Interview: An Interview with editor Joe Walker

Joe Walker was nominated for editing 12 Years a Slave, working with fellow Brit Steve McQueen. He recently was nominated for an ACE award for his work on Sicario. I sat down to talk to Walker about his working relationship with Denis Villenueve and discussed more about his craft… and we talked about being Brits in LA, bonding over going to pub quiz.

Joe Walker : Hello!

Awards Daily : Hi, Joe! How are you doing?

JW: I’m very well! Everyone was saying, “oh you’ll love Jazz; she’s from Britain [laughs]!”

AD: I love that! Where are are you from in the UK?

JW: I’m from Ealing in West London. That was my stomping ground. Strangely enough, I live not a mile away from Steve McQueen, who is an Ealing-ite. They used to call it the Queen of the Suburbs.

AD: That’s so funny! I’m from south London in Tooting.

JW: I used to live in Balham, the Gateway to the South! How funny! My brother lives in Tooting.

AD: I know Balham.

JW: I got to tell you [Balham] was very grim when I was there in the ’80s.

AD: Oh my gosh, yes. It’s changed now. It’s become very posh [laughs].

JW: [laughs] It used to be if you wanted to find somebody to smash you car window to grab your glasses.

AD: Are you still living in London then?

JW: No, I’ve got no real control over where I live these days. I’m renting a place in West Hollywood which is where my daughter lives.  I’ve got another daughter who’s at university back in the UK. I’m currently working in Montreal for six months with Denis; I’m working on an Amy Adams science fiction film. I’ve gotten used to living out of suitcases. It’s a bit bad [laughs]! I’m very engaged with what I’m dong at work so I’m really happy about it, but trying to control where I live these days. The next thing I do will probably be in Hungary. I’ve gotten used to packing light.

AD: You do get used to that! I mean, I’ve lived in West Hollywood now for just over a year and having gone back and forth in a long distance relationship. Finally moving, it was like “Okay, I’ve got to learn to pack.” It’s an interesting town.

JW: I was in Santa Monica and there’s a lot of British people there. I always sort of detected this slight feeling, it was like a shared look that said, “We know what it’s really like on the other side of the pond.” We’re all quite lucky to be over here and we better keep really quiet about it.

AD: There is a great community of Brits in LA and they have pub quiz every other Tuesday and it’s a lot of fun and a lot of them are Brits so it’s a good evening.

JW: I had a little bonding moment or two with Emily Blunt and one of the things we bonded over was the fact that we both went to the same pub quiz on the river. There’s a great place for Sunday lunch in Balham so we had a bit of a joke about that. That’s the strength of Emily Blunt, that you can talk about pub quizzes and then she turns around and she’s wearing a glittery dress and there’s a million cameras flashing and she’s oozing timeless Hollywood glamour. She’s an extraordinary girl, that one.

AD: She’s incredible. I’ve followed her career through films and I’ve interviewed her twice, once for Sicario. That film, I can’t remember when I saw the film, but I saw it just before it came out. It has stuck with me. Everybody knows that it’s my favorite film of the year and I haven’t stopped talking about it. There are so many images and shots that actually stick with you. I mean, that explosion that comes really early on, you were not expecting that at all. And then when you cut to Emily’s character in the shower, you weren’t expecting those scenes at all. And there was a lot of surprise factor, was that what you were going for?

JW: Yeah, I suppose because of my kind of work with Steve McQueen and I’m best known for holding onto shots for a long time, everyone thinks that I cut really slow [laughs]. It’s not that! It has to do with managing tension across time and that’s what we do. In the case of Sicario, it’s full of shocks and surprises and jolts. I mean she opens the door and bang! she sees a guy crawling towards her with some of his head missing and then bang! in the shower. It has these shocks and jolts and it means that when you hold on to shots like that, like when they’re going down the hillside, you can hold that for a long time and it’s very very tense. Things can come at you in this film in a very dark way. I suppose it’s really about landscaping the time so that you get to those moments fresh and it doesn’t feel like slow. You’re on edge when you arrive and you hold onto a shot for a long time. You manage a little bit in terms of sound and sound design and picture design and there’s that constant stress of not quite being able to hear voices correctly and hearing lots of talk back and drone shots and lots of different people. You’re immersed in it. There’s no music normally holding your hand and reassuring you that this can carry on. I really wanted to work with Denis because I was a big fan of Incendies, it’s a wonderful film, and then Prisoners. When I saw that, my heart was beating out of my chest. I’m so glad that people are responding to the tension in Sicario because I would be so disappointed if I cut one of Denis’ films and made everybody have their eyes on stalks.

