Filmmaker Roger Nygard (“Trekkies,” “Suckers,” “The Nature of Existence”) on cutting comedy, the need for editors to also be filmmakers, creativity and why sometimes you have to cut great jokes.
LINKS
A Free Film Book for You: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12
Another Free Film Book: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6
Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/
Eli Marks Website: https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/
Albert’s Bridge Books Website: https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcast
Roger Nygard Website: http://rogernygard.com/
Cut to the Monkey (The Book): https://www.amazon.com/Cut-Monkey-Hollywood-Behind-Scenes/dp/1493061232
The Truth About Marriage (Trailer): https://youtu.be/VeFI_4WC2OI
Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!
"We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control."
Roger Corman, Producer
★★★★★
It’s like taking a Master Class in moviemaking…all in one book!
Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos
John Sayles: Writing to your resources
Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes
John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots
Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals
George Romero: Casting
Kevin Smith: Skipping film school
Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection
Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity
David Lynch: Kill your darlings
Ron Howard: Pre-production planning
John Carpenter: Going low-tech
Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking
And more!
Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!
It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!
Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.
"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond
John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.
The book covers (among other topics):
Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories
Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature
Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period
George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget
Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories
Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations
Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive
Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous
Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget
Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget
Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror
Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget
Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting
L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting
Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing
Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres
This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced!
TOFP Episode 104 - TRANSCRIPT
Damon Wayans Jr 00:00
License and registration please. I’m going to write you a ticket.
Larry David
A ticket?!
Damon Wayans Jr
It was a bad decision on your part to honk at a police officer.
Larry David 00:06
Oh, are you above the beep?
Damon Wayans Jr 00:07
Absolutely. I'm a police officer. I protect your rights.
Larry David 00:10
My rights to beep. That's one of my rights.
Damon Wayans Jr
But you don't beep me.
Larry David
That's a right. That's America, we're allowed to beep.
Damon Wayans Jr 00:16
Yeah, well, I'm allowed to write this ticket.
Larry David 00:19
Good. Write it.
Damon Wayans Jr 00:20
Getting smart with me, boy.
Larry David 00:21
I'm not getting smart. I am smart. By the way. I'm smart and of course, I'll be protesting this ticket. I hope you enjoy your day in court.
Damon Wayans Jr 00:29
Here you go. Have a nice day.
Larry David 00:33
Thank you.
Damon Wayans Jr 00:33
Thank you.
Larry David 00:34
You made my day.
John Gaspard 00:37
That was Larry David and Damon Wayans Jr. In a scene from ‘’Curb Your Enthusiasm,’’ which was edited by today's guest, Roger Nygard. Hello, and welcome to episode 104 of The Occasional Film podcast, the occasional companion podcast to the Fast, Cheap Movie Thoughts blog. I'm the blog's editor John Gaspard. Today we're talking with filmmaker Roger Nygard. In addition to being a director, and editor and a screenwriter. Roger is also the author of a terrific book, Cut To The Monkey, A Hollywood Editor’s Behind The Scenes Secrets To Making Hit Comedies. In it, he explores the nature of editing comedy, with advice from some of the comedy experts he's worked with over the years. Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm, Julia Louis Dreyfus, and David Mandel on Veep. Plus, Sacha Baron Cohen, Alex Berg, and many, many more. The book gives us a great jumping off point, I could talk to you about film —and I have in the past – under any sort of structure.
Roger Nygard 01:44
There’s no reason to stop that now.
John Gaspard 01:46
But the book does raise some interesting points that I want to talk about because not only did I learn stuff about you reading, Cut to the Monkey, but I also learned some stuff about myself that I had not considered seeing what I've done in moviemaking, through your eyes. So, we'll start right at the beginning. You have very supportive parents, when it came to what you were doing creatively as a youngster. Is that safe to say,
Roger Nygard 02:11
Yeah, well, particularly my mother, it's really a mother's job, and I guess my mom did her job in that category, which was when I came home in from kindergarten, they give you crayons, and you'd have to draw a picture, everyone does that. I would hand it to my mother, all proud, and she would say, “That is amazing. You are so creative, you're so talented.” She would fill my head with this delusion that I carry to this day that I'm talented. So, it gives me a framework to keep trying, despite the constant failures over and over again, and eventually, you one of them sticks. I guess, I succeeded here because I didn't give up.
John Gaspard 02:53
It doesn't mean also give yo a trampoline effect in your head that you can just bounce back pretty quickly from rejection, just because you have this basis of, no, you're cool. You're fine.
