TO: It’s unfortunate.
DB: We really had to search for a domestic distributor. It was a film based on a literary property, a period film, and a subject of a disturbing nature and financially there was a risk that the studios were probably not willing to take. Even Paramount, the studio for which Adrian had made almost a billion dollars. Finally, the Samuel Goldwyn Company bought the movie, and realized it in some theaters for a couple of weeks. Then it was released on Showtime.
TO: You used split screens very nicely in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.
DB: Those split screen montages are sort of old fashioned. They come from the ‘70’s from films like Airport and The Andromeda Strain. And the first Wall Street had these split screen montages when they were making trades and Oliver loved them. Remember the Steve McQueen film…
TO: The Thomas Crown Affair?
DB: Yes, The Thomas Crown Affair. We tried to do them ala that film.
TO: I thought it was great the way you did it.
DB: And with all the people talking, it was not easy to cut. The way I approached it first, was to remember once again—make sound work first. I cut it in a certain way where the audio was very clear and then I’d look at the picture and then it became where to place the boxes and what size should they be and what draws your eye. I tried to make it so there was only one person whose mouth is moving.
TO: Really? That’s interesting.
DB: Yes, it’s something I found out. It’s better to have everyone else listening because your eye will go to the moving lips.
TO: Starting with Salvador, you’ve thus far worked on nine films with Oliver Stone.
DB: As an editor, I did Wall Street with Claire Simpson, then Talk Radio, Born on the Fourth of July, and The Doors with Joe. I was on The Doors for about a year and a half.
TO: That long?
DB: Yes, and that was a thrilling experience for me. Later I did Heaven and Earth with the late and truly great Sally Menke. World Trade Center and Wall Street Money Never Sleeps with Julie. My favorite of those films as an editor was probably Doors. It was everything you can imagine. The images that Bob Richardson shot on that film are some of my favorite images that I ever got to cut. And the montages intercutting concert footage with story beats were the most exciting. There’s a song, Not To Touch The Earth, that the Doors play at this huge outdoor concert where there’s an enormous bonfire and Jim Morrison has these hallucinations of Indians around him.
TO: It’s a very memorable moment in the film.
DB: We intercut this with him fighting with his wife. Then he burns the house down and he and his buddies get in a car and are driving around. And finally he gets married in this witch ceremony. And all of these things are intercutting and you have to come back in the song at the moment that is dynamic visually and musically… then you have to choose the right moment to cutaway once again. It was usually with the completion of camera movement or a musical statement… or it could be something more surprising and off-putting. And it all has to build. This is just the most wonderful, challenging thing for an editor. The film had so much of that. When we were on the mixing stage, I don’t think I had had a week off since Talk Radio—three films, back to back. I said to Oliver, ‘You know, I need a break after this.’ And he said, ‘You don’t understand what I’m doing. The next film I’m doing is J.F.K.’ And he described the film to me and it was ‘Oh, my God, how can I not do this?’ But I was so exhausted. I didn’t think I could do it. It was just sheer exhaustion.
TO: Well, you had been going for four straight years, at the very least.
DB: I backed out of the film and it turned out to be one of his greatest, if not the greatest film that he ever made. And all the things that The Doors offered was just a tiny hint of what they did on J.F.K. and the ground broken by Joe, Pietro Scalia, and also Hank Corwin on that film.
TO: But you continued with Oliver Stone after J.F.K.
DB: And Heaven and Earth was a great experience. During our post, he went off to shoot Natural Born Killers. We had to take copies of our edits to where he was shooting in Arizona and it was very difficult to finish the film because of that. But we had a long post and Sally and I got to really explore a lot.
TO: You worked pretty much non‐stop between Heaven and Earth and World Trade Center. Here are the films: The River Wild, Fear, Independence Day, Lolita, What Dreams May Come, The Patriot, Kate & Leopold, Identity, and The Day After Tomorrow. Talk about variety. There was a long gap before you worked again with Oliver Stone on World Trade Center.
DB: You know, for the next eight films or so, Oliver was always on a different schedule and we could never line up. With World Trade Center, he wanted to go back to something that was very simple.
TO: It’s not easy to do a whole film with these two men trapped for the majority of the film.
DB: At first, we didn’t know that he wanted that simpler approach. So, we really amped up the scenes and aggressively cut with a lot of sound design. We even had some subliminal cuts. And Oliver gave me no indication that he didn’t want to do that. So, when I showed him a cut of one of the scenes, he said, ‘No, no, no—I want to make this way more like a documentary. I want to make this very simple. I don’t want to pump this up.’ He was talking about the first act of the film, through where the buildings fall. Once they were under, the situation lent itself to more license. But even those sections aren’t too stylized.
TO: You know the critics wrote something like ‘Stone is restrained’ but I liked the film. It was about these two men and the style supported that.
DB: And it let the actors and the story take center stage because the story was still absorbing and disturbing.
TO: Given all the experience you have, do you get asked to talk about editing a lot?
DB: You know most of us get a little tongue‐tied when we talk about editing. Walter Murch is very articulate about it. He’s a great theorist. For me, I just know what works for me, and, I know when it feels good. Editing is a physical thing and you’re using your gut all the time. And when it’s really working, you’re in this zone where time flies, and you’re really sailing.
Conrad Buff, ACE
Los Angeles, California
Partial Credits: The Equalizer 2, American Assassin, The Huntsman: Winter's War, Snow White and the Huntsman, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Training Day, Thirteen Days, Titanic, True Lies, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, The Abyss, Spaceballs, Jagged Edge.
Imagine being a visual effects editor on The Empire Strikes Back building complicated layers in an optical printer. And then the ability to shape performances of CGI characters as a cut scene evolves. That shows the breadth of experience that Conrad has. He just has this ability to get every bit of kinetic energy that the footage has and highlight it.
TO: Conrad, you are an Academy Award, Eddie, and Golden Satellite
