Film Courage: From having grown up in the business watched your father and your grandfather
how did you know you had the skills that would make you a successful editor? You
knew what you probably didn't want to do but how did you know you had the
temperament, the patience, an ability to be alone in the editing room? Lawrence Jordan, ACE and Owner of Master The Workflow: I didn't know. I
just knew I loved movies and I loved editing but when I was working in my
father's trailer house I started to get a pretty good understanding of what was
required of of an editor he even let me work on some you know promo reels and
sizzle reels and a couple of trailers even when I was just sort of like
schlepping stuff so you know I was really able to get my hands dirty but I
had him over my shoulder to you know kind of tell me where to cut essentially
when I when I when when I was lost and again you know because I had been
playing with those splicers and the 35 millimeter film and the tape and the
rewinds since I was a little boy there was there was sort of just like an inner
knowledge I just I just was confident in in the mechanics you know what really
sort of became you know the challenge and the learning experience was was
learning you know about you know story and and how to tell stories and although
I didn't have a formal film school education I took a lot of night classes
particularly at UCLA Extension and I studied you know I studied story
screenwriting classes but more importantly I studied a lot of theater
classes and you know learned about the the great plays and sort of did some you
know took some critical analysis classes and things
like that at night and you know that's the thing that you kind of have to learn
as you go if you don't have a formal film school education and also I think
it's really important that you trust your gut you know as an editor and I
think that a lot of editors will tell you that a lot of it is instinctual you
know from everything from when a performance doesn't seem to be you know
playing - when a scene doesn't seem to be playing - when an act doesn't seem to
be playing - when the whole movie doesn't seem to be playing I mean you
really break it down you know - individually you can break it down to a
small an element as an individual shot so you know that that really came over
time and and luckily I did have excellent mentors who you know pulled no
punches and we're very blunt about what works and what doesn't work for them and
you know it's that was part of the business on film that we kind of don't
have as much anymore I think maybe some editors work that way but because of a
digital were much more siloed and we work in in in separate sort of rooms and
assistants are very busy with their chores a lot of it has as before
assistants has become metadata management working on the computer
input/output you know tracking things like that whereas you know when you were
a first assistant on film sometimes you would just stand next to the editor as
he or she were editing and you'd be handing them film because otherwise
they'd have to turn around and that would break their thread and things like
that and you you know it was a much more sort of interactive process between an
assistant and an editor and you you know literally sit over their shoulder and
watch them you know create cuts so you know that's kind of the way I was taught
about performance and and and storytelling and you know taste in terms
of you know what what might be best who were most appropriate in a scene
did I answer your question you did so having grown up in the industry and
also there was this like instinctual thing because you had been around the
mechanics of it was there anything where it surprised you where you were not sure
that it was the right career for you whatever it was whether I will tell you
that yeah I will tell you there there was a point when early on when you know
video tape was becoming very prevalent and people were video editors were these
people who seemed like a combination of mathematicians and science nerds and I
am NOT either I have a great respect for science but I I'm not a scientist and
and there was a lot of numbers always happy to punch in time code numbers and
things like that with the videotape and then rolling back and forth and not
being able to like just put a cut in there into the videotape you know like
you could with film you know because I came from film and you know I I was
worried because I thought videotape is the future you know in Francis Ford
Coppola was cutting films on videotape and and I was thinking oh man I'm gonna
piccoli here because I really don't like this stuff I really liked the 35
millimeter or 16-millimeter movie olace and and you know what I had grown up
with and but as you know things would would come to pass I was working on a
film called little man Tate with Lindsay Clingman who you know was another mentor
and an amazing editor and I got a phone call from my father who had kind of
semi-retired but I think he was still sort of doing something screwing around
maybe a little bit here and there and he said they're cutting they're cutting
films on hard drives now and I'm like why what are you talking about he's all
you you know you've got to see this and I had kind of heard about this and was
ignoring it because I was too busy working on a film but then they ran into
some people and they talked about a couple of different systems that were
out there but then I can't remember who I think was my dad said there's this
thing called the avid and it's a computer-based editing system and I said
get out of town and concurrently while working on little man Tate Jodie Foster
had this beautiful color screen Macintosh in her office and I just
thought that was the coolest thing ever I had a computer at home but it was an
old IBM clone and Jodie was very cool about it she was like yeah you can play
with that one you know whenever you want you know you can kind of screw around on
that and so I was kind of like screwing around in the Macintosh and I was just
so you know hypnotized by the graphical user interface it was it was like a
video game to me and although I don't play video games but anyhow so we go to
see a demo my dad and I go to see a demo of the avid media composer and in an
instant I saw that that was my future this was the future of editing and
