Interview: Nathan Nugent on Cutting those Beautiful Performances in "Room"
Tuesday, January 5, 2016 at 12:15PM 
Nathan Nugent won an Irish Film & Television Academy statue for his first collaboration with Lenny Abrahamson. "Room" is their third film together.Editing is often referred to as "cutting," arguably a holdover word from the days where film edictors actually had to slice frames apart and then tape them back together. But cutting, figuratively, remains one their undeniable jobs, pruning away at hours and hour of footage for a given movie. It's a puzzle and a discovery as they work at assembling a single identity for a movie that has so many different identities in its unfinished form. Though the days of film editors hunched over their moviolas is over, the job's creative challenge is the same when hunched over the computer.
Moviegoers are probably quickest to note film editing in the action genre, where the speed of cutting tends to make the "invisible art" ever so slightly more visible. But it's a complicated art regardless of genre to create cohesive and rhythmic visual and narrative and performative throughlines with a series of spliced together images and multiple takes.
So we were excited to sit down with rising film editor Nathan Nugent, who has been making a name for himself in films that you might safely call 'actor's pictures.' Room is Nugent's third consecutive film with Lenny Abrahamson who he met through a film producer with whom Abrahamson went to college. As with the birth of many classic collaborations in any industry it was a matter of networking, opportunity and good timing. Or as Nathan humorously puts it.
"He had said to Lenny, 'Oh, you know, you should try Nathan. And I was available and very cheap.'"
What Richard Did (2012), Frank (2014), and Room (2015) followed in close succession.
NATHANIEL: You've been working with Lenny Abrahamson a lot but you didn't start out in dramas. You started in documentaries.
NATHAN NUGENT: My wish in film school was always to work in drama. But looking back, I’m glad of that -- that I took that documentary route -- because it certainly had an effect on how I see footage.
NATHANIEL: In what sense?
Nugent's answer and more on Room's beautiful acting after the jump...
NATHAN NUGENT: In the sense that, when you’re working on documentaries, quite often you’re not working from a script, so you have a more open sense of how to structure things. You treat footage in a way that its meaning is always open. You can take one shot and push it up against another, and all of a sudden, it means something else.
In drama of course you'll want to execute a scene as it was shot or as written but if you go into it with an open mindset it's about not being too prescriptive. It's sometimes about getting back to what it's originally supposed to mean or feel like. Sometimes in editing you need to grab elements -- like sounds, cutaways, or shots from other scenes -- and work them in, and then you’ll get to the inherent meaning of what the director wanted the scene to be like. It’s always treating footage and performance and sound in an open way, right to the final cut. Everything is in play.
I saw one of your non-Lenny movies, Glassland, a year ago. Both Glassland and Room are mother/son dramas (though vastly different). It seems like you're carving out a niche as an editor who deals with heavily performance-based movies. Does Lenny do a lot of takes? And how difficult is it to edit a child actor's performance?
Not only were there lots of takes, but there were takes within takes. Lines reset, 'hold, try that line again, go again,' with Jacob in particular. His performance is amazing but Lenny worked hard on getting that. Sometimes that means breaking a scene down to constituent parts. In any other movie, you’ll have a kind of baseline of what the rhythm of the scene should feel like, but in Room, particularly early on, Lenny had to really work with Jacob to make sure that he was becoming Jack and staying in as Jack.
With any eight year old, focus can shift and things can be distracting since you’ve got a lot of people [on film sets]. So, reworking the scenes was a challenge at times. With a lot of the scenes, you just had to take another step. You take an extra step with it, and at the same time, figure out a way to make the scene play without feeling too "cutty". Because you couldn’t just have literally every second word from a different line reading.
No. But the film doesn't feel hyper or manically cut at all!
Exactly. Quite often it meant trying to be clever about the best delivery of words, right down to that level, and work off glances. Dramatically, there’s a lot going on in those scenes in Room. Cutting performances -- I love it! You just follow your nose, and ultimately, you want to follow what’s real. Of course, it's got to serve the story, but you strive for what feels real.
