Interview: Matthew Barbato, Editor for Only Murders in the Building

By Orrin Konheim

Matthew Barbato is a profilific editor who has been cutting since the 1990s, and has credits that include directing (Anthony Bourdain’s A Cook’s Tour and Alexis Arquette: She’s My Brother), and editing on hits like The Good Place, The Kominsky Method, Lessons in Chemistry and Apples Never Fall. He sat down with us to discuss his latest gig, Only Murders in the Building, now in its fourth season, that he’s been working on since 2021.

AD: It’s great to talk to you. We’re big fans of Only Murders in the Building.  I can’t help but think editing has a lot to do with it. Am I wrong?

MB: Not to pat ourselves on the back, but comedy is about timing. So you get these tremendous performances from these amazing comic actors, but then you have to honor the timing and also sometimes adjust the timing on certain things. It’s also a matter of which coverage you’re in to properly play the frenetic nature of these scenes. One of the things I always try to keep in mind is that comedy is typically driven by the script and by dialogue, but there’s so much more to be squeezed out of it by behavior and performance so you have to be looking at reactions and the things that people are doing next to the character that’s speaking that could enhance the comedy. We even go so far as to do a lot of things where I do split screens and use a different take where the reaction might be better.

AD: My understanding is that not all TV shows and movies are shot in chronological order, and that can be more stressful for a TV editor to produce dailies. What was the case here?

MB: Well, every show’s a little bit different. On this show, what they do is called block shooting and they have a director for each two episodes. But they mix up, so if a director is shooting episodes 1 and 2 for instance, they may shoot a bunch of [episode] 1 with a few scenes of [episode] 2 in it for efficiency’s sake, so they might shoot everything in one with a few scenes of episode two, because they might want to shoot everything that takes place in the living room at one time.

At this point in my career, it’s just very natural. You get scenes every day; they could be the last scene, or they could be the middle scenes. A lot of the time, we get a half scene where we’ve had to wait for the reverse.

AD: The reverse?

MB: I worked on this show during season 1, and it was during Covid. And there was a scene in there when Charles and Mabel go to visit Howard and question him and they discover a cat in the freezer. The actor at the time had Covid. They shot that scene in two parts on different days where they had all the coverage of Steve Martin and Selena Gomez and on the next day they shot it of Michael [Cyril Creighton]. So we had to split screen it, put it together, and you’re waiting for the final piece to come in and get shot last, so it’s a matter of visual organization and figuring out what you wanted it to be.

AD: How generally tuned into the storyboarding, what’s going on in the writing room, and the deeper themes of the series to be on the technical side of what you do?

MB: The script generally guides you as to what should be happening, and of course, I’m familiar with the season, having worked on the first season on it, and of course, I watch all the episodes that come before, and I read all the scripts that come after. As an editor, I make my first cut of it without anybody’s input. And then I work with the director first to get it to where they want it, and then after that process, we work with the producers, and then the studio gets a shot so we all look at the pieces to refine it and do what the story’s supposed to do and get it to the direction it’s meant to be heading.

AD: Comedy now seems a lot different from the Seinfeld days when laughs were anchored to a music cue.

MB: In these kinds of single-camera comedies, we don’t rely on those kinds of stings to tell the audience that it’s a joke. We just rely on the behavior, the performance, and what’s being said for the joke. We can cut to a funny reaction to help land the joke.

AD: There’s music but it doesn’t punctuate the jokes.

MB: Our composer’s really good, and there’s certainly music in the show that serves a very big purpose in terms of the mood of the scene, but typically it doesn’t step in there to let you know the mood of the scene. But typically, it steps in there to give us comedy. We let the story, and the characters do the comedy and support the feeling of the scene.

AD: Episode six was meant to play as a raw documentary. What was the primary challenge with it?  It seemed like there were a lot of “oners” in it?

MB: I’m glad you say that because that’s how we want it to appear, and that’s the kind of challenge that I like, actually, because it seems very easy to put together. In this particular episode, you see a lot of “oners,” but I’ll almost promise you that none of those “oners” is one shot. There are cuts in pretty much every “oner,” because we’re trying to find the best pieces of takes. It’s hard to do those long takes and get everything right in terms of where the cameras are or where the performers are.

On top of that, a lot of sound work goes into a show like this. Because we’re restricted as an editor in providing different coverage, we have to find ways to keep the pace moving. One of the main sources of information is that our character Howard has been hired as a documentarian for the Brothers Sisters, but then he goes over to their (Oliver, Mabel, and Charles’s) side and he’s following them around.

We had all this footage of him following them, but he was silent. I realized right away that he needed to be part of the scene, as he was off-camera as the cameraman. I wrote a bunch of lines and reactions for him throughout the whole episode, and we got him in an ADR booth. And every single place I could have him do a snort, a reaction, or a line, I wrote all sorts of [sound cues].

And the real challenge of this episode was that we had to tell an Only Murders in the Building story, which contains comedy; a murder mystery that we have to solve, so there’s a lot of plot, and then there are character moments, like Oliver needing validation and Mabel being concerned by how she’s perceived by the outside world.

So, those three threads are always very difficult to get into any particular episode. But on top of that, in any particular episode, we had to tell the Only Murders in the Building story, through the lens of how the Brothers Sisters – these avant-garde kooky directors – would actually see them. So it was this added layer of trying to show a regular episode but in an avant-garde, kooky way and how far could we take it, how raw could we make it, and how little explanation could we give to what this documentary was.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTrHcpCjwdY

AD: You’ve worked with a lot of projects that have amazing writing and character, like The Good Place, Lessons in Chemistry, and this show. Do you find you get invested in the production?

MB: Because the post-process is the last part of the system, by the time I sit down on my computer, you have all these people doing amazing work. For instance, the production design on Only Murders in the Building is world-famous, it just won an Emmy last weekend on it. The cinematography is great, and the cast is incredible and stellar.

It’s always just a huge pleasure to get the footage like that. In the end, we’re all working on the same thing and so when I see other people’s work, I’m not only pleased to see it, I’m thankful because when people look at my editing, they’re gonna see that stuff.

AD: What’s it like working with the other editors?

MB: On this show, everyone’s remote, and we don’t get to bump into each other as frequently. But I’m very proud to work with the two editors this season, Shelly Westerman and Payton Koch. We would chat a couple times a week. We were always looking at each other’s cuts, giving suggestions, and talk about the season as a whole. That’s one thing I do miss about it, to go sit on someone’s couch and talk about each other more frequently.

AW: What do you take from this experience you feel proud of most?

MB: On episode 3, that scene that I worked on with Eugene Levy, Steve Martin, and Richard Kind with the eye patches: I couldn’t believe it. I think it was one of the best scenes that I’ve ever gotten to cut on this show, and one of the best in the whole series. The comedy in it is just classic.

And episode 6 to me, I’m thankful that it looks like it’s easy to put together, but it’s an extremely challenging assignment to get, and I’m really proud of that one.

Everyone who works on this show is really creative, smart, nice, and pleasant to work with. It’s just been a very collaborative show.

You can catch Only Murders in the Building Season 4 on Hulu.