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Darren Aronofsky Wrestles With Andrew Weisblum
Thanks to his role in Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, Mickey Rourke’s trophy room will soon need a renovation. The awards that he’s been nominated for, or already won, are piling up, but the man who deserves maybe the most thanks is a name very few are familiar with: Andrew Weisblum. The man employed as the movie’s editor, a role that is always the sorely under-appreciated architect of strong plots and performances, had an indispensable role in constructing Rourke’s performance from the sometimes very raw materials with which he was given to work.
“As always,” notes Weisblum about the improv-heavy movie, “the script is kind of like a blueprint. Darren was obviously looking to capture a certain reality, so he had to keep the options open whenever possible. That meant that in assembling things it was important not to dismiss or eliminate options because they weren’t scripted or because they were tangents. I had to sit there and think about, ‘Well, is this just something he was allowing people to explore to see where it will go or is this something that appeals to him?’”
“We were just looking for the most natural performances,” explains Aronofsky. “And [we were also looking] to keep the energy up and the interest up and I think that is one of the amazing things Andy was able to do really with this job. Any time the film slows down, we were able to go somewhere else and keep things moving.”
“The question always was, ‘Which things serve the character?’” says Weisblum. “Which things were actually demonstrating something about [Rourke’s character] Randy ‘The Ram’? Because, in an improvisation, even though Mickey’s in character, you have to be clear on what the motivations are and whether it’s going to help us tell the story. So that was always a bit of a challenge because there was great stuff, but it didn’t necessarily fit in the puzzle. That’s always hard to do, but you just want to make sure that there’s never any exaggerated stuff or anything that throws the pendulum too far in the wrong direction in terms of the arc of the movie and what you’re trying to do with the character.
“I would assemble scenes, trying to incorporate all the options that to me made sense for where I thought we would be at that point in the movie or the character—and that was tricky. We ended up with a two-hour-and-50-minute assembly because we would have scenes that were scripted at half a page that turned into a couple hours of improvisation. How do you pick which 20-second clip is gonna actually make it into the movie without actually having the movie yet? You could take a year to take a two-hour-and-48-minute movie and make it an hour and 45 minutes.”
Unfortunately, they did not have even close to 12 months in post. “We knew we had to be at the Toronto [International Film Festival],” says Weisblum, “so we only had eight weeks to cut the thing—and then another three were kind of fine tuning. We knew there wasn’t time to dilly dally.” Because of this tight schedule, Weisblum put in copious hours during production to ensure post-production went smoothly. “I had full assembly done within a week of production,” he notes, “the whole movie.”
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COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT 
- Comment by kral oyun on 5/01/10 at 2:42 am
Attribute her success to tenacity and talent all you want-but Claire Simpson will tell you it’s really all about luck!
- Comment by hongrie on 2/25/11 at 10:37 am
Andrew Weisblum is a film editor and a visual effects editor. He has collaborated frequently with director Darren Aronofsky.
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