Roger Nygard 03:03
Yeah. Well, the thought that I have when something goes wrong, I get a bad review, or someone doesn't like my script, or someone critiques a documentary. My first thought is not, oh, I'm not good enough. My first thought is, oh, what idiots, they don't get it. So, it's their fault, not mine, that they don't like my work.
John Gaspard 03:24
I haven't gotten to that degree yet.
Roger Nygard 03:27
But it's quite a useful delusion. I know it's a delusion. But I'm stuck with it. Because my mother instilled in my framework of my mind as it was soft and solidifying, she got me when I was young.
John Gaspard 03:39
Yeah. I was in the same situation, parents who didn't really understand what I was doing, but recognized the passion I had for it and were just very encouraging. I'm always reminded of Steve Martin stories, and the one where he has brought his parents to see his first movie, The Jerk. As they come out, his father turns to him and says, well, it's not Charlie Chaplin and you go, well, that's a whole different parenting style that I was brought up with. That's the opposite of what you had; and that’s what he's fighting against. In reading the book and reading what you went on to do, I kept coming back to he was so lucky to have that basis of ego, I guess, that allows you to bounce back into business that very often is pushing you down.
Roger Nygard 04:25
Oh, we're all dealt a hand, a certain amount of talent and it's genetic and its sort of here's what you're given. Now, play your hand, the best you can see. Steve Martin had an amazing hand he had a straight flush, and so, he was able to overcome whatever difficulties his parents and others put in front of him because of his immense talent. I, on the other hand, am a completely mediocre talent, but pressed forward by this pressure of support that I felt and so … one thing I learned and maybe I'm jumping ahead a little bit when I made a documentary called The Nature of Existence when I was really questioning existentialism and my own reason for being and what is the point of everything. I learned from that journey, that the point of everything is to be creative, daily, and that's what brings me happiness. So, it's not like I have to force myself to be creative. It's built into my need to be, and we all have a need to be happy. And I'm the same as everyone else. I enjoy the result of my labor, my creative labor daily. A little bit of that Minnesota work ethic, Scandinavian work ethic, is that if I don't put forth some effort during the day, I feel like a complete loser at the end of the day. So I have to have some kind of something to show for myself for the day, some work I put in, some results. Whether it's cleaning the garage, or writing a book, either one, or both are immensely satisfying to have completed, or feel like I completed something today, and look back on myself and go, wow, I did that. I feel really good about myself and then my mother's programming is all part of that, see, you did it, you can do it, you're good. and it's a self-perpetuating process.
Roger Nygard 06:02
So, every day I'm creating, working on the next book, working on the next script, editing TV show, whatever it is, it's all creative. I remember reading a study once I think way back in college, how there was this nursing home where they had 100 residents, and they gave everybody a plant. And 50% of the residents, they said, here's a plant, we'll take care of it, you have no responsibility. The other 50%, they said, here's the plant, you need to water this and take care of it, it's your responsibility. And the ones with the responsibility for the plant lived longer, because they suddenly had a reason for being in their life and it's about creation, they're creating life out of this plant and keeping it alive and it's what's innate in us is to create. And most of us, I guess, we get married, we have children and that child, that's your project for 20 years, or 18 years, or however long it takes to kick them out of the basement. You brought forth a small version of yourself, you created life and you're trying to make a better version of yourself, by putting what you can into that that new entity. And that creativity takes over your life for this two decades. Then a lot of people find themselves back where they started, what do I do now and then they're taking pottery classes, or painting or dancing classes and back to finding ways to express their creativity again. And when a human beings are not expressing creativity, they become depressed. And if you give someone a paper who's depressed and say, take 10 minutes and draw a picture of a plant or a giraffe, just draw a picture, while they're drawing the depression is not a part of their mental framework, because they're expressing creativity, they have a purpose, even if it's for that five minutes. So, you and I, as filmmakers, we put that forth that energy into a film or a product, ultimately, that has a larger result of some kind, we finish it, we show it to our community or social network, we get feedback and then that self-perpetuating loop continues. Some of that feedback is negative, some of its positive, but it's good to get any feedback. Because we're social creatures, we need that feedback, we need to engage and be creative and that's a lesson that I learned from the beginning of from age seven until now.
John Gaspard 08:07
It shows up in the book. I should say, I love the book, Cut to the Monkey. I knew I would because I knew your voice and, in the times, we talked in the past, I've always come away with stuff that I remember that I keep using. It's a terrific book about how to be a good editor. It's also a really good book about how to get a job as an editor, how to keep a job as an editor. I noticed you slipped in there in the middle of the book about screenwriting, which was a nice little diversion, where they also know this a screenwriting book, and then it's back to being an editing book. But that's sort of selfish on your part. Because as an editor, the better the screenplay that you're dealing with, the easier it's going to be for you to edit and you also have some great ideas about story and structure and how a scene works.
