Editors Matt Pevic and Denise Chan helped shape Netflix’s critically acclaimed Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story. Matt edited episode one (“Queen to Be”) solo while they both co-edited episode two (“Honeymoon Bliss”). In this conversation with Awards Daily, they bring their insight into what key choices are involved when crafting a Shonda Rhimes television show. They also talk about the importance of music and finding the balance between humor and drama within the drama series.
Finally, they reveal the importance behind empty chairs.
Awards Daily: Matt, you have worked on several Shonda Rhimes shows. What was different about this one?
Matt Pevic: I have been with Shonda for close to a decade now, and I would say Shonda told us all, after reviewing the director’s cut, what was so different for her is that she finally had a group of people who understood who she was as an artist. Who understood how to bring her vision to the screen. Tom Verica, having worked with her since Gray’s Anatomy, was the director on all six episodes; Jeffrey Jur, director of photography, had worked with her on all of Bridgerton and How To Get Away With Murder; (Lyn) Paolo with costume. There is a big history with all of us and Shonda. I think that enabled all of us to understand the rhythms and cadences and structure of her writing so we could bring it to screen. It’s never easy to translate directly from script to screen, things just change. It’s a collaboration. So I think she was very pleasantly surprised when she saw her first cut and I think that was because it was so close to her original vision.
Awards Daily: Denise, at the beginning of episode two, Queen Charlotte involved a lot of gorgeous spaces showing off the opulence but also reveals Charlotte’s isolation. What went into creating that feeling in the editing process?
Denise Chan: That whole first part of episode two is rather unique in television because half of it, nearly 20 pages of the 30 to 40 pages Shonda wrote, has no dialogue, it is a lot of montage. I think the key element was to remember that I’m telling a story. The story was: this is what happens in a marriage, but it is not a bed of roses, it is not a fairy tale. It’s about that isolation and where she started. We pick up the episode from her realizing she got married and her husband is not going to be there, that they are going to be living apart. So we play into her starting to realize this isolation. She is not really alone, she is surrounded by a lot of people, but she is lonely with her husband not there. So how do you portray that without dialogue? We just have images, and they are pretty repetitive images. She is doing her hair, she’s changing her clothes, and she is eating with a lot of people standing by, but she is alone at the table.
So Matt and I were getting our dailies and they all came in different patches because of location and actors’ availability and scheduling. This is how it works: we get a few shots today and then two months later some other scenes to make a full montage. So we quickly thought, How are we going to tell this central story and convey that he is not there? Then they showed us an empty chair and we thought, that is a great shot, and we thought, “Can we have more empty chairs?” So on every scene when she is at a table eating we tried to put in that empty chair. We shot different settings with empty chairs and sometimes we had to elongate that shot as long as we could. The pace of the cutting was not the same because otherwise it would be super flat. So when we are pausing to emphasize that he is not there we try to elongate as much as possible.
At the beginning of the show she’s just finding out what’s happening and we still need to engage the audience. So it is a complex web of isolation to then intersperse with dialogue scenes that are comedic. The emotions are going up and down along this invisible graph that we are charting that Shonda has written in there. The complex thing about shooting a montage over many months is the actors’ performance, because it is not one whole scene that they are performing continuously, so they have to track how hard to push it and how far to go. We have to make sure we are selecting the shots that convey the best ideas. That was the most fun part for me and basically remembering how to tell the story and to pace it out. Showing it to Matt, to the director, and seeing how they feel. Because we do not get test screenings so I am my own audience with the producer. He’s the guy giving me the first feedback, and then there is Tom Verica who is just amazing. He is the one who shot all these beautiful images, so he was giving feedback like, this needs to be faster, this needs to be slower. So that was the process of how we came up with all that.
Awards Daily: Both of you had to deal with the jumping in time from when Charlotte first arrives and then her as the older Queen looking for brides for her sons. What went into deciding when to make those cuts?
Matt Pevic: It’s all in the script. In fact, early on in the script it said it was a morph transition from a young Queen Charlotte to an older Queen Charlotte. There were discussions early on with Tom (Verica) and with Jeffrey Jur (the cinematographer) and Matt Lynn (the effects supervisor) about how to do this and make it look organic and of the times. Because a morph is a very modern thing in storytelling, it is digital. So Jeff and Tom came up with the idea of what they call their Godfather II transition. Which is a scene where they go from young Michael Corleone to young Vito Corleone and it’s just a really simple long dissolve from one face on this side of the screen to a body on the other side of the screen. We tried to mimic that as best we could. We put little animates so we could keep one face up for as long as possible as the other face was coming on. We tried to enhance that as best we could, but it is a very simple device and it worked elegantly and I think it fit the style of our show and of the time. Let me also say one of the differences in editing both sides: the later Bridgerton era and the younger Queen Charlotte who we are just getting to know, she is always the most important part of that scene. In the modern time she is the queen, everyone knows her, everyone is stronger with her so we know who owns that scene, and who we are going to favor in that scene. She is the one that is going to hammer home in those scenes.
