design, the rhythm of everything becomes one. Look at the movie Wanted, the movie that I did with Timor Bekmambetov. If I could think of one movie that I’ve done that had the best relationship between picture and sound, it might be that movie.
TO: That’s surprising. I thought you would have said Born on the Fourth of July.
DB: Born was awesome. But on Wanted, the way I built scenes from the beginning had to drive the way sound was going to work. For instance, there was a story point that when James MacAvoy’s character got afraid, his heartbeat would go up to an insane rate.
TO: Right, it’s off the charts.
DB: And when that would happen, the picture would change. He would start to see pulses, and as the pulses happened, the picture would slow down. Almost every shot in that movie is affected with some sort of varispeed. He would also have these experiences on the train and the “click clacking” of the train rails had to be in the same rhythm as the picture cuts, the temp music we chose, and eventually the final music. I’m very proud of that film because of the way that sound and music work on that film. Couldn’t have done it without Wyle Stateman and his co-designer on that film, Harry Cohen.
TO: You don’t realize all of that’s going on in the film.
DB: Sure, because you’re not dealing with the most complex story, and we knew that we had to make this about style. Normally, we always temp (mix) our movies, but with something like this, the temp mix is so ingrained on every shot.
TO: You made the move to electronic editing on The Doors and used the EditDroid.
DB: Joe Hutshing and I. Yes, we were looking at a lot of systems. We looked at Montage and we looked at Ediflex, which was the lined (script)‐based system. There was Touchvision, which used a bank of VHS machines all running to try and chase source material. EditDroid worked the same way, but with laserdiscs. EditDroid had to cue two laserdiscs to “cut” from one machine to another. It wasn’t a nonlinear system by any means. I had been cutting on a Steenbeck (Claire Simpson’s flatbed of choice) and the EditDroid sort of reminded me of that. The 20 laserdisc machines made it fun to cut those concert scenes in The Doors. And I loved, for the first time, being able to preview dissolves and fades to white and things like that. We did our first cuts on the EditDroid and we would work through the cuts with Oliver. And when we got to a certain point where we were happy with the scene, we would conform the film. And it was a mess. The conforming process was a completely different program!
TO: Was Born difficult for you to do because of the emotional material?
DB: Yes, there’s a scene where Tom Cruise’s character shows up on the beach and it’s a bright, sunny day. It’s late afternoon and the sun is really low and in everyone’s eyes. And it’s loud and the waves are crashing and someone fires an accidental discharge and then everyone starts to fire. And they go into this village and into a hut where they had killed these women and babies. The scene was emotionally wrenching to say the least. The footage was really challenging—great, amazing, brutal footage and a lot of it. It wasn’t a script‐driven scene, though.
TO: There was no blueprint.
DB: I mean, the script basically said what happened but it wasn’t that much of a help. Right, it was very subjective in how it might be edited shot to shot. There was a point where you had to cut out of the hut and to a Lieutenant who finds out that there’s going to be an incoming airstrike so they have to get out. He comes in and tries to pull Tom Cruise’s character, Ron Kovic, out of the hut. But Kovic wants to get the baby. And I remember when I first showed that scene to Oliver, I forgot to cut outside to the Lieutenant. I was so involved with Kovic was witnessing that I just had the Lieutenant enter and start pulling him out. When I finished showing that to Oliver, he hit stop on the Steenbeck. It was a Friday. He turned to me, gave me a long unfathomable look and said, ‘Do you have any idea what I went through there?’
TO: Oh, my goodness…
DB: And he just stared at me and said, ‘Do you have any idea what we went through there?’ And he said, ‘How could you do this?’ And he looked at me for another long beat and then he left. Those were his notes to me on the scene.
TO: What did you do?
DB: So, with those notes, I came in on Saturday and I re‐cut the scene. And he came in on Monday and he looked at it and said, ‘Much better. Now let’s work on it.’ You know what? He was right about one thing, I did not know on more than a surface level what he went through back there, so there was something I could only discover in the scene through time, a lot of thought, and suffering. There was so much psychological pressure he had on himself to tell that story the right way.
TO: A tremendous pressure for you and Joe Hutshing on the film…
DB: And that was present constantly.
TO: Was there a breakthrough when you realized how to handle the scene?
DB: I think the main thing I realized that I was too cutty.
TO: You were cutting too much.
DB: Yes, I realized that the true moment came from Tom Cruise’s single (angle) and I think I was away from him too much. I had been so blown away by the wealth of these great Steadicam shots and I think the emotion of his character didn’t track. That’s usually what’s wrong with a cut of a scene. Oliver will say, ‘I’m not getting the emotion of the character enough’ and you have to figure out how to get there. Oliver Stone is a notes director. He doesn’t want to be there in the editing process because he wants to have a fresh eye.
TO: March 26th, 1990. Born on the Fourth of July, Driving Miss Daisy, The Fabulous Baker Boys, Glory, and The Bear. At the ACE awards, Glory was chosen and sometimes that’s an indication of what will be chosen at the Oscars. Did you think your chances were good?
DB: No, I didn’t think we were going to win because I thought they were going to give it to Glory, which was an amazing film. But then we won and it was a surprise. I will say that Born on the Fourth of July really stands up.
TO: It has longevity.
DB: It really is an amazing film. Sometimes as an editor you can’t go back and look at a film for a long time, because you think about the cut that you made or the disagreement that you had over a scene, or the long nights disappointing your family. It’s too hard. After a while you can go back and look at the film. And you know what? They don’t make films like that anymore.
TO: Have there been films that you edited that didn’t do well but you think should have done better?
DB: Heaven and Earth opened so close to Schindler’s List that no other dramatic film could really get attention because Schindler was such a phenomenon. I would say besides Heaven and Earth, it would be Lolita.
TO: You edited that for Adrian Lyne.
DB: Julie Monroe and me. It’s one of the films that I’m most proud of as an editor.
TO: Tell me why.
DB: It’s a beautiful masterpiece. Gorgeous cinematography. The attention to detail that Adrian Lyne gave. Every shot, be it a wide landscape or a close-up on one of his actors. It’s a disturbing story and it’s told in a way that Jeremy Irons made this character so sympathetic. And I think, in a sense, it was difficult for people, but Adrian was very faithful to Nabokov’s book. It’s a film that people were afraid of. On top off all this,