Roger Nygard 08:46
Editors or writers. They're the same. It's another type of writing. To be a good editor, you also have to understand writing.
John Gaspard 08:54
That's true. We first crossed paths, you must have still been in Minneapolis at that point. You had just shot Warped, which I get the sense you finished in LA but you started here.
Roger Nygard 09:10
I moved to Los Angeles after college. I graduated from the University of Minnesota in the fall of 1984. In 85, packed up my Celica, drove it over the mountains, barely made it and got a job. I was originally going to go to graduate school, and I applied and got turned down everywhere except USC, I got into USC, the number one school everyone else said no. And by the time my semesters came around to start, I had already found a job and once I did the math, I thought okay, I could start spending $50,000 a year on grad school or I can keep working here and take my grad school money and go make a short film, which I will now own because you don't own it. It's USC owns your film, and there's no guarantee you get to direct at USC, you have to earn the right and very few do. So, it seemed to me a better equation and that's what Warped was, that was my grad school money being poured into making a short film and I went back to Minnesota where I had more than contacts and was able to pull it off on a lower budget. But you and I had actually had crossed paths even earlier way back at the University of Minnesota at a place called UCV, University Community Video, you were making a film at the time, what was your first feature length film called?
John Gaspard 10:16
We did two on video. Deception was the second one.
Roger Nygard 10:20
Oh, I remember Deception. That was what I remember seeing and being influenced, and oh, wow, these guys just made a movie using video, using the same equipment I had access to. I aspired to achieve what you were doing at that time and that would be like 1982.
John Gaspard 10:38
82, yeah and we were not embraced by the University Community Video people because to them, we're using video as cheap film, which they thought was a bad thing and we thought was a good thing.
Roger Nygard 10:51
Their idea of art was very specific. Art had to make you feel bad. I have an opinion that I like to make people laugh and feel good. I get turned down a lot by film festivals for my films, because they're too entertaining.
John Gaspard 11:08
I remember seeing Warped and thinking, this guy is a really good director and a really good editor. When we look back on our earlier films, I don't know what you think about Warped. But I remember thinking, this guy is going to get a job in LA directing, and editing, because I've never seen such sharp editing. And then in reading the book, I learned that our paths were very similar. We were each given regular 8 cameras at a very young age. But what I realized in looking at your path was, we both start with regular eight, and then I moved on to Super Eight and in terms of editing, at that point, I'm a pretty good editor, I'm shooting a lot of coverage. I'm cutting it together really nicely. It flows and it has the rhythms you want and then I hit a speed bump. When I went to Film in the Cities school, in my junior and senior years of high school, I spent every afternoon at this film school. And Kodak had just come out with their single system sound camera, and we could now shoot dialogue and that as an editor, absolutely put the brakes on me, because I could no longer edit, because I had to deal with the sound. So, the first couple of things I did were Woody Allen-esque long takes, and you just join them together. And then I did a feature in Super Eight sound and was able to get in there and make the edits and you can imagine your pictures here and your sound is 24 frames away and you have to cut the sound, because that's what's going to throw people off. The visual, they won't mind so much. But if the sound isn't right. And I did a couple of features in Super Eight sound, and it steered me toward a dialogue-driven kind of writing, then like you, we moved into video, and suddenly we had a little bit more freedom. But if you remember, in those days, it was a cumbersome system, you're using three quarter inch tapes.
Roger Nygard 12:50
Right. The 30 pound PortaPack.
John Gaspard 12:52
But we did get better at it, but you still had that problem of it was very linear, you add this shot, and then you put on that shot, and then that shot and if you want to go back, you literally had to go back and redo everything and it wasn't at a point where there was a computer that was going to remember it.
Roger Nygard 13:07
These are the same problems Charlie Chaplin faced going from silent to sound and so, you followed the same path as Chaplin.
John Gaspard 13:14
What did you learn in that phase of your career when it came to — I think we're kind of fighting the editing system at that time to do what we want. Do you have memories of that?
Roger Nygard 13:23
Well, when I discovered video, yes, it was a whole new world because at the same time that was around, it was just before and as MTV was being born and this idea that you could cut so much was new, and it changed how I thought about filmmaking. I was breaking things down into shots and building more of a visual essay, I was much less pursuing the dialogue long takes, the road you took and more pursuing how to cut a bunch of images together set to music, which was in the direction of MTV. And that led me to shooting these early music videos and filming bands like I filmed Dare Force in concert and I ended up working with Eddie Estrin of Rocking Horse, who did some music for one of my early shorts and was combining music and images. Eventually, I realized I needed to start telling stories though.
