Film editors “The Woman King”, “All Quiet On The Western Front” and “Emancipation” on the fusion of historical epics

There is no shortage of epic stories in history, born of conflict and human resilience. This Oscar season has seen more than its fair share of historical epics that have taken place around the world.

The queen of women look at the all-female Agojie warriors of the Kingdom of Dahomey in 18th-century Africa. Based on the 1929 novel of the same name No news from the western front shows a far less heroic side of the war and the trauma of young men tricked into joining the German front. liberation is loosely based on the story of “Whipped Peter,” an escaped Louisiana slave whose battered image went global in the early 1860s.

The queen of women

Editor Terilyn A. Shropshire was over the moon when director Gina Prince-Bythewood mentioned it The queen of women as “our” next film. “It sounded like music to an editor hearing ‘we’ instead of ‘mine’,” says Shropshire. After hearing the story, she was excited about the chance to present an epic with a focus on a strong female character. “With Nanisca, there were layers to who she was when we were able to peel back those layers and show that vulnerability,” she says. “I often wanted to take the audience into these private moments. I try to serve the moment, because as an editor you always have to be the audience of your film.” Showing that vulnerability is important when working on what Shropshire calls a “heartfeltly epic” film, this is where you find the characters start creating to develop the world. “If you can start with that and then build outward, it really helps with the storytelling.”

One of the scenes that really sets the scene is at the beginning of the film when the Agojie warriors emerge from the tall grass. Shropshire says this scene was not originally written that way. “As we walked into the editing room and really looked at the characters, we decided that the best way to draw the audience in was through a sense of mystery and discovery.” Before any of the characters are introduced, the women rise from the grass. and loading , sets the tone for the warriors so that the audience can embark on a journey of discovery.

The most important thing for Shropshire was to make sure the film was more of an epic than an action film. “Some of the greatest historical epics are really character driven,” she says. She argues that the best way to do this is to make the world as historically accurate as possible. “Even the subtleties, acknowledging everyone’s work, the production designer, the costume designer… they spent a lot of time researching that particular moment and it’s my responsibility as part of the storytelling to make sure that I nor does the audience mean .” just visual, but visceral, in a world that has never seen it before.”

No news from the western front

While The queen of women tell a story of triumph No news from the western front tells a very different story with its brutal depiction of young German troops in the First World War. Editor Sven Budelmann was excited when director Edward Berger approached him for the film, but also felt a responsibility to get the story right. “Every German comes into contact with the novel or the film adaptation from the 1930s in their school days,” he says. “However, I thought it was important to make a new, modern version of it… The fact that the film is told from the German point of view, from the point of view of the losers, also means that there is nothing heroic about it. about it. the. The whole thing is just unbearable and pointless. I think it is important to continue to show how terrible war is and what it means to fight in a war, especially given the current world situation.

After consulting Berger, Budelmann chose an almost documentary editing approach that retained the observational style while still creating an intimate view of the war through the eyes of protagonist Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer). During this time, young men like Bäumer volunteered to join the war and face the terrible realities of combat. “We wanted viewers to experience reality as shocking as Paul Bäumer,” he says. “We wanted to show the brutality of war as authentically and brutally as possible. Not to sensationalize it, but to make it real and tangible. The most important thing was not to make the film heroic. We wanted to show war as it is: madness, relentless, indiscriminate.”

Budelmann’s biggest challenge was to find the right balance between “violence and moments of silence,” he says. “Otherwise it would have been too heavy to carry.” Fight scenes are contrasted with animal shots to create moments of calm for the audience. The greater the force of the violence. One of the film’s most impressive scenes was a long shot in which Bäumer stabs a French soldier with a knife and then watches his painful death. “As viewers, we enthusiastically follow him into the war, but we quickly realize what it means to stand in the trenches and fight on the battlefield,” he says. “For me, this is the most intense scene in the film. When I saw the first shot of the raw footage, I was really touched and felt uncomfortable for hours after watching it. We didn’t want to spare the audience either, they had to go through the same emotional development as Paul. So we recreated the scene in real time without cutting anything.”

liberation

For liberation, director Antoine Fuqua relied on his longtime collaborator Conrad Buff to edit the historical epic. While the film was shot in Louisiana, Buff worked from home in California, which he says allowed him to look at the footage more objectively. “Traditionally, the first step for most editors is that we make the decisions,” he says. Fuqua gave him some notes for the first track, which gave Buff a lot of freedom, especially in the second act. “There’s a certain lack of dialogue, especially in the second act where Peter (Will Smith) and the gang run ahead of Jim Fassel (Ben Foster) and flee the railroad camp, which turns into this chase.” Since there’s little dialogue during the chase, Buff chose which visual moments had the most impact and in what order. “Editorially, there’s no road map. That way, it was more documentary for me to tell a story.”

The swamp chase was also shot without sound, so Buff and the sound crew had to make the foley work for the setting. “Usually, in any action sequence, the sound is often useless and needs to be recreated,” he says. “Because of the physical conditions in swamps, wireless microphones wouldn’t necessarily work while people are wading in the water.” While Foley works for these types of films, it’s normal, but Buff says they had to take it to the next level to create the subtle sounds of the environment. “The nice thing is that it’s not an obvious job. It’s not like boss where you can actually see jets fly. It’s a quieter and different kind of challenge than Foley…every branch, every step, every bit of cloth that rubs against a body, everything has to be built up. In that respect, our sound team was phenomenal.”

While the story could conjure up gruesome scenes of violence, Fuqua chose to have the camera pull away from those moments and instead focus on how Peter reacts to the scene. “There is such an intensity and sadness in those moments, and I don’t think Antoine was more interested in graphics than he was in the finished film,” he says. “It’s such an intense film and I’m quite glad it wasn’t more graphic than it was. It’s already so powerful.”