Whereas in the younger Queen Charlotte she is still a little unsure of herself. George also takes a big part of those scenes and so we might be trading who owns the scene back and forth. We might favor George a little bit more because she is just learning her place in this world. So you are thinking a little bit in those terms as you are trying to tell that story. Whose story is it, who owns the story, and in all those elder Queen stories Charlotte is definitely the one where it is a little more questionable in the younger Queen stories.
Denise Chan: My elder Queen Charlotte scenes were more like whenever the queen appears, it is a comedic scene. I just let her do her thing. She is hilarious; she really brings it with her kids. I just played to the comedy: lots of reactions from different people, and always waiting for the joke to land. Otherwise using the music and pausing for effect, and stuff like that. Otherwise I don’t think there was too much of a difference in terms of editing style. I think it was the color palette and the cinematography that gave it a very distinct look in each period.
Originally when they shot it in dailies the way the DP had shot it they were using spherical lenses for older Charlotte and anamorphics for young Charlotte. When we saw the dailies we were in love with those lens flares, it looked like Transformers, it was so beautiful and it worked. We were just adding in a lot of those images and you can see that the lens itself is doing such a beautiful and different thing. But I guess later on everything was said and done and the look was still there but the flare was too much.
Matt Pevic: Yeah, just to add on that there was a time when the matting was slightly different, the ratio was just a tiny bit different. We were talking about pushing up the mat a little bit as we went from one style to the next. But it was just too subtle so we never ended up doing that. But there was talk at one point shifting the matting. At some point we just instead went with a uniform mat for all the footage.
Denise Chan: Everything became simpler and fleshed out in the story.
Awards Daily: Matt, in the first episode we get the first meeting between Charlotte and George in the garden. We get this quick editing as she’s running out of the castle into the garden. Then when they meet the back and forth is incredibly quick cuts. What went into that decision?
Matt Pevic: A lot of that is dictated by Shonda Rhimes and her writing style. She has a staccato writing style and she uses rhythm in her writing and she very much wants editors to pick up on those rhythms. So their back and forth was going to be a little quicker. Then when he grabs her hand for me that was a really big moment. It was the touching of skin and one of the prettiest shots I had seen in the entire sequence. Their hearts are rushing, they’re meeting for the first time, they are argumentative, they are competitive, it’s quickly cut. Then they touch hands and then he says, “Hello, Charlotte, I am George,” and everything slows down. We just enjoy them, drinking each other in a little bit, and we can be with them a little bit more. George establishes who he is and Charlotte just witnesses all of that for the first time. That is largely dictated (though it is not written down as a note). You see it in the writing, and you do your best to enhance and elevate the writing, the acting, the cinematography, the directing. If we can in any way elevate that and accentuate what they have come up with, then we are doing our jobs.
Awards Daily: Denise, we talked about the humor and elevating that. The scene with the queen’s butler Brimsley and the king’s valet Reynolds when they are trying to inform the Dowager princess and Lord Bute about what is going on on the honeymoon, and the two of them are eyeballing each other because they know nothing has happened. They’re trying to lie to these important people without betraying the king and the queen. What went into a lot of those fast cuts, creating the humor of the situation?
Denise Chan: So again this is Shonda Rhimes’ fantastic writing. She is building all of those goodies and she intended for that scene to be played out between those two boys. It is the tension between them and the other people that are just there to be the subject of their subtext. So going into it, it is a comedic scene, right? So there’s a lot of quick cutting between somebody saying something, and these two are lying, and they are trying to lie quickly and make certain it goes over well with everybody. So you’re constantly cutting to these looks of disbelief from all the different people, and the actors do such a great job, every single one of them. From Michelle Fairley to Richard Cunningham playing Lord Bute–all they do is give you one or two looks throughout the entire thing, and you can actually tell at certain points when they are landing the jokes, and they cut to somebody and I would hold on to it as long as they would give me. Then there was even a portion of it– because we shot it from different angles so the Dowager Princess and the two Lords exchanged looks of disbelief, but in the blocking they only did it once. And I was, like, I need them to look at each other again so it is the same look but taken from a different take from a different angle. And they were doing the look again, but because it’s not the same shot you could believe it was from a different shot altogether. So elongating all the moments, pausing for the effect to land the joke, also with the music helped create that. I came from a trailer promo kind of background and all we do is set up music, climax, drop music, joke. Going into this I approached comedy in that way. Then cutting to looks between Brimsley and Reynolds, because I was making it kind of a round robin from the perspective of the Princess and the Lords finding out that they are lying. But it was Shonda who actually said, “You know, I really want it to be from these two guys’ point of view.” So that was a shift to play up the perspectives from these two guys, making certain it was on them. I think it worked out in the end with all the different looks.