John Gaspard 14:20
When you're editing video, at that point, you're not really fighting the system. The system was working fine for you.
Roger Nygard 14:27
I was learning what the system could do. I hadn't gone to film school yet. I hadn't started writing scripts. All my early films were essentially the same story, which is the story that they—if you watch silent films— it's the same story they tell. It's a chase. Somebody has something and the other people are chasing him for it. Keystone Cops is just a nonstop chase, Buster Keaton lots of foot chases and car chases. And it's the easiest story to tell without much of a plot. And Warped even has a car chase in it, once I finally stepped up to doing narrative. It was so ingrained in me there's got to be a car chase. So, even working in car chasing with an old lady chasing another girl on foot tried to run her down. I guess part of that was, I was always in my mind imagining, I'm going to go to Hollywood and make James Bond movies or something because I loved what James Bond, particularly the Roger Moore era, because it was so funny. I loved the comedy. That's what I was really enamored with. A lot of people want to pick on the Roger Moore era, but I love that era.
John Gaspard 15:29
It is the silliest era for James Bond. Okay, so, then what's your first 16-millimeter piece, was that Warped?
Roger Nygard 15:35
Warped was shot on 16 millimeter, yes. It was really the only time until I shot a documentary called Six Days in Roswell, which we shot on Super 16. But otherwise, after Warped, then I moved to 35 millimeter. I followed what is now more much more common even when people still use film, I made a Digital Intermediate, I filmed on 16 millimeter, but I went to a post house and transferred it all to one inch masters and then from that made three quarter inch dailies tapes, and I edited and then onlined on video, so I never went back to film.
John Gaspard
You're ahead of your time there.
Roger Nygard
It saved money and gave me more flexibility. There was much more I could do when I wasn't limited to just cutting together the film, there's so much more you there are many more ways to manipulate in the world of video. The reason I think I became a good editor or a great editor, whatever level I am, is because of a turn of bad luck. After I made my first feature film, High Strung, it was very difficult to get my second film made. I had a three year stretch where I didn't have much income coming in and I was $30,000 in debt and I took a job writing, producing and editing promos for TNT Latin America, during those two years by being forced to edit promos—when you've got to cut something down to a 15 second spot—it forces you to understand and realize every frame is crucial and anything extraneous has to go. So, I spent those two years cutting those promos. It's like shooting layups practicing my craft and all those tricks I learned during that period, I took forward into making my Trekkies, the way I cut Trekkies, and the way I work on Curb Your Enthusiasm. It's because I had that time where I was forced to go into the trenches and cut these promos.
John Gaspard 16:49
What a great bootcamp to go through, we probably didn't realize at the time that what was going to be sort of your superpower.
Roger Nygard 17:27
Yeah, big problem for a lot of filmmakers is that when they get too much success too early, they haven't gone through a boot camp. So, they end up making all of the typical Film School mistakes on their big feature and then it shows. You’ve got to get that out of your system. So, you can create a product that doesn't have all those typical flaws that every filmmaker makes when they start out.
John Gaspard 17:55
But what do you think is the biggest misconception the general public and starting filmmakers have about what it means to really be a good editor?
Roger Nygard 18:03
Well, the thesis of my book—in Cut to the Monkey, I have a chapter about it specifically. You don't want to be an editor who cuts films, you should be a filmmaker who edits. To be a great editor, you need to be great as a filmmaker. So, what I recommend to film students is to learn about the world, learn about every aspect of filmmaking, then choose your specialty, whatever it is, whether it's wardrobe, makeup, editing, cinematography. And particularly, you should understand story structure. That's the most important thing anyone going into filmmaking should understand is how stories are put together in such a way that audiences like to receive them, you know. Three Act structure. There's a reason for Three Act structure. It's not something that's forced on people by Hollywood, it's something that the Greeks realized way back when they were putting on their shows, their plays, that humans like things told to them in a certain way. This is the way we'd like it and if you don't present a story that follows this structure, you're going to lose the audience. No matter what your job is, whether it's an editor or cinematographer, the better you understand how story works, the better you can do your job. That's the least I think, understood and most important aspect for editors that I try to impress upon people. Here's a rule of editing: you want to enter a scene—or in screenwriting same rule‑you want to enter every scene as late as possible, and get out as soon as you can. As soon as the climax of the scene occurs. You don't want to dribble on past the punch line. So, oftentimes, like especially on Curb Your Enthusiasm, we're dealing with improv scenes where I'm trying to find the best in and out points. They may have shot a seven-minute scene or a six-minute scene or even a three-minute scene that's twice as long as it should be. I'm realizing that the ending came in the middle, they reached the best point and the rest—as funny as it is—is completely unnecessary and then it has to go away.
