Sundance Film Festival

On Saturday at the Outerspace Cinema, I caught the session “Sharing a Vision,” moderated by Avid. Director/producer Doug Liman (Swingers, The Bourne Identity, and the upcoming Jumper) sat down with editor Saar Klein and spoke to an overflowing audience about “the importance of finding the right editor.” The two first collaborated on The Bourne Identity, when both were newcomers to the action genre. (Klein had previously worked in The Thin Red Line and Almost Famous.) They recently collaborated on the upcoming sci-fi flick Jumper, undertaking yet another foray into unknown territory: effects-heavy science fiction.

They described an interesting relationship. Apparently their first phone conversation charitably can be labeled “curt,” after Klein told Liman that he hated the original Bourne script past the first 15 pages. But soon, Liman came to respect Klein’s honesty and independence of vision as an editor. They both found themselves fighting the studio as they tried to avoid adding to the film action cliches such as loud scoring during action sequences.

On their collaborations, Liman said that Klein had become as involved as a screenwriter for the simple reason that he was always around during preproduction. By the same token, Klein describes Liman as a good editor - he always has his own Media Composer for every project (which, of course, allows Klein to tell Liman to find “that one shot he’s looking for” himself).

Their new project, Jumper, involves teleportation sequences and locations on several continents. Still, for an effects-heavy movie, it’s relatively kinda-sorta not all that expensive, coming in at under $100 million. Liman says that this was just a low enough budget to avoid a major CGI player such as ILM to come in and completely take over the effects shots. This meant that Liman got to learn a lot about effects and remain more heavily involved in their creation, from preproduction to post.

Liman says that he used the Red One camera and the Panasonic HVX200 during preproduction, and even shot pickups on HD when they were running out of time. “Some of it worked bumped up to film,” he says. Meanwhile, Klein had to learn to cut together action sequences with quick pans that as yet contained no characters.