Matt Pevic: Just to say real quickly. I think there were times where the joke would have landed on Lord Bute or any of them, and instead you chose to land it on one of the servants and it added to their tension. One would say a line, the other would give them a look like, whoa, I’m not certain you should have said that. That was really nicely done, the way they interacted with each other. They are on each other’s hot seat instead of just on the noble’s hot seat.
Awards Daily: Matt, you kind of touched on this with Shonda saying she had the most freedom with this one. But was there anything she gave both of you of the general idea of what she was looking for?
Matt Pevic: I know that for this show she was very excited to merge the fairy tale with the political. She was really excited to tell that political story, so we were looking to enhance not only this grand love story. That is her signature writing, the talent is in creating these epic love stories and the political. She did this with Scandal and with many of her shows where politics is also really important. So it was very important to her to tell the story of the great experiment. But in all of her shows as we know from working with her for a while now, and what makes Shonda really enjoy the show she is watching for her and her audience, is that the music has to be on point. You have to really nail the music. It is all temp music that eventually Kris Bowers will do his amazing pass on it and make it even better. But we have to try and nail the temp music to hit the emotions that she wants us to hit. So we are looking for all the subtext in these shows to really land that music to enhance that subtext when we can.
That is critical and of course there were the needle drops that the Vitamin String Quartet covers. Shonda said from the beginning she wanted Beyoncé in this show, let’s get her in. We also brought in a lot more strong female artists that were critical to Shonda watching the show. We were always attuned to how the music would help enhance the show and Shonda was pretty thankful for that. One small anecdote was that after watching the first episode she was really happy and very pleased and said, “Matt, Denise, I think we’re going to sail through this, this is going to be a great series. We are in really good shape. However, would you mind trying to rescore this entire show as if it’s a sitcom/ comedy?” The scoring is a labor of love. We have our music editor Sean Spuehler, who is on board by this point, really helping us find the sound of the show, and we are not using Bridgerton music necessarily, just here or there. We want this to sound different. It’s a different theme, it’s a little earlier, we had influences of composers from that era. We wanted to add a lot of Chevalier music to the score. So when she said that we were, like, okay, all right, let’s do it. Not all of that made it in but it really did enhance the show. It brought some levity into that first episode. She knew where it was going to go, that it was going to go real dark in the later episodes. So she knew to let the audience in and let them enjoy these characters before we started getting heavy with them. One last thing is we really wanted to start the show off with a bang for Shonda when she asked for that comedy, so Sean found a cover of 50 Cent’s P.I.M.P. and that was the score that we used for the front of the show. It was really anachronistic, it played a little comedic because it had some high strings that were really bouncy, and it worked beautifully. We didn’t end up using that in the show, but I don’t know, maybe you can hear traces of it throughout the score. It was fun to mimic rap while seeing Charlotte for the first time.
Awards Daily: Any final thoughts?
Denise Chan: The only thing I would say is, going back to the music that Matt was touching on for my portion. It was even more interesting to rescore because when you cut a montage a lot of it is based on music and timing and pacing. So every time you change the pace and the rhythm of each piece of music you are changing everything. I quickly realized I have to use music as a clock to set the rhythm, and not be attached to what goes on, because really the ideal situation would be that I had a piece of music that’s twenty minutes long with all the correct emotions going on to cut to, but I do not. So we have to find these very different pieces of music that have the same emotional beats that we need to transition to go from happy, to sad, to anger and then to frustration, and make it all sound like one. Because Shonda has to hear it as one and not as individual pieces of music. So that wasn’t easy but I think Sean did a really good job helping us go through all of it. The three of us–Matt, Sean, and me–were constantly changing out music on that part and hoping it all works. Then Kris Bowers just came in and nailed all of the beats that we had used.
Matt Pevic: This is one of my favorite projects I ever worked on. I feel lucky to have been a part of it from start to finish. It was challenging, I learned a ton from all of our fellow crew members. It’s a lasting legacy that I am so happy to be a part of.
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