Or we don't need all this preamble at the beginning. Let's get right to the conflict, right to the problem, right to the argument, right to the dead body, the infection, the insurrection, whatever. The inciting incident of the whether it's the movie or each scene. Each scene must have a moment where something is conflictual. If you think about it, every one of your or my favorite movies—everywhere anyone listening to this—all your favorite movies are a fight between one thing and another. One person and another. One person and society. A person and the environment. We love watching people fight,. Some movies even have the word vs. right in the title, Godzilla vs Megalon. We know who's going to fight who, Superman versus whoever. We know, every Marvel movie is a fight between our hero and the bad guy and the bad guy is stronger. So, our hero is doomed and it's quite a struggle to get to the end where the hero emerges victorious. Once the bad guy is vanquished, the movie is over. Obviously, you can't go on past that or the audience is, you've lost them. They know when a movie is over. And then editor has to know when a movie is over and when a scene is over. And you know that because you have studied the language of cinema and the art of story and literature.
One thing I wished I had done more taking more classes in college was in literature and studied more classic literature. That was my weakest link in my curriculum. When I went to the University of Minnesota, I majored in communications because it was the closest thing they had to filmmaking. But I had no minor because I wanted to take a class in every single discipline, from biology, to physics, to meteorology, to psychology, I wanted to learn about the world. I took one literature class, and I wish I had taken six or many more, maybe I should have minored in literature, because that would have been the most useful tool moving forward.
John Gaspard 21:57
One of the things that I find interesting in editing is the misconception that people have when it comes to continuity being the editors fault or they'll go oh, she was holding a cup with one hand, and now she's holding it with the other or whatever it is. And I believe that 99% of the time, that's the editor saving something and making it work when it didn't work.
Roger Nygard 22:17
Well, you have to watch for continuity, you have to try to match things so it doesn't stick out and pull the audience out of the story. That's one of your missions. But our rule on Curb Your Enthusiasm, and my rule is: comedy over continuity. If it's funny, we don't care which hand the pen was in. And, that said, these days we'll do on a typical Curb Your Enthusiasm episode, 100 digital effects shots. Now you don't think of those TV shows as digital effects heavy, but they are and many of those are to take that pen out of the hand that wasn't supposed to be in. Or to change a t shirt. Or to put a jacket on somebody that he was supposed to be wearing and they forgot. We're changing everything now so that we can get the maximum comedy. It doesn't matter the cost in continuity, if it's funny. There are times also where on when I was editing Veep, the showrunner, Dave Mandel, would want to cut six lines. The problem was they were walking from room to room as they're delivering those lines. Selina Meyer, she says a line in one room, and then Dan responds to it in a completely different room. But you can't tell, you know, maybe it's a slightly different color, but you don't, people don't really pay attention to those things if you keep it moving, and keep the energy moving forward and keep the jokes coming. They just feel like that it's all part of one construction.
John Gaspard 23:45
You've gotten caught up in the story and they're not looking for that thing. In reading the book and seeing your phrase, word baggage, I'll let you define that first and I'll tell you my experience with it.
Roger Nygard 23:55
You might notice if you watch people talking—and we're probably included—that they say things like, umm, like, you know, and they pause. They throw all of this, what I call word baggage, into their performances. Actors do it a lot, especially when they're trying to remember their lines. And my job as an editor is to scrape away those barnacles, to get rid of it all. One of them that the big one is, they'll say Look or Listen, before they start speaking. It's an announcement that says I'm about to speak. Look at me everyone, I'm about to speak. I get rid of the announcements, I get rid of the word baggage, I get rid of the pauses so that it flows as elegantly as possible with as little in the way between a setup and a punch line for a beginning and an ending. Whatever the two poles are that I have to get between I want to get through there as quickly and efficiently and elegantly as possible by getting rid of all that word baggage without speeding things up just to speed them up.
What I've noticed is that the best pacing for a scene is always faster than what the actor thought it should be or the director thought it should be, or the writer thought it should be. The audience, especially now, I think people even compared to 10 years ago, and especially 50 years ago, humans are primed to receive their information rapidly. So, you have to keep the pace at a certain level or you lose them, they'll switch to watch something else. Now, that doesn't mean you cut out all the pauses. That just means that as an editor, when there's a pause, everyone pauses, because you choose for them to pause, because it's funny to pause and the awkward pause or the reason and its part of the information.
