Nick Emerson is in an editing room in London, when he found out he was up for an Oscar.
My Oscar Book:
He received one of 8 nominations for Edward Berger’s Conclave, which also scored nods for Best Picture and Best Actor (Ralph Fiennes).
“I just couldn’t believe it,” said Emerson, a first-time nominee for his work on the stylish Vatican potboiler. “We all jumped up and down and screamed. It’s a wonderful honor and I was definitely walking around in a bit of a daze for a couple of days afterwards.”
Emerson’s credits include “Eileen,” “Lady Macbeth” the TV series “Life After Life,” and Berger’s forthcoming The Ballad of a Small Player, a thriller set in Macau, starring Colin Farrell and Tilda Swinton.
In his projects, each cut serves the pulse of the narrative being told.
That quality is epitomized in “Conclave,” a closed-room-style mystery where the narrative pace is so crucial to the film’s success. The movie satisfies with both a final twist and a brief, wordless denouement, as we follow protagonist Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), his job now done after a conversation with Cardinal Benitez (Carlos Diehz), as he relaxes into a brave new world.
The ending of “Conclave”–stillness and precision
What’s been really satisfying is when I’ve seen it with audiences and I can hear a pin drop. What’s really great for me is to know that people are so engaged with it, all the way until the last moment.
Many shots in the final minutes are held for 35 or 40 seconds
We approached it in the same way as the other scenes, which essentially meant making sure that every cut felt motivated and often leaving the cuts until the last possible second.
In the ending, we were slowing down and trying to match the calming presence of Cardinal Benitez. He’s so sure of his place and existence within the world, and we wanted it to be reflected in the cutting. We wanted it to be very simple. There’s no need to cut when you’re watching these great faces delivering wonderful performances.
The scene of Lawrence and Benitez alternates between their two closeups
Every scene has certain anchor points within it, in terms of points that I can look at and go, “I’m 90% sure I need to be on Lawrence’s face for this moment.” When constructing that scene, we knew the audience has just been delivered a shock and that buys us a little capital in terms of time to let the news settle.
Yeah, absolutely. It’s a tricky one because it needs the emphasis as well. It needs a purposeful cut to Lawrence to get his reaction. Ralph played that so beautifully – he’s not angry in his reaction – but we certainly experimented with different takes and different sizes of shots. We even experimented with altering the length by a few frames, either longer or shorter.
Edward did shoot a closer shot of Lawrence reacting to Benitez’s revelation, but we elected to go for the slightly looser shot, because the close up just felt a little too aggressive and it might have seemed a little bit like, as you say, a punchline.
You don’t want to undersell the scene’s impact.
If there is any sort of audience laughter there, it’s more from their reaction of, “Wow, Lawrence has just gone through all these momentous obstacles and now he hears this unexpected thing.” But that’s immediately followed by the moment between him and Benitez. The footage I had between Ralph and Carlos was all really so beautiful and I was confident it was going to land.
There is one closeup of Benitez, when he talks about existing between the world’s certainties
I remember we did cut back to Ralph but it didn’t feel motivated. And that’s the biggest thing. When you’re being so careful about when to cut, or when you try to force a cut, it just won’t work. It’ll stink.
That’s how Edward and I work together. We like to look at a scene, like this one, and say, “OK, there are seven cuts in here, can we make it in four? OK, now can we do it in three?”
The story then stays with Cardinal Lawrence for minutes
We experimented with that. We had shots of the chimney, with all the white smoke and so forth, but we elected not to show it. We also wondered if maybe the audience should hear the new pope on the radio somehow in that scene. But we felt confident that it was enough to hear the cheers and see the relief and the smile on his face. That’s what the audience needs to know.
And it felt right?
Exactly. It’s just so much about feeling your way through it and sensing what’s right for the film? During the beginning of the editing process, you’re wrestling to try and control all this material and trying to shape it into your vision, but ultimately the film starts to tell you what it needs. It reveals its own roadmap.
I always think that you know you’re close to finishing the film when it starts to reject ideas. You have ideas and you start to try them and you’re like, “Oh, wow, that really doesn’t work.” And that’s a sign. Because you could just go on editing forever, but the film tells you when it’s done.
Final shot: Lawrence gazes out the window and we three nuns laughing
Edward always wanted to end on that shot and the optimism of it. There’s the gentle sound of their laughter, and I always like the way they come outside and how the door closes. It’s like one door closes, but another one is opening.
The door closes and then the film goes to black
We spent a lot of time on the length of that shot, in terms of how long to leave it before the black screen comes. We also had this long audio track, the women laughing and so we spent a lot of time sifting through that, finding the exact pieces of laughter.
There was a musicality to it that we liked. There’s a musicality to the wind, there’s a musicality to the laughter and there’s a musicality to the door. Click, cut to black, and it sets up this wall of music that it’s going to come at you in a second or two. That’s the stuff that Edward and I love to do, create these interesting rhythms in the storytelling.
What’s an ending to a movie that you really love?
“Zodiac,” David Fincher.
It’s not necessarily a satisfactory ending from plot point of view, but you leave the theater thinking, “Wow, that murderer is still out there.” It doesn’t matter if he’s dead or alive – that dread is still out there. It’s just so clever and tense and terrifying. I remember thinking how brilliant it was that Fincher pulled that off.
“Zodiac” opens with a Donovan song
“The Hurdy Gurdy Man.”It’s very clever because it’s actually a really odd, creepy vocal. It really underscores the movie’s idea of the boogeyman, who’s lurking. Fincher was ahead of the curve with that film. It wasn’t appreciated enough when it came out but it’s simply an American masterpiece.