AD: I left that film and I was so jarred, in a good way, from it. How many months is it now and I’m still thinking about it. I think the silence was really powerful.

JW: I’m really glad you’re saying that. I just touched on music there, and of course that’s another really great collaboration there with Denis. I’d said, “Let’s avoid music and try to cut it almost like a silent movie.” Quite often, I cut it without any sound at all which is unusual for me, I come from a sound and music background. But, in this one, I just wanted to find the visual rhythm of the film and then make sure that the story is preparing us. You end up using music only where you need to or want to, not as a band-aid, but as a character. Also, giving a composer an empty film with no music in it, means they can go anywhere they like. And we got quite an original track, I think Johann’s music really contributes to that. It’s not there all the time, it is sometimes really quiet and restrained. It gives us just enough time to prepare for the next onslaught [laughs].

AD: I certainly think that added to the tension. One really tense scene was the convoy scene; between the shots, the editing, the editing, and everything else that’s happened before that. You’re thinking they’re going to come under attack.

JW: You could even express that when they’re going down the hill, I was using a couple of helicopter shots just showing the hilltop and Juarez. You see that every corner you turn could be the last corner you see. You don’t always have to show the sweat going down somebody’s face to express [the tension]. They’re really brilliantly shot, all those things. Roger Deakins is, of course, a genius and him in combination with Denis, they plan very well and have lots of storyboarding. In a way, my job was a matter of pride in trying to subvert that sometimes [laughs], and not to surrender to the masters. That combination was incredible.

When you end up on the bridge it was a lot of using dialogue as sound effects almost so we were recording lots and lots of walkie-talkie stuff. I don’t know if it comes from this or if we talked about it earlier, with Denis I was talking about the original Alien movie. One of the really tense scenes in that film is when they touchdown on the planet and they all troop out and discover the egg-shaped things that attacked them. One of the really stressful things in that scene is the fact that you can’t see or hear them clearly. There aren’t clear lines of communication and that adds a real panic to the scene. When you’re following Kate, you don’t really know the objective is 100% of the time, you just seem to work really well in an editing stance where we’re just crackling dialogue in the air all the time. These weird moments where her microphones aren’t connecting properly [laughs] or it has a little feedback or something, just using those sounds to create underlying tension.

AD: So let’s go back. Tell me about that first conversation you had with Denis and his vision.

JW: We talked a bit about 12 Years [a Slave], that had been a big success for me, so we talked about that and then we talked about scripts and, I think, about how there was a parallel almost with Prisoners, in that sense of how far are you prepared to go to the dark side for causes that are understandable, at least. That sort of murky, dark journey in Prisoners and I thought there was a similar journey [in Sicario], but in a way it was more sarcastic. The character Josh Brolin plays almost has an enjoyment in the chaos that he creates, there’s a twinkle to it. That really appealed to me. We talked about that a little bit. We also talked about working with music, we agreed to have a pact about not cutting the music. That was it. It was a swift meeting and then I got the job and off we ran. It was a very very strong script so you’re starting from a very good place.

AD: What was the reasoning behind the text of Sicario in the opening credits?

JW: You know, it’s funny. We had to something really awful in the edit which is we cut a really really good scene. It really hurt because it was a scene with Benicio that started originally as scripted and shot as a scene on the ocean. Basically it was a sequence with Benicio’s character who’s standing in the middle of the sea and then you slowly discover that he’s not looking out to see, he’s drowning somebody and then he pulls the guy’s head out of the water and he starts interrogating him and the guy doesn’t answer so he puts his head back, but he goes too far and drowns him. Then [laughs] he takes this little guy, drags him too the shore, and gives him CPR and the “kiss of life,” brings him back to life and the guy comes back from the dead and then Benicio just carries on interviewing him [laughs]. We cut it because it’s a delicate balance in trying to make sure the film is from Kate’s point of view. We should discover Benecio’s character the way that she does and to start knowing that he’s a torturer. It takes some element of that journey away from it. We felt it was better not to. Also, we had Kate’s journey, but there was the counter of Silvio, the Mexican cop. You don’t really know where he’s going to fit into the story, but you know it’s probably not going to end very well for him, I think. It was just a delicate balance and by removing it, we suddenly got the film that we felt worked better.