It seems like 'feeling real' would be easy with actors like Brie Larson, because she’s so brilliant.
She’s incredible. Incredible.
And she’s so terrific with child actors, too. Short Term 12...
Exactly. Genuinely, Brie and Jacob have the most amazing relationship. You kind of underestimate how valuable that was. Inbetween takes she was always with him, she was always looking after him. But beyond that, she just blows you away as an actor.
I always think of editing as a huge puzzle, because you have all these different pieces to move and try to fit together and so many choices for a scene.
Yeah, absolutely.
Jack Reynor and Toni Collette in "Glassland"
NATHANIEL: You've done two pictures with another rising star, Jack Reynor. Is it easier the second time with an actor, if you already understand their rhythms as a performer?
NATHAN NUGENT: Funnily enough, with Jack, it was. What Richard Did wasn’t Jack’s first feature, but it was probably his most high profile feature because he took the lead. Lenny would direct in a very open way, and What Richard Did has elements of very observational style at times. Jack kind of occupies a place where he’s being both himself and the character, which just gives you a really wonderful blend. The difference between that and something like Glassland, where he plays a rougher character from a different background, and it’s a different director named Jerry Barrett, who did a brilliant job, is just about being careful. It's not necessarily a performance thing, it’s about being careful about to not let the air out of a scene as an editor, and not letting it go on, and not letting the performance undermine itself.
What do you mean?
For example, if the script is too long, or has too many lines. It’s stuff like that, really. Actors are obliged to go through pages and pages of dialogue. And sometimes it’s only when you’ve got a scene together for the first time that you realize, 'Oh, this is too long!' or 'This line is getting in the way.' And sometimes by identifying it early or trying it without those beats or those lines, it’s useful to the director as they're shooting. 'Here’s a version where we don’t necessarily need this piece -- we can reveal it later and the scene feels better.'
Room always makes me think of movies with intermissions. It's not a long movie but it's almost two distinct movies in a way. So did you employ any creative strategies as an editor to differentiate them?
Not really. That juncture happens pretty much where it happens in the script, pretty much where it did in the book. You're so close to this couple, visually and emotionally, in the first half. So there was a certain challenge in the second half. As it begins to play out, you’re always conscious of, 'Okay, they got out. Now where?' And it’s how you flag to an audience that there’s more story to tell here. You just need to pay attention. In a strange way, the hospital works as a kind of buffer between the two. We tightened a lot using Jack’s voiceover in a way that we weren’t originally panning to do. But the escape itself, we don’t dwell too long on that. 'Okay, that’s done, keep going, keep going...'
You go from this momentum based first half to more of a character study in the second half. What ties the two sides of the film together is always Jack, and where and when we decide to fall back into 'Jack’s feel'
So did the escape sequence, which ends the first act, did that make you want to edit an action movie?
I’d love to edit an action movie, absolutely! But as myself and Lenny have discussed, all the tension that’s inherent in the escape scene and before that, it’s because you care so much about these people. The escape scene has moving parts, but if you watch an action movie, it’s cut to like twice the pace of that. Caring about the people you’re watching inherently will make any of those beats you’re watching work. And that was what felt satisfying.
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Reader Comments (5)
This was so interesting, I'm glad you're doing this job of interviewing people with this much influence on the movies we spend the season talking about who don't really get the exposure they deserve.
What Lucky said. These really provide valuable insights into the unsung heroes of great moviemaking.
Lucky -- i so appreciate this comment. I really do. interviews rarely get many comments and they are actually a lot more work than normal articles but we enjoy doing them.
Finally caught up with this. Great interview! "Room" feels so fluid in that first half, sometimes with such minimal dialogue. Impressive work.
Jake D -- glad you enjoyed. and a relief to know that people sometimes come back to these things after their publication dates if they missed them the first time round.