Eric Poydar (the Editor) Meets Larry (the Actor)

by Douglas Polisin | Published October 28, 2008

Archival footage, scenes differing in aspect ratio, a movie that tiptoes the line between documentary and fiction; for even the most established editor, these things could become a real headache in the cutting room. But for Eric Poydar, writer-director-editor of the faux-documentary Larry (the Actor), the challenge of seamlessly interweaving different forms of footage into a present day narrative about Larry (Lionel Mark Smith), an actor on the verge of giving up his livelihood, was met with a desire to tell an interesting story in an innovative and effective way.

With the short movie garnering a ton of buzz from festivals across the country, MM spoke with Poydar about the obstacles he faced in editing a faux-documentary, working with the late, great Lionel “Lonnie” Mark Smith and the universality embedded within the movie’s story.

Douglas Polisin (MM): Larry (the Actor) began as a genre-mixing feature length movie, but ended up as a short. How did the movie reach its end result and what editing choices did you make to reach this?

Eric Poydar (EP): Originally the film was a feature length, mind-bending, soul-searching flick that mixed faux-documentary with a more traditional—albeit trippy—narrative. My co-writer, Brett Portanova, and I were dead set on making it work, but after testing umpteen different cuts of the film, we just kept coming back to the fact that Lonnie’s brilliant performance was a standalone piece. Adding any other element to it, no matter how unique and interesting it was, detracted from the reality of the world Larry lived in. Since the trippy side of the film was intentionally fragmentary and relied heavily on the faux doc to feed its storyline, we had to shelve it for now until I can “fix it,” which will likely involve re-shooting someday. Fortunately, I think it’s better to have a powerhouse, performance-driven, mid-length film than an okay feature-length film that perhaps doesn’t resonate with as many of our intended viewers.

MM: The shooting of the movie only lasted a week. Did this make the editing process easier or more difficult?

EP: In our case, the tight schedule made it easier since we shot in sequence, and I think that contributed to making the film feel more organic as a whole. Also, I knew which areas we needed the most coverage on, so we developed a shooting plan that’d give me a number of choices for those situations once I was on the Avid.

I cut the film on a Mac-based Avid Xpress Pro with an Avid Mojo system. To achieve the film’s gritty look, we shot MiniDV with a Canon XL2 and easily captured all media without losing resolution using Avid’s DV25 codec. I had the ability to slice and dice the footage without ever going back to master tapes, which saved a significant amount of time. Then I took my media drive and corresponding sequences, hooked it up to an Avid Symphony Nitris and finished directly to HDCAM. Until I actually saw the film projected, I was terrified that it’d be a pixel party up on the big screen, but Avid’s vivid HD translation of the DV25 codec looked beautiful. With the extraordinary number of choices Lonnie gave me within each take, I was in a good spot from day one for post-production. It was only a week of shooting, but from an editorial standpoint the shooting ratio felt nice and high.