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| Gosford Park |
Bogart and Bacall. Tracy and Hepburn. Welles and Toland. Lee and Squyres? Plenty of film names come to mind that complement each other perfectly. And while Tim Squyres' name may not be as recognizable as others, some of the features he's edited in the past decade surely are: Eat Drink Man Woman, The Ice Storm, Sense and Sensibility and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (for which he received an Oscar nomination) are just four of Squyres' collaborations with director Ang Lee. Moviegoers can see his most recent cutting work in Robert Altman's Oscar-nominated film, Gosford Park.
From the editing room of Ang Lee's The Hulk, where shooting is about to begin, Squyres spoke with MM about the director he is most often linked with, the chance to work with Altman, and how Crouching Tiger turned his world upside down.
Jennifer Wood (MM): Did you always wanted to work in the film industry?
Tim Squyres (TS): I came from a family of scientists and that's kind of where I always thought I'd be going, so I never took the idea of a career in the movie business seriously. But I always had a strong interest in it. When I was in college I got on the advisory board for the Cornell Cinema, which is the entity that schedules all the movies in the film program. At that time we showed 400 films a year, so I started scheduling what I wanted to see. I was at the movies constantly ,and when you see that many films, you can't help but see the process.
MM: How did you first meet Ang Lee?
TS: The first film that I edited was called Blowback--you've probably never heard of it. The first AD was Ted Hope. Ted went on to found Good Machine with James Schamus. They produced Ang's first movie, Pushing Hands, and they were looking for an editor. Tim knew me from Blowback, so that's how I met Ang.
MM: What are your criteria for accepting a new project?
TS: I've made eight films with Ang Lee, so one of my criteria is, if Ang's going to make a movie, I want to work on it!
The first thing is always the script. The script has to be something that appeals to you; something you think you can understand and have a proper feel for. There are a lot of good movies made that I wouldn't be the right editor for. So you can just tell from a script if it's something that, for lack of a better word, speaks to you. The next criteria is you meet the director and see if you're feeling the same way about the script, but you're also trying to get a sense of the chemistry because...
MM: You're going to be stuck in a room with that person for a long time?
TS: Most jobs on a movie, you're sharing the director with a lot of people and it's business and there's a lot of pressure. With an editor, you're in a room with a person for months and months and collaborating very directly on something that they've already put their heart and soul into and invested a lot, emotionally and professionally. The dynamic of that relationship needs to be the right amount of respect and trust and those kinds of things. And of course you can't tell all that when you first meet someone, but you can start to get a sense. It's very important that that relationship works properly.
MM: When you first read a script, do you have any process that you go through? Do you make notes? Do you visualize the film while reading it?
TS: I don't try to shoot it in my head while I'm reading it, I just read it. With a well-written script, images will come into your head whether you're trying to figure out your shots or not. Of course, as an editor, I don't get to shoot it, so those images are all wrong, probably. But often a script will suggest things like that and the more a script makes you think in terms of cinema rather than literature, that's a real good head start.
In reading the script, I concentrate on the story and character issues. And often in meeting with the director, those are the biggest things we talk about.
MM: Do you like to spend time on the set?
TS: It's always interesting visiting a set--at least it's interesting for 10 minutes. That's always everyone's response after seeing a movie set. They want to ask 'When is something going to happen?' It's interesting meeting the people involved, but it doesn't help you edit. At best, knowing what the director is going through to get performances out of the actors and knowing how cold it was that day and knowing who the camera operator is having an affair with--it makes life more interesting, but it doesn't help you edit at all. At best, it doesn't hurt. At worst, it could hurt.
If the director is having a hard time with some particular thing that an actor is doing, it's better for me not to know that. If I know that then I'll go into the material thinking Œthis is bad and we have to work around it, rather than watching the material itself. I am a real believer in working independently. And that's kind of been forced on me -- it's not a theory I developed -- for the reason that on most of Ang Lee's films I haven't been in the same time zone as where they're shooting, so it hasn't been a possibility. I've never screened dailies with him.
MM: How much contact do you have with him during production?
