Inside the Creative Process: Karyn Kusama Walks Through Five Phases of Production, From Screenwriting to Distribution

Post Production

After your shoot wraps, take a week off. You’ll be exhausted, and you need to be able to physically collapse. Just catch the cold that your body has been waiting to have. Get it out of your system.

That week (or two) I take off is when my editor is doing her cut of the film, including every single shot and scene as it was written in the script, without taking out any lines. Basically, that’s the way to see everything you have in front of you. Screening that material will feel somewhat devastating as you begin to realize what you need to rethink, reshape, or get rid of. Then comes the process of screening your work-in-progress for people, getting their feedback to measure what’s working and what isn’t. The things you have to weigh, here, are the degree to which certain feedback speaks to you, and whether it’s valuable to listen to criticism despite not wanting to hear it.

Post is more emotionally demanding than production. During production, you’re so social; everything is go, go, go. Post is quieter, but requires much more sustained, longterm attention. I’m in the room working my editor every day, but there are times when I feel like it might be more efficient for me to say, “Could you try this?,” and then just leave. A lot of the editing process is looking at all of the footage all over again, asking yourself, “Is this reading of this line that we’re not using giving us more of what we’re looking to accomplish with this scene? Do we need to swap it out? If we do, what does swapping it out entail?”

Any of those kinds of questions can arise, especially with an actor like Nicole Kidman, who’s very spontaneous and never does the same thing twice. What makes her performance in Destroyer so exciting is that there’s a raw quality to it, but from take to take everything she offers is vastly different. You have to know the significance of where she’s standing in a room, or the subtle differences between when she’s standing, or sitting, or on the floor. That stuff comes into play as you refine and rearrange moments of a performance and affects the overall flow of your movie.

Over time, there will be moments that test your editor’s patience. Try to be a respectful partner in the cutting room and not drive them too crazy.

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