John Gaspard 25:31
In the book, you've got the Periodic Table of Nonsense. We could do several episodes just on going through that. But number nine is Do it Faster. And it is a huge bugaboo of mine, as a director, something I'm trying to get better at, because invariably, when you shoot it, and you're watching them do it, it seems just perfect. That's perfect and then you get into the editing room, and it needs to be 20% faster. I remember reading an interview with Tom Stoppard who has directing his first movie, the movie version of his play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. He's in the editing and the interviewer says to him, what would you change? He said, If I could change anything in this movie, it'd be to make them talk faster. And this is a guy who wrote their words, who had seen that done a million times, it seemed perfect when he shot it. And yet you get in to the editing suite, it's like, oh, my, come on. Why is this not? I don't know how to trick my brain as a director to know that is there? Is there a secret to that?
Roger Nygard 26:27
You become an editor, and so, that you think about editing, while you're directing. All the great directors should have an understanding of all of the other jobs on the set, including editor. One reason you should when you go to film school, you should try everything and learn everything. I learned all the roles, because I had to when I was making my first short films, because I couldn't afford to hire people to do these things. So, I ended up having to do everything for the most part. I learned from that, I started putting myself, I started acting as it were in my documentaries by making myself the host of a couple of them and that was because I couldn't afford Morgan Freeman. But I learned so much coming out of making the Nature of Existence. The first time I did that I had so much more respect for actors than I did before. It was like, just say your line, is it hard to hit your marks and say your lines and remember them correctly? Wow, that's hard. So, you have to learn everything, or you should try to learn what each of the roles in the production are if you want to be great at whatever specialty you choose.
John Gaspard 27:34
I think you've been part of a wave of getting dialog faster. I know you've directed on The Office, worked on Veep, worked on Curb. Those are all—particularly the last two‑their hallmark is the speed at which the jokes and the dialogue happened. And if you go back in the history of film, one of my favorite, they were very good at this in the 30s and in the 40s. And if you look at His Girl, Friday, there are a couple scenes in it where there is no editing, they are just going at 150 miles an hour, and you get all of it and it doesn't seem like they're racing, but they're going really fast. And it's something that actors of that age are able to do. I know there's a scene in What's Up Doc, which is trying to emulate that feeling. I saw an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, saying when they did this one scene with Ryan O'Neal and Barbra Streisand, it was like two and a half minutes long in rehearsal. And he said, it's got to be a minute. And they said, what do you want to cut? He said, I'm not going to cut anything. Just do it again and do it in a minute.
[FILM CLIP 28:31]
Judy
What's wrong?
Howard
The future.
Judy
What's the matter with it?
Howard
Well, judging from the recent past…
Judy
You know what Edmund Burke said, you can never plan the future by the past.
Howard
I beg your pardon.
Judy
I guess you're wondering what a nice girl like me is doing quoting an 18th century guy like Edmund Burke, I was a political science major at Colorado State.
Howard
So, you gathered your information on….
Judy
Hey, you’ve got a case just like mine. No.
Howard
No?
Judy
No. Advanced geology Wellesley.
Howard
What about the music?
Judy
Bennington musical appreciation, Comp Lit Northwestern University.
Howard
Is that it?
Judy
Archaeology, Tuskegee Institute, General Semantics, University of Chicago, Veterinary Medicine, Texas A&M. Say when.
Howard
What were you trying to become?
Judy
A graduate.
Howard
Why is that so important?
Judy
It's important to my father. He was very upset when I was asked to leave the first college I ever went to.
Howard
Asked to leave?
Judy
Bounced. You want to know why?
Howard
No.
Judy
No. Anyway, he sent me someplace else after that, but that didn't work out either. None of them did. Some of it was very nice, I read a lot of good books. I went to a lot of movies, mostly, but something always seemed to go wrong.
Howard
Yes, I can believe that.
Judy
Well, this last time was not my fault.
Howard
What happened?
Judy
Nothing, nothing really. It was just a little classroom. It sorta burned down.
Howard
Burned down?
Judy
Well, blew up, actually.
Howard
Political activism?
Judy
Chemistry major.
Howard
I see.