This is a very long way of answering your question, but one of the things he did in the scene that we cut was he defined what a Sicario was. He said the line that it was originally from the zealots of Jerusalem and it just felt like we certainly couldn’t keep that title if we didn’t define what Sicario was. And also, it just seemed to work really well as that kind of landscape to have something referring to the zealots of ancient Jerusalem and the shots of New Mexico just felt really right. These days the focus is to put the title on the end. It felt like we should define what a Sicario is that the beginning [laughs]. There’s still little trace elements to the scene we cut, I’d almost forgotten that.

AD: I really liked that and I did want to know what the reasoning behind it was. I also think that it was Kate’s point of view for pretty much most of the film then, all of the sudden, it switches to Alejandro’s.

JW: That was one of the delicate balances in the film; how much do you show her watching everything as a passenger? Because there’s a bit of a danger where commercial cinema tends to require heroes who change or save the world, so somebody who’s kept in the dark and passive and is brutally attacked and beaten, is a delicate balance in the edits. You have to keep the balance between what she sees and what just happens by itself. Then, of course, when the two viewpoints diverge, you end up discovering much more about Alejandro’s purpose when he kills the cop. It’s quite a shocker, I think, when we sort of really come face to face with what Alejandro’s motives are and what he’s prepared to do to avenge that. I found that very fascinating, editorially, from people’s points of view.

AD: Denis is very precise and known to be precise in his visual style, as is Steve McQueen. You work with directors who are known to have those visual styles. Does that pose a challenge to you at all or does it help you in many ways?

JW: Of course I’m the beneficiary of that, and that both those directors are brilliant with actors. Part of the great joy of my job is balancing with the actors, in some way, and just looking at little nuances and changes of attitudes and different readings of lines and just making the very best until you’re crafting a performance with small ingredients. It’s a combination of that and the visual style that makes their films. I’m just lucky enough to work with two really fine directors. I think that’s always been the definition of a fine director: somebody who’s capable of merging storytelling skills and the strong, memorable cinematic style and good with performers.

There aren’t that many on the planet, funnily enough [laughs]. It’s kind of a rare commodity and we celebrate people who have that combination of abilities. Sometimes with Steve, it’s more of a collaborative effort in as far as he really skates on the edge of not covering. He hates the c-word, he hates the coverage. He’s not into that at all. He wants to shoot the essence of the scene and it’s not like he wants loads of options. Similarly, Denis and Roger together, they’re not coughing up loads of options like three cameras. Both of those filmmakers are working with single cameramen. I think there were two shots, at most, on Sicario that were more than one camera. 99.9% of it was watching it through the viewfinder at what we all see. It’s a really great place to be as an editor because there aren’t too many options with the dailies and you don’t spend six months making something 1% better one way or another. That’s what we’re working with, it’s kind of within manageable terms.

Sometimes its a question of being around to adapt a very strict plan to protect the cuts. It’s hard to express this because it might feel to some directors I’m trying to steal their limelight, but there are moments where you have to say “we need this shot and you haven’t covered the main story at all, we need to see this more clearly” and, reluctantly, normally Steve will shoot that stuff for me [laughs]. Most of the time he’s right and he doesn’t need it and his cameraman very reluctantly saying, “oh look at editorial making a big fuss about it,” and they’ll shoot something. Sometimes, their tendency is to sit back and to show things quite coolly and wide and I’m always urging them to get in closer [laughs].

AD: I do think, not to take away especially from the great performances from Emily and Benicio and the director, but also if it weren’t for the editing the film, or any film, would not be as great without great editing.

JW: Thank you! That’s much appreciated. I think on this one I was working with such good ingredients that it just enabled me to be really muscular and rhythmic and to really find the pungent and potent rhythm to it. That was just the most important thing to me in this film. Using all the things in my command, the sound, the dialogue, performances, the music, sound effects, visuals, everything to try and exert some sort of strong rhythm to it always. I think we found it. I saw the film in Toronto recently and it had been four or five months since I’d seen it and Denis and me were both saying that there’s almost nothing we’d want to change. We managed to get it. That’s really rare and we were both very embarrassed about it because it felt a bit smug and self satisfied [laughs]. I genuinely felt, coming out of that screening, that I got it absolutely right.

AD: It’s brilliant. As I said, it still sticks with you. All the best with the film. It’s fantastic.

JW: It was really lovely to talk to you. I’ll speak to you again someday. Thank you.