it can be really rewarding–of course this only works if you’re working with great people. If you’re surrounded by idiots, then you have to be defensive but thankfully I’m in the best position possible working on a Fincher film.”
Baxter also recently started a new career chapter, wrapping a long tenure at Rock Paper Scissors and several months ago launching an editorial house, Exile, with partners/editors Eric Zumbrunnen and Matt Murphy, and exec producer CL Weaver. At his new roost, Baxter has cut such jobs as a Gap campaign directed by Fincher for Wieden+Kennedy, New York, a Nike spot directed by Mark Romanek for W+K Amsterdam, and GE’s “The Boy Who Beeped” directed by Lance Acord for BBDO New York.
This is the first in a multi-part series with future installments of The Road To Oscar slated to run in the weekly SHOOT>e.dition, The SHOOT Dailies, SHOOT’s December and January print issues (and PDF versions) and on SHOOTonline.com. The series will appear weekly through the Academy Awards. The 87th Academy Awards nominations will be announced on Thursday, January 15, 2015. The Oscars will be held on Sunday, February 22, 2015 at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood and will be televised live by the ABC Television Network.
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