Roger Nygard 29:38
You're looking for the sweet spot where it becomes the funniest. And it gets less funny when you go faster. At some point you go okay, we've gone too far, and then you go back and loosen up the lug nuts a little bit. On some shows—like when I worked on Grey's Anatomy—I realized I was going way too fast and I had to go back and slow down my pacing. Rhea Seehorn—who was on Better Call Saul—I just worked with her on a new web series called Cooper's Bar, and we were discussing this very idea of speeding things up. And she said that actors, the way she put it was, actors feel like every line that they have is the most important line. So, they luxuriate in it, they draw it out, they put in these pauses, that dramatic pause, and you’ve got to speed them up. Okay, when I'm directing, I remember my number one and two most common pieces of advice to actors were—after praising them, that was fantastic, you're great—now try it faster, and try to enunciate more. Just say clearly and faster.
John Gaspard 30:37
How tough could that be? One of the things you talked about in the book is something I would have a lot of trouble doing. Although I pat myself on the back for having done it a few times, in the last few features I've done on digital. Which is I think you call it cutting some B plus jokes to make an A plus joke bigger. I'm from the Joe Bologna, My Favorite Year school: you never cut funny. I imagine it's really hard, particularly if you're dealing with Curb where you say you have all this great material, and you're just throwing stuff away. Does that hurt your heart at some point to go, that's a great joke, but it just doesn't get to live here?
Roger Nygard 31:09
Yeah, it's hard to do to cut funny stuff. But you have to keep the overall in mind. That that's the director's job, really, you're in charge of overall. Each actor is in charge of their own lines. That's why they think theirs is the most important. But the director has to know what's most important for the gestalt of the project. It's tricky. I mean, we cut a lot of funny stuff in Curb Your Enthusiasm, obviously, the shows are much longer, shot to be much longer. The idea of curating jokes, that was Alec Berg. His theory, I met Alec when he was on Curb Your Enthusiasm, and he went on to co-create Barry, and he worked on Silicon Valley. His thought is that the most memorable movies and TV shows have four or five or six gigantic laughs belly laughs. And that's what you when you tell your friends about it. To get those gigantic belly laugh, sometimes you have to sacrifice a bunch of other B-plus jokes so that the A-plus jokes can shine. And you've got to build a framework so the A-plus jokes can land. Bridesmaids is a film that's going to be remembered for a long time because it has some gigantic belly laughs in it. Lots of comedies have come and gone that had 100 B-plus laughs that you watch it and then you move on, you kind of forget about it, because it never rose to that level of that gigantic moment. Each episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, the goal is to have several of those gigantic laugh moments. And it takes planning and some judicious sacrifices of other jokes to get there.
John Gaspard 32:43
I've taken up a bunch of your time, I want to ask you a couple real quick questions, and then we'll wrap up because we could literally do this all day long. Editing is such an invisible art in theory. Do you have a movie, the movie you think is really well edited that you'd love because it's so well edited?
Roger Nygard 32:59
Many. I can tell you the ones that influenced me. There's a movie called The Hunger that was Tony Scott's first movie. The opening scene, it's a tour de force of editing with flash forwards and flash backs and the song Bela Lugosi is Dead, underlies everything. And they cut to a monkey several times in that scene. So, clearly that stuck with me. That for sure is a pivotal movie in my mind. The Evil Dead, the Sam Raimi film, one of his early films.
John Gaspard
The Citizen Kane of horror films.
Roger Nygard
It really is astounding. He introduced so much to the film language in that movie that we all take for granted now through camera and dialogue and editing. It's astounding. The classic films of Hitchcock, there is nobody above Hitchcock, who would direct as an editor, he was pre editing in his mind as he shot and you can see how everything's laid out. This is someone who had a framework and a plan in mind and it's very clear there's a very strong filmmakers’ hand. Those are some examples.
John Gaspard 34:05
Is there a favorite edit you have in a movie when one shot is connected to another one?
Roger Nygard 34:12
I love experimenting with jump cuts. I'm always trying to work in jump cuts in my work. It's hard to get them through though because jump cuts call attention to themselves, but I love it when they work and many times they work as an ellipsis to get from somewhere in time to somewhere else in time more rapidly. They work best in a montage where someone has, like, a packing montage: you know, suitcase gets thrown on the bed, clothes get thrown into the suitcase suitcases slammed, out the door. It's just saving a lot of time, cutting shoe leather, cutting wasted non-informational visual material. You're cutting it out and leaving what remains. If you watch my film, Suckers, you'll see a lot of jump cuts where I didn't plan it that way when I was filming but when I got in the editing room, I started jump cutting things. Like a car pulls in, and then I cut to Louis Mandalore slamming the door of the car, I didn't need to see him turn off the car, get out of the car, we understand that. But the door slam gives me a button in the metronome of beats. So, drive in, slam, house door, he's inside: rule of three, three shots, all following a beat. I look for those whenever possible, to move things along quickly, in a stylish way that doesn't interrupt the flow of information and take the audience out of the story.