TS: I have almost none. During the entire five-month shoot of Crouching Tiger, I think Ang and I spoke twice. He was in China and I was in New York. Typically, I have very little contact. I get the notes and I get the film and I cut scenes and I send tapes back for them to look at, but in the case of Ang or Robert Altman, I get almost no feedback from those tapes. If there's a specific problem, then I make sure that I talk to them about that, but otherwise I just cut the scenes and send the tapes off and they just disappear into a void--which I guess is a good sign. If there were a problem, I'm sure I'd hear about it.
MM: How did you get the job on Gosford Park?
TS: Just through my agent. That job was available.
MM: You talked about being a fan of film. When given the opportunity to work with Robert Altman, does all your former criteria matter? Does the script even matter to you when you're working with Altman?
TS: If you told me in 1979 that I would be editing a Robert Altman film--especially a Robert Altman film that was going to get nominated for seven Academy Awards--it would have been just shocking and wonderful. The opportunity to work with him was so great and when I met him, it was the most relaxed, pleasant interview. It was a film that was going to cut in New York and it seemed obvious that this was a film I could be doing. I liked the script and my meeting with him was great and the time we spent discussing the film and what he thought about it was all just terrific. That was an easy choice.
MM: When I think of your filmography, I can't help but think of it in terms of directors. Up until Gosford Park, you had worked almost exclusively with Ang Lee. Lee and Altman seem like two very different directors to me. Though both of them are character-driven storytellers, Altman's vision is a much larger one. Are they really that different as directors? As collaborators?
TS: Yeah, they're quite different as directors. With Altman, you think about the word 'director' in the literal sense. He takes all these people and he wants them to bring their own energies and their own ideas. Then he takes those ideas and just kind of gently directs them so that they're all working in the same direction. He told me that as a director, he is not really interested in an actor who will tell him 'Okay, tell me what to do with this scene.'
It's the same thing with cinematographers and composers and wardrobe -- he gives you a lot of space. Ultimately, there's no question that he's in charge. It was really an interesting approach. And of course, Ang Lee is a great collaborator also. Any director has to be, but not on quite that great a level. Ang has much more of a clear vision.
MM: Both Gosford Park and a film like Crouching Tiger are fairly action-oriented, though I would assume Lee's version is a much more closely choreographed kind of chaos. Did you have to adapt your editing process in any way to fit the style of these movies?
TS: On both Crouching Tiger and Gosford Park, I had to adapt my techniques a little bit. Everyone has his own technique to get from three hours of dailies to a four-minute scene. So I had to adapt it somewhat. On Gosford Park, the adaptation was that the footage, the coverage, was quite unusual. It wasn't master, two shot, single, single, reverse -- it wasn't that kind of coverage at all. He generally kept the cameras in the same part of the room, and there were very few singles except in scenes with only two people. The cameras drifted around were always moving, so I couldn't really break down the coverage in terms of this shot is for this line and this shot is for this line--it was more just kind of sections. In order to accommodate that, I had to change my way of attacking a scene, which was interesting.
Crouching Tiger was a whole different issue. In some of those fight scenes there were over 200 set-ups, and just to wade through all the footage took days. One scene took me four days to go through the dailies.
MM: Did the fact that the film, like Eat Drink Man Woman, is in Mandarin make the editing process more difficult? I assume you didn't understand the language.
TS: No, I did not understand the language (laughs). It's certainly easier when it's in English. For me, and I don't really know why this is, but in looking at a performance and choosing takes, there are some things I have access to in a foreign language and some things that I don't. The expressions on the face, the tone of the voice, the tempo--all of those things I can evaluate just as well in Mandarin as I can in English. But there are certain other things about the inflection and the pronunciation and what syncs up with what syllable that I just don't know in Mandarin. And I don't pretend I do, I just do my best. And my best is probably not as good in Mandarin as it is in English, but they tell me that the results are pretty good (laughs).
MM: Now you're back working with Ang again on The Hulk. Did you learn anything in taking a break to work with Altman that you can bring back and use in your work with Ang?
TS: Well this film has a lot of new elements. It's a massive budget and a big special effects extravaganza, which I haven't done before, so there's a lot to learn. Gosford Park, as great as it was, wasn't any help in learning any of this. Gosford Park was a very comfortable job. It was a new relationship to work out, but that was easy. And the film itself, it was complicated, but the process of editing it, especially after production was finished, was very pleasant and painless and it was just a very enjoyable, low-pressure job. This one we start shooting March 18th . (2002). There's a lot to learn, and a lot of complications. It's just a big movie.