Carol Littleton

Some people plan and scheme for years about how to forge a career in the film business. For a lucky few, it's almost a divine accident. Such is the case with editor Carol Littleton.  Her husband, cinematographer John Bailey, was a film student at USC not long after they met, and he used to wrangle his good-natured girlfriend into helping out with his student projects on the weekends. "I guess I was the free labor,"Littleton laughs. Soon she got the film bug herself and began seeking other opportunities to get involved. "I got a series of odd jobs that led me to cutting rooms and I just learned on the job,"she says simply.

The first feature Littleton cut was an AFI project called Legacy in the mid-'70s, which garnered its share of good notices and effectively gave the young editor an entry to the mainstream. That early success was the jumpstart she needed, and she hasn't slowed down since. Her outstanding career has seen a solid run of collaborations with a number of brilliant moviemakers, including Lawrence Kasdan, Robert Benton and Jonathan Demme.

Littleton just finished Demme's new picture, The Truth About Charlie, (her third pairing with the director), and is currently in the cutting room sculpting Kasdan's winter release, Dreamcatcher. She recently took a breather to talk with MovieMaker about how editors "cut to genre,"serve the story, and how her experience on The Truth About Charlie gave her a new kind of freedom in the cutting room.

Phillip Williams (MM): Jonathan Demme said that he was trying to shoot The Truth About Charlie in the style of the French New Wave- making the picture in the cinema verité style. How did you deal with the miles of footage that arrived every day?

Carol Littleton (CL): You just start cutting. I learned a long time ago, it's just like everything-it's just like writing-the more you think about it, the more of a stew you can get into. It's better just to start working. The footage informs you and then you feel confident. It was just a different experience because the material that we were getting every day was just so free from all of the fetters of [film convention]: we've got to have the close-up, the long shot, etc. There's a language of film that we are used to now and you think that everything is covered that way, but Jonathan said "Forget about that. Some [scenes] will have conventional coverage and others just won't."

MM: Because of the circumstances he chose to shoot under?

CL: He just said, "I'm going to make up my mind that day."But he thinks about all of this ahead of time, who does he think he's kidding? [laughs] That was the feeling that he wanted in the film, though. There were a lot of jump cuts. We broke all the rules the New Wave broke-and then some. It was kind of an orgy of filmmaking, at least in editing. Most of the movies I've worked on have been so carefully crafted and this was the time for me just to try a lot of stuff that I've always wanted to try. The footage was there and we had fun.

MM: You say that the conventions of film were dispensed with. What were you bringing to that?

CL: I remember the first day that Jonathan wanted to see the film. I decided to show him the first scene he'd shot-the interrogation scene of the Thandie Newton character by the French police officer. He had said, "Don't follow the book. Just go for the moments that work and put them together."As I got into it I got wilder and wilder-I just jump cut the thing to death. Luckily, his reaction was, "I love it!"

After that I felt that I had permission to do just about anything I wanted, and that the editing became a long process of trying different things until the parts became harmonious with each other, even if they seemed to be chaotic at first.

MM: Bringing things into harmony with each other-it sounds like it was an intuitive process.

CL: I guess it's kind of hard not to be intuitive when you've done this for so long. [laughs]

MM: What are the sort of mental notes that you carry with you as an editor that became most relevant on this picture?

CL: I just think the fact that I was a college student around the time the New Wave was at its height. Being able to create my own homage to that style of filmmaking was, to me, amazingly liberating.

MM: Since cutting the film, have you come away with any new ideas or thoughts about editing?

CL: I learned to allow myself more freedom to just go after the moment. If there is a wonderful moment, don't try to reconstruct it in the editing-just let it play, let it go. I know that that is the heart of the style of the great editor, Dede Allen (Bonnie and Clyde). She brought the lexicon of the French New Wave into American filmmaking and, of course, scandalized Hollywood. So I just felt like I was walking in Dede's shoes in doing this movie and discovered how much fun it can be to totally liberate yourself. [laughing] I'd like to bring a bit of that courage to all the film experiences that I have. The fact that we are able to work digitally makes that even easier.

MM: In general, as an editor, do you tend to identify the genre you're dealing with and have that inform the way you cut the picture?

CL: In some ways it does. If you're doing a film noir like Body Heat, you want to keep within that tradition.

MM: What sort of considerations were there with Body Heat?

CL: The relationship between [William Hurt] and [Kathleen Turner]-you really had to understand the sexual manipulation. That's a hallmark of film noir: It has to work on an emotional level. You have to believe it. But it's not about being explicitly sexual. It's about being suggestive.

If you are doing a western, like Silverado-which I also did with Larry [Kasdan]-you had to acknowledge historical context. He wanted it to be about the beginning of the era, not the closing of the era. It had to be optimistic and about the conflicting agendas of the time. In [The Truth About Charlie], we had to acknowledge certain givens of the movie that inspired it, [Charade]. But from the very beginning Jonathan said, "This is going to be different."

MM: How do you choose your battles when you don't agree with a director?

CL: That's part of the fun. Every day is an encounter with the film and an encounter with each other. You talk and you battle and you discover what's best. I have to say, neither what the director brings to the editing room nor what I bring to the editing room usually triumphs-it's a combination of the two.

Jonathan is such a pleasure to work with because he knows how to manipulate material. He's committed to the use of music and he has a strong sense of both images and sound. For me it's like going to graduate school every time I do a picture with him.

MM: With The Truth About Charlie, what were you most proud of?

CL: Just how it all came together because everybody was given a certain amount of freedom. Jonathan is an extremely generous guy. There's always a lot of exchanging of ideas. With this film we used the freedom Jonathan gave us to explore our own craft. And that sense of freedom was contagious. We recognized it in each other, and allowed each other to do that. That's what I'm proudest of.