John Gaspard 35:37
You mentioned The Hunger. Is there one movie that you think has been most influential when it comes to what we think of as modern editing in film?
Roger Nygard 35:44
Well, editing is continually evolving. If you go back to The General and Buster Keaton, Buster Keaton was inventing a lot of editorial tricks that no one had done before, and are shockingly still amazing and funny. Now, people are cutting too fast, oftentimes cutting just to cut, it shows a loss of control of a scene or a movie, when you're cutting too much. I try never to cut, I try to cut as little as possible. If something's working, I'll let it play. Because I'm going to have to cut a lot to fix the dialogue. And the films that I find the most inspirational are usually ones I get lost in, I don't notice the editing. It doesn't jump out at me as though that's a bad edit that that doesn't feel right, or it's a smooth flow, a smooth, elegant flow from beginning to end because the editor steps behind the curtain and that's when I know it's well edited. There are movies where if I start getting antsy, okay, the editor failed, because you know, it's there. If there's a slowdown or a problem and it gets past the editor, scissors, it's the editor’s fault. Now maybe they were countermanded by the executive producer or the director. But then it's still a mistake, a problem in editing that whoever left that scene in or left that moment in, made that mistake.
John Gaspard 37:05
I'm pushing the edge of the clock here. So, I want to ask you one last thing. If you want to give just one piece of advice on how to become a better editor, what would it be?
Roger Nygard 37:12
To become the best at what you do whether, it's editing or anything else, especially in film, you need to absorb the language of film. So, watch movies with a notepad and take notes of everything that you notice: a line of dialogue, a great camera move, an interesting edit. And fill up those pages. I was doing this during college, I would watch movies on the weekend, I would watch three or four movies because I got a VHS recorder and I was able to tape movies off the air. I didn't really know what I was looking for yet. I just knew I was writing things down that I liked. I remember watching Sergeant York and I was blown away by that movie, the Gary Cooper movie. I would have never watched it if I hadn't been seeking out four-star movies and catching up on movies, which is what people need. Don't just rely on the movies on your favorite streamer, go back through the history of movies, watch all the great movies and take notes. By taking notes, it forces you to learn about it, to absorb it, it doesn't just wash over you, in one ear and out the other. You make a special mention in your in your notebook about it and that way it stays with you and you learn from it and you can go back then. I've gone back and watched movies to see if they stood the test of time, like Where Eagles Dare or Kelly's Heroes, that which really affected me when I was young. I have gone back and watched them and they are still they are so entertaining. Brian Hutton, who directed both those movies, was on a roll at the time making these amazingly entertaining films. They're amazingly shot, edited, the explosions. They didn't have digital effects. So, they were really blowing those things up and it's just astounding the logistics that they had to control to make those movies and to make it edit together seamlessly. I took notes then and I watched it and went back and they still stand up. So, study the language of film, you need to absorb it, and you need to take an active participation in studying it.
John Gaspard 39:10
Thanks to Roger Nygaard, for taking the time to talk to me about editing and screenwriting and story structure. And everything else we covered today. His enthusiasm for filmmaking is infectious. As I mentioned in the interview, every time I talk to Roger, I learned something that makes me a better filmmaker. Now that you've listened to the podcast, you should run out and buy Rogers’s book Cut to the Monkey: a Hollywood Editor’s Behind the Scenes Secrets to Making Hit Comedies. And catch up on his movies as well: Suckers, Trekkies, Six Days in Roswell, The Nature of Existence, and The Truth about Marriage. You can find links in the Show Notes.
If you liked this interview, you can find lots more just like it on the Fast, Cheap Movie Thoughts blog. Plus, more interviews can be found in my books, Fast, Cheap And Under Control. Lessons Learned From The Greatest Low Blood Movies Of All Time and its companion book of interviews with screenwriters, called Fast, Cheap, And Written That Way. Both books can be found on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google, and Apple books. And while you're there, check out my mystery series of novels about magician Eli Marks and the scrapes he gets into. The entire series, starting with The Ambitious Card, can be found on Amazon in paperback, hardcover eBook, and audiobook formats.
Well, that's it for episode 104 of the Occasional Film Podcast. Produced at Grass Lake Studios. Original Music by Andy Morantz. Thanks for tuning in, and we'll see you occasionally.