because it was nonlinear it was the same as film except it was on the computer
you didn't have to it wasn't like video tape which was you
know which was linear and you had to you know rerecord the entire sequence if you
wanted to make a change in one place so yeah it was I would say to say it was
like a bolt of lightning would be an understatement
I literally you know would look at those movie owners after that and say these
things are dinosaurs and they are destined for the for the dustbin of
history or they anyway and so after that I took a year off to kind of work with
my dad again and immerse myself into digital technology in the app and Media
Composer I'm sorry what year was this little man Tate was what 1990 would 90
okay yeah Wow so it was this at like a hotel like
where did they have this no I haven't had offices in Burbank oh I
see and they had started to make inroads in commercials because the images the
digital images at that time were very pixelated they almost look like a Dali
painting and you know that was the thing well you know this is great but we're
not gonna cut features like this you know so and of course the sales people
there and the representatives there were like well yes but the next generation of
picture quality is going to be much better and you know fine fine fine
and it wasn't ready for primetime in features but people were using it for
commercials and I said I need to learn everything I can about this because this
is coming this is the future this is how I'm going to be an editor if I'm going
to be an editor indeed and and the picture quality did improve and I spent
a lot of time immersing myself into the Macintosh operating system and the
hardware that made the Macintosh operating system work which was pretty
foreign to me I mean I wasn't a computer you know engineer or anything like that
I I you know frightened of it just like anybody else and oh my god am I gonna
erase everything and things like that but I spent really literally almost a
year getting my hands dirty and you know after that year I I had no fear and I
could pull apart a computer and I was ready to I was ready to go having that
experience how does that going forward when you see a new technology or or a
hint of it you read about it in the Wall Street Journal whatever how does that
make you feel because so many people could shun it and say oh that'll never
happen like they said Amazon oh that that will
fail you know the nothing that will never take off and it's it's changed the
world it's changed how we consume things but so many people in the beginning did
you know how does that make you look at things now well it's different now
because you know that was the beginning of the
of the computer era for personal computer era and it was also the
beginning of the era of computer editing and the adoption of editing in that in
that manner everything is done on the computer now so I I look at it with you
know with interest I mean I remember when somebody told me about uber and he
said uber this is the next big thing and I'm like uh-huh and I mean it was years
before I even understood what it really like so I mean you know in terms of our
industry I think there's still a lot of exciting things because what's happening
is you know the products continue to get more powerful and cheaper and you know
things to make films continue to get more powerful and and relatively cheaper
and I get excited by that kind of stuff I always been excited by the idea of
being able to put technology in more people's hands and have an and have
people you know all kinds of people have a voice in the media creation industries
so but you know AI and and you know virtual reality and 3d I mean you know
I've seen 3d come like three or four times in my lifetime so come and go so
IMAX you know I think IMAX is is great for you you know what it is but I do I
think that's gonna change or take over the entire industry or have any kind of
real lasting impact I'm not sure you know there's all kinds of stuff out
there I I imagine that some of them are going to kind of really take hold some
of these immersive technologies but I don't know
you're making me feel very old-fashioned if it made you bit sorry I wasn't my it
wasn't my digit so what does it make you feel like less of a skeptic or more so
because you like that's truly I think was it even in the 50s they had the 3d
glasses or them with jaws and these different things and and and we weren't
really sitting around wearing them and then we were told we were going to but
but different things where where this is going to be the new the new wave does it
make you more of a skeptic or less so as you saw well you know one of the things
that I didn't want to get into the commercial advertising business one of
the reasons I didn't want was because there's so much hype you know and and
I'm skeptical of hype you know I like to you know if I see a technology that I
that I think has been a really you know sort of bear fruit or empower people or
be fantastic you know I'll check it out and I'll
really like kind of get into it but you know the next big thing I'll give you an
example there's there's a project up at Stanford which is and I think Adobe's
involved in it where they're experimenting with artificial
intelligence as it applies to editing and you know there was some hubbub about
it last year and do I think artificial intelligence is going to replace editors
probably not in the not in in the near future will it will it maybe augment
editing at some point in time probably
you know I think that there's kind of like a lot of hype about artificial
intelligence in general I don't you know I think that's kind of overblown to tell
you the truth it's just my opinion I I don't think that there's going to be
anything that's gonna obsolete us humans anytime soon I think probably get a lot
of help from computers continue to get a lot of help but I also think that
there's know that humans operate on a different
kind of level in terms of consciousness and things like that the computers just
don't have and no one has shown me otherwise so I don't know you know
nothing that exciting has has come along but what is exciting is the improvement
of the tools for what I deal with you know for digital editing for filmmaking
so I'm excited about that stuff
you